HarveyRothman

Jolly Good Show

Fun with synths that permeated the late 80's-early 90's. Some bits are still sloppy.

I could make an album of this stuff honestly.

Bullwinkle rough layout

Testing out using newspaper print roll for animation paper. It's not strong paper, but you can do long background pan layouts, and it's the right amount of translucency. It's off-white so it's not so hard on the eyes too. I'll just have to reinforce the peg holes and decide whether to continue with A4 size, or to find a new standard. A4 is slightly too small, so I might bring it up to 12 inches across for the frame.

And now the weather...

Made a very cheesy M1, DX7, OB-Xa, steam train sample "MIDI stack" because I miss having a D50 and it's a fun sound to play despite being terribly outdated. A sloppy unquantised tune done in about an hour before the soundcard packed in. 

I'm definitely due a computer upgrade. Whether I should aim for a silent PC or maybe a quiet laptop so I can do more music stuff, or a noisy GPU powerhouse 'cause animation is where the work is right now, I'm not sure. Any ideas?

Life drawing

Been to 2 sessions so far, and I'm enjoying it (and getting away from the computer for a bit), although the railway tickets and class every week might end up costly. Proportion is what I really want to nail, then I'll worry about anatomy. I do a pseudo sight-size (by holding up the paper and bringing it closer/further until it's "to scale" with the model) and also checking the negative space a lot.

Robot Rats again

Polished up that little robot rat concept 'cause I liked the composition. I'm not even that huge on the 50's style thing, but I end up doing it a lot.`

Year of the Rat

Some sketches I did last night, roughing out an idea for a Rocky & Bullwinkle reanimate. The toughest bit right now is finding ways to group parts of the crowd into shapes so they have a nice composition, rather than just a random confusing mess. Cartoons are visual synthesis, and I'd like to synthesise sweets for the eyes.

Although at the same time, if I make any further progress with my animation stories, I'd rather drop the reanimates in exchange for working on my own projects. B...

Abyss

Chill hop track done as a result of jamming with a Dreadbox Erebus and Abyss. Finally figured out a dual MIDI keyboard set up for getting a backing track down quickly. All I need now is a rapper.

PPG Wave bouncy thingy

Thought I'd muck about with a PPG Wave sample, but the OB-Xa VST I tried is really nice sounding (and it's free too!). Also an attempt to sequence drums in REAPER like I used to in FL Studio; didn't take too long, which is the main thing.

Science Goat sketch and Sausagescope

Visited my family in the holidays and took some shots of the dog (inspired by a Chaval cartoon) with a Hypergonar anamorphic lens, with a wonky wooden mount and wide-angle converter. Surprisingly it worked with my new camera. I'll have to make a new mount with a different taking-lens if I want any more light coming in and less vignetting 'cause look at that softness and noise.

As for personal projects, I'm in the middle of really thinking hard about what kind of stories and themes I wan...

Floating (rough take)

Isabella had some lyrics for an old tune I did, then I added a washy vocoder in the background. It's a rough, getting-the-idea-down, take (it was a different structure, the version she wrote the lyrics for, hence why a sentence gets cut off) but I already think it's nearly there!

Deer having a lager in Cinemascope

I liked one of my Xmas card doodles so much that I decided to colour it and do a mock-up to test my anamorphic lens simulation on. It's pretty close to how I'd like my future projects to look, or at least in my current vision. Maybe slightly too smeary/extreme; I want to maintain the drawings' details. But it demonstrates the aberrations I'm simulating pretty obviously as an example. My Cracking Calamity cartoon was actually shot with a Hypergonar Cinemascope adaptor, so that's a good referen...

Assortment of doodles

Sorry, been creatively bankrupt as of late! I want to have a story worth animating, and I'm dying to get started on something. It must be the winter being all drab.

Here's some amusingly crude drawings, but there's some fun or inspiration I get out of looking at older, worse, drawings. Ideas I'd have then that I wouldn't have now.

Felix the cat walk cycle

A little contribution to ibcf's Felix The Cat reanimate!

Christmassy song

I know it's illegal to mention that holiday at this point in the year, but it just sounds Xmassy to me that's all.

First traditional animation livestream!

Finding a good angle is going to be trickier than I thought. Naturally I thought the left side would be better 'cause you'll see the drawing and not my hand. But flipping the pages, you couldn't see the movement like I could, so I'll have to find a more over-head angle I imagine. I'm a little flustered and tired and out of practice livestreaming, but I'll get the hang of it eventually!

