Looking great so far!

OMG, 😍 this character is way cute! :3 Sorry for reposting your work but on NG BBS images disappear when you quote a post.

Lmao, the opossum lady gives you her thanks!

Opossum furry/anthro characters are cool as heck. Remember Sparkster (Rocket Knight Adventures)?

Happy New Year, I hope everyone had a great Christmas and holiday!

I'm still on my time off from school, and I've been able to do a lot of artwork so far. As for my concurrent senior film, I also intend on using this time to animate more scenes. More to come on that!

I've begun storyboarding the next major Hyper-Breakers cartoon, and I tried to go all-out on the storyboards. I'd like to share a sample of what the boards look like!

Doing this was very much a worthwhile exercise, I think. While I could have made chicken scratch storyboards, putting more detail gives me a clearer picture of what I want to show. I've noticed that if I leave things too ambiguous/unclear, when the time comes to animate I become intimidated and would not want to work on a scene at all. I would be doing more guesswork rather than just having a stronger storyboard to begin with.

Unlike this episode's predecessor, Caffeinated Chaos, I'm aiming for it to be a two-parter instead of a three-parter... for my own sanity lmao. I'm also hoping that the overall story is stronger too, I think I've improved slightly more as a writer since my last go-around with these characters.

I got this WIP to share from my senior film, a fourth wall-breaking gag!

I was exhausted by the time I was done animating this shot, as a lot of the action with the film reel had to be done on one's. But, I think the result made the effort worth it!

Woah! I haven't updated this thread in a long while!

First thing's first

In that time was that I was able to wrap up my senior film Rat Race!

I haven't uploaded the film to Newgrounds just yet... I'm hoping to enter in some film fests right now. Luckily, Rat Race was accepted into one so far, and it's in my home state too! It's looking like a night out for me and my friends, ha ha! I hope to do a more in-depth write up about Rat Race when the time comes to upload it.

*BTW, if you attended the Pico Day 2024 meetup in NJ, Rat Race was one of the films screened there! It was a surreal experience seeing my work alongside so many other talented folks there. The whole event was amazing to attend, and I enjoyed hanging out with the people there!

Polishing a T̶u̶r̶d̶Oldie

I meant to write about this a while ago, but I got caught up in Rat Race! Back in January, I gave a quick facelift to the first animation I uploaded to the site, Kiwi Store Brawl.

Kiwi Store Brawl was published was back in 2021, and was the first episode to my web series Hyper-Breakers. Being my first upload, my inexperience shows, and I thought it would be a nice exercise to see if I could polish things up a bit, not too much, but some small changes that I hope bring it up a little.

New Animation

The biggest and most sweeping change to the movie was the addition and replacement of a handful of animation. The first thing I did was using an alternate take that was originally discarded for a scene. I actually wrote about that alternate take in this thread sometime after I originally uploaded the short.

At 2/14/22 05:13 PM, RobC3 wrote:

I've just finished organizing some of my old project folders, and I stumbled across an alternate version of a scene that I roughed out when I was still working on Kiwi Store Brawl.

This is how it played out in the final version.

There are things I like about both, but I think the version I cut would have been more funny. Perhaps I went with the final version because I wanted to appear more grotesque, but with my goofy art style I think the version I cut would fared better. Also, I suspect that I probably cut it so I wouldn't have to find a way to color-fade the can into his hand, which is pretty lazy of me, and only created more work and scenes for myself, oops. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I still believe that the alt take is the stronger of the two, so I got to work on cleaning up those old roughs. The part I found the most fun was having to mimic my older art style from 2021. For comparison on how my style evolved since then, here's what the artwork from the story arc's conclusion looked like, circa 2023:

And here's how the finalized version of the alternate take turned out (2024):

While I did animate Kiwi Store Brawl in Flash, I actually did the new animation in Opentoonz, my program of choice nowadays. I think I nailed my old flash style.

