VisitorsFromDreams

Horse with no name

2012-01-27T19:07:00.003+11:00

Well, I didn't make a post last week, shame on me. BUT! I have been very productive. Not only have I just finished working on my very first proper TV commercial, but I also got a few quick illustrations done and managed to finish of my entry for this months Loopdeloop. But lets not get ahead of ourselves.

First of all the commercial, I wish I could post it here, but I cant, so you know what, im going to stay quite until its up on the companies Vimeo account. What I can say is this, I animated it in Flash, which I shouldn't have, and it still somehow came out pretty great, or at least it was until the client told us to "tone it down" and make it less fun. Ah well.

Second of all is my loop! This loop marked the first time I had done a number of new things. It contains painted backgrounds done in Art Rage with oil paints and the spade thing that people use to mix them, I dont know what its called. Anyway, the end result ends up looking something like this.

And then there was the way I rendered the animation, which was the same process im using to animate Gerkinman returns, so the animation came out looking like this.

So once you mix these two things, and throw in some sound and some special effects courtesy of Final Cut Pro which im now learning to use for work, you end up with a final product similar to this.

And I couldn't be happier with it, or at least, not much happier. You can vote for it on Loopdeloop HERE if you feel the urge.

In other news I did a few quick doodles.

Here is Mr Kermit The Frog. For some reason I have been drawing frogs a lot lately.

Here is an Uglysaurus to celebrate Friday because... well... why not?

And lastly here is an angry man bursting through a door. A friend asked me about how she could make a shot in an animation my dramatic, the shot being a guy bursting through a door. I suggested a low angle shot and then for some reason felt the urge to color the original sketch.

And thats it for this week... or the last two weeks. Whats going to happen next time? Who knows! Tune in to find out.

Orange Crush

2012-01-15T13:45:00.001+11:00

A couple of days late again, tho I do have an excuse, Friday was a big day for me. Yup, thats what it was. Also I went to the Melbourne Aquarium yesterday, so it didn't seem to make sense to make a post until I could talk about that.

First things first, ALL the episodes of Bricks Are Fun are now up on Youtube, you can find the four remaining episodes below.

So im glad I have that out of the way. Im not going to be putting anymore older cartoons up until at least Gerkinman Returns is finished, altho all I really have left that I want to put up is a short called "King Dodongo" and the 5 episode series I worked on called "The Martian Saga" which im planning to cut down a bit and put into one film.

I also managed to find the time to do 3 quick illustrations, only spending around 10 minutes on each.

It felt good doing a little bit of drawing again, even if they were only quick doodles. Hopefully I will find the time to do more of this sort of stuff.

It was a busy week last week, working at two different advertising agencies, and next week is looking much the same, if not busier.

As mentioned above, me and my partner went to the Melbourne Aquarium yesterday, and it was quite a bit of fun. While it had many of the same displays as other aquariums, they had a few animals I hadn't seen before, at least not in captivity.

Naturally the first things we saw were the Penguins. They were smaller then I expected, and also pooped more, I mean I expected them to poop plenty, but you never see any stains on the ice in documentaries...

They also had a neat fresh water display with things like fresh water sting rays and fresh water sharks in it, part of the display also had a fake plane crashed into a tree over the water which was a nice touch. One of the most interesting things we found in the fresh water spot was a fish called "The Glass Catfish" which has completely transparent flesh.

Much like Underwater World they also had a Japanese Spider Crab, but I never get tired of seeing those things, despite the fact that this one was quite small compared to others I have seen.

Something that this place had in spades that other aquariums i've been too haven't were Jelly Fish, they mainly had moon jellies, but they also had these cute little ones. I was too mesmerised by there movement to even look at what they were called.

Lastly, they had not one, but two living Nautilus, which was very exciting. I had seen them in videos and my mum was lucky enough to stumble upon a shell once, but I had never seen a living one close up before.

Of course thats just a small amount of what we saw on our visit, I took my camera along so hopefully when I get some free time I will be able to do something fun with all the video.

And thats really it for this week. With next week looking the way it is I dont know if I will get much if any animation work done, I guess we will just have to see what happens. So until next time...

Skyrim Atmospheres

2012-01-07T08:05:00.002+11:00

Wow, im sorry, 2 weeks without an update, I was going to update last Friday but ended up having a massive day freelancing from home and then seeing Happy Feet 2...

ANYWAY, It has been a big couple of weeks, let me tell you about them.

Since this is a creative blog, ill only be talking about the creative stuff, that said, I spent a week up on the Northern Rivers, back on my home turf some might say. While I was there I took quite a lot of time lapse and surf footage. I shot quite a lot of time lapse footage at my parents home over the span of two days and spent another full day at Lennox Head filming, I was even lucky enough to catch a storm going by in the distance. The surf footage I took was also from Lennox Head, and while I wasn't doing anything too dangerous most of the time aside from wearing a silly hat...

But when I wasn't standing safely up on nice green grass I was in stupid places like this hoping that a big wave wouldn't come along and bowl me over...

To give you an idea how big that wave was in this photo, im standing on top of a storm water drain that came up at least a meter and a half out of the water. The end result tho, I like to think was worth it, I put together a lot of the footage I took to the song Il Fiore by Trash80.

But thats not all I have done, while I was away I also managed to finish tweaking all 8 of the original 2005 series of Bricks are Fun. So far I have been uploading one a day, and as of today I have 4 more to go. Im happier with some more then others, but obviously since some are funnier then others thats to be expected.

Now that these are finished and out of the way I can get back to focusing on Gerkinman Returns and this months loop.

And thats pretty much it for this week, I leave you now with the track Skyrim Atmospheres which is what im currently listening too, and is 42 minutes of peaceful ambience. For those who have been wondering as well, the title of my blog is always whatever song is playing on my playlist at the time. True story.

And dont forget to follow me on Tumblr. I need the love...

Morphing Thru Time

2011-12-21T15:18:00.002+11:00

Two blog updates in less then 7 days, I must be going crazy!

No, I just thought since im leaving to visit family tomorrow morning and I wont be able to hop back onto the internet till sometime next week now would be as good a time as any to update this blog. So thats what im doing, and not even you can stop me!

So what have I been up too since I last blogged a few days ago? Well, I uploaded this little flash animation from 2005. Dont ask me now what its about or what the joke is, I dont remember, but I havent made anything like it since so I guess its sort of interesting.

Anyone who has known me since 2004 will also remember a web series I made over the span of a week called Bricks Are Fun. It was a silly little series where the joke was the idea that there was no joke. It sort of exploded on DeviantArt and had lots of spin offs and for a couple of weeks it was super popular. Looking back on it its probably the single most popular solo project I ever undertook, which is ironic since it was made incredibly lazily, with one episode made every afternoon over 8 days. Each one only took a couple of hours to throw together. After talking to a friend about old projects I noticed it was still getting traffic, from people I can only assume are looking for it out of nostalgia. For this reason I decided to get the series ready for upload to Youtube. Ive been tweaking the visuals slightly, so they are all uniform and dont hurt the eyes quite as much as they did back in 2005, with most of the gradients and photos gone in favor of flat shading. The animation itself however has been left untouched and is just as horrible as it ever was. It will however contain a new opening sequence as well as credits and copyright free music. You can see some screens below from episodes in progress. Ive chosen to keep the episode names the same, even tho some of them make no sense structurally, its all part of the fun I guess.

Episode 01: Bricks Are Fun

Episode 02: Bricks Are Flammable

Episode 03: Bricks Are Do Stuff

Episode 04: Bricks Are From Space

Episode 05: Bricks Are Fight Back

Episode 06: Bricks Are Cameo

I still have large amounts of Episode 06 that need to be finished, and then Episodes 07/08 to go and it should be all nicely wrapped up. Im hoping to get all the episodes finished while im away visiting family, and ill do the sound when I get back home and have access to the internet again.

Also on Monday I drew this chocolate teddy with its ear bitten off after a twitter discussion about eating chocolate bears even tho they are so cute.

And thats really it for this week again. Down the bottom you will find all of this weeks Tumblr pics, all from 2005 once again. So until I get home and have a lot to talk about again, as im sure I will. Adios.

Fat of the Land

2011-12-17T17:30:00.000+11:00

Sorry for the late post, I was up last night watching Rise of Planet of the Apes...

Now, what did I get up to this week? Well, to be honest, not a whole lot. I started going through some of my old animations, ones that I thought might be worth putting on Youtube. The first one I converted to HD and re-uploaded was one of my sequences from a Newgrounds Flash Collaboration I oversaw back in 2005 called "The Doom Project". In the end I animated 3 sequences but this is the only one I still have the source file for. It was called "Hall of the Cyber Demon".

I also dug up the source file for another quick animation called "The Pickle Has You" which I will be uploading next Monday, and also all 10 episodes of "Bricks Are Fun" which im not only converting to HD, but also tweaking the art a little bit and redoing the audio so its more Youtube friendly. Hopefully I will be able to release one of these shorts a week over the next 9 weeks.

Today was also a biggish day, me and my partner both went into a small market, which was similar to an Etsy store if it occupied 3D space. They had all kinds of neat stuff at the stalls, and on the tables in the middle of the market they had marker pens so you could draw all over paper they had them covered in. I drew a robot as they are what I tend to draw when I dont know what else to do.

I also got the following movie posters.

Im not sure where I will put these yet, but im sure I will find somewhere appropriate.

I also went to the Android Land store where the animations I worked on are being displayed, was cool seeing them all up in a row.

The only other real news I have is that i've been posting old images with a small write up about them daily this week on my Tumblr. But before I do ill also mention that I will be heading to the Northern Rivers to visit my family for Christmas this coming Thursday, so I will either blog this coming Wednesday or when I get home the week after.

So I guess this is the official end of this weeks blog, if you want to check out a few old images from 2005 that I had posted on my Tumblr then have a look below. Adios.

The Rainbow Connection

2011-12-09T16:34:00.001+11:00

Well, I didn't blog last week. I cant remember why... I remember it being rather chaotic, but not the reasons why... oh well...

This week I remember things tho!

On Tuesday night I went to a special screening of all the final films made by the students doing the Film and Television Tafe course as Swinburne University. That was quite interesting, especially since its a course I am potentially undertaking myself next year. I had my interview for the course yesterday and the teachers seemed impressed with my work which is always nice.

The other thing I saw the following night was a special preview screening of The Adventures of Tin Tin.

When I originally saw the trailer, like most people I was sceptical, and the movie did start a little slow. But on the whole I ended up really enjoying the film. I also liked the fact that despite it was all motion captured it didn't suffer with that strange "dead eyes" problem a lot of previous mo cap movies have had. It wasn't the greatest movie of the year by any means, but it was a thoroughly enjoyable romp none the less.

As for my own personal projects, its been a busy week again with work and other things, so I havent got any animation work done. But I did find the time to make some cute vector art based around Skyrim! Cute by my works standards at least.

