Generive: Refueled

so I’ve been working on a Super Sheep game in my spare time (which I hope to get out within the next few years), I’ve actually been in the process of re-booting development so that I can actually have a plan

because there’s no way I’m winging an entire game (no matter how hard I try)

you may notice that this section is dedicated to cut-scenes labelled as being for “Super Sheep’s Story”

that’s because I want to do 5 separate but connected stories (oh, and since this isn’t a strictly professional thing, the likes of SEGA’s Sonic are in there too)

one noteworthy character I put in the list (besides Sonic) is Captain Cartridge (mainly because he was mentioned in a previous version of the game where I was making everything up as I went along)

as a result I’ve had to make 3D models of Cartridge and his crew (with the only current exceptions being their Commander Sur-Vey, and their newly allocated nemesis Caratosis R. Ton), while I was doing the Model and animations for Randimeer B. Process who, unlike most of the other characters I made in Dreams, I’ve actually had to make a custom rig for since he’s a non bi-pedal character

other characters such as Cartridge could just use a regular puppet rig since they’re bi-pedal characters (although in cases such as Super Sheep’s, the proportions had to be edited) although I have adapted the designs to work in 3D

after I’d finished animating Randi, an Idea popped into my head. “what if I re-did that Captain Cartridge Cartoon that never was, but in Threeeeeeeee Deeeeeeeee fooooooorm!” (and I figured it could be a great way to test the dynamic between Cartridge and crew) and thus, the re-do was born. and you know what the best part is? I can simply skip the writing process considering I’ve already done the script before time constraints forced me to cut the whole thing (unless I feel it absolutely necessary to do a full re-write) which means I can get straight into the storyboard process (although I should really decide what the interior of the Generive looks like afterwards so that I can make it in 3D)

in terms of when I want to get this done by, I’m thinking I might set the deadline for the end of the summer break because it gives me plenty of wiggle room to change things should I so need to.

But first…

a little project management

you may notice that I have twelve weeks to work on this

Storyboards: re-boarded

now as you can see, not everything is going to

ok so here’s how this section’s going to go down, I’m going to work on the storyboards bit by bit print screening interesting or noteworthy things, but other than that. I’ll be putting each piece of Storyboard up as I finish it.

here, I want to highlight a very notable change, I’ve changed the action cartridge is doing from steering a wheel, to typing on a keyboard. the reason I made this change was to make the room they’re in more of a Lounge (like the script says it’s suppose to be)

you may also notice that the new version is a lot cleaner than the old version I did with a pencil

now, once again I’ve decided to use a tried and trusted technique I’ve developed where I’d indicate what kind of camera movement’s going on via arrows with words either below or above them indicating whether a cut, pan or anything in-between is taking place

and just like that, we have the first storyboard page done

so far I think I’m doing pretty good even though I have a head start with having already written the script months ago when this was a College Project with a chance of success, before the cut backs happened. and yes, this project is taking priority over (as well as assisting) the Super Sheep game for the time being, because I feel Captain Cartridge deserves better than what I was able to give him. if I can keep up this level of productivity (I.E: one page or more per night) I think I might get this part done in the next two weeks

Now here, I figured I could highlight the script as I finished each batch so that I know where I’m up to (just in case I have to take a longer break)

now here, I’ve actually added some text inside the storyboard in order to save time hand drawing each letter

and just like that, batch number 2 is complete

honestly this one was fairly easy to do considering my new found experience from the Sello-Man advert, the original version of this cartoon, The Sonic Interrogation and even Super Sheep in convention F-3. I think this will be a rather fun project because it allows me the opportunity to go back and finally fulfil the original brief I’d set for myself back when I’d first gotten started. (except for the part where the characters are 2D, because here they’ll be 3D instead) I could even make this a tradition where for any project that couldn’t quite reach it’s full potential the first time, I could do a re-mastered version during the summer break, plus it could be a showcase of what I’ve learned over the course of that year (when you compare the original version to the theoretical re-mastered edition)

now here, I couldn’t find a way to convey Bitris was rolling his eyes without ruining the artwork so I had to point an arrow at his face and write what he was doing so that I didn’t get confused later on

I should also note that whenever I do a storyboard I’ll sometimes make minor changes, like with Bitris 16’s dialogue (because I figured that since I’m not fully committed yet I might as well play around with the scenario a bit)

and just like that, batch 3 is complete (don’t worry about the knuckles, that’s just part of an in-joke)

you know, this journey’s still going strong (I’m honestly not really sure what to say today, sorry), but I can’t wait to start animating in Dreams once again, but of course, I can only do that after I’ve gathered my asset list (which I will make once the storyboard is finished because I don’t want a repeat of the Super Sheep asset fiasco where I did the asset list first and had to add on to it while story-boarding)

and here is where we get a rather minor but important difference. In the original storyboards, Captain Cartridge and friends are running down the hallway of their ship and Cartridge relays to the team what they need to do. the main problem with this scene is that the camera does a 180 shift so that the characters go from facing the right side, to the left (which would confuse the audience as to which way the characters are suppose to be going, and that’s one of the biggest no no’s to ever no)

to fix this, I’ve chosen to change the scene so that the camera faces an angle where you can still see Cartridge, Bitris and Voltrix, but the camera still has them moving to the right (thus maintaining directional consistency)

you may also find that I’ve chosen to change the angle when Cartridge is scolding Bitris 16 for not using the space lift,, I did this so that you could see Captain Cartridge’s face better

and to think we’re getting closer and closer to the point I originally had to stop everything and start again from scratch (for the most part)

and Just like that, batch 5 is done, and we’re officially past the point where I gave up originally (meaning anything I do now will pull this project further ahead than it’s ever been)

now here, I want to note what I feel is a small yet unorthodox thing I did with the motion path of the Generive, you see the line line that’s been placed where the arrow normally goes, I figured I could use that as a sort of “Stop” position (I.E: The Generive stops right there), the arrow you do see in the Generive’s motion path is meant to signify which direction it’s heading in (much like a typical arrow would), if my technique IS a known thing however I’ll be sure to let you know

now here, I’m choosing to make a more severe change to the Dialogue in this scene

because the version in the original just plain doesn’t make sense to me anymore (why would Cartridge mention the rope first and then mention how Randimeer’s going to be attached to his back)

right, we’re officially past the point of no return, I didn’t think I’d get this far by the end of the week but I’m still cracking on rather nicely. (that and the storyboards usually don’t take very long to do, just a few hours per batch and I’m done)

now here, I’ve added an extra line of Dialogue before Cartridge gets ready to roll

Originally this line would have been “alright, let’s jail and juice boys” for the sake of another Sonic reference

you can find the original line at around 7:40 in the video (and it turns out the line is actually “juice and jam,” which means I misremembered what the line actually was)

but then I figured that lifting dialogue like that might just be pushing it so I changed it to a more generic “let’s rock n roll boys.” that way they can’t sue me for stealing.

that’s right boys, I actually managed to do 2 batches in 1 day (honestly I didn’t think I’d actually get to pull that one off today)

We interrupt this Program to bring you a project management update

I’ll admit, some jazzy jazz happened yesterday (which is why there was none of that sweet sweet project management progress that day) but now we’re back on track my dudes

We now return you to your regularly schedueld program

the reason that this screenshot is noteworthy is because it represents a fork in the road I’ve created for myself, that being, do I have Bitris say any words in this scene. the reason for this is that in the script, Bitris says “good luck captain”

however, after thinking about it for a bit, I’m coming the the conclusion that having dialogue here would be rather redundant because the dialogue just communicates that Bitris is loyal towards his captain, even though I feel that simply having Bitris just do the salute without the dialogue would communicate the same thing (hence the dialogue being rather redundant), so I’m cutting the dialogue out of that scene entirely (it’ll flow much better anyway)

now here, I was originally going to make him frown, but I thought “naaah, too edgy” and made it into a smile instead (although Randi gets to keep his frown)

and so, we’ve finally reach the part that all this was building up to (and the only part that got animated the first time round)

aaah yes, the original version. this thing stinks, he doens’t even have a gold-fish bowl on his head

I’ll be honest, I didn’t think I’d be at this point already (although I didn’t think I’d be blazing through the storyboard process here but here we are)

yeah, the storyboard phase is almost over already (honestly I can’t really believe it to be honest, but when you’re not taking too much time with each illustration, I suppose it goes a lot faster than you expect)

and it’s a good thing too because Pixlr’s gone down for maintenance purposes (which could mean I’ll be forced to either take a break or finish it physically instead)

so it turns out, that maintenance didn’t take very long so we’re back in business baby

and here, we have ourselves an outward pan (which I mistakenly refer to as a zoom out), as represented by the arrows on the camera lines and the box, the box around cartridge’s head represents where the camera has to pan out from. the reason this humble little box is important is to give a frame of reference as to where the camera pans into (or in the case of a pan out, the point of origin we’re panning from). if this was a inward pan, that same box would represent where the camera would pan into, it really all depends on where the arrows point on the camera lines.

can you believe this part is almost over already (just one more half batch and I’m done)

and after 11 and a half batches later, we’ve finally finished the boards

phew, I did it. I finally got to storyboard the entire cartoon, and this time no-one could stop me (not even me) because I’m doing this on my own time dag nabbit. but anyway, I figured I’d get this whole thing done within two weeks although a part of me thought I wouldn’t actually pull it off. (I swear it’s that project management table, there’s some rather crazy shenanigans going on with that thing) but now that that’s been taken care of, the next thing I need to do is make that asset list. (that’s right, I’m finally learning from my mishap with the Super Sheep cartoon) this should be significantly easier than the one I made for the Super Sheep cartoon (considering that I should now have a better Idea of what props I’ll need to make/acquire)

So I did some conceptual thinking

so last night I did some thinking and realised “maybe I should try doing some concept art before I do the asset list thus ensuring that I can further visualise what I need for my asset list

finally, this baby’s getting her interior designed

but before we do, let’s answer the big question

What is this, “concept’s art” and where can I find some?

concept art is a piece of art (either digital or physical) that someone makes to visualise the concept of anything from a place (both fictional and yet to be real) to a character before committing to a finalised design. this can lead to art that ends up looking way different than the final version of something (I.E: a character design or even a place):

Sonic the Hedgehog was Originally A Human — for example, you see those rough looking designs to the left of the final Japanese Sonic design? they’re actually older designs for the character (yes even the rabbit with grabby ears was considered to be the main character at some point due to a design contest held at SEGA), he was also known as Mr needle-mouse once they chose the hedgehog, but that’s a story for another time

now, characters like Sonic here aren’t the only thing that goes through a conceptual stage:

Toy Story 2 concept art | Pixar concept art, Disney animation art ... — Places such as Al’s penthouse for instance also tend to go through the conceptual phase too, in these cases the mood is usually emphasised with colour schemes that are (often) bolder than what the film ends up going with

Pixar Animation Studios — and here’s the final version where, as you can see, more was added since that concept art was originally made

Heck, I’ve even got some examples of concept art too (albeit retroactively of course), particularly in the form of earlier designs for these numbskulls from the Super Sheep universe:

you wanna know what these boys originally were? well here we go:

The Karotton Carrot (who officially went on to also become Caratosis R. Ton in the end)

though don’t fret. The Karotton Carrot went from a Super Sheep villain, to becoming Caratosis R. Ton (A Captain Cartridge villain who won’t be in this cartoon, because he’s not needed)

now that we’ve taken a tour as to what Concept art is…

let’s get on with the show

the first thing I like to do when doing background concepts is to use the line tool (which is within the shape tool) for the sake of creating straight lines (I know this art looks like a mess at first but trust me, it’ll look halfway decent by the time i’m done)

now, in concept art. it’s important that people are able to tell what the art is even a picture of (which does mean doing some clean up using the eraser tool along the way)

whenever I need to draw an object (in this case, a chair and a keyboard), I’ll draw it up using the pen tools

now here, I’ve begun colouring the whole thing (and in this picture I’ve already elected to use the colour replace tool rather than undoing the whole thing due to certain colour choices), I’m basing the colour palette on a more washed out version of the ship’s exterior

and we are done with the first peice and you can kind of see why I wanted to do 3D backgrounds originally, but I know I can improve when it comes to 2D backgrounds with these concept pieces (although I could just make the backgrounds in a theoretical 2D Toon more washed out so that the characters pop better with their bright colours)

Overall, I think this concept art will be fairly decent at the very least (I mean, hopefully I improve with each piece of concept art to the point where I can do 2D backgrounds that don’t stink)

ok, so for this one, I’m designing what the hallways of the ship could look like

for this particular door I decided to reduce it’s size using the eraser tool in combination with the select tool to move the area above the door further downwards

now here, I’m picking a font for the “C-GULL” text

because I can’t really use the same font the actual SEGA uses (even if it’s only for an in universe counter-part) or else they may very well sue me.

