For those of you that were wondering why I'd stopped doing the small updates for Super Sheep in Holly-Weird Hyjinks, I ended up needing to work on what would become "Kyoto Kasuma: A Brawl In Development." (which was my My Final Major Project) Since that was a college project and this Super Sheep cartoon is merely a personal project, I naturally wanted to have all hands (all two of them) on deck to make sure I got the FMP finished on time, but now that that's all finished up, I'm ready to start working on Super Sheep In Holly-Weird Hijinks again, but before we do that...
Project Management Time
As we can see here, I have until the end up September to make this entire thing work, as that's when I start my animation course in university. Not only that, but I'm also doing this particular project management table using a new piece of software I found called "Libre Office Calc", it basically works like "Microsoft Exel" would but without the requirement of paying for "Office 365." Oh, and I also decided to replace "Microsoft Word" with it's LibreOffice equivalent (which is called "LibreOffice Writer") too since then I'll be able to access the script without having to use a Microsoft account. (so if certain elements look different going forward, this is why) As for the two weeks where it says "Null Value", that's just because I'll be going on holiday for about two weeks, so I won't be able to do anything while I'm away. Now that that's all cleared up, it's time for me to pick up where I left off at long last
Alright, Back To The Boards
Ok, so what's all this about being on batch 10 already? Well you see, in the time between the update where I mention about working on the storyboards and now, I'd actually managed to get a whole nine batches of storyboards finished before putting all hands on deck for Kyoto Kasuma: A Brawl In Development, thus meaning we're currently on batch 10. Now that that's all cleared up, doing this was quite easy, as this time around I'm actually using a Wacom drawing tablet in order to draw the pictures (same goes for the other 9 batches)
We Interrupt This Program To Bring You Our First Project Management Update Of This Post
ok, so this might just be the shortest period of time between introducing the project management chart and me actually needing to update this, as I only started working on this project again yesterday. That is all
We Now Return You To Your Regularly Scheduled Program
Here, you might notice that while Hugo is relatively close to being on model (thus making him the worst possible example for showing I'm trying to explain here), there are just a few small things I intentionally didn't bother to fix, as lines that would have been erased are still around, not to mention the fact that Hugo doesn't have the small blue part on the end of his arm to signify where his hand begins. The reason for this is because storyboards are usually meant to be made quite quickly, that way when a scene needs to change for any reason, the storyboard artists can easily scrap what they've done and start again. Usually this is where I'd be going around taking lots of screen shots and annotating them as points of evidence that I actually worked on this project, however, since this is a personal project and not a college project and I'm personally getting sick of constantly repeating a lot of the same points over and over again like a broken record, don't expect as many screen shots this time around unless I run into stuff I haven't covered in previous projects.
whenever there needs to be lots of small text on the screen, instead of actually writing all of it out, what most people will do (myself included), especially if it's for a cartoon production, is actually not bother to write all that teeny tiny text and instead replace is with squiggly lines in order to imply text as a time saving measure, I'm doing it here for the same reason as most would if I'm being honest.
Well folks, I've officially completed yet another batch of Storyboards, this was actually relatively easy, and as long as I don't get too side-tracked looking for new evidence, I might be able to speed up the rate at which I do these boards.
Much like the last batch, this one was quite easy for me to put together considering the poor quality of the art work on display here. The reason these images look the way they do is because I'm using the snipping tool to take a screen shot of each batch, that way I can mitigate Wix's memory limits for images in blog posts since that actually ended up being an issue with a lot of my work for a while. (it's the reason some of the work on here is split into two parts)
I have a feeling a lot of these are going to be super similar by the end.
For the storyboards, while I'm using the script as a reference point for the baseline events and most of the dialogue, I'm using this as an opportunity to alter certain aspects ever so slightly to try and make it better than it was before, that way I get to have multiple drafts while still moving forward with production.
Yeah, much like the other batches I've done, this board was just a matter of drawing up the characters, writing the dialogue while making a few small changes to try and improve upon the story.
With that being said, I actually do want to raise a small concern that's cropping up in relation to this project involving the Star Creation Machine. The reason for this is because in the time between the final update before I shifted focus to Kyoto Kasuma: A Brawl In Development and now, Disney ended up releasing the new Chip n' Dale: Rescue Rangers movie:
personally I quite liked this film due to the concept expanding on the world of Who Framed Roger Rabbit thanks to the addition of other animation techniques besides just 2D animation (I.E: Stop Motion, CGI and even Motion Capture), although I do wish that the Chip n' Dale: Rescue Rangers characters used actual 2D rather than 3D models that look 2D ala the live action Tom and Jerry movie (except Dale, since in universe he's had "CGI Surgery" done), and after finding out about Peter Pan's villain backstory being based on what Disney actually did to Bobby Driscoll (the kid who played Peter Pan in the original movie before getting thrown away by Disney for growing up), I'm not so sure how I feel about him as the villain since on the one hand, the people making the film may not have known about the tragedy of Bobby, but on the other hand, the choices they made with his backstory are eerily similar to what happened back then apart from the fact that Bobby would later die with an unmarked grave, since in the film, Peter Pan went on to make bootleg movies. (although it does raise the question as to how toon aging even works in this universe)
Getting back on track, where's the concern? Well you see, in my cartoon I plan on having the Hollywood versions of Super Sheep and friends be created as the result of a machine that takes the DNA of others and makes clones that can be altered to the users liking. In Chip n' Dale: Rescue Rangers meanwhile, the villains have a machine that can directly change the way that cartoon characters look in order to fit different animation styles, which the villains actually use to turn characters such as Flounder into bootleg versions of themselves to "sneak by the copyright laws" (actual line from the film) and it's suggested that some parts of the characters get chopped off entirely:
Granted, the way me and Disney go about this sort of thing quite differently, but there's just one element in the movie that throws a monkey wrench into things:
Yeah, the monster that claimed to be Sonic The Hedgehog is officially back (now referred to as "Ugly Sonic"), and they actually poke fun of the human teeth and even mark him off as a separate entity from the real Sonic by having Ugly Sonic mention how going fast is "Sonic's thing" while "Ugly Sonic goes Slow Baby!" This implies that somewhere in this universe must be a similar machine to the one we see in the movie that is capable of making copies of characters like Sonic The Hedgehog himself. This might not cause me trouble right now though since they never explicitly say if such a machine exists, but if it does and they delve into this in a sequel, I might end up getting in trouble despite having something like that first because Disney's a big company and I'm just one rando making a cartoon sheep fight a Hollywood version of himself.
With that being said, I think I'll keep the machine since I had this idea before the trailer for Chip n' Dale even came out so I might be in the clear on this one, but if I was just getting started on this idea now, I would probably have to change the elements surrounding the explanation of how the Hollywood versions of Super Sheep and the gang come into existence.
now we're getting to the part where the actual holi-clones come into the picture. With this in mind, I've been thinking a lot about the design for Holi-Sheep specifically and feel that I should change it to be more creepy, as I ended up realising that people tend to find things like Ugly Sonic creepy because they look eerily like mutated human beings with animal features, so I'll try and pivot the design for Holi-Sheep in that direction while also employing a similar technique for The Holi-Night Pig and to a lesser extent, Holi-Hugo The Shape-Shifter, since the whole point is that these designs are supposed to be creepy versions of the regular characters.
man, I'm on a roll today, as I've managed to finish up 3 batches today. If I keep up this rate of work, I'll be done before I know it.
I've almost got as many storyboards as Kyoto Kasuma: A Brawl In Development and Super Sheep and friends are only NOW doing things in Rip Stickler Studios, thus guaranteeing that if all goes well, THIS will have the personal record of most storyboards for a single project I've done, surpassing even the previous version of this project (which was called Super Sheep in Hex-o's Exos) due to the longer length this time around.
We Interrupt This Program To Bring You Another Project Management Update
Well, my holiday ended up getting cancelled for a cool 48 hours before my family managed to find another one with a different airline, meaning I'll be able to have more batches done before I leave, although this does mean I'll need to pick up the pace since once I get back, I'll be on my final week of the storyboarding process.