The final completely new scene I did was just the villain, Flex, flying through some clouds in the sky:

In the original cut, the villain leaves the setting, a convenience store, by doing a DBZ-style power-up and flying through the ceiling. Originally, the character can only be seen flying out of the store for one frame, so its like a "blink and you'll miss it" and it would obviously leave a viewer confused as to what just happened. I added in this scene to be slotted in and make it just a little more clear that he's flying away. It's small scenes like this that help me learn the importance of staging, and will hopefully put me on the right track to being a better storyteller.

The last of the visual edits I did were more or less fixing visual and framing goofs. A more complex example is that the character Aaron the cat catches the villain off guard with a baseball bat... a baseball bat that did not appear at any point previously within the cartoon. So, I though a fun fix would be to set up a "Chekhov's Gun", and have a box of baseball bats for sale within frame in an early scene:

ORIGINAL(2021)

REFRESH(2024)

Making changes like this did involve me going back into my original flash files to rearrange elements.

Miscellaneous Edits

I did other various things like crop the aspect ratio to 16:9 (This entry was animated in 3:2 to break even if I decided more strongly to do 16:9 or 4:3 in the future), I rerecorded my vocal performance to something slightly less monotone (not a whole lot of work, my character spoke only a handful of lines), and recomposited the footage.

The 2021 version was composited with a filter applied over it to make it look like cel-animation... but I never found the effect all that convincing. More to that point, the next two episodes don't even use this filter. For those, I went with a more bright and bloomy look, somewhat like what you see in modern anime (even though my art style itself isn't a polished-anime look). For the 2024 refresh, I just slapped some film grain over the raw flash footage and called it a day, lmao. The episodes afterwards also use film grain, but to recomposite Kiwi Brawl with the same method as those episodes would have entailed a more comprehensive and granular approach, such as moving the flash art to Opentoonz layer-by-layer... maybe even redrawing the backgrounds to be watercolor... much more than what I was willing to do for this small cleanup. Funny enough, my senior film was composited with a cel-animation filter that was of a different method than what I used years ago, and to my eye, at least, appears more faithful.

Alright, that's all I got right now... Happy Father's Day!

When was the last time I updated this thread?

oh that's a long time ago...

THE RAT RACE POST (PART 1)

--------------------------------------------

Rat Race is my senior film that I made while at Pratt Institute:

I always told myself that if I was going to update this thread in the future, I would be doing a disservice to the nature of this thread if I didn't make an "after-action review" type post on Rat Race. I think there's quite a bit to cover, here we go!

Concept

I majored in 2D animation at Pratt, and in the second-half of my third year I took the class "Senior Project Development". This is it, this is where I had to craft the idea that was going to represent all I had to show for my years of studying. The first task was to present three ideas for a project for review to the class. Mine were:

• A cartoon with a conflict between two OC's I've made before: Frederick the Fennec, and Don Jack the Weasel. In hindsight, this more or less could be thought of as my Flash-Forward Jam game from 2021 turned into a full short:

• An animated short about a knight and a defected general. (This idea was developed during a screenwriting class that I was taking concurrently)
• A race-against-the-clock story about a rat who's almost late for work (Ding, ding, ding!)

Really, Rat Race can even be traced to the previous semester. I took a storyboarding class where I doodled a simple anxious-looking rat character design-- also in-line with my habit of drawing Hanna-Barbera-esque designs.

Reese ended up appearing in a couple storyboards in that class. Here's a snippet from a story about a vending machine:

The idea with Reese appeared the most developed at the time out of the three, and I believe I was apprehensive about doing a re-do of Delivery Defense as opposed to an original story. So, it was decided that Rat Race would be my senior project.

The Script

I wrote the first draft of Rat Race while I had the flu. Draw from that what you may.

When crafting the story for Rat Race, I used some ideas from the "Frederick" concept too to give it some meat. I decided to pluck my fennec character Frederick and integrate him into Reese's story. In Rat Race he became Reese's unwitting passenger throughout the whole story.

I realize the directorial decision to include Frederick as the sidekick isn't a super-strong one. I'm a stubborn person and I'll admit I did want to see him in some capacity in the story. Though on the whole Frederick's presence is to act as a foil to Reese, he does end up taking a more "reactive" role throughout. Nonetheless, I appreciate his inclusion and I think it did add to Rat Race overall.

