HarveyRothman

Comin' at ya again (and a wee attempt at mastering)

Here's progress on this tune, which I'm getting nearly done. Or rather I've put as much time into this as I can bear - working on crazy tedious tunes makes you crazy and tedious eventually.

3:42 is a pretty drastic addition bum-ba-dubba-dubba-bum, but there's been little (and not so little) changes peppered throughout. 

As for the mastering, it's mostly just some subtle compression, tonal balance and limiting, although nothing more than a dB chopped off, and hopefully avoidin...

Zelda CD-i Reanimate scene now coloured in!

All that's left is the backgrounds, finding a dozen details I forgot to colour in, and some post-production fancy stuff.

In the last and (partially) in the 2nd scene you'll see I was using the fill tool, but frankly with my rough lines, the fill tool was such a picky bastard to work with. I resorted to making a magic-marker like brush with lots of colour blending and it ended up looking better and spared me some sanity.

Starfox "workbook"

I saw in the 'Setting The Scene' book how they separated storyboarding "for business" and the more cinematic sort. I generally prefer to storyboard scribbles, considering angles/composition more of a Layout job. There's a bit in the book where they talk about the "workbook" approach; after you've done a scribbly storyboard that just tells the story, you can then go through again thinking solely about when you cut, angles, and such with the correct aspect ratio. You're still just doodling, wit...

Gaudy: Multitracked Erebus & D50

I've rerecorded a bunch of the Gaudy song, and the genre's quickly dispersing as I experiment. Here I've soloed the D50 doing some 'Soundtrack' chords, while I play multiple tracks on the Erebus to get a Stevie Wonder-like glidey choir(?) melody. I like how this sounds alone so much I'll probably make it a bonus track on the album (since with the rest of the tracks, this is practically drowned out). There's some Alesis XT:c reverb and Copicat echo going too (deliberately underpowered for lo-f...

Lab rat

And their long-suffering subject.

Izzy Intern

Goat scientist's curious, then easily bored, assistant.

Scientist Goat again

These have been oddly cropped 'cause I drew them on an envelope. I don't fancy being doxxed today!

Vicar mouse

I'll be frank and admit I haven't done all that much creative stuff worth posting - this is what commissioned work and living-related affairs ends up doing. But, not to worry! I've been doing music in my spare time, and when it's made significant progress you'll get to hear that shortly, and before long I'll be doing another short or something. I'll go mental otherwise.

Comin' at ya!

Here's another very-nearly-done tune, with maybe a couple vocals I want to add and slight structural changes. Chances are I'll release an album of songs like these before the ones I super-duper care about, just to see how releasing music goes down. Wonder if it's worth bothering looking into sample clearances (but there's nothing in this that if I had to take out would handicap the song, as dear to me as Arthur Lowe's narration is.)

This also has some bits with an analogue vocoder that ...

Scampish Scampi progress

A few bum notes around the end and it's too damn long, so a bit left to sort out. I'm also working on other tracks parallel to this one, so hopefully got an album ready for the next month or second.

At this stage, I should start thinking about marketing this thing, but I actually have no clue how people listen to music nowadays. What's your preference? (Patrons will be getting the album as a free download though when it's done so no worries!)

Zelda CDi Reanimate: First bit of colour

Using the TWAIN driver for the new scanner, I can save what area to scan for each time I scan, with a pegbar taped on the outside. (This scanner has a convenient spot where you can put your pegbar, unlike the last 3-in-one crap). So now I don't have to put up with scanning each page in full, just to manually realign the pegholes and crop it in After Effects; that's a lot of RAM GPU CPU whatever power being dedicated to crud not intended for the final result! No more, thank goodness.

I m...

Unfinished Knight Foxglove comic 2

Here's the other attempt, which ended up not getting anywhere. I'm still fond of these goofier drawings (compared to the more Preston Blair-y panel in the previous comic).

Unfinished Knight Foxglove comic 1

Got a bargain - a Mustek A3 scanner for £35. There's a couple faults with it; such as a line going down one side, it sounds a little knackered, and needs a clean. I reckon it'd be easy enough to sort out though! I tested it by scanning these old A3 comics I gave up on - what I should've known then is to have a story before bothering to draw any of it. So, my brain ran out before I could get to the next panel!

Goat scientist turnaround

I drew this for my friend David who's really getting into 3D modelling and wanted something to practice with.