Other then that I booked my tickets to visit my family over the xmas break. Hopefully since I wont have internet or anything I will finally be able to finish Gerkinman Returns with no distractions, but we will have to wait and see...

Google Android

2011-11-26T12:34:00.001+11:00

Well, I know last week I said I would be back today with some new content from Nimbin/Gerkinman, but I have had the biggest week I have had in months. I worked at 3 different places, and from home this week. Good to be busy again.

The main big project Id like to talk about was a series of short animations for Google Android. I was called in on Wednesday morning, sat down and was given some storyboards and off I went. This is the first time I have ever been called in to do character based animation as opposed to just web banners and other similar things like that, and I quite enjoyed it. I was working alongside an animation lecturer and the offices After Effects guru. The character himself was animated entirely in flash and then being exported as a sequence of .pngs to be recompiled in After Effects with funkier text and other effects.

All in all it was an enjoyable experience and the other animators were great to work with and id gladly go back again.

In other news here is that Nimbin/Gerkinman pic I promised :P

Im not sure how busy I am going to be next week, so I dont know how much animation work I will get done on the film. Ive also got Loopdeloop Tuesday night. I didn't get to attend last months so im looking forward to going back again.

So until next week!

The Wizard Turns On...

2011-11-18T10:35:00.001+11:00

Boy oh boy what a busy week. Freelanced on Monday. Played a bunch of Skyrim. Got my new loop finished. Oh hey yeah! The loop, thats a good way to start this post.

So the theme for this months Loopdeloop was "Condoms". I had originally gone through a number of ideas before I settled on my final concept. Its not exactly what I set out to make but people seem to be enjoying it. I haven't made anything video game related in a number of years now so it was rather refreshing.

If you want to vote you can make your way over here. The name Super Cock Joke Bros. came a from a follow up project to my short film Cock Joke Solid which I released a number of years ago.

I had planned for a while to make a whole series of cock based video game parodies. Im glad I bailed on that idea tho.

In other news I've been working on the new episode of Nimbin/Gerkinman. Im still not sure which name I will be releasing the series under. Funny how deciding on a name is proving far harder then any of the animation. Hopefully I will have some screens worth sharing next week.

Something else I have been working on and can share is the remastered version of my cartoon "Down at McDonalds".

Originally released in 2008 and animated in a single afternoon, "Down at McDonalds" was based on a story from a work mate, about one day when he was on ecstasy and went to a toilet in McDonalds and swore Ronald McDonald slid under the door and started to lick his leg. Being drawn to that sort of bizarre tale as I am, I had no choice but to make it into a film. So I did. Its something that, for the time I made it in, Im still quite happy with, but that doesn't mean I dont feel like it could be better with some expanding on. So i've started to go back to it in my free time and jazz it up a little. You can see some of the comparison shots between the original and the remastered version below.

The first obvious change, is the new art style, going for a more hand drawn look as opposed to the simple clean vector look of the original. It also now takes place at night, because everything is creepier at night, everyone knows that.

This shot remains largely unchanged, the person behind the counter has been redesigned, as has the menu behind him. I also decided to drop the third man in the line since he didn't really add anything to the shot, but the composition itself remains largely unchanged.

Once again this shot remains largely unchanged. What I have done is made it look much more like the dirty stained toilet one would expect to find in a McDonalds. The original looks more like something from a hospital.

This shot has gone through a number of changes. While not obvious here, in the original shot everything was static. Now not only does the camera pan but also the man in the background moves around as he gets ready to eat his burger.

This scene went through a large number of changes. The main on being in the original short, its a loop of the man eating his burger. Now this shot was recycled 3 times and increased in speed. To avoid that repetition he now goes through 3 stages of eating, the burger, the fries, and a drink. He also just takes a single bite now as opposed to eating non stop.

So far this shot has been the most heavily modified from the original. The original is far to close to the camera and just looks awkward. This was something that I really wanted to rectify. Once again the dirtiness of the toilet is made more obvious as well. Having the camera peeking over the wall of the stall also helps make him look more alone.

So thats about it for next week. Next week will probably be filled with images from the new Nimbin/Gerkinman episode. Got to keep jumping back and forth to keep things fresh.

Until next time...

Nimbin

2011-11-11T13:00:00.001+11:00

Boy oh boy, what a week. As I mentioned last week I was heading up to the Northern Rivers to visit family on the weekend. And I did, but before I divulge into that, heres a video my partner Maya put together for a uni assignment, starring yours truly. Its about dressing for weather in Melbourne.

So, without going to much into the trip I had, We went through Nimbin, and since thats the series im wanting to bring back next year I thought I should do a bit of a post about it.

These here are the Nimbin Rocks, and really, they are the only things from Nimbin that have ever actually made there way into any of the flash episodes or illustrations.

When you finally make it out of the hills and closer to the town this is the sign that greats you. You will find these signs all over the Northern Rivers.

These shots give you a bit of an idea of what the main st of Nimbin is like. Its something I always wanted to include in the original series but never got to, but you will be seeing it frequently in the new season. As you can see from the photos it is a colourful place, which ties nicely into my art style.

Of course the other thing Nimbin is famous for is its ties to Marijuana. There is no shortage of memorabilia and other things over town, from Mardigrass posters to paintings and photos of local super hero "The Plantem". I wonder if "The Plantem" and Gerkinman would get along...

This is a sign that was originally used in the 1973 Aquarius festival. Its been restored obviously. I still find it to be an interesting piece of history.

There is also an interesting museum that covers the history of the town from way back when Dinosaurs ruled the crops to now. The amount of work thats gone into this alternate museum is quite astounding.

The town is also home to some of the regions most colourful vehicles. The original Nimbin idea (Back when it was called Teenage Mutant Ninja Ferals - ferals being the sort of people that inhabit Nimbin, the ones that aren't hippies anyway.) had the crew driving around in a colourful bus, maybe its time to bring that back.

Its also a great place to go for novelty hats. If you are into that sort of thing anyway.

Lastly I leave you with the Nimbin Bush Theatre. A building that was once an old flour mill repurposed as a cinema. I went with my dad to this place a number of times to see foreign films, it really is a great venue, as far as atmosphere is concerned anyway. If I get the feature film made after these 10 episodes, this is where im going to want to premier it.

Next week hopefully I will have some animation and illustrations up, but until then...

Keeping things short this week

2011-11-05T00:23:00.004+11:00

Yes, not a whole lot to talk about this week. I guess the main things are that I re-released my 2008 short film "Spaceman Bob and the Time Apple" in HD on both Youtube and Vimeo. You can find each of them below respectively.

I may record a commentary track for the short down the line. The actual upscaling to HD was a pretty simple process thanks to the simplicity of the animation, and I only did some minor updates (Most noticeably the splash when Bob jumps into the water). I had considered doing a similar thing to some of my other older shorts, but they would require much more reanimating in order to fit the 720p video resolution. So we will see what happens.

The other big news is that tomorrow I am flying back home with my partner to the Northern Rivers to visit family. While I am away I will be taking a lot of reference video at Lennox Head, Rock Valley and most importantly Nimbin, to use in the new Nimbin series. I also hope to use the video from Nimbin in the first episode as an introduction to the town. So we will see what happens. I arrive back on Monday, then I am freelancing at Hubink on Tuesday and Wednesday. That leaves me with Thursday to get some animation work (most likely this months loop) done as once Skyrim hits next Friday... finding the will to animate will be much harder...

Shake It Out

2011-10-28T19:43:00.002+11:00

So I've been told these blogs have been getting a bit long in the tooth lately. Which I guess I should have realised, my last blog took took 10 minutes just to scroll to the bottom. So I will be trying to keep them a little more focused. On weeks where I dont have any animation news I will continue doing retrospectives of my older animations. That said, I have been busy on the first episode of the second season of Nimbin these last 2 weeks, getting around 1 minute of animation done.

Without giving to much away, here is Gerkinman riding on a tram. Here in Melbourne there are Trams, Trains and Buses everywhere, and quite often to get to where your going you have to take multiple forms.

As a general rule I much prefer the Trams to the Buses, not that you can tell its a bus in this shot. Buses just seem to take forever.

Bus stops tend to be in the stupidest places as well, they are never near shelter, at least not in the suburbs. So if you get stuck in the rain you might just end up having all the brown dye in your hair washed out.

This shot shows Gerkinmans home, a giant open and empty space, with dust floating around. This is actually a throwback to his home in The Ultimate Asparagus 3.

His home there is much less empty, but just as dusty.

And here we see Gerkinman looking back on his old life back in the country town of Nimbin. Awww...

I had some fun with the lipsync in this shot. Im just posting this because it makes me giggle. :O

You even get to see Gerkinman with his original Vegeta hair style in his full costume, something that hasn't been in a toon since 2007.

He doesn't stay that way long tho, eventually looking like the Gerkinman people have become familiar with over the last few years. All thats missing is his doobie... Im sure he will get one of those later tho. So what happens after his transformation?

Well, the movie cuts to this. Anyone who watched the old Nimbin cartoons should recognise this immediately. So I guess thats a hint. Has the camp changed over the years? Well thats a secret. I wont be posting any spoilers for the rest of the episode, any shots I do post will have to be ones that dont reveal anything, so we will see how we go. What you can probably see from this image is that it looks a lot more like the art from the original series then the art in the earlier parts of the cartoon.

Also my entry for this months Loopdeloop is finally up. If you want to know more about the process behind it check out last weeks post. Unfortunately I couldn't be there for this months screening because I was at a special screening of the original Jurassic Park. I didn't get to see it at the movies as a kid so it was a special screening indeed.

I also did 2 more scene re-imaginings from the older Gerkinman toons. Pretty happy with how they came out. I like the re-designed Spactafunk a lot more then the ones in the original series. Luis im not entirely sold on tho, I think he could use some more tweaking.

Also last week Melbourne Armageddon. It was my first time to a con in quite a few years. I did manzage to grab a few things while I was there. I picked up a short zine by artist Frank Candiloro called "The Widowmaker". I havent had a chance to read it yet but it looks like it should be interesting. You can see some of his other comic work just by click on his name back there.

I also picked up The Little big Book of Black and White Pinups by Alisha Howard, which is up there for longest title name with Godzilla, King Ghidora and Mortha All Out Attack. You can check out more of her work if you go back there and click on her name as well.

This convention also marked the first time Ive bought any graphic novels since I finished my Scott Pilgrim collection.

I grabbed me a copy of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns which im pretty sure everyone aside from me has read. And also...

Transformers Classics Vol 1, which is essentially the first 13 volumes of the Marvel comics from 1984. I had no idea that the Transformers lore was set down in these comics as they came before the series. Fascinating stuff. I have enough Transformers stuff to fill a blog of its own.

To close, heres me in the DeLorean from Back to the Future. Was pretty neat sitting in there.

And heres me with fellow animator Lochie Axon. He is dressed up as a Mudkip.

And thats it for this week. Tune in next week as I tell you about the time I cured cancer.

