The Production of The Master Piece

Ok, here’s where I can begin the process of creating my final animation project (for this unit) which I am currently calling “The Space-Ventures of The Generive Crew.” I got the name from combing both “Mega-Drive” and “Genesis” into one word. (and yes, I do mean the classic SEGA console)

you’ll start to notice a theme come up as production moves forward.

every good story starts with a well written script (which I conveniently began writing before finishing the research) however while writing a script I believe some development of designs should happen either at the same time or before the script because I think doing it visually can help you when the writing process comes in. This means you’ll already have your visual style worked out before writing (so I’ll prioritize character design over the script for now)

This script will fall under the “Parody Sci-Fi” genre and will be made using the medium of animation

the first design I did is the main character, who I’ve named Captain Cartridge (I believe one should work out what they’re main character is going to look like before doing the others because you can design the rest around that)

Here is his first design (which I might change for the final project)

he’ll be the leader of the Generive Crew (who I’ve named but not designed yet) with his mostly black and green colour scheme (as inspired by Mega Drive, the green is to represent the circuit-boards inside), his red and white shoes (as well his white gloves and the picture on his shirt) were inspired by Sonic the Hedgehog (SEGA’s on-going mascot) while his hat was inspired by Sega Genesis Cartridges as seen in the image below. (The theme is that it’s sci-fi while serving as an ode to the old SEGA Genesis/Mega Drive) Captain Cartridge has plenty of negotiation experience and is always ready to leap into action on any mission (even the ones involving space rubbish)

and I specifically chose this image because it’s Sonic The Hedgehog 2

I think I may have found some inspiration for my next character (or at least his headshape) which will probably be Randimeer B. Process

hang on, I think I might have found myself some inspiration for Randimeer’s body

Here’s to current design for Randimeer B. Process

He has one 360 degree eye that is capable of going in a full circle and his arms are stored inside his body and can fit into small gaps. (which is needed to both repair the ship when it breaks and make it go faster) I made him by combining two pieces of actual circuitry and a little bit of robotics which started after I designed his eye. Randimeer has plenty of engineering experience and due to his expertise, the Generive is faster than every other ship in the fleet

The Next Character I’m designing is the platforming hero Bitris 16 (named after the term “16 bit” which is what is used to describe the graphics of the SEGA Genesis), his design will take inspiration from both Alex Kidd (the former mascot) and Sonic The Hedgehog (the current mascot)

inspiration source 1: Alex Kidd

Inspiration source 2; Classic Sonic

And here he is boys, Bitris 16

Bitris 16 (a name that is derived from the term “16 Bit”) is a Small yet Agile Platforming hero who is able to get around the ship in ways that even Captain Cartridge finds rather baffling. (he’ll wall jump instead of taking the stairs for example) Bitris has the most experience in dealing with super villains in the team

The next character I’ll design is Commander Sur-vey, the commander of the Generive Crew.

I may have gone nuts in some areas

Here’s Commander Sur-vey, he’s the commander of the Generive crew who is always sending our heroes out on space missions (mostly to take out the space rubbish) from his command station, his name literally derives from the word survey. (as in I took the survey I did to decide on this animation’s genre and made a character out of it) originally he started out as a humanoid character (like most of my other characters) but then once I got to doing his body I realised that this is a Sci-fi character and thus let my imagination run wild, at one point he was going to be on wheels but then I decided to stick some arms on his head and put a dog body on him. Now I need to design the space ship (oh and I’m thinking of axing the narrator)

As you can see it sort of resembles SEGA Genesis but I added some bells and whistles to try and distance my ship from that of the SEGA product

This is the Generive space ship our heroes will dart around in, the “Cartridge” on top can be ejected and re-inserted for when a situation takes place some where that’s too small for the regular space ship to handle and the boosters on the side can be spun around not just to go backwards but also so that they can be used as flame throwers and it can go fast thanks to it’s Mega Warp Drive and it’s from C-Gull (which is my parody of SEGA if you couldn’t tell)

I’ve axed the narrator, the story’s better without him anyway

Here’s The Script

The Space-Ventures of the Generive Crew

By Sam Gordon

EXT. DEEP SPACE. SPACE DAY

We see a giant Sega Genesis-esque Space Ship fly to the right across the spacious sky of space.