We Now Return You To Your Regularly Scheduled Program
Speaking of Kyoto Kasuma, I'm actually thinking about giving her a cameo in this short where she plays the role of one of the actors in the romantic film that gets interrupted by the big fight that happens between the justice trio and their Hollywood counterparts since I already have her model (thus allowing me to save time and effort creating another character specifically for this short) and it also allows me to show what she's been getting up to ever since getting out of the Development Dimension in her short.
Well folks, we've reached "Super Sheep in Hexo's Exos" numbers, and given how that ended up covering around 7 minutes or so, I predict that we'll be doing exactly 66 batches total for this project, which is 3 times the work I did previously (I based this off of some calculations I did using the google calculator, thus angering maths teachers yet again), meaning I'm only one third of the way there.
Oh look, I decided to have Kyoto also appear alongside the creepy, inaccurate looking Bitris 16 as the token human character who inexplicably gets more screen time than the supposed main star of the story
Here, you can get a good look at what I now want to go with for Holi-Sheep and Holi-Night Pig, as with them I'm trying to blend realistic animal features with realistic human elements (I.E: human proportions mixed with more animalistic features for maximum creepiness. (and by extension maximum dunks on the Ugly Sonic from the first film's first trailer because I'm petty like that) With Holi-Hugo on the other hand, there aren't any realistic animals that I can base him off of at least, none that I know of anyway besides a chameleon... Which now that I'm thinking about it, that might be a better design than what I've got going on here where it's just creepy Mike Wazowski with spider legs, in fact, let me just go back and change it real quick.
Wow, I did not think anything like that would happen, and it's a good thing it happened now rather than later because here, I only had to re-do the design once instead of however many times I'll end up needing to draw Holi-Hugo as a means to keep everything consistent.
For this particular panel, I wanted to try and blur the characters so that you'd know that in this part, they're supposed to be out of focus. When I tried this with Kyoto Kasuma: A Brawl In Development, I didn't really like the blur effects that were available to me in Pixlr, so I scrapped the idea entirely, but now after doing a bit of experimentation, I think this blur effect actually works quite well, especially due to the fact that it completely covers Super Sheep and Hugo due to how small the space between the outlines is, so I think I'll keep it this time around.
if I keep up at this rate, eventually I'll end up running out of Sonic spin off games to name these batches after (although given just how many spin offs there are, I don't think it'll happen anytime soon, especially if I decide to count things like "SEGASonic Popcorn Shop" down the road)
We Interrupt This Program To Bring You Another Project Management Update
Because of the fact that I won't really be able to do anything during the holiday (not to mention the fact I want to re-design Holi-Super Sheep and Holi-Hugo to be closer to what some random Hollywood executive would actually approve), I may end up having to work on this project during my time at university and simply aim for the very end of 2022 instead (since in the trailer, I only specified it would come out at some point in 2022):
We Now Return You To Your Regularly Scheduled Program
Here, I've decided to go ahead and add in a SEGA 32X since this is the 32nd batch and I wanted to do something special similar to what I do for batches 3 and 22 (those being adding Knuckles for batch 3 and 22 and Joe Gardener for batch 22), and I plan on doing the same thing if I ever reach batch 64
Here, I've decided to go ahead and bring Kyoto back into the mix alongside Holi-Bitris 16 and Gerald. The reason for this is two-fold. One: it allows me to expand upon the rivalry between Super Sheep and Kyoto as suggested by my dad, and two: it allows me to cut down on the cast slightly by not having to worry about making a new security guard model to go alongside Gerald, as I already have Kyoto's model ready to go (which is the same reason I had her do a cameo as the film actress in the first place)
I'm beginning to realise that with this cartoon, I'll end up needing to animate on average around 9 different character models at once during the fight scene alone (not to mention Ruff Bup and Rick are also there briefly, so that brings the total to around 11 characters to animate at once), so I think that'll be the biggest challenge of the entire production, so if I end up running into issues with the gameplay thermometer, I may end up having to cancel this cartoon too and replace it with something else. yup, we may have another one of these go down the gutter due to too much ambition (although I'm not giving up just yet)
Here, I needed to reposition and rotate the drawing I did of The Night Pig so that when he fires the Hu-grappling gun (also spelt "Hugh-Grappling Gun"), it'll head downwards in relation to the screen space. I figured doing this would be way easier than erasing the entire drawing and starting over again.
On a note that's only tangentially related, I decided to go ahead and put together the asset collection now because there were already things I knew I could reuse in there and I decided to take note of the character section in particular:
as you can see, even without the models for characters like the finalised holly-wood versions of the justice trio (which I now realise I'll need to make two versions of since at the end they'll be made to look closer to the real justice trio), Bitris 16 and even characters like Gerald and Clint, this is already shaping up to feature my biggest cast yet.
As such, I wanted to make sure that I would actually be able to fit at least nine of them in one scene and after a little bit of finagling and a bit of optimising the model detail, I managed to get a lot of the characters in the same scene:
of course, this doesn't reflect whether or not I'll be able to fit all the finalised models considering I haven't even started working on them yet but it does serve as a nice prelude as to what to expect. The thing that turned out to be the big issue here was actually the graphics thermometer rather than the gameplay one which I found to be rather unexpected since I figured all the connectors that make up the character rigs would have caused the gameplay thermometer to skyrocket into the 70-90% range, not that it would have affected the animation itself since that's a separate sub-thermometer from the connectors sub-thermometer on the main gameplay thermometer. (lucky me) With that being said, now I know that the fight scene I want to pull off is at least feasible from a character stand point, although I will need to ease up on any potential objects and stuff if I want to pull this off. (not to mention I didn't actually account for the existence of the more reasonably designed versions of Holi-Sheep and friends that'll be inspired by Sonic's finalised movie design, so that's an additional 3 characters right there)
Needless to say, if I do end up at a point where Super Sheep in Holi-weird Hijinks becomes unfeasible, I may have to cancel it and replace it with something more doable.
We Interrupt This Program To Bring You A Belated Project Management Update
Well folks, I'm back from my holiday in Turkey and I'm now ready to get back to working on this project. I enjoyed my holiday quite a bit (more so than other holidays pre-COVID), but over the course of my time away, something quite peculiar happened that's caught me by surprise.
Just before the holiday itself began, I was searching for a free video editor that I could use on my computer as a potential replacement for the Share Factory line of software I'd been relying on for years, that way I could do things like have multiple green screen layers at once and even the ability to add in as many video and/or audio tracks as I wanted without having to pay Adobe or the current owners of Vegas for the privilege, although at the time the reason I was searching was because I wanted to be able to precisely change the speed and have the pitch go up with it so that I could have an effect similar to what happens with DVDs in the UK, as you can see with this comparison I whipped together featuring two versions of a scene from the Sonic The Hedgehog OVA:
Sonic OVA (Region 1):
Sonic OVA (Region 2):
oh, and I found a way to use a program called VLC media player to effectively download any YouTube video I want onto my computer, so videos randomly going down due to copyright claims or what have you should be a non issue so long as I get the video downloaded on time.
Getting back on track, one promising candidate came in the form of something called Davinci Resolve, which was apparently used to edit a bunch of big Hollywood projects. When I went to download it however, it asked for my personal information, so I decided not to go through with it.
Afterwards, I ended up stumbling across another promising candidate called Shotcut and after making sure it was actually safe to use first (since it seemed too good to be true), I downloaded the latest available version.
In the very short amount of time I'd been using it (which was about a day or two because of the holiday to turkey), I was able to make a joke video where you think it's going to be just Kyoto Kasuma: A Brawl In Development again but then the title screen for Sonic The Hedgehog 2 (although in my case it was actually Sonic 2 Absolute) shows up and takes over:
The video itself didn't take very long to put together, as all I had to do was record the Sonic 2 title screen, layer it over my already finished Kyoto Kasuma animation. (so around 15-45 minutes worth of work at most)
The strange thing about this particular video is that over the course of my holiday, it would go on to become the most popular video on my channel despite how little effort I put into it (the title screen isn't even chroma keyed correctly):
At this point, I'm not even sure what to think, as now there's a chance that even if I put years worth of effort into Super Sheep in Holi-weird Hijinks, it'll probably get over shadowed by Sonic.