Jimmy's Dead

2011-10-14T12:52:00.001+11:00

What a week, nothing really happened work wise, in fact I didn't hear anything at all about upcoming work... hopefully next week will change that.

What did happen this week however is I finished my entry for this months loopdeloop. The theme was spooky this time. Normally when it comes to doing these loops I end up going through 3 or 4 ideas before settling on a single idea, but not this month. As soon as the announcement was made I knew exactly what it was I was going to make. You can find the results right here, I call it Party on Bald Mountain. As you probably guessed this is because it is a parody of my favourite sequence from Fantasia, Night on Bald Mountain with the musical piece of the same name written by Modest Mussorgsky in 1867.

This was my first time doing a blatant parody in... well... years really. In some ways I think I may have stuck to close to the original animation, in the intro at least, but I guess the intro is what really establishes it as a parody in the first place, since it deviates quite a bit after the opening sequence.

You can check out some caparison shots below.

Tho heres one expression you never saw on Chernobogs face in the original piece ha ha.

Obviously I couldn't stop there, the real spooky stuff in the original animation were the demons dancing themselves. You can find some of my caricatures for my piece below.

Also this week I went back and completely redrew a scene from "I Am Gerkinman". After writing my big retrospective I felt compelled to go back and do just one scene as it might have been done if I was working on the film today. Naturally it came out looking nothing like most of my current animation. Ah well, I had fun colouring in this way, maybe I will use this rendering style for something... someday.

And speaking of retrospectives, lets keep going with mine. This week im doing both Gerkinman Episode 02: The New Girl and Episode 03: The N64th Dimension. 2003, what a year aye?

As far as I can tell, The New Girl is about Gerkinman hitting a button, which releases a robot. Once the robot is defeated the girl is released. Gerkinman thinks it was his defeating the robot that achieved this, but actually, Louis the Penguin just plugged the machine holder her into a power socket. And thats it...

Here we see Gerkinman, gone is the character model from "I Am Gerkinman" and instead we find this bizarre monstrosity in its place. The backgrounds remain just as horrendous as the previous cartoon. I cant remember why I changed the character model for this particular cartoon...

After Gerkinman presses the button we are introduced to a robot, traced from some game assets in one of the RPG maker series. I believe originally this design belonged to a Golem. Golems are just robots made of stone anyways right?

We then also get to see a redesigned Spactafunk, who tween's around like nobodies business. Hell, his psychic powers have become so powerful that his eyes no longer sit on his face but morph around freely as tho physics have no say in the matter.

We then get an amazing Dragon Ball Z style fight sequence where Gerkinman charges at the robot.

And then something happens, I think the robot his Gerkinman and this was supposed to release the energy in his face. Its visually confusing as hell, I have watched this so many times now trying to understand exactly what I was trying to convey here, but really, I can only guess... Either way, the robot is defeated and explodes.

Regardless of all of this, the new girl is now free. I believe she too was traced from some RPG maker assets.

Despite how bad this shot is, you can still tell that Gerkinman is chuffed as all hell about his victory.

And then we close on a shot of a burnt up Louis, the real hero of the episode.

You can find the actual cartoon right here if you dare.

The N64th Dimension follows up directly afterwards. Gerkinman is about to start talking to the new girl, later named K3rr1, before having a new villain appear on the scene. Chronomew is his name, and he is an evil pokemon that is hell bent on having Gerkinman sucked into an Ocarina of Time game cartridge for the N64, but before you can say Holy Lame Videogame Reference Batman, its all over.

The Dragon Ball Z references continue as Gerkinman and Spactafunk both feel a strong "power level" coming from the distance. It also marks the return of the Gerkinman character model from "I Am Gerkinman". I have no idea why, just run with it.

As you can see Spactafunks model has also reverted to the same one from "I Am Gerkinman". Something else you may notice and was relatively new to the series, were close ups. And lots of them.

Then here comes Chronomew. Now I don't remember the exact details of his origin. Mew in Pokemon Red/Blue was impossible to catch without a game shark, and Chronomew was supposed to be a robotic clone of mew and... oh god, nobody came here for a history lesson on Pokemon. Anyways, hes a bad guy.

Gerkinman and Spactafunk get all close and snuggly because closeups mean you dont have to go to the effort of showing the whole body. Gerkinman is whispering in this shot and im still sort of surprised that it still carries accross.

K3rr1 then reveals that she too is a baddie and works for Chronomew, with the plans of sucking Gerkinman into the fabled Ocarina of Time cartridge. Now back in the day OoT was still super popular parody material on sites like newgrounds, and its a game I referred back to on a number of occasions.

Gerkinman is pretty happy about the whole idea, after all, it is his favorite game. (However, in retrospect I believe Majoras Mask is far superior).

And then he gets sucked into the game. You can see some light frame by frame work trying to recreate the look from star trek.

And then fittingly, Spactafunk and Louis decide that they feel like going to get pizza. The End.

And really, thats how all movies should end, with the heroes eating pizza. If you want to see this cartoon and you check it out right here.

And thats it for this week, tune in next week to read about how that Nimbin reboot is going. Remember that? No... oh... never mind.

Mercy Street

2011-10-07T18:46:00.004+11:00

What a massive couple of weeks the last two weeks have been.

As I mentioned in my last post I have been working at Clemengers, and it has been rather exhausting. I was jumping from flash banners to website designs, mobile app layouts and back again. Its always good to experience new things while freelancing, but because the work place is a little ways from here, waking up early and getting home late can take its toll. I finished my contract there yesterday but they assure me that I will be back during the coming weeks, so at least I know I have more work on the way.

Since I got today off work I decided it was time to grab myself that new Macbook for freelancing, so I did. Nothing crazy, just a standard 13 inch, with an extra 4gb ram to push it up to 8gb. Also since somebody had ordered in a custom one with a 750gb HDD and then decided once they saw the small screens that they didn't want it (did they really not know that 13' isn't as big as 15'?) they sold it to me at the same price as a standard model just so it wasn't sitting around. Currently installing the master suite so Im ready to work when the work comes in. I was originally going to buy a small bamboo to go with it but i've been told a bamboo design refresh isn't far off so I decided to put getting it off until I know whats happening for sure.

Also since I had the day off I started work on this months Loopdeloop. The months theme is Spooky, and I decided that I want to pay tribute to one of my favourite animation sequences of all time. Not that you will be able to guess what it is from these two screens below.

Since I don't have any other real animation news this week I thought I would go back in time to my very first flash cartoon (to hit the internet at least). Welcome to the year 2004 and a little film called "I Am Gerkinman" (Worth noting is that the original version was from early 2003 and has been lost to the sands of time, this is a slightly updated version made just for newgrounds.)

The cartoon was not my first attempt at flash animation, but It was my first project created in Flash 5 (I had been using Flash 4 up until that point and had no access to the internet). It was written and animated for a visual arts assignment. And was for the most part, little more, for the first half anyway, badly rotoscoped animation from The Animatrix.

It told the story of Gerkinman, the sole survivor in a country town after what appeared to be robots went wild and wiped out humanity. As stated earlier, the first part of the animation was mostly badly traced video from the film The Animatrix. While its certainly not something I am proud of looking back on, I do find it interesting that despite the fact the intro is so frame by frame animation heavy, that I didn't go back to doing traditional animation for several years after this flash.

Of course that could also have a lot to do with the fact that it was all done with a mouse, not the most practical tool for doing frame by frame animation. It also featured a bizarre mix of the line tool and paint brush tool with no consistency. Of course I can put that down to being self taught and really having no idea what looked good or bad, at the time I was too blown away just by the fact I was making images move on the screen.

Something I do admire a little going back to it now is the fact that I had put it lighting effects, something that I do currently forget to add in from time to time. This next clip contains R2-D2, I think I had put him into the shot because the video I was tracing was so pixelated I couldn't make out what the robot looked like. Most people thought it was just a funny pop culture reference.

Something else thats funny about this sequence is that it contains a lot of colours that I heavily rely on now in my work, something I didn't even realise until I went back and watched this animation today. I cant quite remember what the colours where like in the original Animatrix short, maybe they were the same.

The sequence also featured music by System of a Down, which I admit to liking in high school. I believe before I made this animation I had made another one using another of there songs "Toxicity". Quite often when I go back to these old animations the most jarring things aren't how bad the animation and character design is, but rather the music.

And thus ended the mostly rotoscope ending of the intro sequence of "I Am Gerkinman". As we see the last of humanity loose there struggles against the ever dangerous line tool. Watching this clip below, I dont know why the guy didn't just side step whatever that thing is. Ah well.

So now all the fighting is finished we finally get introduced to our hero. Looking sad over what is supposed to represent the destruction of mankind but is more like a blue and green mess.

He doesn't stay sad long tho, because he is an idiot, which is the one trait that has stayed consistent throughout his seven year existence. Something he did use to do a lot was make his own sound effects over the top of what he was doing. When I saw Clouds with a Chance of Meatballs (great movie by the way) and noticed Flint Lockwood running around making his own sounds I couldn't help but giggle and think back to this flash cartoon. It also is a great display of why you shouldn't tween people dancing.

Next we are introduced to another new character, and one that has sadly been neglected over more recent years. His name is Spactafunk and he is a psychic seamonkey from the future. He originally looked much like an ape but for these flash cartoons I used Mewtwo from pokemon as a major design influence.

We are also introduced to a Probe Droid. Something that just floats around and scouts I suppose. Looking back at it now its probably the least horrible looking thing in the whole cartoon. I still find the idea of a robot floating around with a sad smiley on its chest a little amusing.

Of course he finds Spactafunk and this an epic battle is begun. Turns out the probe is packing heat, and lots of it. The idea of small characters with large amounts of weapons is a comedy staple and a concept I still find entertaining. Its a shame the timing on this take of it is so off and the direction is so flat.

Spactafunk isn't having any of that tho, and being psychic he does some stuff that only a psychic seamonkey can do. Strangely this shot is the only one after the intro sequence that contains anything that remotely resembles camera work. It was also supposed to be a reference to the general idea of Dragon Ball Z but looking back at it now I dont think it was conveyed very well.

So after this little display of powers Gerkinman demands to know who Spactafunk is and makes a strange expression.

And then Spactafunk explains that he is indeed a psychic seamonkey from the future. This sequence also had a bunch of horrible visual gags, such as a gnome coming up in the corner with a "Hi Mum" sign to a fish and space ship flying past in the background. They are certainly a type of joke that I am glad I grew out of.

All of these bad visual gags send Gerkinman into a frenzy. Also worth noting is that despite the fact the first half of the film is full of sound effects and music, the second half has a very sparse audio landscape. So maybe thats why he looks so upset.

And then we are introduced to Louis, a purple penguin and also Spactafunks side kick, as you probably guessed he too is from the future.

One thing that did make Louis different to a lot of my characters at the time was that he didn't speak english, I basically made a bunch of horrible bird sounds and and then put subtitles on the screen. Since these characters could not speak his language they too read the subtitles in order to know what was going on. This is one of the third wall jokes that I think still sort of holds up, and its something I might even return to in the future. Subtitles... handy.