Hotel Mario Reanimate Scene 4

Here's the final result, huzzah! Now, if anybody knows how you can automate a lot of Clip Studio Paint's processes (like making every frame have the same colour correction/effect etc applied) please let me know; even this ultra-limited animation took all day just to colour in. I'm not looking forward to colouring in the Zelda CD-i scenes which is pretty "full" animation.

For whatever reason the colours came out faded - I hope the same doesn't happen for the official reanimate.

And digitally drawn Luigi

One extra drawing was required to complete the scene, so I thought it'd be funny to put some digital touch ups have the final drawing be digital to see if it was at all jarring in motion. Clip Studio Paint could possibly be the most tolerable of hybrid animation work, but it's still far from ideal with lots of work around etc. I'm not too bothered about the timeline though, since I got my exposure sheet I can just follow in After Effects after renaming the image sequence to conform to the dra...

Traditionally drawn Luigi...

Composite layout

It's good to rough the characters in relation to the background on the same page before either doing separate layouts or going straight into the animation, using the composite layout as the background reference later on.

Grumpy Mario

I don't know, whenever I draw a hold I always default to an hard disapproving glare for an expression. I might change the designs later, but chances are I'll just get it done with.

The Mushroom Kingdom!

Background layout for the Hotel Mario CD-i Reanimate. Going for a 60's style, I still think it would be funny to fully animate the first second or so, then the rest can just be quick cuts n such.

Zelda CD-i Reanimate Part 2

This one took some time!

I'm chuffed with Gwonam's entrance with the carpet curling up, considering the peg holes aren't even aligned yet it still looks quite smooth. That turned out exactly as it looked in my head. I deliberately avoided doing pencil testing before it was too late both as a challenge and not to get perfectionist over it. Obviously the king's animation is way more janky, but hey ho. 

Fred Crippen style Luigi

I managed also to get a scene in the Hotel Mario Reanimate. Since the deadline's pretty tight and I've been overambitious with the Zelda Reanimate scene, I'm going to go for a limited animation style. I'm starting off ripping off Roger Ramjet but it may turn into its own thing later.

"Xerox" Photoshop action example

If anybody knows how to share Photoshop actions, I'll put a link up so you can do the same!

Zelda CD-i Reanimate Scene 4 Part 1

This time cleaned up, scanned, colour corrected, and composited. You know what isn't fun? A pegbar that doesn't fit in the scanner meaning you have to manually align each and every drawing. One day I'll get a A3 scanner but crikey they're expensive.

I discovered in Photoshop, in Hue/Saturation, you can rotate the hue by different amounts for each colour so you can have the whole lot be a blue, say. Then you can isolate the blue channel to make anything that is blue white! Easy-peasy sol...

Zelda CD-i Reanimate Scene 4 Part 1

This was my first go laying out a sliding background, with all the maths, fields and stuff. It was what motivated me to come up with a DIY sliding pegbar bodge in the first place.

One trick I found especially tricky was keeping the vanishing point in the same place. Gwonams animated on unmoving top pegs and the background scrolls on bottom pegs. So I animated the first arch moving with one point perspective, but the wall had to connect in the same place the whole time since its panning....

Mysterious Flump Funk 2

Finally the Jasper synth's back up and running, so I've added some stuff. Eventually I'll be reincorporating real instruments and the piano once its been tuned and my harddrive is replaced. It's making constant glitchy noises which gets in the way of recording anything.

Sliding pegbars & fields for layout DIY bodge

(I say 6 fields when I meant to say 12, timesing it by 2, since I intend to double the field chart's number of squares)

The idea of sliding pegbars & field guides is to work out distances, zooms, pans and the most basic calculateable "tweens" in traditional animation. The idea is unlike cutout animation, you can plan numerically where everything is coming from, to.

 Since I'm working with A4 paper, for now I might as well not bother with the actual standards (and a slidin...

More usual animal doodles

With a pinch of angular Oreb-ness, although it got wonky again.

Well-off Rat

Of course if I do a nice drawing it has to be on the inside of a blue envelope, hence the noisy colour correction. I also isolated the red channel to remove the red rough lines.

Horse Whip Whoosh SFX 3

Rapid back and forth type action, typically associated with cartoon characters stiffly flailing their arms about, or getting caught in a window blind.