But hey, enough about this particular oddity, I've got storyboards to be making
We Now Return You To Your Regularly Scheduled Program
Sometimes when storyboarding, you might end up coming up with a particular way to frame a particular thing only to end up changing your mind because you came up with something better. This is one such case, as here, I wanted there to be one shot where Super Sheep fires his laser and another where Holi-Sheep does the same thing, but after finishing the first shot, I decided that doing this would be way too slow, so I'm choosing to change it so they both fire their lasers at the same time in the same shot since doing so will likely be easier and faster:
I've only got about two and a half pages of script to go and I'll be done here
Now I've officially done exactly double what I did for Kyoto Kasuma
We Interrupt This Program To Bring You Another Overly Simplistic Project Management Update
Ok, so now I'm on the final week of storyboarding, so if I don't pick up the pace at this rate, I won't be able to jump into making the assets as quickly.
We Now Return You To Your Regularly Scheduled Program
So How Was Doing The Storyboarding This Time Around?
My goodness, that took way longer than I thought it would (even without the holiday to Turkey taking up the first two weeks of my summer break), much of the process was pretty straight forward really as all I was doing was drawing the characters, objects and scenery in a worse quality than normal (thus saving a lot of time and effort in the long run), my only real enemy at that point would be lacking productivity. (which luckily wasn't too bad this time around) Luckily, thanks to some of the breaks I ended up taking the whole process didn't become too monotonous but by the end I was starting to get sick of it. Not to mention the fact that my usual naming convention (where I name each batch after a game from the Sonic The Hedgehog franchise) came under threat a few times due to me almost running out of Sonic games to name each batch after. (of course, this means I'll need to get together a list of all the Sonic games so that I don't run into this issue again)
Now that that process has been taken care of, it's time to move on to designing all the new characters I'll need for this short.
This List Of Characters To Design (will Underline once completed):
Holi-Sheep 1
Holi-Night Pig 1
Holi-Hugo 1
Holi-Super Sheep 2
Holi-Night Pig 2
Holi-Hugo 2
Gerald S. Curity
Gondile Foodalstein
Clint E. Orson
Holi-Bitris 16
The "Kyoto's Boyfriend" Actor (Role Now Filled By Ringle Rockwell From My Sello-Man Advert)
The Character Design Phase
In this phase, I'll be going ahead and designing all the characters who will be getting their grand debut in this particular short since designing characters like Super Sheep again would be pointless unless I decided to change the core design itself.
The reason I'm doing this is twofold: One, It'll give me the opportunity to decide what the characters will look like before creating the 3D models (that way I'll have something to use as a reference so that I don't making it up as I go along), and two, I'm doing this as a means to put off doing the asset list a little bit longer because of how boring I find doing asset lists to begin with.
With all that said and done, let's get to work.
Character 1: Holi-Sheep 1
For this design, I decided to take a look at my original Super Sheep design that's worked for years and decided to try and take the same approach as your average Hollywood executive. "How much of the original design philosophy can we completely discard in favour of realism while making it look just enough like the original to get that sweet sweet brand recognition."
As such, I decided to go ahead and commit what I would consider the main cardinal sins when it comes to Super Sheep's design.
1. I decided to give him actual shoes rather than letting his feet simply look like shoes in the first place because I figured the Hollywood executives would want to put a little bit of product placement for a real life shoe company like they did with Sonic's shoes in the Sonic The Hedgehog movie.
2. I separated Super Sheep's eyes and made them look more like that of a regular sheep with a little bit of a human flair thrown in with the fact his eyes are green (which was inspired by my sloppy attempt at creating an anime version of Super Sheep which I decided to nickname "Tyler")
3. I gave Super Sheep five fingers on each hand as appose to the usual four fingered approach I use with him and the other animal characters. The only reason I did this was to try and make this version appear more human like as a means to up the creepy factor on the whole thing
4. I put Super Sheep's mouth in the middle as appose to to the side, much like what I did with "Tyler" (the attempt I made at doing an anime Super Sheep), I only did this to further add to the realism of this design since unlike in cartoons (specifically Sonic), most people's mouths remain firmly in the middle
With that out of the way, it's time to turn The Night Pig into an abomination with my next design
Character 2: Holi-Night Pig 1
For this one, I decided to do the same thing I did with Holi-Super Sheep and totally butchered (no pun intended) the spirit of the original version of The Night Pig by doing things such as giving him five fingers on each hand, changing his painted hooves into shoes, ext.
The main difference between this new version of The Night Pig and the original is that I decided to make this version significantly fatter. I figured since this is supposed to be a Hollywood style version of the character, I thought to myself "if I'm going to make this look inaccurate, I might as well go as far as I can with this and make it look as cliched as possible." (because ha ha, the pig is fat)
The challenge with these designs is that for as much as I'm attempting to go in a more realistic direction with these designs, I still need to make sure that the characters themselves still fit within the cartoon world that Super Sheep himself (the real one, not the Hollywood one) occupies since if I don't, there'll be a major aesthetic clash going on.
Character 3: Holi-Hugo 1
That's right, I've now officially done the Hollywood-ified versions of all the main heroes.
For this design, I didn't even need to look at the original Hugo as a point of reference since this design is supposed to look the least like their original concept. Looking back however, I feel as if I may have gone a bit too far in making this look as unlike the original as possible, as now I've got what is ostensibly a completely different character on my hands.
With this, I think I might want to drop the idea of this guy even being related to Hugo the Shape-Shifter in any way and just have him serve as an original character that Hollywood executives would mandate to be in the film for no reason at all (Think along the same lines as Longclaw from the live action Sonic movies and Gutsy Smurf from the live action Smurfs movies)
as for the design itself, I found that landing on a good colour scheme for this guy was a lot trickier than I thought, as certain palettes ended up looking too similar to pre existing characters (I.E: Yoshi from the Mario series, Scaler from the game of the same name and even Spyro from the Spyro The Dragon series), but eventually I landed on a teal and washed out yellow colour scheme after a few attempts.
Character 4: Holi-Sheep 2
for this one, I took a lot of inspiration from the movie Sonic design that was created after the (well deserved) backlash they received after what they tried to do to that prickly blue hedgehog
As such, this design was making sure that the character looked more like the actual Super Sheep while still retaining some of the design inaccuracies I intentionally put on the Holi-Sheep design that'll get the most screen time, I.E: the separate eyes, the shoes, the bone colour and even the faded wool. Speaking of the eyes, at first I wanted to retain the green eyes I gave the other Holi-Sheep for the sake of paying tribute to Sonic again, but at the last minute I though to myself "ok hot shot, this might be a little bit too much Sonic influence, even by my standards", so I made them a dark shade of brown so that when you view this design from a distance, you'd think he has black eyes (sort of like how there's a small bit of white fur on movie Sonic's face that's meant to look like a part of his eyes come to think of it)
Character 5: Holi-Night Pig 2
For this design, I more or less took the same approach I did with Holi-Sheep 2 where I made him look more like the actual Night Pig but with a few of the inaccuracies still in place (I.E: Separate eyes, Gloves and Shoes and even the fact he's fatter than the original), not much more to say about this one if I'm being honest.
Character 6: Holi-Hugo 2
This particular design was actually the easiest to make since Hugo himself is quite a simplistic design and I wanted to make this version look more like the actual Hugo but with a few inaccuracies, I.E: Shoes and Gloves, Separate Eyes and, my personal favourite inaccuracy, the fur. The reason I decided to give this version of Hugo fur is as a means to give this version of Hugo a slightly different silhouette from the normal, non furry Hugo The Shape-Shifter so that people don't get confused if they're both on screen at the same time. To pull the fur effect off, I just added a load of consummate V's (learned that one from Homestar Runner) to the the brown areas of Hugo's body
Character 7: Gerald S. Curity
Well would you look at that, it's the first actually new person I've made for this project (remember, every other character I've designed thus far have been little more than variations of Super Sheep, Hugo and The Night Pig) and I have to say, I quite like how this particular design turned out, as when I started, I more or less envisioned a straight up security guard. As I went along however, I ended up giving him elements that you'd typically find on a Soldier in any given military specifically the United States since the flag is on his hat.