And now that all 3 of these to be heros are together, they go to find the key to the future, or story, or something. Turns out that key is a chick, it is stated in dialogue but its horribly showed in a visual sense in the shot below. Really? What the hell am I looking at?

And that conclude the first Gerkinman episode. Its always a little strange going back to look at old animations or other projects. I currently have 78 Newgrounds submissions, and while I doubt I will do a retrospective on each of them, I think I might go through all the significant ones. Anyway, if your still reading, hope you found this sort of insightful and see you next time. And if you want to watch this bizarre piece of my animation history, then click down here!

JUST CLICK IT!

Girl with One Eye

2011-09-25T16:03:00.002+10:00

Oh dear, i've neglected my blog again. Shame on me.

To be fair it has been a very busy couple of weeks. You see I have been freelancing at a place called Hubink. You can check out there site here. Its been a very enjoyable experience so far, with a number of jobs which I have had complete creative control over, which to me was exciting. I have been mainly working on flash banners, but I have also been working on a few pieces of motion graphics for a couple of websites. There is one in particular I have been happy with and I hope to put in my next showreel or on vimeo. They have also offered me a part time job, at least 2 days a week, which after 2 months of almost no work is great relief.

Im not sure what days im working next week, but I am also working at Clemengers tomorrow. Its my first time back in a couple of months and they asked for me personally which has never happened to me before.

In animation news, not a whole lot to report, Loopdeloop is running twice this week. Once at the Loop Bar as usual on Tuesday night, but also this Thursday at The Warren as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival. This months theme was "Down the Rabbit Hole" and there have been some great entries. You can check out mine below.

Its a little different to what was originally envisioned, and I had an incident where the original .fla corrupted so I had to reimport the .swf and reapply all the dropshadow effects frame by frame which was a pain, but ultimately I am still happy with the outcome.

On top of this loop screening on Tuesday and Thursday night, the following 2 loops will be on cycle at The Warren all week which is cool!

Unfortunately, because I have been so busy freelancing and because this months loop to so much longer then it should have, I have not got to touch Nimbin this month. Hopefully next months loop theme wont drag out as long and I can get the scene I had been working on completely finished.

I am also needing to buy a macbook for freelancing, so doing so should allow me to work on Nimbin and other things during my lunch breaks. Im also looking forward to getting one of the new Wacom Inklings, as im sure it will allow me to start posting a tonne more doodles.

Also worth noting is that on Friday me and my partner will be going to see Gotye in concert which I am pretty pumped about.

Thats about it really, no screens to show off, feels bad man :(

Mr. Big

2011-09-10T22:54:00.001+10:00

Well, its a day later then it was supposed to be, but a late update is better then no blog update.

So as I sit here listening to "Icehouse - White Heat", let me tell you all about the goings on in the wide and exciting world of my animation.

I suppose the first thing I should talk about should be the Nimbin Pilot, which now im looking at it isn't so much a pilot as it is a reintroduction to the series set an undisclosed amount of time after episode 5 of the original series. But I think for the series after this short, I want to start all over again, telling Gerkinman's origin story and then having that lead into the main Nimbin series. The reasoning behind this was that I had originally written Gerkinman's origin story for use in a graphic novel (How to Pickle a Gherkin), but looking at it now I think it would be better suited to animation, mainly because it can be read in its entirety in less then 10 minutes, but also because animation is so much more dynamic. Its not as short as what I had originally planned for the series to be, but I think if im going to be trying to sell the series to TV networks, or at the very least pitching it, the story I had previously written would be better suited. That doesn't mean I wont release the shorter episodes I have written in between major episodes however. Anyways, You can find some final renderings from the first scene below.

I still have 2 and a half scenes to finish in this style, but if this scene was anything to go by it shouldn't take more then a few weeks.

I have also started work on this months Loop De Loop, with the theme "Down the Rabbit Hole". The animations will be getting screened as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival. You can see a screen below. What does these two handsom gentlemen flying through space in a convertible have to do with rabbit holes? Well thats a secret!

I also managed to watched the entirety of the series Adventure Time in just over a week. Its the first time I have really sat down to watch a series in great length since last years season of Dr Who. I remember seeing the pilot for adventure time back in 2008 and being excited at the prospect of it being developed into a full fledged series, but aside from the odd episode here and there I had not really had the chance to watch it at length. Ive got to say I was very impressed by it, I think there was only one episode in the whole series to date that I didn't find entertaining. It was refreshing seeing something that really captures the essence of being a kid but isn't afraid of dark themes, or flat out disturbing imagery (Like seeing a bird turned inside out and hopping hopelessly as it tries to fly). Im looking forward to seeing more of it as it comes out.

And really, thats about all this week. Maybe next week when my Loop is finished I will have something more substantial to talk about.

Peace out!

State of the Art

2011-09-02T16:58:00.000+10:00

This new and improved version of blogger is pretty neat, oh sorry, I didn't see you there.

Well its Friday, and that means im going to update my blog, as id like to update it at least once a week and Friday is a good day.

So this week, first week with internet in a while, what did I do. I have set up a Vimeo account finally, you can check it out here. I also uploaded my loop for last months LoopDeLoop to youtube.

It was well received on the night which is always nice.

I also updated my website, redoing the animation page and also adding a page for the Nimbin character models to the Graphic Art section.

Speaking of Nimbin, heres a bunch of new screens, some of these you may remember from my last blog which were of the animatic, now they have backgrounds. Woh...

There will only be a few more shots after this that will be rendered in this style, and then it switches to the new character models posted earlier in the week. Its a bitter sweet parting, but one that needs to happen for the sake of ever getting this pilot, neigh, series! completed.

As far as personal life goes, I still havent found work, but I have found out that through one of the recruitment agencies i get work through, they will pay for me to do a 2 week course through Lynda.com. I am currently talking to them about doing the course in After Effects, as I would like to get out of web and more into the film - television line of work.

I am also currently looking at going to university to study film and television, although choosing a university is tough as they all offer different things.

And thats about all for now, lets see what next week brings.

Man of Colours

2011-08-29T21:56:00.002+10:00

What a full on few weeks it has been. I have been living in my new home now for around 3 weeks and only just had the internet connected today. The move itself went relatively smoothly, although my TV was destroyed which sucked a rather large amount.

But lets not dwell on the negative, lets hear some animation news since thats what this blog is supposed to be all about.

First up we have my new animated loop for "loopdeloop". This months theme was "Masks", which wasn't an easy theme to come up with ideas for at all. Originally I was going to do a photomation as I had for the previous 2 months entries, but after having numerous ideas that just didn't seem to come together I decided to try something else I had been wanting to try for quite a while. I haven't done anything with heavily tweened character models since I worked on "Alison" promos in 2009, and I had been experimenting with drop shadows in my work for several years. This loop is a combination of these two elements.

The Loop also contains a character that will be replacing the current Visitors From Dreams logo to some capacity. But more on that once it happens. Check it out "here"!

Being home so much has also given me time to get some serious work done on the animatic for the Nimbin pilot episode. Im currently working on the last sequence of the pilot that will feature the art style below. I don't want to give to much away about whats happening in these shots, but I'm sure most people can probably work it out for themselves.

Unlike the rest of the series, the Pilot will contain two very different animation styles. The original Nimbin series had very minimal art and animation, and this is a tradition I want to continue with the next series. I do however want to refine the characters a great deal, and you can see some results of that process below. Some of the characters such as Amir and Blob remain much the same as they did, although Blob now has limbs. Ben and Max have however gone through some massive character design changes. (Refer to the screen with Gerkinman holding the photo above for reference). Of course anyone who has been following my work for the last few years will have seen these designs a number of times over the last 3 or 4 years. This however is the first time I have shown the final character renderings and I am quite excited to finally do so.

I realise a few people will probably be disappointed in me returning to tween based animation, especially after the mostly frame by frame "The Telescope". The problem is really time, and that I think that this particular way of rendering art is what is best for the Nimbin series. With assets like these I can easily both create new animations and comics with relative ease and it will help me create more content more frequently. Especially now that I am in the habit of writing a project in full before starting to animate. (Most of my older work was made up on the fly). And lets all be honest, I have never been a very good animator in the first place. I consider myself more of a storyteller with animation as my chosen medium then I do an animator that likes to tell stories.

Hush

2011-07-31T19:32:00.002+10:00

It has been an interesting few weeks since my last update. I have spent the majority of the last 2 weeks freelancing at an agency known as Clemengers, with the Melbourne branch being the second biggest advertising agency in Australia. It was a great experience. Now I am waiting to hear back from one of my other recruiting agencies about another job, but thats all boring, how about some fun stuff?

Work has finally started on the new Nimbin series, I dont just mean storyboards and character design either, I mean animation has finally started with the animatic for the pilot episode well and truly under way. I originally thought the first episode would only be around 1 minute long, but now that the animatic has begun, I can see its going to more likely be around the 2 1/2 to 3 minutes. That doesn't mean its going to take 2 years to finish like The Telescope did however. I don't want to say im animating it cheap and nasty, but I am reverting more to an animation style I used in one previous short that was designed around making things look like they are moving smoother then they actually are. Its also the first time I have done lip sync in over 2 years, learning it all over again. So here are some screen grabs.

The main issue im having now is with the title of the series itself. I don't know wether I should called it Nimbin or Gerkinman. After all, it is a direct followup to the original 5 episode Nimbin series with all the same (but redesigned) characters, but it also features Gerkinman a lot more then the original Nimbin series did (he was in 3 of the 5 episodes). Gerkinman is also a much more recognised name online... decisions... decisions...

In news that is completely unrelated to my own animation pursuits, Waldemar Schuur is creating a feature film based on 2 shorts he did called Anusboy. He is looking at raising $10k for the project to cover expenses which is quite achievable I think compared to some other animators demands for this sort of project. You can check out his cry for help below.

And he threw up this animatic as well to help get people interested.

Go lend him a hand over here.

Thats about it folks, keep on keeping on.

Too many rappers

2011-07-14T22:25:00.002+10:00

Its almost been a month since my last update, shame on me.

And what a month it has been, turns out a lot can happen in a month. I managed to put a bunch of new shorts out, a couple of illustrations, recorded commentaries for all the Nimbin episodes and The Telescope with Mark Schnieder (animator of the original series). And also managed to loose my job. A lot can change in a month.

But lets start at the beginning. Shorts, animated of course.

So there is a thing thats been going on down here called Loop De Loop where animators all get together and make a little animated loop that gets screened at the Loop Bar here in Melbourne at the end of the month. So far I have contributed to all 3.

Starting off with March we had the theme of "launch". I created this loop which I call "Planet Hopping"

Junes theme was "Opposites". I restarted my loop more times then I care to count. Originally it was an old man on a banjo and young kid on a keyboard playing Dueling Banjos. That didn't work out so I animated a giant mouse chasing a little elephant, but that didn't come out how I wanted it either. So after talking to my dad about it he started talking about "The Amazing Shrinking Man" and somehow my first ever experiment with photo cuts outs was born. I called it Big Fly because I wasn't feeling all that creative after spending the night on this. The night before the due date that is.