Storyboards

*while I did begin storyboards after the first few drafts of Rat Race, it was naturally clear that I was going to be developing it and the script side-by-side. Not enough time had passed during that semester for me to be fully confident to "lock" anything down.

Here are some of the early storyboard drawings I made during that semester:

*These are taken from the nightmare sequence in the beginning. Originally, I had opted to reuse my design of Don Jack as Reese's boss *owing, again, to the "Frederick" idea*. It was later I decided to design a different character to take that role.

Another big difference is how the "water-heater" sequence takes place. Originally the scene was going to involve a maintenance worker getting distracted by the Mythbusters-parody on the TV. Reese and Frederick would then sneak behind the worker's back and straight up steal the water heater. Then they would use it as a rocket ship in the stairwell.

TO BE CONTINUED... (in another post)

THE RAT RACE POST (PART 2)

--------------------------------------------

Storyboards (Continued)

When my senior year began, Rat Race did have a complete animatic that covered the whole story left over from my Junior year, but things were still not quite locked down yet.

One of the things I finalized was the design of the boss. Taking the place of old Jack the Weasel is a new crocodile character, named Mr. Crocburn. I re-storyboarded the nightmare sequence to include him, as well as the ending sequence in his office.

*In this chicken-scratch drawing he's playing Rock 'Em Sock 'Em robots.

Also during this time I hammered down the final iteration of the "water heater sequence"

These were not the only sequences to be given a second pass, the storyboard did have more polishing done overall.

Animation

After the my winter break concluded, Rat Race only had a little bit of it's animation done. The animation it did have was still in a rough state. I had to get my stuff together if I wanted to bring Rat Race to the finish line without cutting any scenes.

Throughout the months after I tried to knock out scene after scene. Rat Race's inspiration in classic TV cartoons made me more comfortable with using limited technique. But, I think I compensated for it with my knack for expressive art.

When I make animations I try and keep an excel sheet to track my progress on all the scenes.

What wasn't completed was in red. When I started to get serious, I would finish a scene completely. I would rough it out, clean it up, ink and paint it, and finish the background and compositing before moving on to the next scene. The momentum started to pick up soon enough.

A Quick Detour to Special FX

I composited Rat Race to appear like a cel-animated production. It was done in a two stage process. I did all of my artwork within Tahoma 2D, a fork of Opentoonz. In it's FX suite, it uses a node system for applying special effects.

Generally, once a scene was completed I would apply several macros to the art. One macro I would apply to each layer of animation to give it a cast shadow, to give it the appearance of layered celluloid and paint. Additionally, I would apply a noise texture to the background layer to make it look like grainy paper stock.

I would export that scene as an image sequence only to import it into another Tahoma2D project to apply the second stage of compositing.

In the second stage, I would apply a second macro to give the appearance that the art was photographed by a camera. I nicknamed this macro "MacroReal". It's a cluster-*expletive* when you take a look inside, but I'd really like to share/document it when I have the chance in the future. I just added a bunch of filters and blend modes until I got something that I was happy with.

Before "MacroReal"

After "MacroReal"

It's hard to pick out the minute details, but it's the closest I've gotten in cel-animation style compositing

*I would do this two stage process throughout separate project files mainly to save time. Tahoma2D/Opentoonz would slow to a crawl if I tried to apply all the macros and effects at once.

TO BE CONTINUED... (in another post)

THE RAT RACE POST (PART 3)

--------------------------------------------

Back to Animation...

As described in my 2024 year-end blog, Rat Race somehow, someway, got finished two weeks early. I breathed a sigh of relief.

Here are some WIP bits from when I was in the middle of animation:

*This gif shows an alternate background style I was testing. This was my attempt to replicate something in the style of those old Pink-Panther cartoons from DePatie–Freleng.

The final style you see in the film has inspiration in the pilot episode art of Angry Beavers from Nickelodeon.

https://www.whitingpictures.com/angry-beavers

I liked the striking style of the hard-ink outlines, vivid colors, and the retro offset-paint.

Sound Design

The music for Rat Race was composed by Bryan Teoh, @sleepFacingWest, who shared my enthusiasm for a 90s-cartoon style score for Rat Race (a la Rocko's Modern Life). He also helped out in cleaning up the dialogue, which gave me a good starting point for the film's final mix.