Got it (although in Dreams, the font will have to change anyway because of the small pool they have to choose from)

and in this screenshot, I’m opening the first piece of concept art so that I can use the colour picker tool to steal it’s colour palette (because stealing is fun)

and here, I’m opening the files for all the main characters so that I can decorate their quarters with their respective colour scheme (that way you can visually connect the characters and their quarters)

and to think I’d just need to design the Cartridge section and the Airlock, and after that. I can do my asset list.

now here, I’m making a new layer dedicated to the hover chair (that way I can copy and paste it over and over again)

and hey presto, 4 hover chairs created from 1.

now here, I’m going to steal the colour palette I chose when making the original Generive design (albeit these colour are going to be more washed out)

and just like that, The Cartridge bit has been designed

and hey, since this is the 3rd piece of Concept art. you know what that means

he’s only here here because I didn’t want to muddy up the artwork

now here, I’m splitting this concept art into 2 layers (because one of them’s going to be the space layer)

and now we come to the part where splitting the layers is handy (because if I wanted to I could get two pieces of concept art out of one)

and thus the airlock is now finished babeeeeeeee

and now that all that has been done, I can get to work on my Asset list (which I will put on this post when I’m done with it)

We once again Interrupt this program to bring you another project management update

Well holy smokes, I only have 10 weeks left

well, I finally finished most of the preparation work (except for asset production which will naturally come next) I honestly only thought I’d get the Storyboards done, what I didn’t expect was to also do 5 pieces of Concept art and an asset list on top of that. (which you will see in the next section) Even though I still think I’m fairly good, it’s for the best that I keep the whole project on schedule.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled program…

…already in progress

Asset-ing the situation

Ah yes, the part that gave me a fair bit of trouble during the Super Sheep production (mainly due to my own smug arrogance when making it before the storyboards), The Asset List! now, just to re-iterate, an asset list is a list of whatever things you need, lots of stuff can be put in these asset lists from Software used, the Props you’ll need to get and/or make, costumes (or in the case of an animation like this, entire characters), camera equipment and even shooting locations. As you can tell from the list of things typically found in an asset list, they’re a pretty important asset (for lack of a better word) during any creative production whether it be a Movie, Game (of both the Video and Board varieties), Song or Graphic Design Piece. with that being said, here’s the asset list I’ve been working on the past few days:

Characters	Do I got em?	How will I get em?
Captain Cartridge	Yes	I made him in Dreams
Bitris 16	Yes	I made him in Dreams
Randimeer B. Process	Yes	I made him in Dreams
Voltrix	Yes	I made him in Dreams
Commander Survey	No	I’ll make him in Dreams (not sure if I’ll use a 4-legged template though)
Super Sheep	Yes	I made him in Dreams
The Night Pig	Yes	I made him in Dreams
Hugo The Shape-Shifter	Yes	I made him in Dreams

Characters

Sets	Do I have those Sets	How will I nab em?
Deep Space	no	I’ll have to make it in Dreams
Space: Above Planet X	negatory	I’ll have to make it in Dreams
Generive: Lounging Quarters	Uh uh	I’ll have to make it in Dreams
Generive: Halls	Oooooh, not quite	I’ll have to make it in Dreams
Generive: Cartridge Area	Uuuh no	I’ll have to make it in Dreams
Generive: Airlock	Negative	I’ll have to make it in Dreams
Generive: Space Lift	non	I’ll have to make it in Dreams

Sets

Props	Do I got em	How exactly am I suppose to get em now?
The Generive	Yes (but I may want to do some quick modifications or make a new version entirely)	I made the original model in Dreams PS4 (I’ll do the same thing if a re-make is necessary)
Boxes	Well yes but actually no	I’ll make them in dreams
The “Lights!” Poster	nope	I’ll paint it in Dreams
Some Cans	Nope	I’ll make them in Dreams
Compact Disc	No way sonny Jim	I can make it in Dreams (but if not, I can always find a disc in the Dreamiverse)
Some “C-GULL” Game Cartridges	Nope	I can make a template cartridge in Dreams (or find a good cartridge template in the Dreamiverse)

Props

Cards n Logos	Do I have those cards	How do I grab em
“We’re Dinny Done Here Folks” End Card	Yes (I can simply alter it if I want to)	I made it in Dreams during the production of “Super Sheep In Convention F-3”
Slamination Studios Logo	Unfortunately skipper, no	I can make it in Dreams
Space-Ventures Thumbnail	nope	I can make it in Dreams

Cards n stuff

Music and Sounds	Do I have em	How do I do this
(Inst) SEGA Mega Drive Instruments (AKA. FM Instruments)	Yes (I can use them to make various sound effects)	I found them in the dreamiverse
(SFX) Sonic The Hedgehog (Genesis) Sounds	Yes (I can modify them)	I found them in the Dreamiverse
(Mus) Generive Theme	No	I can make it using the Mega Drive instruments
(Mus) Operation Compact Disc	No	I can make it using the Genesis Instruments
(Mus) a garbage problem	No	I can make it with those Mega Drive Instruments
(Mus) We’re Dinny Done Here Folks Theme	No	I can make it
(Mus) C-GULL Mission Briefing	No	Time to learn some composing skills

Sounds

as you can see, I’ve chosen to split the list into several smaller lists for easy navigation, this is just one of many ways one can choose to format their list, I’ve just chosen what I believe is best. The reason I like this particular format is because of how easily I can organise everything into various categories. (I.E: Sounds, Characters, Ext.)

Now that I’ve finally gotten that asset list done, now I can move on to asset production. I’ll be honest, Doing the asset list didn’t give me any trouble this time (though that can mostly be attributed to the fact that I did this list after I completed the storyboard, a lesson learned from doing “Super Sheep in Convention F-3”) which is really good because I’ve finally learned from my initial mistakes.

Asset 1: Commander Sur-Vey

now, we’re going to be adapting this bad boy into 3D, luckily I have a fancy pants solution for all this

Production Streams

That’s right, I thought it would be a good idea to stream the production of these assets. mainly so that you could get a look at the assets as they’re being made, and I can reflect on them afterwards.

Sur-Vey Reflection

Welp, it was certainly easier for me to simply put the default puppet on all fours rather than find a template in the Dreamiverse. (like I originally intended to) Although I will admit that the head and feet gave me way more trouble than I thought (the head in particular was really troublesome because it kept spinning around the place whenever I’d play time, likely due to me having attached a pair of arms to it) luckily for me, once I removed all the game-play stuff, his front feet stopped acting weird (although there was still the matter of his head spinning around an giving me issues, to fix that I eventually figured that key framing the head and neck to stay in one place would fix this. needless to say, it worked like a charm)

Doing the mouth and eyes was real easy however, because all I was doing there was literally painting the pupils (as well as modelling the eye-lids) and mouths on. for the mouth, each emotion was a single frame, thus making it easy for me to switch emotions using key frames. (all the characters I made (and the Sonic I remixed) use this approach for the mouth, mainly because it’s my favourite approach to take for such a thing) The eyes work the same way but there’s usually no extra frames involved (except with Voltrix and Syntha-Sheep. they get extra frames), this is so that I can move the eyes in any direction I so choose. (be it up, down or all around) The eyelids I make are cloned from the original eye ball sculpts but I recolour them to match the character’s skin, and for the angry, sad and halfway lids? I just subtract a piece from clones of the eyelids (and from there I simply tie visibility to key frames for easy switching)

in terms of the music that played in the background during the second part, I though of that Idea right then and there (and it shows), next time I’ll make sure to do the music in advance so that I don’t waste time searching for it in the Dreamiverse

Overall I’m quite impressed with how well I was able to replicate the character in 3D (but hey, that Dreams for you. it works wonders) considering his rather alien design. and the best part is, if there’s an element of his design I don’t like (like say, his colour scheme), I can easily modify it on the fly (and at this stage I can change core design elements if I so want to), although if I had animated the character and decided to change core elements of his design (like whether he has arms or not), then I’d have a more difficult time.

The next asset I currently plan on producing is the can(s), I’ve got a rather practical Idea I want to try out. I’ll give you a hint, it has something to do with this screenshot:

Asset 2: Cans with Labels

That’s right, I did what John K. apparently couldn’t do in 6 or so years, I gave cans some labels. Although I didn’t have much of an Idea what I actually wanted to put on the cans (I made that up as I went along)

Production Streams

Reflective Cans

well, this was quite an interesting endeavour. when making the cans, all I did was make a cylinder, make sure it was to scale with Cartridge’s hand (in case I want the characters to hold a can in future projects), and then after that I simply cloned said cylinder and put different logos and branding on each one using spaypaints, with some of them being references to other characters I made, I.E: Hex Moother’s “Hextasy” drink and even Dank-Field’s Gamer fuel being a reference to Jim Star-force. Speaking of the Gamer fuel, I originally wanted to throw in a bit about how it contains bath water (because of reasons that may very well ring a Belle) but then I decided against it because I figured the whole “*gaming* water=bath water” joke might go over people’s heads, although I could very easily re-implement the bath water bit if I so wanted (not that it would be particularly relevant to the whole SEGA Mega Drive theme of this cartoon, or even the wider 90’s console war theme of the IP as a whole), because it’s only going to serve as background decoration anyway (same goes for the boxes by the way)

I didn’t have any problems making the cans really (in fact, the hardest bits were making sure they were to scale and coming up with the labels, the rest was easy street) although I should at least mention what I did to the cans after I created them.

you see, I made all the cans invisible and then used key frames to animate the visibility being turned back on, and then once I finished doing that I put all the cans in 1 spot using the grid and afterwards I hooked up the key frames to a selector and a pair of switches (so that I could switch between labels with ease) and hey presto! I’ve turned 1 can, into 9 different bodygroups (while making sure to leave one blank so that I can clone it and create even more labels should the need strike me at some point), and the best part? this technically only takes up 1 unique element. (the limit of which is 256 unique elements)

as you can see in this screen shot I took of Lucid Stew’s Expanded Thermometer explanation video

now, for the next asset I plan on making, I think I might do either the boxes or the Lights Poster (maybe I’ll even do them both, why not I mean it’s all be easy street thus far) because then I can show off another use of the paint tools.

Assets 3 and 4: Boxy and the Post

that’s right, I made 2 assets in one day (and that’s only because it was easier to make those assets at once rather than one at a time)

Production Streams

and then the game crashed

Box-tastic Poster reflection

well then, I certainly had my work cut out for me today. even though it was all relatively easy to pull off.

I should point out though that with the box I only wanted to do one variety originally, only to run into an issue deciding what texture to actually go with so I chose to do multiple variants using the same body-group trick I did when making those cans yesterday (making multiple copies of the same blank model and texturing each one differently and then tying visibility to key frames), most of the texture sets reference things like Mario (particularly with the Question mark box) and the Ratchet and Clank Series (which is what I originally wanted to reference in the first place), but the box with a rubbish bin textured on it is meant to tie into what the main characters of this short do for a living (which is clean up some space rubbish), I’ll admit thought that I though putting the textures on all 4 sides of the boxes would be a pain, until I used the kaleidoscope mirror tool and discovered that it copy’s whatever you do on one side of the cube on to the other side surfaces (with the exception of the top and bottom surfaces)

another thing I did before I did the texturing was add some extra cuboids to the box in order to give it some of that sweet sweet 3-Dimensionallity, there were a few small bits of imbalance that I had to fix afterwards but other than that, I’d say it was easy.