Then we came to July, this months theme was "Monsters". Strait off the back of The Big Fly I decided to give photo cut out animation a go. Inspired by any number of Cyriaks works. Crowned "Eat Da Moon".

Lastly, I finally put The Telescope up on youtube, because its a bigger video I had some problems a long the way, but It got there in the end, and with remastered audio. Check it out if you haven't already.

And then we have some new illustrations.

Heres some fan art for Billy Demon Slayer

And some concept art for the new Gerkinman series!

Sadly, as mentioned above, its not all good news. I no longer work at NDS Creative, and its back to freelancing for me. I did a short contract today and hopefully I will have more in the future. Fingers crossed aye. Ill keep you posted!

Silent Warrior

2011-06-21T08:53:00.002+10:00

Well now, it sure has been a while since my last update. Best change that I suppose.

The Telescope is finished and has been released on Newgrounds. Im yet to put it up onto Youtube because of problems with the internet at home, which is inconsistent at best. Drop outs aren't particularly helpful when uploading large video files. The film was relatively well received, personally, I was just glad to finally get it released, I didn't want it to become my own personal Duke Nukem Forever.

So what am I working on next? Well I will get to that, right after some new piccies.

This was a piece of Fanart for the music video for the Gotye song Eyes Wide Open I actually started when I first moved to Melbourne, then I forgot about it but I found it again the other night and decided to finish it off. His next single is coming out next month and im really looking forward to seeing what neat animation he will have to go along side it.

Im not entirely sure what this is, I had been going through a bunch of old illustrations and cleaning them up. I think it was originally a piece of concept art for Out There.

These were just some odd little alien concepts I had several months ago, once again just vectored versions of some old drawings.

And lastly a picture of Gerkinman I threw together last night, I really want to be able to better use the brushes in Flash, and this was a little test to see if I could get my lines a bit less wobbly. Why do I want to do this? Several years ago me and my friend Hayden Fryer who is best known for a small press comic series called Billy Demon Slayer decided we were going to make a comic cross over. At the time I was working on my own comic which was released in 2 volumes simply called Nimbin. A long time passed and nothing happened, but I feel within myself now that The Telescope is finished this is the perfect time to start the project up again. Gerkinman as a character has been sitting around doing nothing for a long time now and I think its time to reboot him and get him back out into the public eye. So I guess thats my new big project, a graphic novel of sorts. It sure has been a while. Its a shame making it look like the piece of concept art from 2008 below would take too long and cost a bajillion dollars to print.

Make Some Noise

2011-05-19T23:03:00.002+10:00

Roboteer the rocket robot!

Holy crap it has been a massive few weeks, and I do mean MASSIVE. With 3 completed animations. Not bad for someone that went for years without completing anything worth while.

Of course "The Telescope" is the main one, after all it is the main thing I have been working on for the last 2 years. You can find it right here!

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/570002

I will no doubt post up the Youtube version as well once I get it up and running.

And here are some screens from the last few scenes of the film. Aren't you glad you wont be seeing more of these for a while? I know I am, in a bitter sweet sort of way...

But as I mentioned, that isn't all I have finished, oh no, why just moments ago I finished my loop for http://www.loopdeloop.org/
It felt good to work on something short and sweet. I also experimented with tweening for the in betweens rather then the squiggly in betweens I had used in Telescope which just aren't practical with the way I vector my animation. I will probably end up uploading it elsewhere after the end of the month, most likely with a looping 8 bit soundtrack.

And if that wasn't enough a commercial job I did for work has also gone live. You can find it on the front page here. http://www.whalerealestate.com.au/
It felt sort of odd not vectoring the line art like I had in the above animations, although I did render the backgrounds the same way. It was definitely a nice change of pace and the first time in a long time I have had to animate like this to a brief. In the end there are somethings I would have liked to have done if I had the time, but im quite happy with what I accomplished in the limited time I had. I also got to use some really over the top expressions, for the first time in my history of working on commercial jobs, so that was exciting. I really hope I get to work on more projects like this in the future.

In non animation related news, my parents are visiting tomorrow, it is there first time to Melbourne and they are staying until Monday morning. Im really looking forward to showing them around. Will be nice to take a break from the computer for a few days as well. So I guess I will write about that once its happened. Until then, peace out.

Godly Intersex

2011-05-01T23:17:00.002+10:00

As i sit here listening to Of Montreals False Priest I present to you a new batch of images from The Telscope. I have a little less then 20 seconds left to animate and cant wait to get this thing finished and out of here.

As you can tell from these screens, the last act of the film is a lot more character based then the rest.

Once the film is finished I plan on putting together a 30/40 second trailer, and then the film a week later. So keep watch.

Derezzed

2011-04-23T14:43:00.002+10:00

So its a long weekend, I already spent Friday playing Donkey Kong Country Returns instead of working on The Telescope, and most of today has been spent resizing images for this blog, but thems the breaks, maybe tomorrow I can get a good start on it. But dont be thinking I haven't been touching it, oh no. Want some proof? Here, have some.

But why stop there? It just so happens I've just taken some photos of some of the original concept art from back in late 09.

Originally Allen was going to have a little tuft of hair like Alfalfa from The Little Rascals, but I eventually decided that much like Krillan from DBZ, he was bald from birth. Also you can see a young Gerkinman here, he has since been written out of the film.

Here we have both a Yowie and a Bunyip, they remain pretty much unchanged in the final film.

Lastly we have Merves mum, she has stronger cheek bones in the final film, and her dragon for has lost her nipples and tails, but once again, she is almost identical to how she was originally designed, despite not being draw in the film until 14 months after the concept art stage.

I figured since I posted the concept art for The Telescope here today that I might go over some other concept art that was never used.

Some of you may remember a few years ago I was working on a pixel film called Out There, it was originally supposed to be a 10 part series spanning an album by a chiptune artist known as Rushjet. Well, the series died, mid way through the second episode I stopped because the animation techniques involved were too time consuming for the pay off. Originally I was planning on restarting the project on my own using art similar to what you see above. Obviously it never happened, but thats okay because The Project is still going ahead, it just wont be looking like what you see here. Obviously the main character Astro from the original is in that image, and I kept his original look from the pixel short. I cant quite remember who the other character is supposed to be.

This image shows Fatcat, once again he looks much the same as he did in the original short, as does the doctor. Interestingly both of these characters have been written out of the new project entirely.

The same can be said for both of these characters, The Suit and Foot Soldier. Once again, gone now.

Now we are getting into some fresh stuff, these were originally designs for a sequence called "Forgotten Planet" which was supposed to be a very alien looking world, which is obviously hard to pull off when your lead character himself, is an alien. The Dinosaurs I like the design of as a whole, tho they dont look alien enough for that particular project. The stalker and limb based aliens on the other hand...

Speaking of aliens...

These were some designs for one of my many many failed War of the Worlds concepts.

Which leads me to this piece of concept art, which was for a Digital Radio for Nextwave Digital. The concept was to have a DAB radio attached to a home theatre, walking around like a Tripod from War of the Worlds shooting out sound waves that turned the world from a drab grey to colour. Obviously it never got off the ground.

Something else that never got off the ground that I wanted to make for ages was a piece of vector art, a sort of Cyberpunk Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.

I wanted to have seven Droids, each one with a clear purpose when it came to mining, but all small and cute in there own way.

This guy I believe was like a floating flash light.

This super lame looking guy here was obviously a drill.

This guy I think scanned the rocks for minerals.

Ol matey here got to carry all the minerals back and forth, he was like the mine cart puller I suppose.

This guy had lasers mounted to his face so he could carve out stone.

I honestly can't remember what this guys roll was.

Nor this guy, tho I think those things on the side of his head are like lights, similar to the lights found on large construction machinery.

Also worth noting is the wicked witch, kept all old skool?

The following images are just odds and ends.

I call this guy Sporeman, its one of the few old drawings I have that I still like.

Here is Mr McDonald from Down at Mc Donalds. Something I would like to remake at some point. Its still one of my favorite short films conceptually.

I rarely draw fantasy type stuff, and this was supposed to be an attempt, came out just looking like some bald headed farmer with a badly drawn dragon in the distance.

Heres a picture of Gerkinman in some sort of desert, I guess it was really hot the day I drew that.

And Gerkinman again, this time with the Eye of Providence.

Speaking of which, I tried mixing it with the Rainbow Serpent of the Aboriginal Dream Time. Hows that for sacrilege?

But its not all doom and gloom, I do finish things occasionally, see? Heres the Bullfrog from a couple of posts back. Yes he has teeth.

AND LASTLY

My girlfriend cut my hair yesterday. Check it out.

Im the hippin and the hoppin.

Now if you will excuse me, im off to see Reggie Watts perform, ta ta.

Cosmik Debris

2011-04-09T15:15:00.002+10:00

And it buries the night a brave new sunrise
With a sweep of the sword, a blood red sunrise

Its been another big and productive week. I couldn't tell you how many banner ads I churned out this week, but I can tell you it wasn't a small number. Even outside of work I have had a rather large week creative wise.

First up here is a vector piece. I did the original drawing probably around 6 months ago while I was still in Brisbane, during a lunch break. Only now have I got the time to vector it, with most of the line art done during my lunch break at work. Managed to finish it this morning because thats what weekends are for.

Also during my lunch breaks this week I finished this little piece, which I posted the pencil sketch for last week.

Also today since I had the time I created a facebook page just for Gerkinman himself. He needed a profile pic so I quickly threw this together.

I also manage to finish the single longest scene in The Telescope this week, now that its finished Im hoping the rest of the film flies by, since few scenes are longer then 3 seconds.

I've also done quite a bit of doodling this week.
This first one is going to be turned into the poster for The Telescope, ill be using it to promote the film a week before it comes out.

And this image here is some concept art for the Gerkinman film I've been wanting to make for years, still going over concepts for the film in my head.

These last 2 aren't really anything in particular.

In non animation / illustration related news.

I saw a tram collision last Friday, that was sort of exciting, if only because it meant I could walk all over the road without worrying about traffic. It felt rather surreal since that day was largely spent running around the rooftops in Crysis 2...

Me and my partner also went to the comedy festival last week, we ended up parking on top of a building, was 4 or 5 stories. Took some snaps since its not often you can see all the buildings around you from half way up.

And as the sun sets in the afternoon sky, so does it set on my blog.

It's like your amazing unit was meant to lead us all to the promised land!

2011-03-29T20:40:00.003+11:00

Its almost been 2 weeks since my last blog post, shame on me!

