Almost There!

The animation is all done (save for some inevitable minor adjustments)! now all's left is the audio. My friend Mark McCabe, who gave us the music for The Agent Ep.1, is working on a piece, and my friend John Worsley introduced me to his friend Michael Holloway who did the music for this:



well, Michael's doing a piece for The Agent Ep2. as well. I can't wait to hear what he comes up with. based on the above video, i'm sure it'll be great!

I'm working on the foley stuff now, and this weekend I hope to have all the dialogue recorded.

That is all.

[insert space cliche here]

sorry, it's late and i want to go to bed... all the clever space titles i tried to come up with fell short, so cover for me. i usually do these during the day, but my work schedule has been all wonky with cut-backs here and trying to make it up there, etc, etc.

anyway... today we behold the creation of yet another character! as you can see below it took quite a few tries before i hit on a design that i didn't think sucked rocks (sorry for the hard-to-see drawing... i have a pretty light hand when i sketch, which makes for crappy scans).


actually i was rather fond of the fish bowl guy, but i thought it was too similar to the fish Earth Worm Jim character. i know, he didn't have a body, but it was a fish and he was in a bowl and he was in space. so i decided to keep trying.


and trying.


EUREKA! i haven't properly named him, but have affectionately been calling him Astro. bet you didn't see that coming. so here's the finished design in Flash:


OK i'm off to bed. gotta work 2 jobs tomorrow. gonna be a long day. see y'all next week!

Walk Cycles A-Go-Go! [pt.3]

I know it's been a while, but my motivation for doing these posts has been rather non-existant. Now that my dear friend Sally is no longer with us, however, and is now in a better place (Massachusetts) I've decided to start up the ol' blog again since she really liked it. or at least told me that she did. So this one's for you, Sally!

It seems i left everyone hanging on the 3/4 walk cycle, so click on the image below to see it in action:


pretty exciting, eh? this was the most difficult to do, but i think it turned out the best out of all the walk cycles. to be completely honest, i had a little help from my life drawing instructor/wife in getting him to look less 2-dimensional. but to my credit, it was just a small correction.

after it's all said and done, i'm not sure i'll take the 3/4 plunge again any time soon. it kinda sucked. we'll see.

I'm getting relatively close to finishing the animation portion of the 'toon, so the end is in sight!

tune in next week for more Agenty goodness!

Walk Cycles A-Go-Go! [pt.2]

As promised, i return to you with the front and back walk cycles. for these scenes i need a bit of a slower walk... a ramble if you will. unfortunately that means i had to draw more frames than the side view (about 25 each!). on the other hand, the motion is a lot smoother. hmm.... more work = better quality? it can't be!!
anyway, here's the goods...

First the front:



then the back.:



to see them in action click on the above images.

Most cartoons you see operate only in 2 dimensions. I mean the characters only move left or right, and very rarely towards or away from the viewer. Now i know why... because it's a big pain in the ass animating perspective and foreshortening and all that business. but afterwards i thought," this front/back stuff doesn't suck enough. I'm going to animate 3/4 perspective!" oh, the folly of youth.

more on that next time!

Walk Cycles A-Go-Go! [pt.1]

Like i said before, i spent a large chunk of my vacation working on the cartoon. when i story-boarded this sucker i wrote in a montage of The Agent strolling into town, all spaghetti western style. Unfortunately that meant i needed lots of walk cycles. what's a walk cycle, you ask? click below and see! (no porn, i promise)



I had to draw The Agent 16 times to make this cycle. ok, there was some copying and pasting involved, but it was still a lot of work. especially when you consider i'm a SLOW drawer. If you remember the past episodes of The Agent, you might notice he's a little less sloppy and clunky. if you don't remember, refresh your memory. his previous incarnation had its charm, but i thought i'd try cleaning him up a bit. i particularly like the way the movement of the glasses came out. good job wes!

Tune in next week when i show you the front and back cycles... how exciting!

Back is the Incredible...

OK, the blogging break got extended quite a bit longer than anticipated. after i finished the work for the previously mentioned shows i had to fill the majority of my spare time with home improvement projects and helping my mom [not] move. I'm out of the woods now, and i spent a large chunk of my "vacation" last week cranking away on the ol' cartoon. i gotta tell ya, this is a big improvement from the last episode of The Agent, as far as animation goes. I think the writing's better too, but the improvement is not quite as obvious as that of the animation and design. I'm going to push for more out of my voice talent as well, so start practicing Dustin! ;) The down side is that it's taking me a bit longer than anticipated to get done. what can i say... quality takes time.