Now as for the poster (which took 2 streams to do because the game crashed on me for the first time ever), that was a little bit more difficult to do because sometimes the flecks would jank out a bit (and later you can see some of them have tilted), I’ll admit though that part of that jank was on me because I used a cube as a surface snap reference until I got to write the word “Lights!” in the poster and I hid that surface for a brief bit before realising I’d need that surface again. ( and thus I made the task more difficult than it needed to be yeah, soooooo… my bad) Besides that, the most trouble I had was colouring in Voltrix. Other than those, I’d say I did a rather ok job at this regardless.

The Next Assets I think I’ll try tackling are the disc and the music because I think it’s about time I started learning the ropes on how to compose the music I’ll need.

Assets 5-5.5: Compact Discs and composure begginings

well the music’s still unfinished, that could be tomorrow’s job

Production Stream

that’s right, there was only 1 because I had to do a thing elsewhere

Reflection.MP3

well then, looks like today was the start of me getting into some actual composing (which I haven’t tried since The Night Pig’s theme), although the main thing that I did were the CDs.

What I did for the CDs was that I cloned one and made the other copies have different textures on them. The reason I did it this time was so that I had a wider choice once the animation process begins with most textures totally hip parodies of other works, I.E: Ouch is DOOM, Sting Bee is Crash Bandicoot, Rondo The Dog CD is Sonic CD and Martin Steve 22 is Mario. The only thing I’d say was difficult about doing the CDs was making sure that the textures resided on one side of the CD (especially with the initial colouring) but I was able to get it done with minimum bleed through by simply using a really really small brush after I gave the CDs their initial colours. (considering how thin I made the CDs themselves) Doing the CDs also served as an excuse to create a Generive equivalent to Sony (which I hereby dud “Jonesly”), one thing I should point out with Jonesly’s disc is the reason I made it black on the back, the reason I did this was to make it accurate to how actual PS1 discs would have looked back in the day.

When Playstation game discs were black on the bottom side. : nostalgia — as you can see here

now, as for the Music (which still goes unfinished currently), I had a slightly more difficult time doing that because I don’t normally dabble in music making. in the stream you can see me go for one thing and then switch it slightly for another. The reason for this is because the music I’m making takes some inspiration from other Sci-Fi works, particularly Harry Partridge’s Starbairans series

although I’m not intending to steal it, so I can’t realistically borrow any actual melodies from this suite

as for the instrumentation? well, since this whole thing came about as a SEGA Mega Drive reference, I figured why not flat out make the music using various instruments from the SEGA Mega Drive itself. here are some examples of what I was going for with the instrumentation:

The instruments I’m using here were imported by Voodu_xyz, the same guy that imported those cartoon sound effects I used in Super Sheep (you can find them in the Dreamiverse in a collection of theirs called “FM Instruments”), although I should stress that the music is still unfinished so tomorrow’s job will be to get that piece done so that I can move on to the Cartridges and then the rest of the soundtrack, but I can tell there’s still some learning to do on the musical front.

Assets 5.5-7: More Music and now Cartridges

that’s right son, I’ve been busy today

Production Streams

Relflection.Executable

you know, learning to compose is certainly shaping up to be an interesting experience, although I do wish that I’d played around with music just a little bit more before jumping into it willy nilly. For the Cartridges, it was a totally different story.

The Cartridges were done using the same tricks I used with the boxes n Discs. (make the base, clone the base, texture all but one copy, tie visability to keyframes, yadda yadda yadda) similar to the discs, the biggest challenge involved making sure there was no bleed through (especially when you consider that I also did a rudimentary microchip as part of the cartridge sculpt)

in terms of the second piece of music (the one I titled “operation compact disc”) I ended up going for a more drum n bass feel because I don’t think I have a strong enough grasp on melodies yet (although I currently view this one as the best of the bunch)

Tomorrow I think I’ll start working on some of the sets (while still doing music in-between each one) because then I can start actually translating the concept art into real 3D space.

Asset 8: The Generive Lounging Quarters

aw yeah, we’re building sets, but before we do…

We Interrupt this Program once more to bring you another project management update

well then, looks like I’ve got some speeding up to do.

Production Streams

Construction Reflection

well, today has been quite eventful while I was making that Generive Lounging Quarter. I had tons of fun making this set because of some of the challenges that came my way mainly figuring out how to make it look like other characters were in other areas (I.E: Super Sheep and Sur-Vey), which I did by simply constructing those areas outside the ship and making sure nothing cast shadows into the Generive itself by turning them off in the case of Sur-Vey, even though it does make him look like he’s being green screened in his own environment (in the case of the Justice Trio I ended up going with a text displayer for the ground because I was having grass troubles and I felt the sculpted ground made the graphics memory too high), and keeping the remaining shadows bright enough to see the characters faces, which I did by messing around with the sun and sky brightness until I felt the sky was dark enough to where you can see the characters faces.

why were the shadows a big issue? you see the sky brightness seems to also affect how dark the shadows are (which means if the sky is dark enough, the shadows will become pitch black, which you can also do with the grade and effects tools), this was a challenge because I also wanted the sky to be fairly dark (because this takes place somewhere in space and space is usually fairly dark) so I had to strike a good balance between bright shadows and a dark sky. (which I think I did reasonably well)

with that being said, I did have a rather funny blunder happen while I was making the “Planet X” screen area. I was making the space cloud using the paint tools to create a mirrored kaleidoscope that I would then enable the animation for, although a slip of the hand created a line that goes way out (well it created 32 lines that go far out in different directions), I played around with this a bit and got a pretty snazzy looking effect. After I’d saved that thing as its own creation (that’s right, Dreams lets you do that for anything in the scene, which also means I could save the keyboard I made as a separate thing if I so wanted) I deleted it and tried again and this time it went off without a hitch.

Overall I had lots of fun doing the set design (which is currently more than I can say for composing the music) and can’t wait to use it to do the full animation. Tomorrow I think I might continue doing some more set design (and thus leave the music until dead last because the music is my least favourite part at the moment), I think I’ll do either the hallway, deeps space or the Cartridge section next.

Asset 9: Insert Cartridge

now I’m constructing that Cartridge section

Production Streams

When Cartridges reflect

Ok, so while this set wasn’t as challenging as the Lounging quarters (mostly due to me not having to create the illusion of multiple locations being projected on a “screen”), I still had a lot of fun making it because it ended up bringing about a different set of challenges (mainly with making the water cooler, although all I had to do there was use that sweet sweet Kaleidoscope mode in the paint tools again)

One of those challenges surprisingly being getting the Roomba I’d made in that very scene to change directions whenever it hit a wall which I eventually sussed out by simply removing all dampening on all the movement axes except for the X axis while a rocket rotator handled making sure it faced the direction it was moving. While you could argue that the Roomba isn’t necessary (and you’d be right), but I figured it would be a fun thing that would roam across the floor (that and you could think of it as a neat little reference to A Hat In Time)

A Hat In Time | Hat Kid tormenting the poor roomba - YouTube — because in that game, Hat Kid had a Roomba (or as it’s known in universe, Rumbi) in her space ship

One of my other challenges was when I decide that you should be able to see parts of the Generive itself because sometimes a little bit of R E A L I S M can be a good thing, but only in small doses (here’s looking at you, DISNEY! ruining The Lion King like that), I was able to over come this challenge by altering the model itself to not include the spoiler (which would have clipped through the actual scenery) or the Cartridge exterior (because we’re in the Cartridge)

While I was doing this I’d also been saving various objects I’d made in the Lounging quarters (mainly the hover chair and the Space sky and grade and effects) and then re-using them in the cartridge section (and modifying the chairs in particular using the tinting tools)

and since I’m actually building a small library of props and other stuff as a result of this project, I may want to take a small amount of time to organise the in-game asset list I’ll be using (I’m surprised I didn’t do this considering how early I did it with Super Sheep’s cartoon) and then after that, I think I’ll get to work on the hallway next.

Asset 9.5: the hallway

now we’re doing the halls (which currently go unfinished because of time)

Production Stream

The reason this goes unfinished for now is because of the dreaded S H O P P I N G

A hall of mirrors

I’ll admit right now that this hallway is currently unfinished but I think one of the challenges that are ahead will be making sure that the rooms all line up with each other (and making sure all the widths of the doors are nice and consistent), tomorrow I’ll have to get back to work finishing the hallway.

Asset 9.5: The Hallway 2: The Squeakquel

just me finishing up the hallway

Production Streams

Another Hall of Mirrors

and just like that, I’ve finally finished that darned hallway, and I’ve got to say, it’s rather satisfying finally getting that hall done because now I can move on to the airlock, Planet X and Deep Space (and then afterwards I can finish the music off, gather those sounds and BOOM, we’re ready for Animation baaaaaabyyyyy!)

I did the other rooms by simply copying the floor twice and copy some walls to each doorway (and sometimes changing the colour of certain parts of the floor to give the illusion of using different floor pieces), I also had to make a smaller prop-less version of the Lounging quarters in case the Cameras end up showing that particular room while were in the hall. (also because I don’t think I’ll be able to fit the regular version of that room in the hall way and vice versa), Overall I can’t wait to finish the assets and finally create the actual animation in question. (and thus fulfil my original vision with this short at last) I think next I’ll create the Space sets and then the Airlock. I think doing all the space sets at once so that I can focus more on the Airlock and eventually the music.

Assets 10-15: Locations, Grades and a wee bit of music

and we’re kicking asset production into MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE!

Production Streams

A reflective stew

well then, I got quite a bit more done than I expected to today (if I keep up at this rate I’ll be ready to do the animation in no time), Today I created Deep Space, Planet X, The Planet X Grades, The Generive Air-Lock and even the Mission Briefing Track.

The easiest things I’d made were Deep Space and Planet X (as well as it’s grades) because literally all I had to do was plop in some grades, add in the stars (as well as planet X itself and it’s nebula in the case of that set) and I was pretty much done (which is why they had to share the same stream as the airlock), the hardest bit of those was getting the nebula to not slow the game down to a crawl once you get up close to it (which technically is an unnecessary step considering the short wont ever take us super up close to the nebula, but it’s still good to optimise your jazz so that it runs as well as it can)

comparatively, one of the harder bits (besides the music which I surprisingly breezed through, though we’ll get to that later) was making the airlock (and even then, it was only by proxy of having to put in more effort than simply placing a grade and some stars down), mainly the buttons that’ll open and close the air-lock because they’re dangling by a rope, which I had to make by first painting the “rope” as a single straight line (which went downwards so that the parent stroke was in the ceiling) and then attaching the other end to the device itself (although that wouldn’t be enough) and then afterwards I used the “rope” connector (while making sure the parent was on the ceiling and the child was on the device) to create the actual rope that would get the device swinging around, (one could even say this device hangs out in the air-lock, thank you thank you, I’m here til next Thursday with more bad puns) after that I changed the connector type to be of a more elastic nature. (I’m sure Elastigirl would be proud)

Now, as for the music, I think I’m beginning to get a bit of a swing of things (although I’m still not good by any stretch of the imagination) because this particular music piece turned out quite alright indeed. The reason I think this is however is because I decided to try using the performance mode (where you press the buttons to play the instrument in question) on the main melody which while it initially didn’t create the exact result I wanted, I ended up sticking with it and I believe those imperfections may have made the music better than it would have been if I’d gotten it all right. (I mean, It’s still not great, but it’s better than the other two tracks in my opinion, which is good because it means I’m slowly getting better)

Next I think I’ll continue composing the rest of the soundtrack because it’s not like I have much else to do in terms of this project before the animation finally kicks in. (although given the results of the mission briefing track I may very well have higher quality music by the end)

Assets 16-18: a garbage problem and We’re Dinny Done here folks x2

that’s right, two versions of the new Dinny done here folks

Production Streams

When notes reflect

I’ll be honest, I kind of thought the music here would end up being better than it was (which officially mean that my favourite piece of music ended up being the Mission Briefing) though given the results it’s not the worst music I’ve ever made. (that title currently goes to The Generive Theme) For the Garbage problem I actually did something most film scores tend to do, But to explain it, I’ll first need to show you some examples of this trick in action. see if you can figure out what all these pieces of music from The LEGO Movie have in common.

use this track as a reference point

if you’ve listened to these tracks carefully, you may have noticed that a particular piece is repeated across the soundtrack, this is known as a leitmotif, the leitmotif in question is playing in service of a particular character (that being Emmet Brickowski), and what’s interesting is that this leitmotif is usually altered ever so slightly (whether it be with the pitch, speed or even instrument used in the case of this movie) depending on what’s happening to the character. (whether they be getting up in the morning, getting chased by the bad guys or even building a big ol’ construction based robot using their newfound master builder skills) The reason I bring this up is because I took the main melody of the Generive theme and made it a part of the Garbage Problem track as well (while altering it slightly to fit its new place), although the reason I did this was because I couldn’t think of a different melody for that part in general (and laziness) although I do like the way it came together in the end (not as good as the mission briefing track though) because now it gives the sound track slightly more cohesion.