One of my favorite classes that I took at Pratt, ironically, was Sound Design. For Rat Race I decided to take on the responsibility of editing the film's final sound mix. As a refresher I dedicated a few days to blazing through an old Linkedin course on Audio for Film/Video on Pro Tools. I kept a notebook with me and tried to take thorough notes on everything like ducking, stems, busses, loudness:

The DAW I used to mix Rat Race was REAPER. I had used Pro Tools while taking my course at Pratt but... hey, 60 bucks for a license? Come on REAPER's a steal! Luckily I found a lot of the practices in that course transferable to REAPER's workflow.

This is how Rat Race looked on REAPER by the time I was done editing it:

Also, over time I had been building up a sound library compiled from various sources, many of them free. I sold my soul(email) to various sound studio sites to get their free sound pack goodies, I got the Sonniss sound packs that they release for the annual GDC conferences, Zapsplat, Humble Bundles, you name it. This blog here helped out a lot in building up my sound library:

https://www.andrewvscott.com/Building-A-Large-SFX-Library-for-Free

Poor Man's ADR (Automated Dialogue Replacement)

One of the craziest stories from the time I was working on Rat Race was when I had to do ADR for a character's dialogue. I originally provided the voice for Reese's boss, Mr. Crocburn, but it was becoming apparent to me that I wasn't the right voice. The only thing is that I had already animated and lipsynced scenes with Mr. Crocburn with my performance. In comes my friend @gorbogobmin the CHAD, he's gonna be Mr. Crocburn's new voice.

How do we dub it?

ADR.

ADR's a practice in filmmaking where dialogue is rerecorded by an actor over an already-filmed scene, with the goal of matching the lip sync on the picture. I hacked together a basic setup at my home and we went to work.

I was able to setup Reaper for ADR, allowing it to play the 1000hz tones before playing the scene-to-be-dubbed, and automatically recording multiple takes in every repeated loop.

Somehow the process was painless (uncommon for ADR standards). The new dialogue was recorded and able to be lip synced with minimal editing.

Finalizing

This is the last frame I created for Rat Race, I always laugh when I see it.

I finalized the edit of Rat Race in Davinci Resolve (No thanks, Premiere!). One of the finishing touches was adding a layer of film grain to complete the retro look. I checked the edit over a few times and then rendered it!

I'm trying to be more conscious of what good things I have going for me. I was caught off guard when a professor told my class "don't worry, your senior project doesn't define you!". I definitely feel most fortunate and blessed to have been able to complete Rat Race in the state that it's in, and still true to my original vision for it from the very beginning. It's a work I'm proud of and appreciate it's place in my life.

And that's the end of "The Rat Race Post". Stay tuned for more stuff in this thread. I'll try to not wait another eight months before posting here again!

The amount of work you did on this is absolutely insane. It rivals productions that have big teams with shots doled out to other students and several people specializing in different areas. I hope the post-grad life is treating you well!

I began animation on the next Hyper-Breakers short last month. This one's about the two main characters, Aaron the cat and Todd the dog, trying to find the last part to fix a gaming PC. I've posted storyboards for a sequel short for Hyper-Breakers here on this thread before, but that's actually for another future story, shhhh!

Originally, I had my mind set on having the backgrounds for this short done in Flash, but I got cold feet! I have some backgrounds in a pencil-and-watercolor style done on Krita:

(Flash Version of this BG for comparison):

Hyper-Breakers as a series certainly has it's shortcomings (two main characters who don't seem that different, confusing writing, etc.) Hell, I'd even say I'm guilty of allowing the Aaron character to be a self-insert (not helped by the fact that he gains a cool superpower).

A lot of these problems I'm sure can be solved with large sweeping changes to the format, but I found comfort in just finding ways that I can make small improvements as I go along. I hope I'm not engaging in some kind of a sunken-cost fallacy, though Hyper-Breakers is one my oldest creative ideas. Perhaps it's my stubbornness.

One of the things I did recently was whip up some refreshed character designs. I hope it goes further to distinguish the characters and give them some more personality.