In the meantime, I'm resuming the blog posts! so tune in for some [hopefully] interesting progress reports and what-not. I'll have an official post complete with pictures and stuff soon.

until then!

ps: today's 9/11... the day we mourn the death of Liberty in the United States. light a candle. or pray. or burn some incense. or just remember.

On youTube!

I FINALLY found a way to get my animations on youtube! you'd think that Macromedia or Adobe would have that covered... nope. not if you're a Mac person, like myself. On PC, you just export to .avi then presto! but on mac your only option is to export to .mov. the rub is that Quicktime hasn't updated their Flash support since Flash 5! I have 8, and they're currently on 9 (CS3)!

Anyway, i found a demo for a screen capture program that did the trick. not the best way, i know... but beggars can't be choosers.

Now that Welfare Queens is in the bag, i need to take a break from animating to work on a couple of pieces for upcoming shows. Unfortunately that means you won't be hearing much from me here on this blog for the next couple-3 weeks. I WILL, however, continue to post my regular tirades at www.companystate.com.

Hope to see you there!

Doom and Gloom

OK, I'm done with the backgrounds and have begun on character design. Unfortunately i just started last night, so i haven't amassed enough material worthy of a post yet. Instead, here's ANOTHER BACKGROUND!

There wasn't a storyboard frame for this one, as it's part of a montage and i didn't feel like drawing it all out at the time (shame on me). so if there are no objections we'll skip straight to the perspective guide.


While caught up in the magic world of vanishing points i didn't stop to think about what a pain in the @$$ it is to animate a 3/4 view walk cycle, which is exactly what i've set up here. CURSES! It's going to be part of a quick montage of The Agent walking through the "twilight trails" trailer park. Which was until recently a real place, btw.


yessss... gloomy... run down..... i love it! the kind of place i'd go to shoot photos, were it not full of creeps and meth labs.

Speaking of gloomy, Arthur C. Clarke died recently and as a nod to the old fella HAL makes a cameo in the cartoon. Not that i particularly liked 2001 (i still can't watch it without falling asleep) but it's become an icon of sci-fi cinema and literature. The IDEA behind the movie is great... an AI going crazy and killing everyone because of secretive orders from on-high? Awesome. the execution, however, was a snooze-fest.

NOW Charlton Heston died last Saturday to boot! On a day i chose to watch Omega Man, oddly enough. Heston made several movies that i like so i was a little more moved by his passing than that of Clarke's. I think it fitting that i give Chuck some kind of nod in the 'toon as well. I'll think on it.

seacrest out!

A beginning is a very delicate time...

(name that quote!)

well... the idea for my toons generally start with a little sketch or blurb on a post-it note or scrap of paper, but since i didn't scan any of that stuff, here's a picture of my neighbor's dog instead:

if i decide later that the idea is worth fleshing out i'll start researching. for example, on this particular cartoon i must have read about a dozen articles on welfare, its origins, myths associated with it, arguments for and against, and its corporate incarnations. for what i'm doing here i really over-killed it, but i wanted to make sure my bases were covered.

after much reading and highlighting i make an outline with the basic structure of the cartoon with lots of notes. here's 1 page of the outline:



there's more but my wife says no one can read it, so i didn't bother to scan 'em (she underestimates the legibility of my awesome handwriting). After the outline, i type out the script. nothing real exciting there. normally i'd have the help of my buddy Dustin with this part (cuz he's a writer and can be pretty funny), but he wasn't available so this one was solamente wes.

Then comes the embarrassingly bad storyboards! here's a couple pages:


seriously, i almost didn't put them on here. but i figured it'd be neat to see that from the crapfest storyboards:


comes the lesser crapfest background paintings:


and that's really as far as i've gotten. i'm a little more than half way done with the BG paintings. i'll post some later and try to have something interesting to say about 'em as well.

until next time!
wes

NEW!

Making a cartoon is a lengthy and involved process. ESPECIALLY if you're doing the lion's share of the work by yourself. When i get going i don't have the time or even desire to work on other projects, so I tend to fall off the face of the planet for the duration of production.

In order to let people know I haven't totally given up on the CO.ST (and that I'm not slacking!) I decided to start this blog to give progress updates on the current cartoon so that hopefully folks will stay interested (and to keep me from slacking).

So stay tuned for storyboards, background paintings, audio clips, screenshots, and other various signs of progress!