Right, I’ve gotten all the main assets together but there are still a couple of outstanding assets

namely the Slamination Studios Logo and the Video’s thumbnail

now I know what your thinking, “why not just use the image boy? that’s what it’s there for isn’t it,” well to that I’ll have to say no, because I feel like a little bit of Animation will come in handy, but just like with the Dinny Done here sequence, I’ll animate the logo if I find some spare time at the end and If I don’t, THEN I’ll use the picture for the Youtube version, and as for The Dreamiverse Version, I’ll make a temporary 3D image tomorrow so that I don’t have to worry about it during production.

We interrupt this program to bring you another Project Management update

and just like that we’ve reached week five and already I’ve got all the garbage I need (even if I’d forgotten to put that paddle ball on my asset list) so I can actually begin the Process of Animating this cartoon (although I do want to do a little bit more work on the paddle ball first)

we now return to our program, already in progress

Assets 19 and 20: Logos, Paddle balls and a few modifications

if you’re wondering about the last minute paddle ball stream, it was because I’d straight up forgotten to put it on my asset list.

Production Streams

Another Fun Filled Reflective Stew

well then, talk about being last minute asset production.

First I decided to produce the Logo I said I would (that being the static version of the Slamination Studios logo), the main challenge that I came across there however was actually layering the text particularly the explosion emoji I used to replicate the explosion used in the logo (albeit not quite the colour palette I wanted it to be but still), mainly due to how unexpectedly finicky things got for a bit that and figuring out how to get the explosion to only cover the “An” part of “Anination Studios” (yes, the misspelling is intentional so that the studio’s full name rolls better off the tongue), but I had to settle with it covering as little of the I as possible so that you could still read the logo. but other than those two things (and the glowing anvil dropping on a glowing Captain Cartridge) I’d say this logo came out pretty good I’m actually quite surprised I was still able to do the Basketballs as O’s (I did that by replacing the O’s with Basketball emojis)

Next I decided to make a couple of last minute alterations to Cartridge himself (namely giving him the watch and goldfish bowl helmet), the reason I simply added onto the original Cartridge asset rather than doing each asset separately was so that I could future proof the character in case I want to use the goldfish bowl and watch in any future projects (I.E: Cartoons, Video Games Ext), I also did it to make wrapping the watch itself around his arm easier. (because you know what they say, it’s easier to sculpt a watch when you’re wrapping it around a character’s arm to begin with) at first when I put the watch in the arm group using the select method it caused his whole arm to glitch out, but then for some strange reason once I held onto the object and added it to the group using the other method (hovering the held object over the thing you want to group it with) there were no such issues (funny how that worked out), as for the gold fish bowl? I simply used the ol’ Kaleidoscope trick (while making sure the origin flecks were inside Cartridge’s neck for the sake of the mirror) and then I used the painting’s clone creation tool (not to be confused with the regular cloning tool) to add more versions to fill in any holes and then I made the whole thing transparent. and here, you’re probably wondering, “why not just make a gold fish bowl sculpt and make that see through?” you see, Dreams lets you make paintings see through but you can’t do the same with sculptures (if I remember correctly it’s probably due to the way the bubble bath engine is built, but don’t quote me on that I could be wrong)

after that came the final asset (that being the paddle ball), which ended up being rather easy to make (say for a collision problem or two, likely resulting from how thin I made the paddle) but then production got cut short once the others wanted the TV, (yeah, that can be a bit of a problem when you’re making cartoons on a PS4, you never know when production will get cut short) tomorrow I think I’ll do a little bit more work on the paddle ball (and any last minute assets I may need) and then I’ll finally start animating the whole thing (yeah baby!)

Some more last minute stuff (or just Production day 0)

ok, now I’m just stalling for time at this point

Production Streams

And then the internet went down

The Finished Images

Slamination 3D (basketball hoop by Nelamyan. Anvil by Ramkibainuzuka)

Reflectional feelings

well then, today certainly had a slightly different flavour than normal. The main issue I ran into today was that the internet had cut off for a brief moment (and thus forced this stream to be split in two) which resulted in me being unable to access my own jazz for a bit (because I’d saved everything online privately whenever I could) but luckily, by the time I’d started the second one, things went back to normal.

The first thing I’d done was try and fix those collision issues I’d mentioned yesterday, turns out all I had to do was go into the rope connector’s tweak menu and simply turn the “collide with connected” function on (which I actually had to do with the elastic connecting the air-lock controls to the ceiling), which I find to be a rather peculiar thing for connectors to even have to do but I’m sure there’s a good reason for it.

Afterwards it was on to making that thumbnail for my cartoon (which realistically I could do at any time but I wanted to get it done and out of the way. oh, and I made it by remixing the Planet X scene), one thing I wanted to do for the thumbnail was also have Randi on Cartridge’s back, but when I whip out Randi, I ended up realising I’d made the model a bit to big to fit on Cartridge’s back in a convincing manner so I had to scrap the Idea and just attach the rope directly to Captain Cartridge instead which means a model shrink may very well be underway tomorrow for Ol’ Randi.

To get Captain Cartridge’s pose I simply had to whip out a keyframe and manipulate his body parts into the right pose. after placing the CD in place it was just a matter of positioning both so that Planet X was visible in the background (and the sun lit up Cartridge’s face), after that it was a matter of placing in the Generive and attaching the rope (which did take two attempts due to how small Cartridge himself ended up being at a distance) while I was doing that I also used some text displayers in order to get those words onto the screen I also played with the colouring and the fonts in order to get that space vibe, particularly with the name of the cartoon (which I’ve now decided to call Operation Compact Disc, because I felt it would perfectly communicate the plot of this cartoon in conjunction with the image), as for the other big green thing I began work on (which currently goes unfinished), that’s going to play the role of the part where it goes “Slamination Studio’s Presents, A (Insert Character and/or Team Name Here) Cartoon” like in the Looney tunes and the Who Framed Roger Rabbit shorts

Yeah, like the beginning of this video

although I’ll have to finish that fight tomorrow unfortunately, although while I’m here I should at least mention the characters’ voices. For Captain Cartridge I’m thinking of going with an exaggerated accent (think either welsh or Scottish) and for Bitris 16 I want to make him sound like Jaleel White. why? you guessed it, more Sonic references.

a sampling of what you can somewhat expect Bitris 16 to sound like

as for Voltrix and Randi? I’ll have to figure out a distinct sound for them (and yes it will include that robot noise but I can figure that out as I go along)

Production Day 0.5: finishing that intro off at last

that’s right, I’ve finally managed to finish the intro baby!

Production Stream

Reflection

well that was quite a lot of fun.

The main thing I worked on (after I’d shrunk Randi down) was getting the first half of the intro done (the half where it says “Slamination Studios Presents: A Captain Cartridge Cartoon”), the main workload involved getting the characters into different poses that get their personalities across. I also had to make sure that the text didn’t overlap the characters (and also added in their names so that you’d know who they were before watching the cartoon) and I had to make sure you could actually read the text as well.

A minor issue I ran into was realising I didn’t actually have a proper intro track, so I ended up thinking “what if I mix the Generive theme with the Dinny Done here folks theme?” so I did (really easily in fact, all I had to do was take the dinny done theme, and replace everything except the beginning the final piece of the Generive theme in order to make the intro) and I’ve got to say I really like the results (and also my decision to time the intro to the beat was a nice touch), although I should really look at making a proper intro theme for any future cartoons (I could even make different versions of that same theme depending on which characters star in the cartoon)

I also experimented with reducing the cameras’ field of view in order to get a more 2 Dimensional look to the 3D space, but it only ended up working out for the “Slamination Presents” part (because the “Captain Cartridge in” section just ended up looking weird without the default field of view), I’ve got to say doing this has certainly helped me achieve my goals of you being able to see all the characters and their names (even though the default FOV (Field of View) got the job done just fine but I think the reduced FOV made it better due to the flat-ish look)

in order to get the intro to actually move like a video I simply placed everything in a timeline and messed around with the timing of the text displayer and the wiper that transitions us between the “Slamination Studios Presents” and the “Operation Compact Disc” title card (both of which are actually part of the same scene, this wiper gives the illusion of two separate locations)

after Shrinking Randi however, I realise that I may have to alter the scenes he’s in quite a bit due to his new size (for example I may need to change the part where they’re running so that Randi just sticks to Cartridge’s hat or something), though I can cross that bridge when I come to it. (most likely tomorrow when I finally get started animating the cartoon for real)

Production Day 1: now we’re using integers

Production Streams

Some Cold Hard Reflection

and thus, the animation ball finally gets a-rolling.

Today I mainly created the establishing shot (where the generive flies across the screen) and started work on the beginning where our heroes gain the call to adventure (or in this case, to clean up some rubbish) where the main things I got done were Cartridge’s typing animation, sounds for a Generive Video Game, Birtis 16’s paddle ball animation and even The Justice Trio’s run cycles (because Sur-Vey mentions the Justice Trio)

when I was making Cartridge’s typing animation however, I realised I forgot to add typing sounds to the asset list (yeah, quite silly I know) so not wanting to add on to the list too much, I simply had to use my mind to come up with a solution to this problem (preferably one that didn’t involve going into the Dreamiverse and plucking some sounds out of nowhere) and eventually I settled on using the cartoon running sound effect (as imported by Voodu-XYZ but owned by Warner Bros) and altering it so that it sounds more like a keyboard that someone’s typing on.

The Generive TV game sounds were made by taking some Sonic The Hedgehog (Genesis/Mega Drive) Sound effects, altering them a bit and then sticking them on the same timeline as a modified version of the Generive theme and an effect field which I also modified slightly (that way they loop back around eventually) and I’ve got to say, I really like the way it all sounds because the effect field creates a filter (which I can modify to my liking) that makes the whole thing sound like it’s coming from a lower quality CRT TV speaker (despite the seemingly massive screen this is all being played on)

in terms of the actual animation I kind of wish I’d gotten more done than I did today because I feel if I didn’t focus so much on doing trivial things I could have at least made it to the part where Sur-Vey can begin his call (although I do like what I did do, I just wish I’d done a little bit more of it but during the later stages I sort of started petering out. Hopefully that won’t happen tomorrow)

Production Day 2: finally some Voice acting

Production Streams

Insert Unfunny Reflection Pun Here

well now, this is more like it. I actually got more done today than I did yesterday.

Today I decided it would be a good idea to do all the voice acting for this scene first that way I could animate the cartoon around the voice lines rather than the other way around like I did with Super Sheep. I think that working around the voice lines will actually be beneficial for me because it means I don’t have to worry about re-doing the animation if it ends up out of sync like I would if I did it the other way around, but at the same time, it does come with the drawback of not having the actual visuals to go off of so really it’s a bit of a trade off depending on what you want to do. (because either approach is valid really) For Captain Cartridge I ended up doing a sort of exaggerated version of a welsh accent where as with Bitris 16, I tried to get a sort of Jaleel White sound from the voice, the key word being tried because I don’t think it’s quite as good as it could have been (luckily I havent animated Bitris 16 very much yet) because of certain subtleties I don’t think I channelled fully. as for Commander Sur-Vey, I sort of gave his voice an extra bit of flair by over doing certain sounds. (I.E: “sp” and the letter B)

One thing that I thought would be a bigger challenge than it was was the 15 second time limit for recording audio (it used to be 3 minutes but in a previous update Media Molecule changed it to 15 seconds, likely due to various Copyright concerns) but I didn’t even need to worry as all the voice lines ended up being within the time frame (even if I did have a few close calls here and there)

It did take a few takes to get everyone’s voices right though and in Cartridge’s case I actually had to delete a take just to maintain consistency with his voice as I felt the voice changed too much between each line, for Bitris 16 on the other hand I ended up really liking one part of a particular take, so I re-did only half of his line thus splitting it in two and kept the other half thus turning two takes into one (which is actually a surprisingly common technique in creative media, especially among animated works where the acting is primarily done with one’s voice), I then put most of the Voice work into the main animation timeline so that I can do some lip-syncing (which I tried to do today to see if I could do it, but maybe I should save it for when the animation of a particular scene is finished because It didn’t quite feel right once I got part way into it)

Another thing I did was get some actual Animation done, and I’ve got to say It’s shaping up to be something decent at the very least, and the storyboards are helping tremendously.