Speaking of that very flag, I decided to quickly look up a reference image to make sure I got the colours on the stripes correct (since some Americans might end up getting mad if I get it wrong)
At one point, I considered giving him coloured eyes since I also want him to pull double duty by being part of both the Super Sheep and Kyoto Kasuma intellectual properties, but I decided to just go with the classic black eyes instead, and given the direction I took the character in the end, this ended up being for the best.
For a character like this, I think it'd be fun if he was a delusional security guard who believes he's part of the U.S. Military because of the way I decided to dress him mixed with the pose I decided to draw him in.
Character 8: Gondile Foodalstein
I came up with the Gondile Foodalstein (or at least his name) in one of my later attempts at writing the first Super Sheep movie (which as of writing this blog post, still hasn't even been finished yet because of how I ended up taking on other projects, including this one), I came up with the name because I needed the character of "Criti-Cow" (who in the story would go on to become Hex Moother since this film is supposed to serve as Super Sheep's origin story) to disguise himself as a meat factory worker in order to smuggle Shiv Waldo (who at this point had yet to gain his powers and become Super Sheep) in there in order to save other animals from being killed:
As such, the character of Gondile Foodalstein has been on my mind for the past few years, the only thing holding him back from actually being made was the fact he didn't seem to fit into any of my projects until now. (since none of them called for an angry man who's always getting his ID stolen)
Speaking of his anger, that's actually the reason I decided to make his face redder than the rest of his skin, since it communicates that he's gotten angry so many times it's caused his face to permanently become red and his hair to start balding.
Character 9: Clint E. Orson
For Clint, I went with a bit of a "Generic Business Guy" look with his overly shiny hair and moustache and even his all black attire. (except the red bow tie, which exists because regular ties are hard to model) The only thing I needed to watch out for was making him look too similar to another business guy I created but have yet to use in anything, that being Guyzo's nemesis, Jim Starforce:
Overall, I think I did a relatively decent job at making the two distinct characters (although that's only because I gave Clint a bow tie and a moustache)
Character 10: Holi-Bitris 16
I actually quite like how this particular design turned out, since the washed out colours, more realistically sized eyes and the needless changing of his hair style to be more like a mohawk rather than the mess going on on the original design makes this look exactly like what some dumb Hollywood executive would sign off on when making a live action movie with based on the (currently fictional) Bitris 16 I.P.
Character 11: The "Kyoto's Boyfriend" Actor/Ringle Rockwell
Alright, after considering what to do with this character's face, I ended up getting a bit of an idea. "Wait a minute, what if I put someone Surfer Dude Jeff into this role instead of designing yet another new character." So after looking through my old creative media level 2 website for potential characters I haven't used yet, I decided instead to go ahead and bring back the character of Ringle Rockwell from my Sello-Tape advert staring Sello-Man himself since outside of that advert, I haven't really used him or even the grand majority of the other characters I've designed before and during creative media level 2 come to think of it.
So with that, I'm pretty much done with the character design side of things when it comes to everyone in the main cast.
So How Was Designing All The New Characters
I've got to be honest, I did not expect to get all these characters designed as quickly as I did, as usually one character would take an hour or two to draw out, but for some strange reason, I was able to bang out one character every twenty or so minutes on average (even for the actually new characters) which I personally find quite impressive considering how clean they turned out.
My favourite part of this process was finally getting an excuse to do the design for Gondile Foodalstein because I've been waiting for several years after coming up with the name.
Of course, now that this part is over, I'm afraid it's time for me to move on to the most boring bit thus far, the asset list. (since now I don't have anything more interesting to do until after the asset list is complete)
The Incredibly Boring Asset List
Ok, so usually when it comes to evidencing these asset lists I like to take a screen shot of me in the beginning of the process and then just go make the rest of it and talk about what I did. Here on the other hand, I decided it would be a good idea to record a video of the whole thing. However, around 7 minutes in, I decided to scrap the idea because I figured it would be way too boring even with music playing in the background.
As for the asset list itself, it actually holds the title for being my biggest asset list yet (thank goodness I decided to split the assets into their respective categories ages ago or else this would get very convoluted very quickly. (as a pose to getting regular convoluted) With all that in mind, the list itself was rather boring to make, as all I was doing was listing everything I'd need for this project and how I'd get and/or make what I don't currently have yet, nothing special here.
Now that that part is over however, it's time to move back into the actually interesting bits as I go ahead and get everything together for this project.
Holly-Weird Asset Production And Gathering Day 1: Holi-Sheep 1 and Modifying Super Sheep Himself
Today, I decided to start off by making Holi-Sheep 1 since he's one of the more important new characters. (especially given how he's one of the main parts of the conflict in this cartoon again) To save myself time on modelling the body all over again, I decided to simply take my already existing Super Sheep model and make the feet smaller, give his arms and legs a more muscular look, make his cape red, swap out his hands (which I then made brown) and head and even de-saturate the his wool colour in order to try and make it look more "realistic."
I do have to say that so far, this 3D model is coming off as a lot more creepy than it did in the 2D illustration and I think I might know why. It's more than likely due to the fact that in 3D, all the characters have more literal depth than they ever would in 2D, thus allowing the characters to look more real than they would otherwise, meaning that it's actually easier for something like my Holi-Sheep 1 to come off as creepy.
When it came to doing Holi-Sheep's mouth, I originally wanted to try and stick it in the centre of the area below his nose in order to make it look more realistic, but after several attempts to get it to look right, I ended up giving up on that idea and just decided to do what I normally do with the mouth and stick it off to the side instead. Of course, because I want this to be more realistic than the rest of the cast I decided to also add in extra details such as gum-lines and I even added more detail to the inside of his mouth. (I.E: the reddish colour and even the uvula) Speaking of the mouth, one thing I ended up finding out by experimenting was that I could actually have different parts of the mouth be made of different materials, thus allowing me to enhance the realism without changing the actual art style. (I say this because for as much as I want to make Holi-Sheep 1 and his team to creep the audience out with their realism, I still want those characters to be able to fit in with the rest of the cast)
After a while, I decided to go ahead and add a black and white mode to my regular Super Sheep model in preparation for when I need to do the black and white part of this cartoon, this was quite easy because all I was doing was modifying my Super Sheep model with a single key frame and a few additional pieces to represent the new shoes and gloves.
Tomorrow, I'll probably finish up work on Holi-Sheep 1 and then move on to Holi-Night Pig 1.
Holly-Weird Asset Production And Gathering Day 2: Finishing Up Holi-Sheep 1 and Starting The Holi-Night Pig
Today, I managed to finish up most of the remaining business I needed to take care of with Holi-Sheep 1 such as giving him ears (which I re-used from the first version since both versions of the design have the same ear type anyway) and even keyframing all the body groups (the mouth poses and the eyelids mostly) before moving on to do Holi-Night Pig 1. (although I did forget that he's supposed to have horns, so I should go back and fix that at some point)
Doing his fat body shape proved to be quite easy because earlier I decided to put all the character designs on my phone so that I'd be able to use them as reference as to what the 3D versions should look like without having to turn my computer on just to take a quick peek.
Much like with Holi-Super Sheep, I decided to go ahead and make Holi-Night Pig a remix of the original Night Pig model I made so that I could use it as a base to make my changes to without ruining the original, all the meanwhile I then get to use said original as a point of reference, of course, due to his fatter body, I did end up needing to completely re-do the Pig-signia regardless. Hey, speaking of the Pig-signia (yes, the name is a total pun, get your pitchforks and torches ready), I decided to go ahead and make the paint strokes look like they're made of a shiny metal in order to give off the impression that this version of the Night Pig is engineered to be fabulously wealthy unlike The actual Night Pig who I decided lives below the poverty line along with Super Sheep.
As for the hands, I decided to take the ones from Holi-Sheep 1 and copy pasted them onto Holi-Night Pig because I already quite like how the hands looked and didn't want to re-do it again. (a case where I decided to work smarter, not harder) As for the mouth meanwhile, I did the same thing I did with Holi-Super Sheep and add in a bunch of realistic detailing to the mouth itself (I.E: gum-lines, uvulas, ext.) because I believe it'll work quite well in making the initial Hollywood designs of Super Sheep and friends true to what Hollywood executives would actually sign off on in the assumption that they'll get lots of money.