INT. THE GENERIVE SPACE SHIP: LOUNGING QUARTERS. DAY.

We see a crew of rugged space bozos, which consist of their tidy captain Cartridge, the tough as nails engineer Randimeer B. Process, their small but speedily agile Platformer Bitris Sixteen and their robot Voltirx all lounging around in their Generive Ship

They Get a Phone call from Commander Sur-vey, a hot pink head with arms that’s strapped to a dog’s body

CAPTAIN CARTRIDGE

Commander Sur-vey this is Captain Cartridge of The Generive Ship an-

COMMANDER SUR-VEY

Yes yes, save your space-life story for the big screen Cartridge. I’m calling to tell you space idiots that there’s a space piece of space rubbish in sector 32 of the pixel quadrant above planet X from when 3 morons passed by. *brief flash of the 3 space morons, one sheep, one pig and one shape-shifter* CLEAN IT NOW! Goodbye

Sur-vey ends the call

CAPTAIN CARTRIDGE

Well boys, looks like we’ve got to fix somebody else’s space mess for the sixteen billionth space time

BITRIS 16

You don’t have to put the word space in front of everything man, now let’s get this over with.

INT. THE GENERIVE SPACE SHIP: HALLS. DAY

Our 4 heroes then rush to the lift to the “space cartridge” section of their ship which is just at the end of the space hall

CAPTAIN CARTRIDGE

Randimeer, get to the Processing units and activate the Mega Warp Drive and meet us at the Cartridge.

RANDIMEER B. PROCESS

Roger that captain

Randimeer then leaves screen right

 CAPTAIN CARTRIDGE

Voltrix, Bitris. You’re with me.

When they stop at the lift Birtis 16 leaves the others to start wall jumping so that he can get to the cartridge section faster

CAPTAIN CARTRIDGE

For Pete’s sake Bitris there’s a perfectly good space lift you can use

BITRIS 16

Yeah but it’s not fast enough old man

Captain Cartridge and Voltrix then get in the lift and start rising towards the cartridge section.

TIME CUT: 1 minute later

INT. THE GENERIVE SHIP: THE CARTRIDGE. DAY

The doors open at the cartridge section and Captain Cartridge and Voltrix find Randimeer and Bitris waiting for them

BITRIS 16

Eeeeeeey captain, volt bot. Randi and I have been waiting for about 30 seconds, c’mon

Our 4 heroes take their seats and Captain Cartridge presses a button

CAPTAIN CARTRIDGE

Computer, set a course for Planet X.

EXT. DEEP SPACE. SPACE DAY

The Generive then blasts off towards Planet X

EXT. ABOVE PLANET X. DAY (BY PLANET X’S STANDARD)

The Generive arrives out of hyperspace.

We see the rubbish float into view

We then cut to just outside the cartridge section where we see our heroes formulating a plan to fix this mess

INT. THE GENERIVE SPACE SHIP: THE CARTRIDGE. DAY

Our heroes then huddle up

CAPTAIN CARTRIDGE

Alright boys, I have a plan, I call it Operation Compact Disc. I will go out and pick up the rubbish with a rope attached to Randimeer, who is attached to my back by the way, that way Bitris and Voltrix can pull the rope after we’re done. And we can all go space bowling.

Randimeer then attaches himself to Cartridge’s back and puts on a goldfish bowl like a helmet.

CAPTAIN CARTRIDGE (CONT)

Let’s do this.