One thing that helps me animate complicated scenes with loads of characters is to organise the whole timeline (having character keyframes and sounds above the camera and establishing a colour code to each character’s keyframes I.E: in this toon I’m reserving green keyframes for Cartridge, Pink for Bitris 16, ext), that way I don’t end up getting confused when I come back the next day.

Overall I think I’m doing pretty good for the most part because I’m actually getting things done and even finding creative uses for the resources I give myself. Tomorrow it’ll be more of the same really, although I think my biggest challenge will be getting the screen to look like it’s changing (and that’s with the groups I’d made for that express purpose)

Production Day 3: some bulk acting, some further animation and a few technical difficulties

Production Streams

the audio and visuals fell out of sync near the end

some more de-sync near the end

and here things went off without a hitch in terms of technical issues

Reflection Injection

well today certainly took a rather unexpected turn due to an unexpected change of circumstances happening from next Monday, so to anticipate it I decided to just cut to the chase and do the rest of the main dialogue all in one go (thus saving me from any trouble in the future), although now it means that come Monday, I’m stuck with the take I went with today (which means I can’t do another take if I notice any subtle mess ups in the acting) and since I’ve got family jazz happening tomorrow I can’t really animate anything new that day and you know what that means, the voice acting has now become one big…

and rushing things is no good (the game I’m referencing is quite fun though, I just wanted a nice Sonic reference)

although I am glad it’s out of the way now (even though I enjoyed doing it), I think it’s had an effect on my productivity in terms of the animation itself as I didn’t really get a whole lot done, the main focus was getting those “screen” transitions down pat (which I suspect to be the reason I didn’t do all that much today)

overall this particular scene is taking me longer than expected (heck, it still goes unfinished) likely due to the part where Sur-Vey calls up Captain Cartridge and crew with all those different screen groups being turned on and off and some of them even having their own animations and what not (I.E: Sur-Vey needing to move, the floating disc and even the Justice Trio running to the right), it’s enough to actually make me thankful that I had to cut the short back originally because who knows how I would have dealt with those bits in particular although saying that, I’m still glad I’m doing this now that I have a little bit of experience in the field. (that and I’m glad this isn’t a feature length movie like I plan on making someday)

Tomorrow I’ve got other business to attend to so unfortunately I may not be able to actually animate that day (though we’ll see how that other business pans out)

Production Day 4: realising it was actually NEXT Monday, not this one

remember when I said today was the day circumstances would change? turns out I was off by an entire week (which means things change NEXT Monday, not today) which means the big Sonic Rush was rather pre-mature on my part (not that it matters anymore in terms of the dialogue), but it does mean that a re-take is currently still on the cards. and another thing…

We Interrupt This Program To Bring You Another Project Management Update

and luckily I’ve got a solution to fix this:

this Meet The Robinsons reference

Problem is, this solution relies entirely on fictional nonsense so, yeah. let’s get on with the show.

Production Stream

Rev-lection (ha, Car puns)

we’re back baby, and we’re getting lots of Animation Done. (now I’m nearing completion of the first scene) I think the reason I was so productive today was because of the break I took yesterday (due to certain events that I’m going to remain intentionally vague about because it’s personal dag nab it)

but enough about that, I’m going to mention some of what I did today. I mainly continued animating Captain Cartridge and his friends (inching ever closer to completing this scene), the main new thing I can really talk about is how I used a fade out to make it seem like Captain Cartridge’s voice was leaving the screen as he was (almost like the voice was coming from his mouth which I’m thinking about doing the lip syncing for once all the main animation for the cartoon is finished), Why did I use a simple fade out instead of Dreams’ 3D audio features like I did with the paddleball sound, the “keyboard typing” sound (which I made by modifying the and even the Generive TV Game? (well, for the TV game I simply tied all the sounds to a speaker that has 3D audio instead) I figured it would be easier this way because it’s not like the 3D sound’s source can be moved independently via Key frame (the only way I know to move a 3D sound around in play mode is if it’s tied to a puppet or another moving object)

the main challenge today was getting Cartridge to turn around convincingly, I simply solved this problem by simply not showing Cartridge’s legs when he turns around (although I should stress that the storyboard kind of called for his legs not being in shot anyway so this part’s kind of a mute point), although I did at least have to raise one of his legs a bit (considering how a small part of his legs were in view)

At one point I ended up realising I’d forgotten to deselect the Key frames for Bitris 16’s eyelids so I had to do some undoing to get them back. (luckily I didn’t lose too much progress during all this, but it was still an inconvenience non the less) Yeah, sometimes it’s easy for me to forget certain things in Dreams (like whether I’m scoped into a certain group of not, though that one’s due to how I set my preferences to “Minimal” most of the time)

Tomorrow I get the feeling I might finally finish the basic animation for this scene because I’m already most of the way there at this point.

Production Day 5: finally getting to the end of the scene

that’s right, I’ve finally finished the basic animation for the first scene (dad gum that took longer than I originally though, probably due to all the screen changes)

Production Stream

The Mighty Reflections Win!

ladies and gentlemen, we’ve finally finished work on the basic animation for this scene (break out the non-alcoholic drinks ladies and gentlemen), although that doesn’t mean I’m finished with this part yet (although like with Super Sheep, clean up will come later, and this time there will be a lip-syncing process to boot)

today I mainly finished up all the basic animation for this first scene (yes, I’ve been animating one scene for the past 5 days now, probably due to the increase in the amount of characters from one main character and four side characters to four main characters and four side characters), I’d say the biggest challenge thus far has been the screen transitions, what I mean by screen transitions is getting all the animations done for the other “screen” groups although I did accomplish this by simply adding the timelines to those groups (with the exception of Commander Sur-Vey who’s animations are all stored on the main timeline. Speaking of timelines, I did actually have an Idea about how I could organise this mess from here on out. instead of simply labelling the key frames with each of the characters primary colours, I could simply put all the individual character keyframes into their own timelines with in the main timeline (thus cleaning things up further, and I can put specific sounds in any of the timelines if I so want to) although one issue that does come with this fancy new approach is how I’m going to sync up the cameras n stuff (though I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it)

I should mention that due to Dreams’ planned server maintenance (which I’m assuming has something to do with that VR update considering how both are happening on the same day), I’ve decided to take the day off tomorrow (although the server maintenance is only suppose to be for two hours), although I will be back the day after tomorrow.

Production Day 6: We’re Back: A Cartridge Story

so after a break that lasted longer than expected I can finally get back to work, but first…

Some Jazz I forgot to mention on Day 5

Remember when I did that pose for Bitris 16 just before he charged his run? I actually had to use a reference image just to get that particular pose right, here’s my reference Image before I forget:

because if you’re going to steal… I mean, reference a pose, you might as well admit to using a reference. (not to say I think using a reference image in and of itself is stealing, but the way I did it, I’d say I did a copyright infringement) now that I’ve said everything I needed to, let’s get on with the show once again.

Production Streams

We’re Back: a reflect-osaur story

ok, so bad puns that reference an old animated movie about dinosaurs aside, I’d say today went rather smoothly, I can already tell it’s going to be much easier to make this scene than it was with the other scene mainly due to how I don’t have to worry about creating the illusion of a screen on the ship switching which moving image it’s using.

Today I mainly just animated a bunch of run cycles for Bitris 16, Voltrix and Captain Cartridge. For Randi on the other hand I simply reused the run cylce I’d made for the playable character. I was originally thinking about re-using the original run cycles I’d made for each character (and was even partway through doing this too) before deciding “naaaaaaah, we need some hot new animations instead” so I simply took all the characters that weren’t Randi and then gave them all new running animations specifically for this scene and now I’m in the process of separating the different parts of each character’s animation (the Arms, the Head and the Body) and stick them into timelines within timelines. The reason for this is so that I can turn each part off and on as I need to.

Speaking of timelines within timelines, I actually decided to stick various elements within the main animation timeline into their own separate timelines that exist within the main timeline, (I.E: one dedicated to Captain Cartridge Keyframes, one for Bitris, One for Voltirx, one for the ground, ext.) I can certainly say that doing this has so far led to less of a mess in terms of the main timeline. (although I’ll actually have to finish producing the scene in order to say for sure) That isn’t to say there weren’t a few bumps on the road to getting this new system in place. These bumps mainly consisted of me fumbling around with the timeline sizes but other than that, I’d say putting in this new system seems to be worth it so far considering how if you put these timelines in the beginning of the main timeline the time in seconds actually lines up perfectly. (to the point where all I need to do is control one of the sub-timelines to get the main timeline’s play head into position) The only other thing I can really say about this is that I’m surprised I never came up with this method during the production of Super Sheep in Convention F-3 because I think it actually would have saved me a little bit of headache from all those keyframes

In terms of trying to figure out Randi’s new size I did try one thing before deciding to give up and have him running like the rest of the cast. I tired situating one Randi on top of Cartridge and have a second one jump off (while trying to make it seem like there’s only one Randi), but due to some unexpected technical difficulties where Randi being attached to Cartridge’s head group caused Cartridge’s head to start rotating on it’s own once time started playing, I simply gave up on that Idea and just put a singular Randi on the ground running with the other characters like in the original storyboards.

Another trick I’m using in this scene is making the hallway seem longer than it actually is, how am I doing this? well remember all that time ago when I’d made that Dreams Ps4 Showcase video? if you don’t here’s a refresher:

just go 5 minutes and 36 seconds in for the start of that trick’s section

in the video, you’ll have seen that I had a section in there where Super Sheep and Sonic appeared to be running on some grass. I eventually revealed that the whole thing was actually an illusion created with the flow tool in the ground’s tweak menu in combination with Super Sheep and Sonic doing run cycles to enhance the illusion. well I’m doing the same thing here, except now the walls are getting in on these shenanigans too. if you don’t know how this works let me explain: the characters will run in place while the flecks that make up the ground and walls will do all the movement (thus creating the effect of an infinite hallway), although this time Cartridge and friends will do some actual moving first to further enhance the illusion, and after a certain amount of time the characters stop moving and the floor and walls take over as the camera cuts to the next angle, thus bringing the illusion to life. the only hole I really have to fill from there is making sure I don’t show the back and front walls as doing that will destroy the illusion entirely due to how stationary it will be once the walls and floor start moving (this means I’ll have to get clever with the camera angles)

Overall I don’t making this scene is going to take as much time as producing the first scene did because it lacks a lot of what makes the previous scene so complex (I.E: all the screen groups that need to be switched on and off), Tomorrow the show will (hopefully) continue building steam as I continue moving forward at full speed.

Production Day 7: gee, it’s been a week already

wait, it’s been a week in terms of production streams already?!