Now where was I last time, ah yes, I just started working at my new job. Well, it may come as no surprise but im still working there, making banner ads and lead capture pages. Some jobs are really fun to work on, others are complete bastards, just like any other job in the world I suppose. I do prefer working on banner ads then the lcp's, but im sure with practice as I become more proficient doing lcp's it will all balance out. You can check out my desk space below. Those drawings on the right aren't by me but another animator, who also happens to be called Daniel, you can check out his work here. He has come from a TV background and ended up in web banners because times are tough in the Australian animation industry. Sounds like the opposite of me, starting off in web banners with the hope of eventually making my way into television commercial animation. Maybe one day the animation industry in Australia will actually become... you know... an industry. Im not holding my breath tho.

Also during my lunch breaks at work i've had a chance to chill out and do some doodling and work on vectoring some illustrations I drew last year. You can find the vector piece i've been working on below, its concept art for a project id like to do after I finish The Telescope, which I fingers crossed will have finished in the next 2 months. Anyway, me and my friend Mark Schneider plan on rebooting Out There, with a new and more dynamic animation style then the pixel based original, and we hope to start when he visits Australia later this year.

These are some other doodles, the first two are just basic old doodles, and the last 3 are character designs for a 40/50 second animation I need to do for a collab on TheBackalleys based around the idea of the end of the world in 2012. My concept is a faux 50's sci fi styled movie trailer.

In non animation based news, this weekend I went to the Queen Victoria Markets for the first time, my partner Maya guided me around all the sites, and I ended up spending quite a bit of money. I ended up grabbing a nice ankle length leather jacket, and a Clockwork Orange poster since its one of my favorite movies. I also got what was quite possibly the biggest sausage roll I have ever seen. The pastry was incredible, shame the meat was pretty average... or below average.

Also this weekend, going back further into time and space, when I had my mate Felix over and we watched some films of the animated variety. First up was Fantasia, which is one of my all time fav films. But everyone is familiar with that film.

What was more interesting was the second film we watched, a Japanese film called Dead Leaves, which is another of my all time favorite movies, and some what of an inspiration.

What I didn't realise was how much of an inspiration it actually was, when I look at my work all I can see is how slow, and methodical it tends to be, with little in the way of action or dynamic camera camera angles. BUT that didn't stop Felix from pointing out similarities in character design and color theories.

I felt rather good after the conversation actually, now if only I could make my work as visually exciting as Dead Leaves.

Other then that, not much else to report this week. Check out this gorgeous morning sky and lovingly restored Indian Motorcycle.

Ill close with this Dead Leaves shot because I want to leave an impression!

Back to work

2011-03-16T20:50:00.003+11:00

Yes, its been a busy few days, that is for certain. As you have no doubt worked out from the title of this post I got the job at nds creative. I started officially yesterday, its been mainly banner amendments and re sizes so far. Ive also had to learn Fireworks on the side since a lot of banners a just gifs, and Fireworks is apparently what everyone likes to use now days, what happened to Image Ready? I also started to work on a whole new creative this afternoon, very detailed brief as far as animating the business logo is concerned, I hope what I have created impresses them, as I'm pretty damn proud of how the logo came out, and at only 3kb. Unfortunately I seem to be getting sick now, I've had an odd and unpleasant feeling in my stomach for the last 2 days now, and its been followed with a sore throat as of this afternoon, surely im not working too hard already? Ha ha...

I also had my cousins wedding last weekend, it was great catching up with all my family again. Should have taken some pictures of Newcastle while I was there, it holds NSW largest KFC, it looks like a shopping center.

On the down side, what this all means is that I haven't had a chance to update The Telescope since my last update, so instead here's a bunch of photos of insects and spiders I've taken over the last couple of weeks.

This here is a Mayfly, I haven't seen many around the last week or so, from memory they have a really short life span.

And here is a decent sized Dragonfly, I found it in a web outside the window of my office. I untangled him and tried to set him free, but his wings were too damaged from struggling in the web for him to fly, I felt quite sad for him... or her...

This is the spider who's web ruined said Dragonfly. What sucked most about the whole thing was that it had happened during the day, so the spider wouldn't even come out and put the thing out of its misery.

And while I'm on the topic of spiders, I found these two separate huntsman shells on the front veranda. If you look closely you can see that both are missing the abdomens. No idea what happened to them, or how they got here.

This is just a spotty moth, nothing all that exciting really.

Recently the weather has been quite wet, so all the millipedes have come out of hiding, normally you can find slugs on a nightly basis at this place, but this is the first time I've seen millipedes here.

Lastly, the other night on the way home from the cinema (which I will get too soon) my girlfriend pointed out to me something odd buzzing around the flowers. It looked allot like a hummingbird, and turns out she wasn't far off.

Apparently they are often called hummingbird hawk moths, because having one birds name in your title isn't enough for these insatiable moths. Was fascinating to watch, and really hard to photograph because they moved so much, and so unpredictably.

Aside from these insect photos all I have really taken lately are just a couple more shots of.. well, Melbourne.

These were taken just outside of my new work office. Pretty nice area actually, some great shops in the area.

I can't remember where I took this, but it has the moon in it, so that's cool I guess?

This motorcycle was parked outside of Flinders Station, now I'm no expert, but that looks pretty well mostly hand made, right down to the oil leaks... The welding marks on the tank gave it a lot of character, or at least I thought they did.

Also, one afternoon walking my friend Felix home from the city with partner after... coffee and cakes I believe, we found this large umbrella hanging in the power lines. You don't seen that every day.

But yes, the cinema.

I'm sure many of you have already seen this film, or at least read a lot about it. Personally, I loved it. The animation was gorgeous, the voice acting was great, I didn't have any problems with the pacing, which I have heard some people complain about. Ive also heard people complain about the character designs being to ugly, personally I thought they looked more rugged and worn then ugly, and each one was just bursting with personality. It also had an amazing score which I need to look into. Honestly, the film goes so hard against the grain of modern animated movies that I'm surprised it exists.

Also, after all the Oscar buzz and hype I finally got around to seeing

I enjoyed it a lot as well, once I got my head around the way it was edited. I guess I'm so used to American movies treating me like I have the IQ of a mango that the way the movie jumps back and forth between the past, and two separate court cases in the present disorientated me, after my brain got around that fact tho it all came together.
The acting was great for the most part, the twins were a bit iffy. It used CG in a way, well, I didn't even know about it until I started watching the special features. It was definitely used in a subtle way that enhanced the movie, which is how CG should be used. It also had some fantastic dialogue and one liners. All in all, much I highly recommend it.

That's about it for now, I have a back catalog of Blu Rays I need to get through, and will no doubt leave thoughts on here. Those been Moon, Escape from New York, Fantasia, No Country for Old Men and Kick Ass.

Hopefully in my next update I will get to include some new screens from The Telescope too, wouldn't that be nice.

Back to the start

2011-03-07T14:39:00.002+11:00

Yes, back to the start, of The Telescope. Why you ask since my last post was about how I had finally finished the animatic? Quite simply a lot of the earlier scenes needed to be touched up, since the film was started over a year ago, what I thought looked decent back then and what I think looks decent right now aren't really the same thing. So I've gone back and added in a bit more detail to many of the earlier shots. I only have one other shot that I think needs touching up and then its onto all new stuff, which is exciting.

I also recently got a chance to sit down and watch the 1962 sci-fi classic, Day of the Triffids.

At first, I wasn't really impressed, but that was just because the DVD transfer was the worst I have ever seen. I guess thats what happens when you pay $4.00 for a DVD. Turns out that the movie deserved a lot better treatment. The effects were pretty neat for the time, at least from what I could tell, I guess they probably wouldn't have held up so well if the film had been restored, but you never know, but what really stood out was the pacing. The movie just moves along at a quick pace, from location to location, usually with no explanation, but for some reason it never really feels like it needs one. You know the worlds in crisis and people just do what they have to do, and much like real life, you never really know all the facts. The way they show how society crumbles once a large portion of it looses its sight is also quite fascinating, especially for the time it was produced. If your into old sci-fi movies its well worth checking out, just be prepared for the poor restoration of this film to grate on the eyes.

I gave a go at doing a caricature of a Triffid from the film but it came out looking like ass...:(

The animatic is finally finished

2011-03-04T14:32:00.002+11:00

And I couldn't be happier.

Ill start cleaning up some of the earlier scenes this afternoon, before heading into the city of dinner. I guess since the rendering process is so long you wont be seeing another image dump like this in a while. Still, it feels great to get this much finished, im hoping I will have the movie almost ready for release by the end of March, fingers crossed.

2 Day Trial Next Week

2011-03-03T12:07:00.004+11:00

Not a whole lot to report this week, work is still going ahead on The Telescope, with the animatic almost completed. Hopefully once the animatic is finished the rendering process wont take nearly as long to complete, seeing as the first half of the movie was made scene by scene, based on storyboards in a little note book.

In other news, next week I have a 2 day trial at , this is to see how well I blend into there workforce and also to see just how well I go creating banner ads from scratch. I already did one trial banner, and it was a little jarring at first, with assets that didn't particularly lend themselves to the dimensions (300x600 and 728x90) that were required. After a couple of hours it all seemed to work out, I dont know if it was just my brain getting back into the zone it used to be in permanently years ago when I was working in banners full time, or if I was just being a drama queen and thought it was harder than it actually was, but I was happy with the end result. I was also struggling with some of Flash CS5's new features, mainly text indenting, turns out I wont be able to use it in ads anyway because AS2 is still the standard for web banners, looks like i'll have to stick to the good old space bar for a while yet.

Thats really about all for now. More as it comes.

About time I put some animation news up!

2011-02-25T17:03:00.003+11:00

Yes, for an animation blog I havent really been posting much about animation have I? Ah well, better get cracking. First of news, me and my partner both now have a home, at least for the next six months, and we also have the internet connected, making life much easier for us. I also have a job interview on Wednesday for a banner ad studio, fingers crossed for the best.

Now, for animation!

On Monday I released my first little short in a long time, the pacing is all over the place, the concept is far from my usual fair, but I just felt like I really had to finish and release something, it had just been far too long. Its called Happy Bieberday and was originally going to be a short for xmas, unfortunately due to floods and moving it didn't quite work out that way.

Since the release of that particular short, I have gone back to work on my film project that has been dragging on for far to long, a film called The Telescope. Its about a small child that finds a telescope laying on the ground after being sent away from home by his abusive mother and this telescope acts as a portal for his imagination. I started this film back in late 2009, so the fact its still going is embarrassing, but I have made good progress the last few days, focusing mainly on filling in gaps from earlier, adding more detail to backgrounds (with place holder assets as you will see in the next two shots) and adding more animatic work to the end.

Here are some more screens just showing off some other parts of the film.

And this is what it looks like before I vector it and make it all pretty

Im not making any promises about a release date, but id really love it to be finished within the next 2 months... fingers crossed.

Alright, onto something else now.

I recently sat down to watch Spieldbergs War of the Worlds. Its been a number of years since I last watched it and seeing as one day id love to make a film based on the book by the same name (it really bares little resemblance to the Spieldberg film) I thought I would sit myself down and take some notes, on what I liked, and didn't like about the film.