Time jump to: Captain Cartridge getting ready to open the airlock

BITRIS 16

Good luck captain

Captain Cartridge then opens the airlock

EXT. ABOVE PLANET X. DAY (BY PLANET X’S STANDARDS)

We get a close up shot of Captain Cartridge looking determined to clean up the rubbish like this is some kind of epic climax.

We then get a side on shot of the rubbish (which is situated to the right) with captain cartridge flailing onto the screen from the left.

After he’s fully on the screen he reaches both of his arms towards the rubbish.

He then grabs the rubbish

CAPTAIN CARTRIDGE

WE DID IT BOYS! WE CLEANED THE SPA-

We hear a whooshing sound of a ship that’s off screen (despite the fact that space has no sound)

We then hear a ring tone on Captain Cartridge’s watch

He answers

CAPTAIN CARTRIDGE

Hello?

COMMANDER SUR-VEY

(From the watch)

Uuh it’s great that you picked up that rubbish boys, but now there’s 65 billion more bits to clean after that Supreme Ringando ship went by. Looks like I’ll see you bozos in 55 years time, toodles.

Sur-vey then hangs up on a shocked Captain Cartridge.

Captain Cartridge then looks at the camera with a frustrated look on his face and whips out a bit of paper with a target recital as if to say “shoot me now.”

The End.

and yes, I’m giving Super Sheep and friends a Cameo

The Sheep

The Pig

The Shape-Shifter

I also decided to use Voltrix (who I previously created for my board game LIGHTS!) to speed things along slightly.

there’s the robot lad himself, Voltrix. since he’s my character I created for LIGHTS I can get away with re-using him here.

Here’s my action plan for today (as well as next week)

This is the first piece of the Storyboard, you may notice that some of the characters are off model at the moment, this is because during this phase in production i’m more concerned with positioning and drawing the characters fast than drawing them complete accurately

This is the second piece of storyboard, on further reflection (and after drawing cartridge without a neck) I’ve decided that he looks better with his neck than without (maybe a neck will improve some of my other characters like Guyzo the Mechanic)

Here’s piece 3 of this storyboard, as you can see on this one I used the backside of storyboard piece 2 to draw my own boxes (this is the same method that was used when making Super Sheep Comics back in high school)

This is the next piece (honestly I’ve gotten a lot more of the storyboard done than I thought today)

I’m afraid I have some bad news boys

So after researching how long it would take to do five minutes, I found this on google

unfortunately for me, I don’t have that kind of time.

in combination with that google search I did a while back (even if the picture has a different date on it) and talking to some friends. I have made the hard decision to cut back the length so that it only takes a few seconds. on top of that I’ve had to cut everyone that isn’t Captain Cartridge (and put Super Sheep’s cameo at the end)

Production: Take 2

This is new storyboard panel 1, I chose to take a digital approach with this second attempt and have each panel be it’s own scene

panel 2, Captain Cartridge come onto the screen

he’s still struggling

now he’s reaching

he did it.

these storyboard were fairly easy to do since all I was doing was creating digital stills and switching them out as need be.

The Part That involves Dreams

Ok so the final background will involve the Game Dreams on PS4 (still in early access) and how I designed that.

First we start with a blank slate

then we break out the Sun and Sky and the Grade and effects gadgets to start changing the visuals

if you use these gadgets creatively you can create some interesting visuals

Now I’m messing with the Grade and Effects Gadget to change the general feel in ways you can’t with sun and sky (IE: Saturation)

while working you can activate studio lighting (useful for helping you see in dark places)

This is me placing a brown sphere (which will become Planet X once it’s been up-scaled)

This is me altering the material Properties of the sphere

This is me going into the dreamiverse to fetch my Generive 3D model I made before the cut backs (because there’s no way I’m wasting an hour or so’s hard work)

This is me placing the Generive into the world

This is me up-scaling the sphere to the emph degree

This is me creating the star-field by placing a simple painting fleck

this is how one star can become a ton of stars (or at-least one way of doing this) I could have gone into the dreamiverse and found Media Molecule’s star-field, but since I’m testing the waters with this whole “using dreams” thing, I don’t want to risk this being invalidated because I used someone else’s jazz for it