We Interrupt This Program To Bring You A Belated Project Management Update
Given how many assets I'll need to make and/or gather for this project (everything from locations to music and characters ext.), I may end up needing to extend the amount of time I do this if things start to go array (especially since the Hollywood designs are taking a bit more time than I anticipated) but hopefully I won't need to do this.
We Now Return You To Your Regularly Scheduled Program: Holly-Weird Asset Production And Gathering Day 3 (And Knuckles)
Today, I finished up work on The Holi-Night Pig 1 where I added the mouth orientation chip (which itself is the reason I'm even able to have the characters mouths off to the side rather than in the middle in the first place) and even giving him his blue eyes. I also ended up needing to adjust the proportions a little bit so that his arms were a little bit thicker by using Dreams' "stretch" mode (which allows me to effectively make parts of the puppet taller or shorter and it even makes changing the size of extremities such as the hands and feet affect the rest of the leg or arm to an extent) which did lead to the hands needing to be naturally bigger due to how the proportions need to remain uncomfortably realistic here. (unlike the normal and second Hollywood-ified versions of Super Sheep and friends who all just get big hands regardless)
After I took care of that relatively simple task came the most complicated character I've taken on thus far. (at least in this project) That being Holi-Hugo, or as he will now be known, Tarmizand Kai. Meleon. (since he looks so different from Hugo that it warrants him being his own person instead, and the fact he's a chameleon had a lot of influence on the latter parts of his name) The reason I say he's the most complicated is because for him, I had to do more than just mess around with the default puppet and sculpt the body and head, as I actually had to make and rig his tail (thank goodness for the live clone feature, or else I would have had to paint each piece of the tail individually), although once I got myself into a good rhythm it was relatively smooth sailing from there. As for Tarmizand's hands meanwhile, putting those on didn't quite go as smoothly as I would have thought at first due to some technical difficulties that had to do with me accidentally messing up the puppet mirror for some reason, but after enough trial and error I was able to get both hands on and painted at the same time. (since I live cloned one of the hands, thus meaning when I paint one copy of the hand, the other copy also changes with it) Keep in mind, I still haven't finished making this guy yet, as there's still things like the mouth and the rigging of the eyeballs to do, so I'll have to take care of that tomorrow (hopefully things go relatively smoothly for me here)
Holly-Weird Asset Production Day 4: Lizard Mouth And The Bandwidth Strikes Back Again
Ok, so things were going quite smoothly for me at first, as while doing Tarmizand's mouth I ended up improving the razor sharp teeth by simply choosing to draw them one at a time rather than all at once like I do with everyone else's teeth because I found that whenever I tried to do the teeth all at once, the line work ended up becoming quite sloppy by the end. (probably due to me not having the most steady hands when it comes to motion controls) Staying on the topic of Tarmizand's mouth for the moment, I actually want to highlight the fact that I decided to make it look more less realistic than I did with Holi-Sheep 1 and Holi-Night Pig 1. The reason I chose to do this is actually because I actually want to make ol' Tarmizand Kai. Meleon an entirely separate character from Hugo because of how radically different they both look from one another and I still really like Tarmizand's design.
Unfortunately for me however, I actually needed to drop the stream early so that my dad could use the internet for work stuff again. Yup, I'm not even at the animation stage and already I'm facing a production issue that's beyond my control. (oh the minor inconvenience in the grand scheme of things) Saying this however, I did have the PS5's internal recording feature on hand so nothing was lost at the end of the day.
As I was painting Tarmizand's mouth however, I slowly but surely realised that de-coupling Tarmizand from Hugo like this probably won't make sense with the current version of the story I have where he's introduced as a digitized solution for making a Hugo clone without his DNA. As such, I'm actually thinking about re-writing the script for this cartoon entirely as a means for allowing the story to be more cohesive, and not to mention I could actually include the likes of Kyoto Kasuma, Holi-Bitris 16 and maybe even the real Bitris 16 in a more meaningful and natural manner.
With this in mind, I'll still be making a good majority of the stuff on the asset list, by this I mainly mean the characters since I know I want to keep the cast the same for the most part. That way, when I end up being able to focus on this project again in 2023 (assuming I end up in university by the time all the prep work is complete), I'll be able to focus solely on the animation process and the post production phase. not to mention how the additional time I'll have on my hands can be used to expand on the central concept (that being me poking fun at the film industry at large, specifically the concept of poorly done live action adaptations of cartoon and video game properties) by making it longer than 22 minutes and adding more characters such as Dr Dingbat himself.
Back To The Writer's Room
Last night, while I was in bed, I ended up thinking to myself "you know, there's a lot of funny material I could get out of the concept of the Justice Trio poking fun at the film industry, more material than I could probably fit in a single 22 minute short." With this in mind, I've now officially decided to split this project into three parts:
The reason I've decided to do this is so that I can potentially tap into more of the material (I.E: the trend of making all female reboots) I'd have no choice but to miss out on if I made the entire thing 22 minutes. With this in mind however, you may have noticed that I'm not actually working on the script first. The reason this is the case is because for an especially big project like this, one needs something called an "outline", which essentially acts as a way to organise elements of a story before jumping into the actual writing phase, everything from the full cast of characters and their roles in the story to the order of events.
The reason this is especially important is because it'll help me keep track of what's going on as I write each of the scripts that make up this Saga. As for how I'll be approaching this, I'll probably be doing all the pre-production work for each part (Writing, Storyboarding, Asset Lists and Asset Production) before I even think about animating part 1, that way I'll be able to give myself a lot of leg room once the animation process starts (and I can release one part while working on animating the next one)
This outline is also quite a good opportunity for me to decide the actual cast of this story, as this project will end up having my biggest cast yet if I end up completing it, so I'll need to make sure I include everyone in this list at some point in the story. Now that that's all been taken care of real quick, it's time to get back to re-writing the script.
First things first, we've got to talk about the location line (which is the one at the top), this particular line exists to establish the current location we're in at the moment. The formatting here can come off as quite weird for some but let me lay down how this works. The first part (which here is labelled as "INT") establishes whether we're currently outside or inside (usually these are abbreviated as INT for INTerior or EXT for EXTerior), this information is important because it allows the set designers to know if they need to give the environment big open spaces or relatively less open cuboid shapes for example. The second part meanwhile (here it's labelled as "DR DINGBAT'S LAIR") tells us the name of the location itself, whether it be New York City, Green Hill Zone or any other location you could think of. This helps the film crew know what a specific location is called and what range of locations to send their location scouts to in order to find potential filming locations (I say this despite the fact I'm making a cartoon here, so really it's more so the set designers and the artists know what metaphorical ball park they're playing in) As for the third and final piece (here it's labelled "Day") simply lets us know what time of day a given scene takes place in, that way the crew will know when to make it look like they shot their scene at a certain time of day, even if in some cases it wasn't actually the correct time of day, which itself is a non issue in the animation field because the animators have control of everything. (of course, the time of day becomes completely irrelevant when it comes to scenes taking place in voids, portals and possibly the deep vacuum of space)
The reason this particular format was likely chosen by whoever first used it in a script is because of how much information you can pack into a single line, as here we can gleam that this first scene takes place inside a building, that building happens to be the lair of a character named "Dr Dingbat" and the scene itself takes place in broad daylight.
Moving on to the next line we can see something important is happening, as this is the part where you actually describe what the location is and what's in it. This is important because not only does this allow the other members of the crew to imagine what the location itself looks like, but in cases where we're in a specific character's place (which could come in the form of a house, lair, castle or even a trans dimensional courthouse), this can actually tell us a little bit about the character without resorting to direct dialogue. For example, since this scene takes place in Dr Dingbat's lair and the fact that said lair is full of advanced genetic equipment, it tells us that his character is quite intelligent and that he likes dabbling in genetics.