Production Streams

Reflection deck

Ok, so today I figured I’d continue getting the scene to a rough point where it play out, and after that I could do smaller things like having Cartridge’s arms point in certain directions during the run cycle (hence why the arms were all put in separate timelines in the first place)

I’ve got to admit though, Bitris 16’s wall jump was much easier to animate than I thought it would be mainly because I only really had to do the animation for when he was actually on the screen (and after I realised I’d need to zoom the camera in so that the shot could be more about Cartridge and Voltrix the entire wall jump animation ended up off screen, thus meaning I didn’t even end up needing what little I did end up doing for the wall jump animation), Speaking of Bitris 16, his jump noise is just a modified sonic jump sound effect:

I just stuck in a bunch of filters and pitched it up by six (also the title of this video lies about the lack of copyright)

the reason for this is because it helps to make it an even bigger reference to the Mega Drive (because that’s how I came up with Captain Cartridge and friends in the first place)

I actually just want to say that today actually got cut short. yeah, that’s the thing about using console games like Dreams to animate, you can get chucked off at basically anytime for pretty much any reason (be it football or some other jazz), but eh, you learn to live with it. (although getting something like PlayStation’s Remote play app could mitigate this drawback)

Tomorrow I’ll need to continue working on this part of the cartoon (like I always say I’ll do every other day, and probably will continue to say over and over again at the end of each section, but hey, not much changes from day to day)

Production Day 8: an attempt at hilarity

the reason today’s called “an attempt at hilarity” despite this whole production (as well as blog-site in general) could be described as such is because of what I named the stream this time around

Production Stream

yeah, there never tends to be a rhyme or reason for the names of even half of these streams (although in this this case, I chose the name because it sounds similar to the word Animation)

Production Reflection with a dose of infection

I’ll, production today mainly consisted of doing some more animation for Cartridge and even Voltrix got in on the animating action (because I started giving him some more animation too), one thing I did was figure out how to stop cartridge and friends from slowing down to maintain the illusion (yeah, that randomly became a problem during yesterday’s stream. But today I fixed it by turning off the key frame smoothing on that particular area)

I also modified the “Garbage Problem” track so that it was just the drums and even further modified the drums themselves to make the track that plays while the characters are running down the hallways (it’s a lot of fun being able to modify the assets I already have in order to make new ones on the fly, and that’s one major pro to animating in a game like Dreams) but other than those two things, not that much happened that was all that note worthy

this means I can finish this little bit of reflection by simply saying, here’s to tomorrow.

Production Day 9: finishing up this scene

we did it boys, we finished the basic animation for this scene

Production Stream

Some Wii-flection (that’s right, I’m even resorting to Wii puns now)

and 4 Days later (only one day less than the last one), the basic animation for this scene is complete (which again, means clean up still needs to happen once all the basic animation is finished)

the main piece of animation today was actually with giving Voltrix a little more movement (in terms of having him actually look around during the lift part and his walking animation) and giving that darned lift some movement once Cartridge and Voltrix walked on in there. It was rather easy to do given how there wasn’t very much to do to begin with (just a walk cycle and a lift moving up a bit), the main challenge was figuring out what who I wanted the narrator that says “30 seconds later” to be (and I didn’t have much time before the big change came by this afternoon either), so each take I tried a different voice (ranging from an exaggerated french accent to an Arnold Schwarzenegger voice), until I realised I could use my secret weapon

That’s right kids, Hugo The Shape-Shifter now gets a vocal cameo baby

I ended up liking that take enough to keep it in (although my favourite part was actually putting in the extra “they don’t pay me enough for this” ad-lib at the end)

Speaking of the 30 seconds later bit, I actually wanted it to be it’s own separate scene from the rest, but then after working on it a bit I thought to myself “why should this puny little transition card be it’s own scene when I can simply make it part of the end of the lift scene and thus make it less disjointed from the rest” and thus I simply went back to the original scene and extended it out to include the “30 seconds later” bit (also, R.I.P: my ability to voice act on weekdays)

Tomorrow I’ll start work on the part where our heroes are in the cartridge section of the ship getting ready to head on over to Planet X to get that rubbish and by my (admittedly skewed) estimates it should take roughly 2-3 days to do.

Production Day 10: Inserting Cartridge

*insert blow on the cartridge reference here*

Production Stream

Reflection Indentation

and today begins another scene that needs the good ol’ animator special. I believe this scene will be even simpler to animate than the last one, the reason for this is because of how I don’t even need to make a hallway appear longer than it actually is (although that was quite easy thanks to the sculptures having a tweak menu with a flow slider, the hardest part of that whole thing was picking camera angles that look good while also making sure the back wall didn’t ever get shown once), just 4 characters heading to their chairs and even then they don’t move that much because they spend most of their time either standing or sitting there (depending on which part of the scene we’re in)

I think the most complicated part will be getting some of the characters to sit down mainly because of the way I plan on having some of the characters jumping over the seat (mainly Bitris 16 and his acrobatic nature, heh heh)

Tomorrow I’ll have to see if I even get that far ahead (although I think I might if I play my cards right)

Production Day 11: Cartridge pins

that’s right, we’re still on the cartridge bit

Production Stream

Some Reflectivities Abound

well today wasn’t particularly productive partially because I had family business to attend to at noon as well as some shopping jazz that afternoon. (which may have left me a bit drained afterwards) what little I did do was continue animating Bitris 16 (and finally finishing his first shot of the scene in the process), but even then I didn’t quite animate the part where he jumped onto his seat (probably due to both me being rather slow and the things I had to do today)

hopefully I’ll be able to make up for what happened today next time because if I keep lowering the productivity at this rate, I may never get this cartoon finished in time (and that’s no good)

Oh no, I just realised we never interrupted this program to bring you another project management update (gotta fix fast)

oh bungles, good thing I remembered now (not that that helps much)

mmmmmmm, I’m falling behind Scoob, gotta pick up the pace.

Production Day 12: Unfinished Chair shenanigans

yup, the animation for this scene has already surpassed the original two to three day mark I’d set for my self (what a bummer)

Production Stream

To the Reflection-mobile (and jazz I for got on the previous day)

ok, in all seriousness let’s do this

So today I mainly continued working on the animations for when every one sits down in their hover chairs (I just need to do Voltirx and I can move on to Cartridge saying “set a course for planet X” and I can move on to the next scene)

One thing I should mention that I did yesterday (but I never mentioned), I decided to give the part where the generive leaves the same treatment I gave the “30 seconds later” bit, I decided to make it so that that part ends the scene rather than be its own separate thing, that way it doesn’t feel as disjointed as it would have otherwise (given how Dreams would need to load that small chunk and then load the next one), I’m actually thinking about going back and giving the beginning the same treatment so that Dreams can simply load both pieces at once rather than load them both separately (and thus make the whole thing slightly faster in terms of the load times being cut down)

Ok, back to today, I’d say the hardest bit was trying to get the characters to their respective seats quickly so that it doesn’t drag the whole thing down (which of course meant having to scrap the walk cycle I’d originally made for Cartridge in favour of a run cycle instead), although one thing I managed to get away with doing was simply teleporting Randi in front of his seat once the camera cut to the chairs themselves (given how the angle actually obscures Randi’s original position) and then animating him jumping into his seat (which made things rather easy when it came to Randi), for Cartridge I simply decided that the best way to solve the problem was to have him shimmy between his chair and Randi’s chair so that he can sit down afterwards, Bitris simply did a jump which meant having to put a character in the air. (and Voltrix is yet to be animated actually sitting down)

It’s today I’m actually realising that this cartoon may actually take longer to produce than Super Sheep in Convention F-3 (which took 14 Days to make) because this is Day 12, and I haven’t even finished the entire toon’s BASIC animation yet (and I probably won’t for a good couple of extra weeks, which is no good because august is approaching! oh no)

Tomorrow I’ll do by darndest to finish the scene. (but unfortunately for both of us, I can’t quite garentee it)

Production Day 13: Finally getting the darned cartridge to work

you hear that, we did it, the cartridge section is done my dudes

Production Stream

Some Late Night Reflection With Jimbo Stevenson

I did it gang, I finally animated that darned Cartridge scene, the Generive’s finally on the move to Planet X baby!

Honestly I didn’t think I’d actually get this scene done (given the decline in productivity recently), but hey, I guess now that I think about it, I only really had to animate Voltrix sitting down, cartridge telling the Generive computer systems to set a course for planet x and the Generive actually leaving. (good thing I’d made the choice to place the Generive in the scene two days ago ey?) Speaking of the Genrive, I animated that thing using an action recorder, with an action recorder I can simply grab objects with the Imp and move them around around a bunch and like the name suggests, it records what I do, thus making the animation of objects like the Generive much easier (albeit at the cost of precision due to the motion controls)

but for now, it’s time to celebrate the fact I finished this scene at last with some smug dancing

Production Day 14: crossing the Super Sheep Threshold

whelp, it’s day 14 my dudes and Super Sheep’s laughing at how long this one’s taking

Production Stream

I’m surprised I didn’t think to make this joke earlier

Ready, set, Relfect!

So today I mainly got started on the animation for the part where our heroes form a big ol’ plan to get that space rubbish cleaned up. the main challenge came from figuring out how to make it seem like the generive and the generive with the cartridge section showing were actually one object. I ended up solving this problem by simply switching which group was visible just as the camera cut to our heroes (our heroes also become visible here because I stuck them all in with the Cartridge section Group)

the other thing I did before all that was actually animate the Generive itself stopping. I did this by using an action recorder to move it backwards (and from there I reversed the animation and messed around with it a bunch until it looked good)

I honestly haven’t got very much else to say if I’m being honest but, here’s hoping for tomorrow when I continue once again.

Production Day 15: Generiving

and as we’re continuing on, time’s slowly beating me in the big race, who’s going to win? stick around to find out.

Production Streams

Hot-n-Ready Reflection

Hot diggity darn. Today actually got kind of frustrating, the main reason for this was because of all the constant shaking everything was doing as I got close to things like Captain Cartridge’s head (and that even included the menu text. THE MENU TEXT!), although to be fair, I don’t exactly know what’s causing this little bug of mine (maybe it has something to do with the fact I have two Generives intersecting and all I have to do to fix it is get one of them out of the other, but that doesn’t make it any less frustrating though the other main source of frustration was the odd bit of Imp Drifting that happened here and there (yeah, I know I’m picking at nits at this point, but still)

Moving on from that noise I just want to say that I’ve mainly been doing some more animation on Captain Cartridge and friends, although I did end up getting a funny Idea where Cartridge would slam Randi onto the table, so I followed through with it and… oh boy was that one of the hardest things I’d ever animated in my life (well, So far anyways) because I had to account for where Randi is in relation to Cartridge’s hand and even after I’d done, it still doesn’t feel right (although Clean up can fix that one), but I still wanted the gag dag nabbit because at the end of the day this is meant to be a funny cartoon.

My favourite part of today’s animation sessions was the part where Cartridge slams Randi on the table because it allowed me to do a little bit of exaggeration with Cartridge’s arm motion by literally making his arm bigger as he grabs Randi by the neck (because if I didn’t make that arm bigger, it wouldn’t have quite reached Randi, and that would have been no good)

Tomorrow I’ll figure out how to have the boys all huddled up so that Cartridge can explain his big Idea on how to get rid of the rubbish in space, cheerio.

Production Day (Bitris) 16: Cusp-Head and his pal Key-Frame

well, we’re getting there, reeeeeally slowly. but first…

We Interrupt This Program To Bring You Another Project Management Update

You know it’s times like this that make me wonder why I didn’t just start this project as soon as I’d finished the final major project because then I’d have a lot more time than I do now.

Production Stream

Jet Cooling Reflection

OK, so today may not have been as productive as I wanted it to be, but I did do a few things that were worth noting at the very least.

The main thing I did today was animate some more of the characters and even reach the beginning of that “huddle up” shot (and I can already tell it’s going to be rather difficult to pull off considering how I’ve had to reposition Bitris 16 over and over again and by the time I’d wrapped up for the day I still hadn’t even started getting the other characters into position yet), to pull that off, I decided to make the table itself invisible for the duration of the shot because when the camera passes through objects in Dreams it created a small effect where things get a bit darker if the objects are visible (hence why I’d made the table invisible using a key-frame)

the other thing I did was give Bitris 16 a little bit more of a reaction to when Randi gets slammed onto the table (which I found to be much easier than I’m currently finding the “huddle up” part because I was simply posing one character), I mainly did this by giving him a more frightened expression (thus implying that Cartridge has done this plenty of times before), I do eventually plan on also giving Voltrix a similar reaction to this nonsense as well but I’ll have to cross that bridge tomorrow. Cheerio kids.

