HarveyRothman

Xmas card 2022

Cover for a quick card I did for my sister on behalf of the family. (She's been living away for around a year now and I wish her only the best).

BBQ For Two scene

I've put W.I.P.s of this here before, but I'll plonk the YouTube video here also for perusing folks who aren't donators to look at.

misc music doodles dec 2022

A couple are worth expanding, while others I may pillage for elements of their sound design or melody in future, better tunes.

0:00 tapechordsample

1:21 Jungley thing made out of dexian shelf clangs and slowed down guitar boing

2:02 MS10 bleeps of doom

2:47 chill echoey rhodes thing

3:30 gakken daft

4:04 vocoded MS10 + didgeridoo

4:26 soporific piano noodle

Foxglove scriptboards

I'm gradually discovering a process (hopefully future cartoons won't take so long to write, once I pick out the methods I've tried that inspire the easiest). I've got to the stage with the script now that I can't tighten it any more without having to see what it's going to be like. I'm "weaning-off" the word processor, and writing the following drafts on paper so certain sequences or key shots can instead be storyboarded. So there's this fluid stage that weaves between script and dra...

Melting moggy

Bit for Ollie & Scoops done in OpenToonz. (There will be animation for my own projects coming eventually, promise!)

Sound Effects 2022

Some bit more "hi-fi" sound design/recordings. Can't remember what the last lot of noises I posted were. About half of these are in fact sounds from years ago I hadn't properly mastered, trimmed, named, de-noised, etc. until now. 

In fact, I have a really hard time naming some of these noises, especially when they get abstract. What I always liked about the Hanna-Barbera sounds is that they're metaphors representing impossible cartoon actions. Who's to argue what "dashing out the s...

Misc. bits and bobs

Various doodles. The green robed mouse was from a drawing years ago that I still quite like, but the colours aren't quite how I would like them.

Still writing Foxglove. It's all, as my friend who helped structure the initial idea said, problem solving; from big story structure problems, down to little problems like 'what sentence will have the meaningful subtext that would lead a character to have this particular epiphany?' I'm just an especially slow and inexperienced problem solver. 2022-11-17 17:01:31 +0000 UTC View Post

FNAF Security Breach thing

Was meant for Halloween but ended up late. So rushed roughing stage, but then took time with colours and cleanup which is kind of the reverse order of importance. Oh well!

10082x4449 resolution TIF (and others) in attachments.

Foxglove's brothers

Bit stumped again with the storyboard/writing. It would help if I had a vague idea of some of the secondary characters' backgrounds. I don't know whether Foxglove's antagonistic siblings are aspiring to be knights or not. There's a point in the plot where they suit up with weapons, so I assumed they were knights hired on a temporary basis with long unpaid breaks. Now I'm leaning more towards them being peasants, disappointed in life, looking for scapegoats to direct their aggression onto. Tha...

Another dimorphic deer doodle

Part of a very short brainstorm with Golfinho to pitch an idea. Still, I like these sort of colours (and the last one I accidentally made the background layer black which might make for an interesting super-simple background style).

AOK rough

Little bit of animation for Arón Keyser's (aka PrimatePunk's) AOK, done using OpenToonz! I probably could have better conveyed the neck-break gag, but hopefully you get the idea lol.

OpenToonz uses the MyPaint brush engine, so any brush preset made in that will work in OpenToonz which is cool. But unfortunately any "tilt" data from the tablet is ignored in OpenToonz. I made a very nice tilt-y pencil-roughing brush in MyPaint, but in the end I had to settle for low pressure making the b...

Kooky Nuts Pop Vol. 5

https://istotne-nagr.bandcamp.com/album/kooky-nuts-pop-vol-5

Here's a free album I submitted a track to!

Main sample by BarryDennen12. I'll add the original FL Studio track from, I think, 2014 in the attachments later for a laugh. 2022-10-12 09:32:33 +0000 UTC View Post

Quick Krita brush test

After a few days of repeatedly having brushes corrupt and not be able to load them, I figured out my large textures were a little too large. Most of Krita's patterns are ~100-150KB whereas mine were up to 14MB. Compressing the hell out of them down to around 1-4MB seems to have not impacted the results any, and they no longer corrupt. 

Still, saving brushes is weird, 'cause it'll temporarily save changes to the brush you used as a starting point for your new brush, and then I'm won...

Quick OpenToonz test

Certainly runs better on the new Linux machine than on the Windows 7. Though if a program makes a 32GB RAM 12-core CPU computer choke, even a little, then it's the program that's wrong lol. (But now I know to shrink a 1080p animatic video to something small 'cause that's what was causing the slowdown in spots.)

Flatpak permissions etc. are weird and I ended up just plonking the ffmpeg binary build in the home folder just to export this. Further investigation required, but now I'm doing ...

Dozy compressed piano tune

Dad's weird "upwards" compressor design with saggy, laggy time constant does a nice job doing that 60's over-compressed piano effect. I end up playing slowly and laggy to complement it.

This was done a couple months ago. Normally I just post stuff as I make it, but I figured people would rather see more visual stuff than just music doodles all the time. I haven't done much of either 'cause I'm bouncing between half-finishing a lot of things. Like finally migrating from the old computer ...

big fat popeye face

Did for the Popeye reanimate credits. Also trying out Krita.

3 bottle-based tunes

Few months ago, I sampled some bottle blowing and plunking (been on a sound recording/organising/design binge lately) and here's a few musical doodles based on those sounds. The metallic "wow" sound in the first tune is made by scraping one of those springy clock gongs on a table. The second tune's a little bit Plus-tech Squeeze Box inspired, but with a house beat. The last one's a chill bossa-nova type thing.