Speaking of Dr Dingbat, in the next paragraph, we can actually see that something rather interesting is going on with Dr Dingbat's name, as it's been typed out in all caps. The reason this is the case is because this is actually the first time we see the character in action, and as such they need to be emphasised in the script. Not only that, but you also need to give a brief description of the character your introducing so that the actor playing the character (or in my case, doing the voice of the character) can know how best to play the character. (luckily, once you introduce the character, you're free to write their name normally from here on out)
Up next we can see yet another completely different format going on when the character needs to say a line of dialogue, as now the character's capitalised name is justified into the centre of the page (not to mention the line below is also the same way except without every letter being capitalised), this is mainly so that the dialogue sticks out from the rest of the script which is all justified to the left side of the page. As for why the character's name is written above the dialogue itself in all caps, this is so that the actors for the respective characters can know when they're supposed to talk. (and yes, this time the name is to be written in all caps every time they have a line of dialogue)
The reason I've decided to go ahead and take a dive into including a little bit of "licensed music" (even though I don't actually have the license to use it since I don't own the rights to the song) is in part because I actually plan on using ShotCut to edit the video, and nobody's imported this song into Dreams as far as I'm aware so any excuse to use the software is good in my book.
Here, we can see that Gerald S. Curity gets multiple lines of dialogue without anyone else coming in to say anything in-between both lines. (in this case, the only thing separating the two lines of dialogue is a single action line) In cases such as this, it's customary for a writer to put a "CONT" next to the second instance of the character's capitalised name (as well as all uninterrupted instances), which I assume either means "Continuity" or "Continue" since those are the only two words that start off with "CONT" that make sense to me. The only thing that can break the infinite chain of "CONT"s is actually if the writer decides to give another character even a single word of dialogue.
A Speedy Dingbat Re-Do
Ok, so let me explain this one real quick. One day, I decided to create the character of Dr Dingbat, who as of the time of writing is a psychotic bat who loves to dabble in all things genetics (whether it be genetic editing or even genetic duplication), this is what he looked like originally for those of you that are either new here or just need a refresher:
Since I haven't used the character in anything yet, I figured "hey, I might as well give Dr Dingbat a slight re-design before it's too late", so today, I just went ahead and did it and it resulted in this:
for this one, I mainly decided to give Dr Dingbat some clothes in order to communicate the fact that he's a geneticist bat better (since the original only ever wore a pair of orange shoes), but at the same time I wanted to make to where he can still fly while wearing his clothes (hence the rip that's going on around where his wings are), although like I said in the little descriptive line you can put below each picture, I do plan on making a few adjustments when turning him into a 3D character in order to make the final design (I can already tell the wings are going to be rather difficult to pull off via paintings alone)
Alright, Back To The Script
The reason I put that "O.S" right next to Gondlie Foodalstein's name (not to be confused with the "HU-GONDILE FOODALSTEIN" next to Hugo's name) is because I want to insinuate that the character is actually speaking while they're off screen, hence why it's acronised (if that's even a real word) as O.S. (another version of this involves typing in "V.O" next to the character's name if they're nothing more than a voice over in the scene)
Whenever two or more characters need to say their lines of dialogue at the same time, it's usually formatted with both characters names and their respective lines being justified on opposite sides of the page so that you know who's actually supposed to be saying what, like so:
In my case however, I decided to go ahead and break this particular rule by simply putting both characters names in the middle and sticking the dialogue itself on the line below like normal. The reason I'm doing this is because I want both characters (in this case, Hugo The Shape-Shifter and The Night Pig) to say the exact same piece of dialogue at the same time, so I don't really feel it's necessary to essentially double my work load for no good reason. That's not even mentioning the fact I'm using Libre Office Writer to write the script, which similar to Microsoft Word (as far as I'm aware anyway), doesn't even have a feature to format text like this automatically like you get with something like WriterDuet (since Libre Office Writer and Microsoft Word aren't specialised script writing software), so I'd have to do it manually. As such, the only time I think the proper version of this format should be applied is if the characters are saying different lines of dialogue at the exact same time (even if the differences in words are minute at best) since at that point, you'd need to keep track of which character is saying what.
Hold Up, It's Design Time!
And this time around, it's a double whammy, as I decided to go ahead and just do the designs for both The Madam Night Pig and Holly The Shape-Shifter at once since they're the final major characters that I've yet to make and I figured I could knock them both out in about 40 minutes. (20 minutes per character) What actually ended up happening however was that I was able to complete both characters within 26 minutes, which is way faster than I was expecting to make them (although to be fair, they are literal variants of The Night Pig and Hugo The Shape-Shifter respectively, so much of the design ground work was already done, I just needed to swap the gender and I was good to go)
In the case of The Madam Night Pig, I decided to give her a white shirt with the female symbol printed on it as a means to make her significantly different from her male counterpart, plus I removed the mask in favour of an inexplicable head of hair because I figured going overboard with the fact this is a female version of the character should separate it a degree from reality, thus hopefully avoiding being called sexist despite the fact people on twitter will likely do it regardless. (it's the same for all the female clones really, as they're supposed to be helping the profit driven bad guys)
As for Holly meanwhile, I decided to just make her a re-colour of Hugo with a little bit of eye shadow, in part because after a little bit of consideration before hand, I decided it just wasn't worth giving Hugo breasts to be honest.
About Holly The Shape-Shifter
Ok, so so remember when I did the design and simply made her a bona-fide re-colour of the original Hugo? Well as I was making the 3D model for the character off stream, I ended up realising a pretty big problem with this approach. To demonstrate what I mean, here's a comparison shot between Hugo and Holly I did in Dreams:
At first, a hypothetical causal observer might just look at these two and might not see what's wrong with the fact they both look so similar (I say "hypothetical" because there's no way any sane person would look at these two together and see nothing wrong here), they could likely tell them apart quite easily thanks to the difference in their colour schemes. (which I might be thinking about changing Holly's since in hindsight, it does look quite garish and I feel I could do a better job on that front) However, what use is having two different colour schemes when you break the characters down into their silhouettes:
The reason this becomes a problem is because when the characters are turned into silhouettes like this because now you can't rely on the colour schemes to tell the difference anymore since now everything is pitch black, thus meaning it's up to the character's body shape and posing to guide the audience on who's who in a given scene. The thing is however, since both characters have very similar body shapes (especially when facing sideways), so people may end up confusing Hugo and Holly with each other which isn't an ideal situation for your characters to be in, especially when one of them is one of the heroes (in this case, Hugo) and the other is one of the villains (in this case, Holly) since that can lead to major confusion as to who the audience is supposed to root for.
As such, I think it'd be a wise decision to give Holly The Shape-Shifter a make over, so without further ado...
Let's Give Holly A Makeover
For this design, I decided to go ahead and make Holly into a totally different character. The first thing I did was change her from being a mere re-colour of Hugo himself into a human woman who's head is the exact shape of Hugo's body (since she was born via the celebri-maker 3000) in order to at least keep her somewhat connected with the person she's supposed to be a female version of in the first place.
One good thing about making her body different from Hugo's (besides the fact I can now re-use Hugo's colours on her clothes now) is that now, even when both characters are silhouettes, you can tell who's who due to the body shapes now being different from one another rather than being basically the same.
The only trace of the original Holly design I decided to keep was the make up around her eyes and her lip stick, since I felt those were the best parts of the original design to begin with, thus making them worth keeping around.
When I ended up getting to the end of the process however (the part where I save the file to my PC), I ended up thinking to myself "wait, if earlier in the story Dr Dingbat makes a big deal about not being able to steal Hugo's (at the moment non-existent) DNA earlier and suddenly the villains managed to make a version of Hugo with different colours who could also shape-shift, then it would create a big plot hole", so I decided to just scrap the idea of Holly even being a shape-shifter at all and just have her be a genetically engineered woman who dresses with Hugo's colours and who's head looks like Hugo himself.
I've Done Part 1 Folks!
That's right, the script for part one is fully complete. Usually this is where I'd simply past the entire thing in, talk about the process of writing it and move on to the next one. However, I've decided I'm not going to paste in any of the scripts for this one for two reasons, one: as I've stated in previously, when people write scripts professionally, they don't turn around and release the whole thing because of concerns that it'll get stolen by someone else via copying and pasting. The second reason for this is because this isn't a college project, it's a personal one, therefore I can write about it however I please. (whether I choose to be formal or informal) However, I do want to say something I wrote but then decided to back track on while getting started on part 2.