This is me trying to get the right amount of glow for the stars

Now I’m placing the camera down so that I can take the picture

This is me tweaking the camera while in the camera

This is me saving the scene. (I named the scene Space Background by the way)

Space background version 1

Just needed to get the space nebula in there first

Space background version 2 (now that’s more like it)

Overall I had a lot of fun making this background because I was more or less in my element (given that I’ve been playing for a while) and since I did it in the game, It didn’t feel like as much work as it would have if I did it in blender or something like that. now I just need to animate the character getting the can and hey presto, a finished disapoi- I mean, Animation.

As you can see here, the can I’ve been animating has some ghost frames (this is called onion skinning.), these are to help me reference where the can is (particularly the two lines on the inside)

Onion skinning is also really helpful when animating characters as you are about to see in the next screen shot

as you can see here, I’m erasing pieces of captain Cartridge, but his arm can still be seen via the ghost frame (which is a copy of the first frame)

here you may have noticed that I haven’t erased the line going through his arm, don’t worry, this is only so that I can keep the body consistent throughout the animation. I’ll get rid of that line once the clean up process comes (clean up is when you clean up any lines that you don’t want to be in the animation. The reason this is done before colouring in anything is because when I get around to using the fill tool, it will colour everything that isn’t blocked off by a line)

here I’ve taken a slightly different approach to drawing his hand (normally I’d be drawing each finger first but here I used what I’m going to call the ball and finger trick)

you may also notice that Cartridge hasn’t moved an inch so far, this is because I want to make sure I get the swimming animation right before moving him where he needs to be.

Don’t get too use to this mouth, most of it will be covered by his arm

the reason I decided to draw his whole mouth again is so that I have a reference for where the arm I draw will end up covering, this is so that when the mouth eventually gets erased it will look more believable.

This is the part where we use the first frame of the swim cycle to become the basis for the reaching animation

This is me merging a duplicate of the “Can 2” layer with the “Cptn 12” layer to make it look like he got the can… man. (heh, funny puns)

All merged.

so here I’ve decided to use the free transform tool to simulate Cartridge turning around (if this counts as a legit tactic, I might just have lady luck on my side)

he’s going woo hoo

principal animation finished

now that the principal animation is done I’ll have to clean up the frames (which means getting rid of any errand lines and doing some small stuff that I may have forgotten during principal animation)

I have to start from the begging for a proper clean up process

as you can see the white area is now the fully covering the background, this is so that I can see every line and then when I zoom in I can also see the little pieces that may have escaped from being erased the first time round

this is what the whole swimming cycle looks like by the way

here I’m getting rid of unwanted lines so that when I get around to colouring in I’ll have a much easier time

I personally found clean up to be easier than the actual animation because here, all I’m doing is improving the quality of what I’v already drawn, this doesn’t mean it’s not time consuming though. now that clean up is finished I can start colouring in everything

as you can see here, I’m choosing a slightly lighter black colour, the reason for this is so that the colour of the background doesn’t blend in with the colour of the character’s shirt (and thus confuse the audience), I also think that it generally looks better as you will see with the next two images

as you can see on this early night pig design, I make the suit the same shade of black as the out line which now means that if he we’re to be on a pure black background you couldn’t see his arm or his legs

as you can see on Captain Cartridge, the black of the shirt is not the same as the outline, therefore, you can see his shirt even in a pure black background (it’s just really difficult to see)

as you can see, I’ve chosen to colour him in one piece at a time (which means colouring the shirt in all the frames, then the skin, then the beard and so on), I chose this approach because it will help save time in the long run because I don’t have to keep going back and forth between frames so that I can re-pick the colour over and over again.