Timestamps: 0:00, 1:39, 4:00

whole bunch of musical doodles/noodles

Lots of bum notes and poorly mixed etc. as these are the results of slapping ideas down in the middle of doing something else (usually another tune) as soon as it comes. It's unlikely I'll go back to most of these, but there's little bits here and there that could be adapted into something else.

Timestamps for each tune:

0:00 sq80/erebus thing

0:47 funk thing string machine

1:50 stupiddd_001

1:59 k3-v mucking about

2:21 zozoio e zue

2:50 obnoxious bas...

ollie and scoops episode 9 roughs

I already plonked this on Twitter but here it is in better quality. Also because Patreon seems to be the most complete archive of my stuff at this point, I may as well try and keep everything together here.

popeye reanimate scene composite test

A friend helped me out a bit with Natron, and it's behaving much better now. Although this is before any filters or effects, so we'll see how much worse it gets. But there's a lot about Natron I love in regards to a raster-based animation workflow and wish other compositing software would borrow:

Image sequence's missing frames can be "filled in" by preceding frames:

2022-07-03 15:18:58 +0000 UTC View Post

popeye reanimate pencil tests in reverse order

Having a webcam attached to a mic arm which is clamped onto the animation desk is very convenient! I like to deliberately set myself up for unpredictability by drawing keys and even inbetweens that don't entirely connect (and it's unpredictable enough in traditional as it is); leads to weird results and funny mistakes.

I also learnt TWAIN scanning via Clip Studio Paint or IrfanView is really bloody slow. After TWO HOURS of scanning and putting up with slowdown ...

ode to doorbell

Or at least the melody sounds bit like that.

Same old kick, hi-hat, clap beat I've been doing a lot lately. Hi-hat from 'Ovis of Opalescence', claps and shaker from Kaleidoscopic Bubbly, cabasa from that "3D Man" song I should get back to, Kick from Dissolves by Frank Ricotti but no one would ever know that. 

The SQ80's already been packed away, so this is effectively a "remix" of an improv jam from couple years back. Started this at about 6:30am 'cause I woke up anyway and w...

sonic remix (and soundtrack album download)

'Cos Green Hill Zone hasn't been done to death already! For the Golfinho cartoon credits.

EDIT 27/05/22: Attached now is the soundtrack! (like it is on Bandcamp 'cept this is .wav format cos can't be arsed converting to .flac). I'd like to extend some of these tracks in the future, if I'm inspired to.

doe in green

oo-er, getting a bit furry

Anyway I like to experiment more with colours, and Paul Klee and Rothko often manage to barge their way from the subconscious to the conscious over the course of chromatic mucking about. 

There's a couple more Foxglove colour keys also, but looking at them now I'm not too happy with just how green that one shot is; needs a little more variation. I'll make a new post for them when they're finished.

Once the insanity of moving back and acclimati...

bart meets sonic OST

Pretty sure this cacophony is final. Marty said it reminded him of Plus-Tech Squeeze Box, which I didn't know about, but is fitting 'cause they're a Japanese band. This'll make sense once the cartoon's up. 

I'll do a version with each "song" separated and without SFX for an OST release. I'd like to extend some of these tracks, but I can't be arsed right now. Has anyone "extended" a song by just slowing it down? Some of these tracks sound good at half-speed!

Anyway, I needed s...

dull improvised video explaining audio scrubbing in reaper for animation use

I literally only just discovered "loop segment" scrubbing minutes ago, which is why I documented my findings in this video because otherwise I'll surely forget all about it in a few months. So "Here's how I use Reaper etc etc" should've been "here's how I might use Reaper"; I'm a big liar.

I'm still debating whether I should use Reaper to actually put my animatics together because it's a DAW that can also do basic video editing which appeals to my musical timing sensibilities. Before I'...

odd tune thing dunno

Any bits/ideas that didn't fit the golfinho cartoon immediately got cut/pasted into its own project, and sometimes from there something immediately comes about just from playing about with it. The Casio drums are in the cartoon still.

I'm keeping the music computer together while I'll be doing the Popeye reanimate in case I want to do more music, but once the Popeye scene's done it's all getting put in boxes ready for the move.

samples (shh): Bruno Bozzetto 'Alpha Omega', Carry On...

more tune wip for golfinho cartoon

Pretty sure the animation's been done for a couple weeks now, but I was too stressed out and uninspired the past week to make much progress...til today! There's just one scene left to do, and that's already got something started.

Damn, now I really want to extend each of these tunes into their own thing.

funky acid

Figured out how to tie notes on the Timbre Wolf, which opens things up considerably. This is just a one-bar loop knob twiddle thing. After using the internal sequencer as a scratch pad, I'll probably transfer the MIDI over to Reaper to do more nuanced variations etc. like I do with the x0xb0x & Sampletrak. All the other music stuff's packed away, except for the Timbre Wolf, lol.

timbre wolf

First noodle with the infamous Akai Timbre Wolf. Live, so few bum notes. 

I don't know why these companies feel the need to market analogue synths as "aggressive" all the time, especially when they're not, but that's what led to the vast internet bullying I think: a complete ignorance to what was actually being sold on the advertisers' part. Stupid buzzwords like "Howl" etc. It's a polyphonic synth in the classical music theory sense, i.e. independent running melodies, with differe...