You see, originally I wanted the ending for part 1 to contain a reveal where the audience find out that Kyoto Kasuma is actually the creator of Hugo The Shape-Shifter himself (thus being his mother by extension), but then one night after I started writing part 2, I thought to myself "you know, I feel like this reveal might not fit anywhere in a story where the characters are fighting Hollywood versions of themselves" so I decided to make it a little bit more implicit instead meaning the audience will at least find some sore of connection between Hugo and Kyoto but they won't know she's his creator unless they read this blog:
Now that that's been established, writing the second part is probably going to be a bit more of a challenge since I need to make sure I don't accidentally make it sexist towards women since the target is female led reboots, not women in general, much like how the target of part one was live action adaptations of beloved cartoon and/or video game properties. Luckily, I consulted a female friend of mine about what I'd written thus far and she say I'm in the clear thus far (of course, this does mean I'll need to be more careful going forward in order to keep it that way, not to mention it was only one person I'd consulted so far)
As for writing part one, that was quite easy since I didn't have to worry about accidentally making the whole thing racist or sexist (unlike with part two which again, I'll need to tread very carefully on to avoid being sexist)
Now that I've said everything I wanted to say, it's back to the hypothetical writers room for me.
Part 2 is complete!
This part was a little bit trickier to write than the first one due in no small part to the fact that if I were to mishandle how I poke fun of the female led reboots, I might end up doing a sexism by mistake, which will lead to me getting cancelled before I can even begin thinking about put Super Sheep in cinemas. (since it looks like they'll fortunately be sticking around after all)
At the same time however, I didn't think I'd get it done as quickly as I did despite all the second guessing I had to do for certain parts, I.E: how often the ladies of justice call the good guys sexist (in part because I'd be at risk of wearing the joke thin) and even whether or not to bring up the fact that the justice trio were willing to work with a lady in order to defeat the ladies of justice, which I ultimately decided not to do here because I figured the way I would have pulled it off would have come off as sexist in and of itself since I'd be explicitly pointing and going "look, a woman!" And as Knuckles The Echidna once said in an episode of Sonic Boom, pointing out the breaking of gender roles "ultimately undermines the concept of gender equality by implying that this is an exception and not the status quo", the only time I do bring this up is when Super Sheep mentions that his mother was a great super hero and even then, my intention is to elude to the character of Lorange in general:
And that's not to mention once I do decide to finally implement the character into one of these stories (preferably with a woman handling the voice because I'm a dude who can't do female voices well), she won't be coming from nowhere.
Moving on to a different topic for a moment, there actually is one other noteworthy thing I decided to do here:
To be honest, I was actually thinking about adding in this quick cameo appearance for a while because of something that's been happening recently. You see, I did another test animation using Source Filmmaker where I had Sonic The Hedgehog do his classic waiting animation:
As you can see, there really isn't much to it, it's just 10 seconds of Sonic waiting impatiently. However, the strange thing about this is that much like my little Sonic 2 meme I did for fun, it too has managed to amass a whole load of views in a very small period of time, going on to be the second most popular video on my channel:
While I'm happy that people seem to be enjoying the Sonic videos I made, I do find it a bit frustrating the most popular content on my channel that's meant to showcase my original work stars a character I don't even own the rights to. (I didn't even make the 3D model of Sonic used in the video, as I got it from the Steam Workshop for Source Filmmaker, and the map itself came with the software) As such, I need to be very careful about how I go about doing the animation tests in the future, as I don't want to be known as a guy who makes Sonic videos (only because I have my own original I.P of course, nothing against the topic itself)
So yeah, you could think of this Sonic cameo as me venting about my (admittedly rather petty) frustrations in a creative way. With all this in mind, I do still enjoy the Sonic series though, here's hoping Sonic Frontiers is a good one.
Now that my little Sonic rant is over, it's time for me to get back to work writing the final chapter of this trilogy.
The Trilogy is Complete!
Well folks, the entire Holly-Weird Hijinks trilogy has officially been fully written out and I'm ready to go on the storyboarding process. Writing this particular part involved some of the same challenges as the second part due to the presence of the female versions of Super Sheep, The Night pig and Hugo since I needed to make sure I poked fun at things that female led franchise reboots actually do while not coming across as sexist or racist myself (as such, I might not touch that particular topic again after this outside the odd gag here and there), as such I decided to go ahead and comb through the script for anything that could be misconstrued as racist or sexist. This mostly led to me taking out a mention of Super Sheepette wanting to wipe out the entire "straight white male population" and boiling it down to just the entire male population so that I don't come off as a right wing extremist, although to be honest I am a bit torn as to whether or not I should do this because on the one hand, It could make me come off as a right wing extremist by mistake (to be honest I don't really give a hoot about politics, I just want to tell what I think are good stories with funny characters), but on the other hand, it's only the antagonists that use that kind of politically charged language while the protagonists themselves don't because they either don't know what the ladies of justice are talking about or they actively repulse at what the female versions are saying. (as right after I do have Super Sheep and friends comment about the strange direction this cartoon is heading in):
But ultimately after doing a bit of thinking, I feel that given the nature of the world in which all this takes place in (where hyper advanced human beings and anthropomorphic cartoon animals co-exist), it probably wouldn't make that much sense to be that specific about it and just make it so the ladies of justice only want to destroy the entire male population since that would include all the male animal characters. Now that that's been taken care of, let's look back at how I did in this phase of production as a whole.
So How was The Writing Process
Overall, I'd say the writing phase has gone quite well, as I was able to get around 22 minutes worth of material (on average) written within a single week three times in a row meaning there'll be over an hour's worth of content (in this case meaning roughly 66 minutes) to storyboard, do the asset list for, animate and then release.
The main challenge for this phase definitely came from writing the female versions of Super Sheep and friends because of the rather tumultuous nature of what I'm using them to poke fun of (that being female led franchise reboots like Ghostbusters 2016), as one wrong move will end up getting me cancelled before I've even had a chance to put Super Sheep and friends in cinemas (and if I get cancelled, I likely wouldn't even be able to change career paths since social media works hard and fast)
Other than that, things were quite breezy for the most part, as I was able to use the outline I wrote to give me a vague guide on the plot itself without even having to look at it very often since I only wrote a brief plot summery of each chapter to give myself the freedom to find the execution. heck, there were even times where I took a few liberties from my own outline to help the story flow better:
Needless to say, I think the scripts came out quite good, but like I said earlier, I won't be putting them here in full until after I finished the project as a whole, that way if people do steal it, it'll already be too late for them to do much with it since I already made the original.
Now that all that's been settled, it's time to move on to...
The Storyboarding Phase
ah yes, the storyboarding phase. This is the part of pre-production where you take the script and translate it into rough sketches in order to plan out how you want the whole thing to play out visually. This includes deciding where the character are in relation to each other, the environment they're in and even the screen. The reason this particular phase is important is because it then allows the film crew (which in this case is likely going to be me myself and I once again) to plan out how they're going to pull everything off when it comes time to do the final project. (which in my case means animating the entire thing) Usually these are done quite quickly, so the art isn't normally of a very high quality since these are designed to be easily discarded if any changes are made to the story. (much like what I had to do with the previous two versions of this project come to think of it)
Much like how I handled the script, I'm going to be doing the boards for all three parts at once so that I can do all the animation work in one big chunk rather than starting and stopping as each part comes up.
I'll also be relying upon my trusty storyboard template I stole from StudioBinder because it's the template I'm the most familiar with:
However, I will be making one major change this time around:
The reason I'm using this is because unlike everything else I've made up until this point, this project is a multi-parter, so I'll be using this section in the top right corner to keep track of what part I'm on at the moment (I.E: if I'm doing part 2, then it'll be part 2/3) in addition to having the title of the part I'm working on taking up the usual title spot (the title of the overall project will be in the top right corner too), now that that's all been taken care of, I can finally begin the storyboarding process (I can already tell this is going to be the longest time I've spent doing storyboards yet)
The first thing I wish to mention here is the way I've chosen to go about drawing Dr Dingbat himself, as I've decided to give it the lower quality treatment in order to get the drawing done quickly. This is because as I said earlier, these boards are meant to be quickly taken out of the story if there are any changes made later on, much like what happened with the infamous Black Friday Reel of Toy Story or even the previous versions of this project. (yup, I'm counting "Hex-o's Exos" as a previous version along with the one and done version of this one)
Another thing you may have noticed is the arrow that's pointing at Dr Dingbat. This is to signify which direction he's moving in relative to the screen because having the character move around is impossible when you're at this phase of pre-production. (that's what the animatic I keep skipping is for) The label I wrote for the arrow is mostly here to give context as to what the arrow is meant to signify despite the fact I have text below the panel to explain what Dr Dingbat is doing.