Im not going to bring up the obvious stuff, like the fact the Tripods were already here and that the aliens came down in lightning bolts, that would be to easy, nor will I go on about Spieldbergs usual traps like the fact a mans video camera continues to work after everything else has been stopped by EMP and leaps in logic just to pay homage to the film from the 50's (which I will review at a later point) . Rather, my main problems were with missed opportunities to further engage the audience which are found in the book, but in none of the adaptions.

Of course this film is set in 2005 rather than 1898, technology had changed a lot, in the original novel mankind was armed only with rifles and cannons, and one naval vesel. In 2005 we had access to all sorts of advanced weaponry, which is why I suppose they gave the aliens force fields, because thats what every sci fi movie does when it wants to explain why our weapons have no effect. I guess this is one way that the films (all of them) have really deviated from the book, in the original book the army actually managed to take out a number of Tripods, using surprise attacks and playing off the fact the invaders didn't have an understanding of how all humanities technology and war tactics worked. A canon ball to the face as a tripod walks past a hill with the military hidden behind a piece of higher ground manages to take one of them out, as does the naval vessel Thunderchild, taking out a number of tripods by being unpredictable, This created hope for the reader, as you thought humanity stood some sort of fighting chance, of course the invaders were smart, and never fell for the same trick twice, crushing the readers hopes and increasing tension. In every adaption the invaders had been completely unstoppable, never showing any weakness and then just falling apart at the end. Humanity is just left in a defenseless panic and then BOOM everything works out okay. This has always bothered me.

Likewise the ending of each adaption has been completely rushed through, in the novel you have a man who believes he has lost everything, and then tries to offer himself to the invaders because he feels alone in the world, and like life is no longer worth living, this act in itself stirs emotions in the reader, you've spent the whole book with this person, you feel for them, and now they want to kill themselves. Only then is it revealed that the invaders are dead, as the narrator stands there offering himself only to find that the invader is dead, standing motionless with crows pecking at the pilots corpses.

Each of the movies just sort of rush it in, the stars of the film have pulled through this, they came out okay, and the invaders are dead, lets have a party.

Of course these are just small things and its probably just me being to much of a purist as far as the book is concerned, and I realise that written work and film are two very different mediums, and that over 100 years has passed since the books release.

There are a number of things I do like about the film, the main one of course being the design of the tripods.

And also a number of nods to the original book, such as having crows land on the tripods to show that they have lost their shields, but as a whole, after watching the film for the first time in around 3 years, I found the first 45 minutes to be as exciting as ever, but everything after the characters head into the basement is just... feels like another movie, a far less superior movie.

Personally if I could recommend one adaption it would be this one.

As for me, im going to keep doing layouts, character designs and what not while I finish up The Telescope and whatever comes up next.

Dont feed your Korean girlfriend hot dogs made with Kangaroo

2011-02-13T18:58:00.002+11:00

What a strange little bug...

Yes, this was my lesson for the week, I thought I might give a bit of the ol' cookin a go. I had some Kangaroo sausages, had some onion, had some eggs and got some bread rolls. Turns out it wasn't such a great idea, for my girlfriend at least. I liked it, but im told I like strange things.

So here is my step by step instructions on making the "Kangaroo Manwhich"

Step 1) Caramelize some onions and fry some eggs.

Step 2) Bust out your weight loss friend Mr George Forman, he can cook like nobodies business, make sure you put some holes in your banger's with a fork first, or else they end up looking like mine, consider yourself warned.

Step 3) Cut some bread rolls down the middle, probably the easiest step.

Step 4) Probably the most important step, cram it all into said bread roll and drench it in BBQ sauce, and that's pretty much it.

Its not for everybody as Kangaroo is quite a strong flavored meat, but there you go.

In other news!

This jeep has a shovel mounted to the front. I didn't get a chance to ask the man why, seemed a little strange to me. Was he a grave digger? Perhaps just wanting to be ready for the inevitable zombie apocalypse? Or maybe even he was just a guy who wanted to stick a shovel on the front of his jeep for the hell of it? I guess we will never know.

Also worth noting is this form of advertising, I know its a little hard to see but its a helicopter flying with a big banner behind it. Ive seen this done with planes in movies but never in real life, least not with a helicopter. What happens if the wind changes? Or it starts to rain? Or storm? Helicopters aren't cheap to run, why would you want to use one for your marketing campaigns, especially when it all depends on the weather?

Last of all, aside from all these fun things, I've had the opportunity to play through Transformers: War for Cybertron.

Its actually the first game I've played from start to finish since Mass Effect 2 hit last year, and I got that game at launch. This game has been out for months. Ive got to say I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. The art style was a great ode to Gen 1 of the TV series, all the characters sounded how I remembered them for the most part, and it contained plenty of references to the original series and movie. I was a little saddened by some characters absences like Shockwave and Wheeljack, but it was far from enough to spoil the experience. The gameplay itself felt refined and enjoyable as well, the shooting felt smooth and responsive, the ability to transform at any time really opened things up strategically. But I did have a few niggling issues with the game as well, for one some parts of the game (one in particular) were clearly designed around playing co-op online, and playing these areas of the game solo lead to large difficulty spikes. Also the Decepticon campaign felt more enjoyable then the Autobot one for me, especially with all the scripted events surrounding Omega Supreme which were fantastic. The Decepitcon campaign really built up towards the confrontation where as I felt the ending of the Autobot campaign fell a little flat by comparison. Id easily recommend the game to any 3rd person shooter fan, whether they are a fan of Transformers or not.

The only other note id like to make is I get the net back at my own home on Wednesday. Hurrah!

Making a house a home

2011-02-10T13:40:00.003+11:00

What a busy few days it has been. Ive been to two interviews at two different recruitment agencies, pretty well moved into the new house, all kinds of fun and exciting things have been going on.

The main thing to come out of these interviews is that I need to do some tweaking to my resume and completely redo my website, again. Now im okay with this since my current website was little more then a place holder, I just need to work out how to get some code to work that I had struggled with last time, that being parent and child .swfs in AS3. Probably the only thing I can get to work in AS2 but not AS3. Quite a pain indeed. This means pushing back my iOS app, but im sure it will live. There are quite a few options open to me in the web banner space, its just a matter of waiting for an opening.

Check out this place, it has vines all over one side of it, I love it!

Obviously since all our gear has arrived we have also begun the process of turning this house into a home. The bedroom is still looking a little bare but the home theater has come together nicely. I love having a dedicated home theater!

Also worth noting are these slugs, I don't know what kind they are or where they came from but they are far bigger than anything back home on the Northern Rivers.

The new crib

2011-02-04T22:05:00.002+11:00

Yes, me and my partner finally have a new home to move into, although we wont be for a number of days yet, this is due to the need for the connection of power and gas to the home, what fun is a home without power? None says I, least not when the sun goes down. But I digress, I shall return to this topic in good time.

EH HEM!

Okay, so really, me and my partner did go to a couple more inspections before deciding that we would go with the home that we now have. They were actually on this side of town, which we were rather keen on because its close to the university and the food here is just, well, great. This homes were so close in fact that we walked from where we are currently staying.

I dont really have an explanation for this, it was at a pottery store, a life size green giraffe, or at least what mankind would assume to be life size for a green giraffe, as the creature doesn't exist one can only speculate as to its size.

I also saw some pretty clouds =3

And this old building which was opposite a home we were inspecting, so much character! So pokey looking, but those windows just open it right up. Love the flaking dark paint as well. Reminds me of something out of an old painting.

We also found this awesome crossing button on the walk home, I dont know how old it is but it just looks classy.

Compare that with this, the cold hearted and boring design of modern society with a giant button as if to say "you clearly dont know what your doing, you should walk this way!"

I also found this mother at the local 7eleven to be a wee bit over priced, $4.80 indeed, what do they take me for? Wait, hang on a second... that says $48.00! Those are some good margins!

As mentioned earlier there is some great food in this area, this however is not food, its a soft drink, from Japan. Whats up with the marble in the top section? I had no idea what I was doing when I "opened" this bottle and still to this day dont know if I was doing it correctly.

This was at Shuji Sushi again by the way, amazing bento boxes for $10.90, unbelievable value, I should be getting paid for this blog post, maybe I could ask them about doing some marketing online for them? ha ha...

Yesterday we also ventured to the Pancake Parlour in the CBD, now ive been to the one in Brisbane CBD a number of times and never come away feeling like I got what I paid for.

I came away from the one here in Melbourne feeling like I had committed crimes against humanity, or at least my stomach. So much food, but ever so good.

They also had these funky balls... thats all im saying.

We were welcomed home by this lovely sunset. Awww.

So that brings us to today, the day we went and picked up our keys to our new home.

I saw this sign while we were waiting for the train, something about it, just cracks me up, I think perhaps it should have been two separate signs? Almost looks like they want to deter people from people feeding the birds cigarettes. Just saying.

Eventually after signing several thousand documents we got the keys to our new house. It was much easier to take photos now that there is nobody moving out.

The back yard once again, nice and green, im a bit iffy on the BBQ by the shed, im going to try to get it going but I make no promises.

The kitchen has recently been redone and is quite frankly brilliant. Also comes with a heater for those cold winters nights, I hear it gets quite chilly in these parts around winter time.

This is the lounge room, which we are thinking of using for a bedroom since it has a set of doors and a heater, no heating in any of the real bed rooms. Its unorthodox but we are going to give it a whirl anyway, with plans to use one of the bedrooms as studio and the other as a designated home theater.

This place also has a heap of stain glass out the front which I absolutely love.

This is looking from the lounge room into the bed room and back again, just to give a sense of size to this place, which is massive.

And heres some pretty leaves so your eyes can take a break from all the brown and white.

Lastly worth noting is that on the way home there were some "storms'a'brewin".

These of course lead to flash flooding which you can read all about here.

http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/floods-cause-traffic-chaos-20110204-1aga5.html

Ironically we left Brisbane thinking we were getting away from all this... ha ha

I wish I had more to post on my iOS app but between moving and looking for work I havent been able to spend the time I would like on it, so hopefully I will have something to show for myself next time. I also need to change that header, looks awful...

Its so hot today!

2011-01-30T15:01:00.003+11:00

I havent experience a day like today since leaving the northern rivers, its 40 degrees (celsius) with a dry wind blowing in from the north west. Just weird after experiencing nothing but humid days in Brisbane. Makes sitting down at the computer to work unpleasant, but thats okay because im going out soon anyway, OR at least I did go out, im back now and re-writing the last half of this sentence, time, what a funny thing.

Anyway, so first is first, my app is coming along well, ive paid for my iOS Developer Membership, just waiting for my certificate now which I hear can take anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 weeks, ive been waiting for a couple of days now so who knows when it will arrive in my inbox. That hasn't slowed me down tho, not by a long shot. You can see in the next few images the progress from a sketch to final interactive piece, the blue squares in the centre obviously hovering over interactive elements. The text will be interactive too, but thats still a little ways off as im not sure as to what will be the most practical way of doing it.