now the initial concept design is coming to further use

as you can see, I’m stealing the colour from my own concept design so that it matches in the animation (I’m doing this for all the other colours by the way, just so you know)

because now it’s serving as the rest of the colour pallet

this method of colouring is done so that I don’t have to pick the tone again and risk it looking too different from the design I created for him, also I find that it’s easy

the skin is officially coloured in

the beard (and every other part uses this same method of taking the colour from the concept design and using it on the final design)

the gloves and other white parts too

Overall, I’d say colouring was an easier process than cleaning because all I have to do is use the fill tool another contributing factor to the easy colouring is that I swiped most of the colours from my past self. now, comes the fun part. Animating the scene

now I have to animate captain cartridge doing what he needs to do (and also get rid of the translucent background)

Now I can save the whole thing as PNGs rather than the native Pixlr File type I’ve been using this whole time

as you can see here, I’m saving thses frames to my pen drive specifically so that I don’t have to keep sending them to myself via E-mail

I realized that I forgot to Animate the can so I’ve been replacing the second and third frame to fix this nonsense

I realized that I forgot to remove the white background so I’m replacing the frames again to fix this

since the first cycle is complete now I need to take all the frames and reposition them for the sake of consistency.

while we’re here I just thought I’d show off the end card (where Super Sheep and friends get their cameo) that I made at home by smashing together some cartoons I did previously in Pixlr and typing in “We’re Dinny Done Here Folks!” using the text tool. this was really easy to make considering how I basically did all the hard work of drawing the characters a while ago.

this screen shot shows 2 things. one, I’m using frame 9 as a reference for when the swimming cycle should stop, and two, I’ve found an easier approach to the swim cycle itself (just take two frames and use the earlier one as a reference to where the later one should be) which means no longer having every frame at once

the swimming part is finished

Here I am copying Frame 10 multiple times so that I can keep some form of consistency

all of the frames have been saved, now I just need to compile them together to create a coherent Animation (with the End Card Included of course)

I will do this using photoshop because I’ve done all the frames quicker than I expected (even though it was a mere 62 whole frames), I expected that it would take a few days and I would have to use Movie Maker instead (given the fact I have Movie Maker at home) but I want to try Photoshop again. after this is done I’ll have to add Captain Cartridge’s voice which I will record using dreams for the PS4 again because I want to make the most out of that game dag nabbit.

let it load, let it load, let it load em up and… load

So I’ve made the animation but can’t save it because the disk is full

I just figured out I can save this to my pen drive

now all I have to do is render it as a video on my pen drive, record the voice in dreams, edit the video in movie maker (if the program doesn’t choose to ruin my day), put the card at the end and presto, one complete animation

video time

doh, fiddle sticks the animation is only one second long

now to re-render the video but this time with a 0.1 second delay

ok, that’s much better

the movie maker plans went ka-put, I’m using we video for the time being

I’ve created the visuals but unfortunately for me there’s now going to be a stupid water mark (unless I remake the video in movie maker with the sounds in-tack)

I’ve put a pre-made curtain into the video (which means it’s curtains for the sudden cut)

it’s export time

here is where you may notice a glaring detail that I’ve neglected to mention because I’ve been thinking about it ever since I’ve made those unfortunate cutbacks all that time ago. you see I decided that since I’ve already cut most of the Generive Crew, the name “The Space-ventures of the Generive Crew” would no longer make sense, so all this time in the back of my mind the name had been partially been eating away at me, so literally just now, as I’ve finished the visuals, I’ve decided to change the name to “Captain Cartridge and the Rubbish Skinubish” to better fit the fact that there’s just one character (I know this seems very last minute of me and I’ll admit it was, but at the same time, I was the one who tried to do something too big for the time scale initially, so this is all my fault)

oh, I almost forgot about this part, I get a feeling that this “tell us if it’s for kids” thing could be a major problem considering that youtube might label this video as for kids (because you know, cartoons) despite me being a college student, making this for college purposes (and no i’m not talking about demonetization)