Speaking of the text I wrote below, that's here to explain what's happening in a specific panel, which is especially useful if the art is rubbish like mine and the person looking at it wants to have any idea as to what's going on.
Meanwhile, above the panel in the box where it says "shot#:" I'm actually using it for the purpose of listing what shot type I'll be using for that specific... uuuuh... shot. I'm doing this as a means to skip having to do a proper shot list down the line since I find those things boring to make and I still managed to get by without them. (and it's a good thing too because this project's hypothetical shot list would have taken a long time to do so it would have been a nightmare)
Above that meanwhile is this little arrow I've got going on that jumps from one panel to the next and says "cut." I put that there in order to tell whoever may end up reading this (which will most likely just be me again but you never know)
The final thing I should bring up here is the lack of a proper background. Much like the lower quality art, this too is to help me do the storyboards quickly (well, if by "quickly" you mean several weeks in this case)
Oh, and if you're wondering why Dr Dingbat's missing his wing shape, that's just because I want to make it so his wings are retractable, that way when he's not flying his arms gain the same range of movement as everyone else.
Now that I've basically burned through a bunch of screen-caps worth of information in one big infodump, don't expect too many more screen-caps outside of when I manage to finish an entire batch of storyboards unless something new comes up while I'm making the batches themselves because I don't want to have to split this post into multiple parts.
Sometimes when you're working on a storyboard you can get away with copying and pasting the contents of one panel to another, especially if it's digital like mine, in order to save time redrawing everything all over again, which is useful if the next panel only involves something minor like a character changing expressions.
Looks like I've got a very long journey ahead of me this time, as I'll likely be doing 48 batches per part (going off of how many batches I did for the previous version of this project, which was 22 minutes), meaning have a total of around 144 batches by the time I'm finished (and before anyone thinks I'm some funky maths wiz, I did use a calculator to get the answer)
Here, I've decided to draw a box around Dr Dingbat himself with arrows pointing away from said box. The reason I did this was so that I could signify that there's some form of camera movement going on here in this case, the camera zooms out from where the small box itself is (likewise, if you wanted to communicate a zoom in, you'd point the arrows towards the small box rather than away from it)
This screenshot is also a good example of something I tend to do a lot of during the storyboarding phase, and that's deviating from the script in ways that I feel would improve the story overall
Well, this batch was quite easy to put together, but the hardest part was actually designing the poster for "Rondo's Big Adventure" because I never actually described what it looked like in the script, thus leaving me room to get creative with it.
For this batch, I ended up concocting a name for the fake character that Kyoto Kasuma plays in the Bitris 16 movie (which is also fake), that being "Jennifer", the reason for this is because I wanted to have the executive guy who shakes her hand congratulate her on a job well done and simply needed a name for him to say. Staying on the topic of "Jennifer" for a moment, I'm actually considering adding "Anne" as her middle name and "Knuckles" as the surname, thus making the full legal name "Jennifer Anne Knuckles" (which in and of itself is a thinly vailed "And Knuckles" joke)
As for the actual making of this batch, it was the easiest one thus far since I could copy and paste an entire third of the batch and make changes to the later instance to save a lot of time.
With this in mind however, I think this project may require that I do a full on trailer for this hypothetical Bitris 16 movie so that I can have Bitris 16 pause the trailer more easily.
Not a whole lot to say about this one to be honest, it was more of the same. (that'll probably end up being a running theme throughout this process if I'm being honest)
Six batches in and it's only now we're finally getting introduced to the actual main characters of this whole thing (those being Super Sheep, Hugo and The Night Pig for those of you in the back), the hardest part of making this batch was actually the very last panel, as it called for me to draw The Night Pig from a bottom up (the opposite of top down) perspective, which I almost never do. Luckily, since these are the storyboards, it doesn't have to look very good as long as I label everything correctly so it was fine.
This is simply to signify that the character's path is supposed to stop at a certain point. (I.E: if a character needs to stop in their tracks or something like that) Under ordinary circumstances, this would be the only thing I'd say about this part, but literally moments before starting the storyboarding process for the day, I ended up discovering something that's going to be quite game changing for me. You know how whenever I've been using Pixlr up until now it's always been over the internet via an internet browser? (mainly chrome) Well as it turns out, Pixlr actually has a free app version I was able to download off of the Microsoft store. (never thought I'd be venturing down that road in my life) Don't believe me, here's a screen-shot to prove it:
The best part is that this version is the exact same as the web version down to the last detail (although this does mean I still need to avoid the premium features like the plague) except for the fact I probably won't be needing the internet to run it anymore since it should be installed locally on my computer. (so yay, no more needing the internet)
The main thing I should explain is why I decided to put in a top down shot when the characters enter the cave. The reason for this is that in the previous shot the characters were going screen left in order to enter the cave and if I were to suddenly have them moving screen right when they're in the cave, it would come off as rather jarring, so the purpose of the top down shot is to serve as a bridge so that I can pivot everything to the right, that way when they're in the cave it won't be as jarring as it would have been otherwise.
I seem to really be picking up the pace on this one, as already I'm on batch 10. This is probably because I've done this part of the process several times before and I've been getting a little bit faster each time.
Before I move on to the next batch, I just want to mention something I after yesterday's storyboarding session. Remember when I mentioned how I wouldn't need the internet to use Pixlr's desktop apps? Well you can throw that in the rubbish as when I turned off my internet and booted it up, this happened:
meanwhile over on Pixlr's website, they explicitly state that Pixlr desktop can be used even when offline:
Either this is an issue related to the Microsoft Store (which is where I grabbed this app in the first place), or Pixlr have employed an ancient dark art that's most frequently used these days by massive corporations (especially game publishers) called "lying" to get fools like myself to be more likely to want to download it.
As for the storyboards themselves, those were fairly easy to put together, no complaints here.
With this batch, we can see that I've got myself a split-screen shot going on like what I did with Kyoto Kasuma: A Brawl In Development. Unlike in that cartoon where it only lasts about a second or two, this one will need to be a bit more substantial (and not to mention it'll have two different lighting conditions, which will likely be impossible for me to pull off in Dreams PS4/5 unless they update the game to take full advantage of the PS5's power. With this in mind, why am I doing this anyway? Well you see, by the time I end up getting this entire storyboarding process done, I'll likely be knee deep into my animation course at university, so by the time I actually get around to the animation process for this project I'll be able to use more traditional animation software such as ToonBoom, Maya, Source Filmmaker (which itself I'm already tinkering with) or maybe even a few freely available alternatives for some of the paid stuff given how I use Pixlr instead of Adobe Photoshop due to Pixlr being free for the most part.
The batch itself was easier to put together than the last one because for the most part it's just me copying and pasting the split screen and changing minor elements
Taking on a Smaller Project
So I was storyboarding the part where we see the Bitris 16: The Movie trailer, I mentioned about how I would need to make the entire trailer in order to make things easier in the long run. Right now I think I want to get that particular project started because last night I actually encountered a piece of animation software called OpenToonz, a free piece of software that specialises in 2D animation (apparently Studio Ghibli had something to do with this):
This Bitris 16 trailer (as well as some other potential test animations to help me "git gud") seems like it'll be a great opportunity to test this new software I found out before I continue on with the rest or production and if all goes well, this may end up replacing Dreams for the PS4/5 for the most part (since I can still use Dreams to compose music and all that), thus allowing me to use the game for more recreational purposes again.
With this in mind, I'll be doing that project under a separate post because I don't want this mini project to cause this post to go over the memory limits. (I expect I won't be back for a long while)
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