Production Day 17: Making up Ground and Redacting Rad Dads

that’s right, we finally finished the scene (it only took a few cut corners to do this but we did it regardless)

Production Streams

Redacted Reflection

{This section has been redacted}

ok, in all seriousness I actually managed to finish up this scene and it only took 4 days (and several cut corners [especially at the huddle up section]) to finish the basic animation (I can always do the clean up later), and oh boy am I glad I got this scene done today because it means I may very well have made up quite a bit of ground in the process (and that’s really good because I may actually get this cartoon finished if I keep going at this rate)

Remember when I theorised that moving the first Generive out of the way would help mitigate the issue of screen shaking? (good times) well it didn’t fix this issue like I’d hoped it would, but it did seem less frustrating afterwards (although that could be because I’m a little bit more use to it now in combination with these sessions not needing me to get as up close and personal with the characters this time around)

The main things that got animated today were Voltrix’s reaction to Cartridge’s ro-buse (robot abuse) and huddle up pose as well as Cartridge going over to his education board to exposit about his hot new plan that’s definitely not due to turn year old once October hits.

In terms of the Huddle up scene, I did run into an unexpected issue where due to certain collision settings in conjunction to how close the characters heads are to each other (and not to mention how big and top heavy their heads are to begin with {except Voltrix}), some of the character’s heads jitter about in an odd way (which creates some slight jank), I simply responded to this problem the same way Bethesda seems to respond to their QA department whenever they find a glitch, ignore it entirely to focus on what comes next. (besides, I can always fix it in clean up later)

Un-funny jokes about Bethesda aside, the the other main thing I did today was draw the Captain Cartridge stick figure (think of this as a little preview into my expected main work flow for when I animate the next scene tomorrow), it wasn’t very challenging (especially when you consider some of the previous challenges I’ve faced during production) because all I was really doing was drawing a 2-D image much like I do on Pixlr all the time, (and at a greater level of detail too) the main snag is usually that I’m using motion controls (though I have since gotten a bit use to doing this) but like I said, compared to everything else I faced, this was a cakewalk (much like the next scene might be)

All I can say is that the only way production of the next scene can be made even faster is if I’d made all the 2D assets in advance instead of Drawing them while doing the scene (that way I could place the assets, plop down the timeline and audio and then make sure the audio syncs with the camera movements and hey presto), but we’ve long since crossed the point of no return ages ago so, what are we gonna do. The only real snag I can realistically think of running into is whether or not the lighting and sky look thematically appropriate. (although even then, if I play my cards right it’ll be super easy, barely an inconvenience) So yeah, I can’t wait for what tomorrow brings, cheerio.

Production Day 18: we’re Mario Painting now bucko

and yes, I did get the music for it (C’mon, I couldn’t help but take this big opportunity)

Production Stream

Painted Reflection

and so begins the production of the next scene (as well as the assets for it because I never thought to make them in advance), so far painting isn’t going too badly (although I am just starting work on this scene)

The main thing I’ve been doing today was painting the likes of Cartridge as a stick figure, the reason they’re being done as stick figures rather than my usual art style is because it makes it seem as if Cartridge drew theses plans himself (also motion controls make my art style slightly harder to do in a way that looks good, so there’s that as well.)

after I drew each I simply got to work colouring them in (well, at least the parts that don’t consist solely of a single line), this wasn’t too difficult (I mean all I was really doing was trying to stay within the line boundaries) although I do wish there was some kind of fill tool I could utilise, although I do understand if that might be asking a bit much considering how they’d have to find a way to implement a tool commonly associated with 2D drawing software into 3D space without it filling every empty space on the screen.

the main reason this drawing session wasn’t a challenge despite me working in 3D space however was because of two very key ingredients to making painting things in 3D work (at least in my opinion): plopping down a cube which I then stretched to be bigger and turning on the “surface snap” feature offered by the paint tool (which effectively snaps your paint brush to the surface of any object, thus allowing me to effectively work in a 2D space), without these things painting would be a very different story indeed. (I.E: Colouring would be rendered impossible for me to do, due to having to worry about the Z axis)

Tomorrow it’ll be more of the same really (mainly because I didn’t have the foresight to make the 2D assets in advance), cheerio

Production Day 19: Rondo Paint for the C-Gull Generive

that’s right, the painting continues

Production Streams

Insert original paint related reflection pun here

well then, I certainly had a rather productive day today, I spent the entire day painting all the assets I need for when Cartridge explains his little plan and I’ve got to say, I think I’m doing fairly well so far (considering the aforementioned lack of foresight) because I’ve already gotten most of the assets finished (I just need to do the bowling set and I can actually animate this part and once that’s finished I can move on to the next bit)

one thing that actually happened inbetween streams was with the music I chose to use while making the paintings (the “creative exercise” track from Mario Paint), I decided to remix the track so that it had more of a SEGA Mega Drive sound to it because it felt slightly weird that I was using a track with a Super Nintendo Sound font to paint characters that are references to the SEGA Genesis so I replaced all the instruments with Mega Drive instruments (hence why the music sounds different across both streams)

I should note however is that in order to get certain colours (like the hot pink and 90’s neon green) was that I actually had to bring in the 3D model of Bitris 16 and use the colour picker tool on his hair and his glasses in order to have those colours to use with the paint tools, that way I could make the colours accurate to the character, but as a stick figure

Sort of like what happened with Elfrix’s design process
but now we’re turning them into stick figures (so it’s in reverse)

so yeah, I get the feeling I’ll be done painting tomorrow (considering just how much I’ve done today), and then it’ll be on to placing everything where it needs to be so that I can have cameras pointed at them all, cheerio.

Production Day 20: we did it boys, we completed the Mario Painting

that’s right gang, we’re done painting! pop the champagne

Production Streams

wow, that was short

Some paint based celebration

and just like I predicted yesterday, we are done with all that Mario Painting for this scene and producing the scene itself afterwards was a piece of cake (just a couple of cameras and some quick animations here and there and we’re golden)

now as for the painting, it was actually quite fun to paint all those assets as I was going along (thanks in no small part to the Storyboards I’d made earlier to use as a reference, perhaps I could make a cartoon like this someday), especially when I had that Mario Paint tune playing in the background the entire time. Don’t worry, the Mario Paint tune isn’t a part of the actual soundtrack, I’m only using it as production music like I did with all that Sonic music when making the assets originally (and even then, I only used the Mario Paint tune to fulfil a funny joke opportunity)

The main assets I painted today was the bowling set for the big “let me explain the plan” scene. (and now we’ve finished it Scoob)

Tomorrow, I can finally start work on the next scene (and subsequently go back to 3D land), so yeah, I may need to get clever if I want to avoid having to split it into too many chunks, cheerio

Production Day 21: The Search For Productivity

Production Stream

under cooked reflection

Right, let me just say that today was not very productive at all (and I’ve only just gotten started too), all I managed to do was put a doorway into the Planning scene (seeing how I forgot to do it yesterday) and create a single pose for Cartridge (and off camera I saved all the 2-D Paintings as assets for future use), so in other words, not much happened today and as a Direct result this reflection section is underwhelmingly short, hopefully tomorrow I’ll get way more things done. Cheerio.

Production Day 22: eh, it was better than nothin I suppose

Production Stream

Some Slightly Less Underwhelming Reflection

well, today was… better than yesterday to say the least (not by very much considering the fact that I still didn’t do much), for one thing I actually did a little bit more animation than I did yesterday (pop the mildly fizzy Pepsi folks), mainly on Captain Cartridge, and I thought it was a good Idea to have some production music in order to speed things up. well that’s all for now, cheerio.

Production Day 23: we’re slowly getting back on track

but before we do anything else…

We Interrupt This Program to bring you another Project Management Update

OOOOOOOH NOOOOOOO! TIME’S CATCHING UP SCOOB!

we now return to your regularly scheduled program

Production Stream

even the puns are running dry

Rumours of Reflection

well hey, things are slowly starting to get back on track at least (although I probably shouldn’t say that on account of how I have a tendency to jinx a pretty good flow every time this production goes well), I think the reason for this is because I’ve started to get some production music (the stuff you’ve been hearing in the background for the past few days that WON’T make it into the final soundtrack), because it gives me something to listen to in the background while I do the animation (thus engaging me further in the work), although this is only a recent strategy so who knows how that will pan out.

Today I mainly animated Bitris 16 placing Randimeer onto Cartridge’s Back, and boy was it rather time consuming because I had to animate both characters at the same time and with the way I chose to go about this, I couldn’t progress with Bitris until Randi was at the same stage of the animation as Bitris was, so there’s that (thank goodness I though to organise those timelines or that shot would have been an even bigger nightmare to animate), overall I think this scene may be the most difficult to animate thus far (when you consider everything that’s suppose to happen from Randi being on Cartridge’s Back the whole time, a rope has to eventually be seen and they have to float in space to get the rubbish), luckily, I still have time (although I don’t have a lot of it) to animate all of that, so I think it’ll all work out in the end, cheerio.

Production Day 24: We’re Going Places

that’s right, we’re finally getting back on track

Production Streams

Reflecting like some guy

now this is more like it, although I did have to do a lot of other stuff besides animating I.E: making element versions of some of the Generive’s other areas (by simply remixing the scenes and saving the remixes as elements) so that I wouldn’t have to split the scene into chunks, now you’re probably wondering “but Scoob, why didn’t you simply put the locations in as scenes?” well the reason I didn’t simply do that was because in Dreams you can’t place entire scenes into a world unless said scenes are saved as elements (which yes, I have seen that happen before), hence why I remixed those areas to save them as elements this time around. (although thinking about it, I probably could have simply saved them as elements the first time around and save myself that little bit of hassle)

Besides that today was mainly animating Cartridge and friends and getting the Airlock of The Generive into the scene (that way I could simply teleport the characters there once I was done with the Cartridge bit), overall not very much actual animation took place today due to the hassle I’d mentioned in the first paragraph (you know, with the asset saving and everything), but I do think the production music helped me get more done today than I would have without it.

Another thing I want to mention is the rope. why? because I think that the rope will be the greatest challenge of this scene, so attempting to account for this, I decided to make the rope that extends from Randi’s back go as long as I could so that you wouldn’t see the end on-screen. Needless to say this may have led to some complications of it’s own considering how when you make the rope physical it barely affects the bottom part (where Randi is) even with maximum gravity applied to it (which to me is a little bit weird), although I’m sure I’ll figure something out tomorrow, cheerio.

Production Day 25: Back in the open space

I’ve got to admit, it feels a bit weird being back here once again talking about Cartridge picking up that rubbish (considering how that brief bit use to be the whole cartoon), but I’m glad I made it to this point in the end.

Production Streams

the only reason there’s three is because this one got cut short due to speculated internet issues relating to these streams that my old man was facing with his work

and this joke is enhanced by what game Youtube seems to think this is a stream of (here’s a hint, it involved someone who’d rather flex their muscles than chuckle)

Reflection 3D: and Knuckles

aw yeah, now that’s what I’m talking about! a nice, productive bit of production baby!

in all seriousness though some real progress was made today, I’ve made it all the way up to animating Cartridge grabbing that rubbish (the part the entire cartoon was building to in the first place, and the part that got animated originally), and now I’m finishing up the process of getting Cartridge to pick up that rubbish

you know, it’s funny. I took a good few weeks to animate just this small part way back when (and that was AFTER cutting everything else out), and now I’m currently in the process of finishing up that bit in only a day (although the fact I’m animating in a video game might have something to do with it), funny how that works out.

speaking of that part, I can use this as an opportunity to highlight the differences between 2D and 3D animation. in the 2D version I didn’t have to worry much about parts of Cartridge clipping into the environment (mainly because technically there is no environment besides whatever’s in the background layers), nor did I have to worry about his poses looking good at every possible angle (heck I didn’t even have to worry about drawing parts that weren’t currently SHOWING) because when drawing, there’s only one angle anyway. Another thing 2D has over 3D is that you don’t have to worry about the face being obscured in shadow (unless you want it to be) because once again, there’s no lighting to speak of. (unless you draw the highlights and shadows yourself)

Meanwhile in 3D animation (and most Stop Motion projects), you actual have to account for the lighting of the scene or else you won’t be able to see key parts of the character (you know, like their mouths and eyes if they have any) and if you only make a pose look good from one angle, it’s not going to be enough because if parts of the character are clipping into each other, the audience will likely notice (if it’s obvious enough to pull the audience out of the story) so you’ve got to make it look good from every conceivable angle even if the audience only ever see one in the final product. You also have to account for all 3 Dimensions of movement (including depth) which means if you want the characters to do things (like say press a button to open an airlock), you have to account for the character’s arm length (because there’s only so much you can exaggerate it before it looks weird) so if you get it wrong, you’ll either have to change the scene entirely (like I did) or simply bring the object closer to the character in question. so yeah, both of them have their unique challenges to over come, moving on.

