Piemations

Production Post: HELLO

Hellooooo. Been a few months so let me catch you all up on everything.

The Sheriff Hayseed short known as "A Few Cards Short" or later "Swindling Simpletons" faced a big issue during production. I'm sorry to say I simply didn't like how it was turning out at all. I feel it was too long with too little happening, the art style wasn't clicking in ways I hoped and overall I knew it wasn't my best. So I've painfully made the decision to throw the video out and start again. Many assets from ...

EARLY SHORT: "Something's Off" + Update

Mike & Zach go vertical in our first YouTube short, which could be a fantastic vehicle for more frequent uploads! This was ultimately testing the water but I'm excited at the prospect of making more for any amount of characters in my toolbox.

And now a little update on the goings on

For the moment, I've picked up a project for ShadyVox, animating a fairly simple music video...

NEW VIDEO: A Happy Jam! Public release

Hop aboard the tram off to happy land with this song about how happy we are and how nice everything is! 

EARLY VIDEO: A Happy Jam, a new song!

Bit of a personal song I wrote during the pandemic but I'm particularly proud of it! No help on mixing this time either, it'll be the first song on the channel fully mixed by me.

Planning on releasing it in a couple more days, still needs Patron credits and a real thumbnail and such things like that but I figured I'd drop it a lil early. Hope you like! 

Soon it'll be time to return to Sheriff Hayseed for a sprint of animation to try and finish that nice and quick

NEW VIDEO: Sonic Frontiers of Pain

Here's this! Our December video is here to take Sonic through the wonderful world of Frontiers and it's very fun bosses.

Production Blog: Greetings from the Sonic Frontiers parody

I'm animating the last sequence now, so here's some stuff!

sonic fucking dead

Eggman trapped in Cyberspace

Sonic committing violence

2022-11-29 19:52:07 +0000 UTC View Post

Production Blog: Biiiig ol' update

Hey all! Hope everyone's been good. We've been busy over here as you can imagine from the long lapse in posts. But I'm here now to share some of it!

We'll start with the big ticket item of course, our new Sheriff Hayseed video. We now have about 2 out of the 8 minutes of animation completed, so still a long ways to go but well it's way. 

We've hit a good couple snags with the rigs that were meant to be convenient and easy but have caused some slow downs and ...

Production Blog: Sheriff Hayseed Animation Previews

Animators Charlie and Crowne have been hard at work animation shots for Sheriff Hayseed: Swindling Simpletons! Above are two shots from Crowne, as Charlie is focusing on keys for multiple shots at once and will finish them all at once later. At the least, it's easy to say Crowne is killing it.

We're currently at 1/55 sequences animated. GOTTA START SOMEWHERE MAN. I do wanna say I'm s...

Production Blog: Sheriff Hayseed Heads Into Animation

Hello again Patreon folk! Here with an update.

The storyboard for Sheriff Hayseed: Swindling Simpletons is complete. Background artists are on the job and animators will begin today! The storyboard came in around 8 minutes long, with 28 backgrounds to make, and a whopping 55 SHOTS to animate. 

This is no small project and will take some time, but hop...

NEW VIDEO: Mike & Zach Beat It

A mini Mike & Zach! A little something while assets for Sheriff Hayseed were finalized. Animation should begin soon on that new short! But in the meantime, hope you enjoy :)

Production Blog: Halo Turnarounds Done! + weapons

I finished up all the designs needed for the Halo 2 parody! Everything we'll need to build animation assets quick once the time comes. Now for some updates on sheriff fox guy!

Bisque continues building the final Hayseed rigs. I've been so happy with the work, I figured I should have him build all my puppets for now and see how it goes. His experience in Harmony far surpasses mine. Likewise, once he's done, I plan to have him hop onto building the rigs for Halo parody. 

2022-07-26 02:17:41 +0000 UTC View Post

Production Blog: Hayseed takes a small detour. Halo stuff

The rigs for Sheriff Hayseed have taken a small detour in direction as storyboarder and animator, Bisque, has offered his expertise on the Harmony puppets to make sure they're the best they can be. Bisque has real experience in the industry (of which i technically have none) so it should be interesting.

This shouldn't add much time to production at all and, at best, speed things up actually. If...

Production Blog: Sheriff Hayseed Stuff!

Routine Stop is done, so the next Sheriff Hayseed short is next! It will have the final art style to be used in multiple further shorts, so lots of time is being spent developing the puppets.

In the meantime, Gintoki has been spending a lot of time working on the storyboard. We renamed the short to "Swindling Simpletons" after some rewrites and an initial run of voice acting has been done as well to compliment the board.

Also, Mixy set up a Trello for the team! Outside of keeping ...