I really want to focus more on character interaction then making little games that take a moment or two to finish and leave children with no desire to go back and play them again. Maybe im approaching it all wrong but I just feel like kids are smarter then that and really, would find interacting with the characters and environments more engaging then dragging a couple of objects around or some other super simple puzzle.

Aside from that, not much has been happening the last few days, put in for a few jobs, waiting for word tomorrow wether or not we got we got the home we applied for, all that fun stuff.

Heres a bunch of photos of Melbourne ive taken over the last few days, no real reason, just addicted to taking photos I suppose.

Love the contrast of lush trees and buildings in the CBD.

I found these clouds interesting while we were house hunting yesterday.

I found this sign in a park in Altona Meadows, i think it means that Dogs stand still while people walk in the park, i dunno, that dog sure as hell isn't going anywhere and that man is going to trip over him if he doesn't watch out.

I also found this in a JB, what the hell am i looking at? Who is this guy? What do you do in this game? Why was there 7 preowned copies? I guess they were all traded in xmas presents. How would you feel if you unwrapped a gift only to see that guy laughing at you?

I haven't been into this place yet but if the sign is anything to go off its probably the coolest place ever.

Also worth noting are these sushi rolls, they were amazing, from a place called Shuji Sushi in Hawthorn, my girlfriend had a bento box that was equally amazing, if your ever in the area be sure to check it out.

Sat on a wall

2011-01-28T12:51:00.000+11:00

Looks like today is going to be a big day, heading out to meet up with fellow animator Neil Sanders before heading into the CBD to look for some art supplies, but your not here to read about what im about to do, your here to read about what I have done, on this occasion at least.

I mentioned in my previous post that i was working on something for iOS, and this is true, I have been. I dont want to go into to many details but im more then happy to post up some screens. Its being built in Flash CS5 since obviously thats as far as my coding knowledge goes, how it will run, well, i guess we will see when i start testing it. In the mean time heres the title screen, you can see the thought process behind it, or at least I think you can?

What a cheerful fellow. Hopefully I will have the first fully interactive page finished tomorrow, how exciting.

In other goings on, me and my partner have been house hunting, in fact thats what we spent most of yesterday doing. Before we got started we popped into a small cafe in Yarraville for breakfast.

I had this gorgeous home made Steak Bacon and Cheese pie, the pastry was amazing.

And I quickly followed it with what I think could have been the best Fruit Flan I have ever eaten, the pastry was perfect and the glaze was just, so good. Id recommend the place but I have forgotten what it was called...

Yarraville also has some funky seats around, no real reason, just to look neat I suppose.

The first home we checked out was in Footscray.

It was quite small for a 2 bedroom apartment, especially for the asking price.

Had a good view off the balcony tho. It was on the 4th floor, carrying furniture and groceries up there, no thanks.

It was also right next to an ambulance centre, so im sure you would hear sirens all night.

The next place we visited was in West Footscray, me and my partner both absolutely loved it and amazingly only one other person showed up to check the place out. It had polished timber floors and more space then I would know what to do with, I couldn't take any photos inside because the tenants were still moving out, but the outside was just as nice.

Just so lush and green.

Neat old garage out the back too.

Also worth noting is this place down the road.

Now im not entirely sure what the story is but these bricks protrude out more then other bricks, and they are also colored differently, is this supposed to show burglars how to get to the rooms upstairs?

We had a look at another place after this one but heaps of people showed up so I didn't take any photos, it was brand new but didn't have any real character.

We are going to spend pretty much all of tomorrow looking at new homes too, heres hope we find something soon.

On a side note, im currently redesigning my blog, it was looking a little boring. So expect some visual changes over the next few days.

The last legs of the journey...

2011-01-26T10:34:00.000+11:00

I have been here in Melbourne for a number of days now, since Sunday actually, and I havent even updated this blog, shame on me! To be fair things have been rather hectic since arriving, but its Australia day so im going to take it a little easier and get this done. So I suppose the best thing to do while I drink this horrible Caramel Macchiato from Starbucks and listen to The Flaming Lips would be continue from where I finished on my last update, so I will.

Thursday Morning, was a chilly morning, chillier then me and my partner had experienced in a long while anyways.

Didn't seem to disturb my sisters puppy all that much, dawwww!

Warmed up a bit once the sun came out, and as such we headed off out of Tamworth.

But not before visiting the giant golden guitar, because you know, every tourist has to do that. Anyways, after checking out the guitar we left proper.

Amazing countryside between Tamworth and Cessnock. Lots of vineyards and a pretty decent road. Shame it goes through so many little towns, slowed down the trip quite a bit.

This was just sitting in a car park at Cessnock outside of where we decided to have lunch, I mean, isn't that where you would keep it?

The toilet handles in Cessnock also have a sense of humour...

After stopping in Cessnock we pretty much powered right on through to Sydney, well, a suburb called Coogee. Pretty wicked place, right on the beach, well beaches, its got all your bases covered. Sandy beach? Got that. How about a rocky beach? Got that too.

Heres the view from one of the fancier parts of the area, thats Wedding Cake Island in the distance, I guess its called that because Weddings are cool, so are cakes, and rocks are kind of cool?... I guess...

This house was built literally on the side of the cliff, it was also huge, id almost call it a castle. Worth approximately a bajillion dollars.

More views from around the area.

Also here is a funny/cool looking building.

And heres some benches, because i need a rest after all that typing...

Okay, im good to go again.

This is Coogee beach itself, always heaps of people, but i guess thats understandable.

Also worth noting is my uncle and aunts yard, so full of life. I love gardens like this, my imagination runs wild.

Me and my partner then went for a drive out to her god parents home in Blacktown, on the west side of Sydney.

A different landscape all together.

They had a lovely garden as well, just teaming with life, and spiders, oh god there were a tonne of spiders!

After our visit to my partners god parents it was time to drive to Canberra, a place that i had never been but had heard many stories about. The landscape outside of canberra was just amazing.

Got some nice storm action too, that was cool.

Canberra itself was an unusual place full of plants and sculptures.

I think this guy must have escaped from a Kirby game, cutest eagle ever.

Honestly I think Canberra is the cleanest place I have ever been too and i would love to go back again some day.

While we were there we also went to the war memorial.

Wicked old BMW

Classic war time racism, great illustration tho.

After leaving Canberra we also stopped at a place called Holbrook, mainly because there was a giant submarine sticking out of the ground.

Keep in mind this is the middle of nowhere.

After that I ran out of space on my camera sadly, but thats enough of that anyways. Trip is over and now im in Melbourne. So what am I doing now? Looking for work for one, and working on my first iPhone app for another, but more on that next time!

Through the highlands and down again...

2011-01-19T23:02:00.001+11:00

Before I get into the days events, here's what I had to eat after I arrived at the destination mentioned in my last blog.

Yum!

So I was woken up this morning around 6:30am by my mum, apparently there was something outside I needed to see. She was right!

Not the most inconspicuous place to be hiding for the day...

After seeing this monster stick insect it was time for a coffee!

What a lovely mug!

I also took a shot of what my parents did with the hi fi gear I sold them when I upgraded, I must say im impressed, curtains and everything, just like a real theater! I then proceeded to do my usual thing and take some photos of stuff outside, always find that fun for some reason.

Couldn't leave before eating some awesome breakfast.

Omelet, Asparagus and a Croissant, was the bomb

Anyways, then we left.

Tenterfield was the first place we stopped on the trip south.

Two chimneys are better then one I suppose?

Such a neat old building!

We also drove through Glen Innes. Before stopping on the outskirts.

Just like the real thing!

Amazing landscape to be sure.

Eventually we arrived just outside of Tamworth, had to stop at this lookout!

What a view!

And yes, that is part of a fan in the tree...?

Also a huge ass ant mound.

Eventually we arrived in Tamworth itself.

My sisters puppy tried to "om nom nom" on my foot, but failed as my feet are hard as nails. He is still so adorable tho.

They have some funky furniture in the home too.

I was very surprised to see water displays in the local shopping center, why didn't we have anything cool like that in Brisbane?

Great view from the house too.

So tomorrow we head off for Sydney. I wonder if the trip will be as interesting as the trip here to Tamworth was...?

The adventure continues...Lennox Head

2011-01-18T14:48:00.000+11:00

Okay, so I wont be able to post tonight because I will be at my parents place, they live near Lismore, and they don't have the internet, or a computer for that matter. Keepin it old skool. As such im blogging a little earlier today, with some photos from around Lennox Head as I went for a little walk.

Actually, before I went for a walk a ducked outside for a moment to take some photos of the plants...

You can see in this photo Lennox Point, which i proceeded to walk towards, and climb...

But not before taking a shot of Byron Bay in the distance, and a shot strait out to see which im pretty sure if you walked continually in that direction you would eventually find yourself in New Zealand...

So then I walked a whole bunch...

And eventually came to the foot of the headland...

And then I climbed it...

Before finding a goofy looking plant and calling it a day.

The first day of the rest of your life.

2011-01-17T23:06:00.000+11:00

You may have noticed that i haven't posted here in well over a year, id like to change that now. In fact, lots is changing right now. First of all im moving from Brisbane to Melbourne, me and my partner have already left in fact, and we are currently at Lennox Head on the Northern Rivers. We will proceed from here to Lismore, then to Tamworth, through to Sydney, before marching onto Canberra and finally Melbourne. Im not sure when I will have the net and when I wont, but rest assured when i do you will find yourself in a batch of new photos from the trip. After the trip is done I plan to get back into Flash animation and development while I look for a job in said field with more then a few ideas of my own as to what direction I want to take my own personal projects, but more on that as it comes.

So lets start with the trip so far, before we left Brisbane we had some flooding, the worst in over 30 years. We weren't effected by it all that much but it was enough to push our adventure back by a week. So here are the last few photos i took before we left.

Interesting fact, i love taking photos of sunsets, especially if there are trees and homes around to make interesting silhouettes, chuck some nice clouds in there and im a happy chappy.

Also saw my friend Zekey on the way home, always a pleasure to be around.

And the results of the floods I have mentioned earlier. Coles car park was a few meters under, that Coles is in New Farm for those of you playing at home.

Now after we left we stopped to fuel up, both the car and our tummies. We had Nando's which is always good, tho as we discovered today, not AS good when its cooked by a bunch of Crackers. Regardless, the McDonalds next door was absolutely packed, which isn't unusual, but what made it all very confusing is that all they had left where Cheeseburgers and Fries, and thats literally it, im putting it down to supply troubles due to flooding. Ofcourse having signs up everywhere telling people they didn't have anything else too eat didn't stop people from walking up and asking for everything except what WAS in stock. Poor girl had to keep pointing at the signs... "Oh... I didn't see that big obvious sign up there... well, what do you have?"

Finally here is a shot from Lennox Head taken once we arrived, and where walking up the street to get some Chinese. You get quite a lot of great sunsets, and sunrises from Lennox Head come to think of it...

Anyways, here's to you Brisbane, you were fun.