My Grudge Monster can beat up your Oscar the Grouch

Well, I think it's a perfectly valid reason why I don't take out the garbage.



Flash

H.P. Lovecraft

So in the past few months I've gotten pretty knowledgeable in all things Lovecraft. Friends, Doug Simon and Kate Mcelroy, and I have been working on project of H.P. Lovecraft's The Statement of Randolph Carter. After much work, dedication, curses thrown at Flash, and sorry to say (but typical) lack of motivation at certain moments, and some denial of certain scenes on my part (damn you walk cycles!), we have a festival-worthy project that is almost complete!!

The entire project is to be done in Flash. I wish Flash were a person... because then I could punch Flash in the face. Don't understand why? Try doing the most simple thing in Flash... go ahead, try it, and see if you can do it so that Flash doesn't throw a tantrum...I dare you.



Randolph Carter (character designed by me and there is no relation to Doug Funny... he just seemed like a sweater vest type of guy). Doug designed the backgrounds and colored them, and I cleaned up and colored Carter.




Screen capture from another scene. Character designed by me, and animation done by me as well. Clean ups and backgrounds created by Doug Simon.

More updates posted when the motivation strikes me.

Dragons, Knights, and a whole lotta Chroma-Keying

This is still one of my favorite things I ever animated. It truly was a labor of love as I combined several different techniques in order to produce this scene. In the story the White Knight is set to complete many tasks to prove his worth to the King for the honor of his daughters hand. The last challenge is to slay the dragon. Being the good guy, the White Knight of course prevails however, the Knight holds a very important secret that comes to light at the end of the story.

For this scene I used traditional paper cut-out puppets. However, as anyone who has tackled paper cut-outs know that when animating them it is always best for them to be as large as possible. Clearly I wanted a huge size difference between the knight and the dragon but wasn't about to make an enormous dragon, so, I had to animated both the characters separately. I used a red cloth backdrop (as that was the color that contrasted the most between the two characters) and animated the dragon first based upon how a large cat would move. I then timed every movement the dragon made in order to move the knight which I did at a separate time. The were then scaled, edited, and had their backdrops chroma keyed out in After Affects and a new background added. I then took the finished product, sans fire, into flash where I was able to animated the fire, and the fire I painted on paper and scanned in to flash. Voila! There you have it! A perfect example of how you can still be traditional, but use technology to its full advantages.

Check it out on Vimeo, here, http://www.vimeo.com/9914031