NEW VIDEO: Routine Stop

Routine Stop! A short video about Officer Paul Ease engaging in a routine stop with a very normal civilian. This is the first video almost entirely animated by my team of animators, crowne, charlie, and bisque! I handled some revisions but some shots I didn't have to touch at all! We are continuing to work on streamlining the process to make these faster while retaining the quality, but for now, hope you enjoy!

Production Blog: Routine Stop - Animation Preview

Here's a preview of some of the shots the animators have been doing! Still not sure if I'm going to end up animating anything for this video, which is so cool i can't even describe it. Gonna try to get this out this month! Stay tuned...

Production Blog: Happy June, time for toons.

Animators Crowne, Charlie, and Bisque continue animation work on Routine Stop as I dabble in a couple other things.

I whipped up a draft storyboard for the Halo parody which now moves to some asset prep work before making the final boards. Vanadium is working on character designs and Gintoki will flesh out the boards once they're done. Until then, Elites look like this. Might release the full cut of this

2022-06-01 19:49:10 +0000 UTC View Post

NEW VIDEO: Printer Problems Extended Theme

A little treat I made while the core of the team works on the next short, Routine Stop. More on that later

Production Post: Routine Stop and Sheriff Hayseed stuff

Rigs for Routine Stop have been made! Including refined and rebuilt officer Paul Ease.

Outside of that, Jess Thomas has been developing Sheriff Hayseed background references for all the shorts going forward! Troughwater has never looked so gooood

NEW VIDEO: Printer Problems

Our biggest team effort yet, and the beginning of a new era of Piemations. We hope you like it :)

Production Blog: The goings ons

As the music and sound on Printer Problems is finalized (release on the 23rd for sure), Some prep work on the next projects continues as well as some merch concepts.

Me and Ben worked on a Halo Infinite parody script

Vanadium created a rat tessellation for some reason. might put on a shirt

2022-04-16 14:14:10 +0000 UTC View Post

Printer Problems release date? + Zach fucking dies

Production on Printer Problems is drawing rapidly to a close! Here's a preview of zach fucking dying 

Production Blog: Printer Problems nears completion

with 31 out of 36 shots animated, Printer Problems is geared to go live sometime this month! We also now have at 2 additional animators working on shots. We're in the final stretch and working hard! We're very excited to get it out there

Printer Problems WIP Preview: Mouth Music

PREVIEW TIME. In this clip I did some "mouth music" to tell the composer generally what to do for the actual music. It's effective but downright silly

Production Blog: SCM 5 Character Designs and More Sketches

Our still-growing team is hard at work on Suction Cup Man 5! Massive headway on the script while visual development continues. 

And all the while, the new Mike & Zach short reaches 23 out of 36 animated shots as in heads in for preliminary audio

Production Blog: Suction Cup Man 5 concept art

Suction Cup Man 5 is being written! Here's some conceptual sketches done by Vanadium

The working title is Suction Cup Man 5: The Clown Underworld

Parts of Production Blog moving to YouTube Community

For those of you who enjoy the Production Blog, you should know that I will start posting the more basic progress updates on videos to the YouTube community tab instead of here as part of the rewards.

The plan is to allow more people to see how videos are coming along, thus less viewers left in the dark. As for the hole left by removing these from Patreon, I'm planning to post far bigger previews, with no holds-backsies on spoilers.

There is a longer version of this announcement o...

Production Blog 🎬: Picking up speed :)

hello! The new video "Printer Problems" is nearing half animated! 

The yellow blocks with names in them show who has been assigned what shot. Otherwise I've been handling them. Knocking out one shot every couple days or so. Still slower than I'd like to be moving but it's moving!

I do thank yall for your patience, those of you that still have some lol. I'm doing what I can for wo...

Production Blog 🎬: Progress on "Printer Ink"

Firstly, I'm calling the episode "Printer Problems" now. Second, here's the spreadsheet!

Vanadium has completed all the backgrounds! I'm moving on to asset layout but managed to animate a few scenes in between. It ain't much yet but it's honest work

yeehaw

Production Blog 🎬: a short called "Printer Ink"

Screenshots and backgrounds! Animation has finally begun on a new short! Sheriff Hayseed's "A Few Cards Short" has moved to the backburner in the meantime as we're still developing some things.

This new short will be the beginning of "season 2" for Mike & Zach with some big design changes, extra artists, and tweaked characters. 

Here's a more precise breakdown of the progress that I'll include with any future posts about the short!

2021-12-12 00:26:44 +0000 UTC View Post

"NEW" VIDEO: Mike & Zach - Season 1

As slow as production has been lately, I'm just glad to put something up lol. There's a little something at the end however. Production Blog resumes soon