Traditional animation livestreams

Traditional animation livestreams! I've been wanting to attempt this for a while, but before I moved the computer and animation desk were in separate rooms (the animation room having no internet) and I didn't have an HDMI capture box thing. But now I can borrow one, and the desks in the same space, livestreams may be coming up soon. Also, I'm going to make a few more acoustic panels both to make the microphone sound good and to cover that horrible wallpaper.

Soppy Korg M1 chords

While I'm well over "lo-fi beats", and think most of it's just lazy sample flipping, I get in the mood to do my own jazzy chords to a drum loop sometimes.

Scampish Scampi Part 2

Probably one of the last styles of music I'd expect to use a growl bass in, but here we are. Also, at the moment this song's ended up at 9 minutes long (this is the second half) 'cause of the constant variations of the theme, and me not wanting to remove any versions. Still 9 minutes is a bit much, so I'll have to deal with that. Or, make the less interesting bits more interesting to justify the length, 'cause some bits linger a bit.

Gwonam Does A Drive-Thru - Zelda CD-i Reanimate Sc. 4 Process

Finally got round to doing a video of this! The Mama Luigi one got on my nerves for how often I repeated the source audio, so I experimented with filtering and mixing with music.

Few animals

Sorry I haven't been up to much original posting lately! All work and no play for the time being. 

What I have been doing with my spare time is making acoustic panels out of rockwool to deaden the echo in my studio a bit for recording dialogue and music etc. Right now it's sonically quite uninhabitable, but soon enough that'll be sorted.

Once I have a personal project on the way I'll probably be livestreaming traditional animation since I discovered my mirrorless camera can e...

Smug reindeer

Just a wee bit of animation practice before I proper work. Hooray for being an adult. If I were a half-decent writer I should do various sketchy short-form cartoons but I just need skits worth animating!

I could spend a day on this to make it super solid, but it turned out okay enough for hardly constructing any of it.

haha - milt kahl head swaggle rolfmao!!!!!!!

Gaudy song more or less finished!

I think some master fader riding could improve the slight inconsistent level unless you think it's fine! But all that can come later when putting the whole album together to sound consistent. Big thanks and love to my sister, Isabella, for the main melody, lyrics, and singing (and helping generally with the song structure)!  

Every track in this album probably won't sound as polished; that's more because despite the educational experience working on this song forever, the hearing f...

Wide angle compositions

Giving thumbnail doodles of ultra-wide angle perspective compositions another go.

Just so you know, I'm going to be away for a while as I re-set up everything as I'm moving out. There might be an upload or two in the next couple weeks, but most likely not much will be happening for a while. Just thought I'd mention that. See you all later!

Little funk jam

Another sloppy preset jam of just two easy chords. Quite enjoyable, but not sure if it's original enough to flesh out. It's some cross between Head Hunters and Toejam & Earl. 

E Piano and Dexed bass jam

A very sloppy, poorly mixed improv' jam to prove that making preset track templates for REAPER is worth it. It took only about 30 minutes or so to get this track down, whereas before if I wanted to start making a tune it would take 30 minutes just to set up the drum machine. Of course I ain't going to use presets all the way through, but there's always certain sounds I like to start off with to get an idea down. So, the whole preset thing really helps let me write a song before forgetting wha...

CD-i Reanimate scene finished!

It all comes together in it's full glory. The only thing I wish I did was maybe make the outlines a dark grey and especially give Gwonam shadows in shot 2 & 4, so he looks a little more grounded. It was a jolly good attempt at perspective though, and I honestly just wanted to get this done after how long? I've been a fool and applied for a few more reanimates though, oops. Nice to finally animate something again though, and the textures out of the brushes and Clip Studio Paint scanning sy...

BPM/FPS Calculator on steroids

I could not take "only BPMs that divide perfectly into so many frames per beat" as an answer. Nor could I tolerate the non-mathematical method of just following the waveform's peaks. So I updated my simple BPM-to-FPS-to-BPM calculator to make suggestions as to how to nudge animations back into sync with (most) BPMs. 

The BPM to Frames Per Beat (FPB) part, if given a BPM that doesn't divide perfectly into an FPB, will suggest one of two compromises: either adding or removing frames ...

First background!

And first attempt at doing a cloud while actually looking at what they look like.

Ain't she a biggun!

I gave making brushes a go in Clip Studio Paint, using scans of ink covered bubble wrap. So you end up with rather rough, but still circular, textures to go with. Once I'm happy with them, I'll make a download link!

Jungle Boogie (mastered)

I thought maybe the songs I couldn't change the mixes aren't a complete lost cause. So I did my best to improve the dynamics, tonal balance, and stereo width using the export. Hopefully it sounds better than the version on Soundcloud, although there's still plenty of sloppiness in the mixing that I can't fix with just the stereo mixdown.