oh cool, I can disable personalised ads anyway (considering I’m just doing this as a student)

here’s the video, keep in mind that what you see is a version with out the audio in place. once the audio is in, then the video will be considered finished (and also there’s the created with we video thing at the end)

if I can predict the future for one moment, I think that recording the audio in Dreams will be a sinch (which means easy) because all you need to record audio is a playstation 4 and a playstation eye camera (which I’m calling the Eye-toy camera 3 from now on because my Playstation 2 nostalgia must live on dag nabbit) which luckily for me, I happen to have both. the only obstetrical in my way here will be my parents wanting to go on the TV after a period of time though I could just work around that.

here’s me inserting the audio

Now that I’ve got the audio in there, I need to make sure it all syncs up with the character’s current predicament. (which in this case means trimming the clip to the needed length and getting copies of the same clip)

this is me messing with the fading function so that the audio doesn’t cut off so suddenly

this is me trimming the third audio clip so that it only plays the middle part

this is me finding audio that could sound like a curtain (in this case without being an actual curtain noise)

at this point I’ve got one last decision to make before wrapping up production, whether or not to have a small piece of music at the end, the reason this is a big decision for me is because the tune I’d want to use if very much copywritten it’s the tune “The merry go round broke down” (used in the looney tunes and who framed roger rabbit), just saying.

the version here is owned by Warner Bros.

this is me after converting the Youtube video into an MP3 (the legal ramifications of this are a topic for someone else to handle)

this is me adding a new audio track so that I can put the music in

this is me importing the music into the software

this is me adding a quick credits sequence (because dang it, copyrighted music being used like this certainly needs credit)

this is me finishing up the video at last

well gang, I did it, I finally finished the video

ok, now the video’s finished (though there is a bug where the video briefly goes back to frame one)

The evaluation of this piece

looking back on this, I wouldn’t say I passed the original criteria I set for myself initially, (cough cough it’s not five minutes. Cough cough there were suppose to be 5 characters and an actual story) probably due to how unrealistic the original plans were in the end. Luckily, with help and suggestions from my friends and a soul crushing google search, I was able to change course just in time to avoid missing the deadline by several months. (or maybe even a year) I suppose what it comes down to is that while it’s good to have ambitions in life and on your animation, too much ambition (especially at my inexperienced level) will cause your project to become unachieveable within the current timescale, in this case being six weeks.

while this evaluation may make it seem like I didn’t have fun making this, I actually did. The hardest part for me is a tie between drawing the frames for Captain Cartridge and having to cut the project down to mere seconds. the reason for this tie is because while drawing the character was very time consuming, cutting out most of what I’ve already created (aside from Captain Cartridge and a very small piece of the original script) meant basically starting production again from scratch, hence why there’s two versions of the storyboard.

Likewise the easiest part was everything that involved Dreams (the voice and background) because I’ve been playing the game since before this project began so I had quite a bit of experience, not to mention that it’s a Video Game (in early access) that I can play at my house, production didn’t cut into my free time too much. (maybe I could use the game to do other things that traditionally I’d have to wait until college to do)

All in all, I’d say the animation is just ok, not great, not outstanding, just ok. next time I get the chance to do one of these, I’d try and set a more realistic length for it to avoid cutbacks as much as possible and I’d try and figure out how to have a moving background instead of the static one used in this video (because it’ll make the world seem more alive than it really is)

well since the production of this is officially over and I’ve already got the original script written and the characters already designed for it, maybe I could do a “directors cut” of this animation to show the world what this animation was suppose to be.

Wait what?

so a few hours after finishing, I found this old video that was made to market something called “The Cartridge Place,” and you’ll never guess what they just happened to name their character.

so as if not being the originator of the word “Slamination” wasn’t enough, now it turns out I’m not the originator of the name “Captain Cartridge.” looks like I’ll need to be more careful when naming any future characters from here on out.