Today I mainly animated Cartridge walking through the hallway and opening that airlock to go outside, the airlock bit was a bit of a challenge due to me having the rope’s end never became visible on screen, but I eventually solved it with a wiper (which is different from a doorway because it allows me to have the scene fade to black without actually leaving the scene itself, thus keeping the whole thing as one continuous sequence) and a cleverly placed cut to the disc before we fade back to the scene and Cartridge can get that disc.

Tomorrow I’ll finish up animating that part and then it’ll be on to the part where life slaps Cartridge in the face, much like what 2020’s been doing to the world since it began with at least one disaster every month, whether it be Covid 19 sweeping the world (that one’s still on going as of this post), buildings blowing up, riots in the american streets over racism, World War 3 almost happening on numerous occasions (with the way tensions are in some countries I’m surprised it hasn’t been straight up declared yet) and even fire sweeping across Australia. (and that’s not even all of them) And with that depressing note, Cheerio.

Production Day 26: more spacey shenanigans

we’re still spacing it boys

Production Streams

Reflonction

we’re getting closer and closer to the end now boys (and girls too), I just have to animate Cartridge answering Sur-Vey’s call and him wanting someone to hit the target and then boom, the main cartoon’s over (afterwards I can animate a hot new Dinny Done Here Folks using the old one as a base), at that point I’ll be doing the lip sync for the cartoon (that’s right, I didn’t forget about that part) and any other additional clean up that’s needed before I release it to the world.

Today I continued work on the space sequence (so far he’s been tied up by his own rope) and so far it’s going pretty good. to achieve the smear effect (albeit with said smear currently static at the moment) I’d simply painted a disc and coloured it with all the colours of Cartridge’s Pallet (except the greenish-blue for Rondo The Dog), made it invisible by default and when the Supreme Bambino ship goes by (as indicated by the camera shaking and a whooshing sound going off), I made Cartridge invisible at the same time as the Smear becomes visible (although it’s currently not finished yet as you can tell with Randi still being visible the whole time), when Cartridge comes back on the screen though he’s just a bit different (mainly in that he’s been tied up), I achieved that by simply making that cylinder I’d made earlier visible once the smear was over.

Tomorrow I plan on working on the effect further and getting that call made, cheerio.

Production Day 27: fixin some effects

we’re doing up the smear

Production Stream

Pen’d-a-flection

ok, so I was suppose to start this earlier today, but I’d run into some issues getting the stream to work so I had to wait a while and do the stream at a much later time than normal.

Now as for what I did today, I simply fixed up the smear effect by making Randimeer invisible too. and from there I simply made the effect a little bit more dynamic using a rotator to spin the smear (that way we can get a little movement going), after that I began animating the part where Cartridge takes the call except I’ve kind of stopped there for today, Tomorrow I’ll have to figure out what to do for the big pile of rubbish that gets revealed (and if I play my cards right, I’ll even get to animate the part where Cartridge gets that target paper out), cheerio

Production Day 28: Ladies and Gentlemen…

…we got em

Production Streams

We did it gang, we’ve animated the Cartoon

wow, I didn’t think I’d actually finish the basic animation for this cartoon today (gotta give myself some kind of props for this)

Today I did a little bit of painting for the big pile of rubbish (because there’s noway I’m getting a ton of models together with my current skillset) and then I quickly put together a (rather thick) piece of paper with a target spray painted onto it while animating Cartridge taking Sur-Vey’s call. so yeah, a lot happened today in a small space of time.

I also did a couple of new voice clips for Cartridge while my Dad wasn’t working and I’d say they came out alright in the end (especially the one I did for when he’s spinning really fast) because now there’s actual noise (no the vast emptiness of space doesn’t count as noise I’m afraid) to break the silence (although sometimes silence is paramount to making a joke work)

after I’d finished animating the end scene I figured I could at least get started on the Dinny Done sequence (which is a remix of the Super Sheep one), so I recorded Cartridge’s voice and used keyframes to make it so that the music turned up once he finished talking, but while I was recording for Cartridge, I realised that I didn’t know if I’d get the opportunity to do voices for a while, so for the sake of facilitating the creation of a template version I can use over and over if I need to (and to save myself time in the future), I decided to also record basically the same dialogue but with the other characters I’ve made:

the one that’ll actually feature in this Toon
I didn’t feel like reusing the other “dinny done here folks” line so I just recorded a better one
took a few takes due to my improvisational nature
took a few goes but I think I’ve got a good feel for his voice (besides I can always change it later if I don’t like it)

Tomorrow I’ll animate Cartridge’s friends (in much the same way I animated the other characters in the Convention F-3 Short) and then I’ll get to work on the credits sequence, cheerio.

Production Day 29: Creditin

now we’re doing the credits

Production stream

Ravlection

Dad gum what a day, I finished up the Dinny Done here folks bit by posing the rest of the characters, and then I got started on the Credits sequence.

for the credits I simply gathered together every character and prop I’d used in the Short (including the stuff from the Slamination Logo) into one location (the main worry here was the graphics thermo) and got a bunch of text dis-players to display their names (the names that come up on the Dreamiverse), tomorrow I’ll be working on actually getting the credits going (like with the words n stuff), cheerio.

Production Day 30: Crustaceanal Crediting

Even Mr. Krabs could get on board with this

Some Crabby Reflection

well boys, we did it. we finally finished that darned credit sequence.

Honestly doing the credits wasn’t very hard (all I did was place some cameras around the characters and props and then make sure some music played the entire time (except for when there’s sound effects and other music playing) while text let’s you know who made what. it was overall not really interesting from a reflection stand point if I can be perfectly honest. Tomorrow I can now move on to the lipsync and clean up phase of production, cheerio

Production Day 31: lip stync

oh boy, I can tell this is going to be a bit of a challenge

Production Stream

Some Glossy Reflection

and so, The clean up and lip-sync begins.

I can already tell that lip-syncing is going to be a challenge, mainly due to how tedious today’s process was, I acheived the (admittedly not very good) results by simply sticking in a whole load of key frames with each one switching the mouth to a predetermined painting (for example, it could be an L, an E or a general open mouth position), this was done for all the characters (that speak) in the scene which as you can tell, might get a little tedious after a while, but it has to be done here because of the more dialogue heavy nature when compared to the previous short:

looking back I probably should have lip-synced Super Sheep saying “We’re Dinny Done Here Folks,” but again, this wasn’t very dialogue heavy.

but with Captain Cartridge on the other hand, I don’t get to skip the lip-sync process because this time, characters actually say more than just “We’re Dinny Done Here Folks.” Tomorrow it’ll be more of the same but for the next scene. Cheerio

Production Day 32X: Still Syncing

yup, we’re going there

Production Stream

That Sandy Reflection

Much like yesterday, today pretty much consisted entirely of me doing some of that lip-syncing and netting a personal record of under an hour (not bad for only the second scene of the cartoon), and like last time… it got tedious to say the least. (but if all goes well it should only take me a few more days to complete the lip-syncing, even if it’s not the greatest thing in the world) Tomorrow it’ll be more of the same really, cheerio.

We Once Again Interrupt This Program to Bring you Another (rather late) Project Management Update

well it’s a good thing I’m wrapping things up or else I’d be in even more danger than I am now

Production Day 33: Syncing to the Depths Below

We are going to Reach the Titanic boys and girls (and attack helicopters and everything in between)

Production Stream

Ron-Flection

and with today, we’ve officially set ourselves…

27 minutes aint bad

today was more of the same thing as yesterday (lip-syncing n stuff), but this time, I realised something (perhaps I should have realised this sooner given how these are MY characters), the character’s default position is usually a closed smile. So I figured “hey, why am I doing keyframes in the blank spaces between words when I could simply leave them blank” (I mean, the characters are usually smiling anyway), of course, I’d still have to do the closed mouth keyframes if the characters are frowning but it’ll be no big deal. other than that startling revilation, not much changed (it was still rather tedious, but the Sonic Music made it less tedious), tomorrow I’ll be lip-synicing the part before Cartridge explains his brilliant plan. Cheerio.

Production Day 34: Sync Drying

in the words of that one US president (i think it was Regan) “Ladies and Gentlemen, we got em.” I only have the Dinny Done part to go and we’re set.

Production Streams

Randi-flection

well gang, the main cartoon now officially has some form of lip-syncing, now I just have the Dinny Done part to go and we’re all set. but for now cue the victory theme:

This part (while relatively quick) was rather tedious to say the least, but it’s worth it because now the characters actually look like they’re saying things to each other rather than forming the impression that everyone’s just thinking their lines like in Garfield does in Garfield And Friends (of course this is a perfectly legitimate way of doing things depending on what your going for):

I should note that human characters such as Jon actually move their lips when they talk.

another thing I did today (particularly during the last part) was add in some extra sound effects (which is something I’ll be doing for the next few days) and give Randi and Bitris 16 a little bit more life. In the case of Bitris I added some extra expression to his face and with Randi I simply made him move a little bit more during the space part. (that was my favourite part of the day to be honest, because I did a little bit more animating)

Originally I was only going to to the part before Cartridge explained his plan (I would have done the final scene tomorrow) but at some point I thought “what the heck, I’ve come this far, why ruin a good streak?” (hence why there were two production streams today) which means tomorrow is pretty much dedicated to the “Dinny Done Here Folks” portion. Cheerio.

Production Day 35: Lip-Synced Resurgence

we did it lads, the lis-syncing is finished (for reals this time)

Production Stream

Rev-ioli-oction

well gang, The Dinny Done sequence is finished (and in record time too) you know twhat this means right, it means I have a little extra time to do some further clean up before the big ol’ due date I set for myself (maybe I’ll get to animate the logo after all), tomorrow I’ll start that clean up. Cheerio

Production Day 36: Clean Up and the rise of the Gamer Headphones

I got to test out my new gamer headphones too

Production Stream

Sparkling Reflection

Today I mostly did a little bit of re-posing for the huddle up part by taking the characters arms and making it look more like they’re actually touching each others shoulders (or Randi’s head) and added a couple of new voice clips by recording them using a different microphone. let me explain, you see this whole time when I needed to record voices, I’d usually get close to the play station eye and say whatever dialogue (or hip new noise) would be required, that was until I got some new Gamer Headphones to celebrate passing my English with one of those microphones you talk into. (which now means I no longer need to get ridiculously close to the TV every time I need new dialogue or noises) The thing is that I got them after I’d already done all of the dialogue (so any new voice clips I may need will use the new gamer headphones)

I also attempted to fix an issue with the rope during the space scene (where it appears to detach from Randi for a breif bit because of the way I’d set up the position keyframes for Cartridge), except when I tried to see which frames the problem occurred at, I strangely couldn’t find anything (yet whenever the cartoon plays the issue occurs), so this may be an issue i’m unable to fix for the time being. Tomorrow I’ll see if there’s anything else to clean up and afterwards I’ll probably animate the logo. Cheerio.

Production Day 36: continued wiping

but before we do anything else

We Interrupt This Program To Bring You Another Project Management Update

so there’s only a week left of production now, but that’s ok. I’m almost finished now.

We Now Return To Your Regularly Scheduled Project Production

Which is already almost over already

Production Stream

A Rather Shiny Reflection

and thus, brings the conclusion to what needs to be cleaned up (at least until tomorrow when I inevitably decide to clean something else), and I’ve got to admit something. I might not animate the logo this time around, mostly so that it doesn’t add any needless filler to the run time and I’m kind of lacking the time necessary to do this job.

I should mention that those gamer headphones seem to put out pretty good recording quality compared to the Eye-Toy 3’s (my little nickname for the Playstation Eye because PS2 nostalgia must live on dang it) microphone (which was kept close to the Tv so it picked up the PS4’s noisy fan, unlike the gamer headphones), I know this is a bit of a random tangent but I never actually mentioned how the headphones’ microphone was in comparison to the Eye-Toy 3. (well, the headphones do sometimes give a crackle, but I just have to move the mic further to the side and I’ve fixed it)

Honestly I’m not sure what I’ll do tomorrow, I could put the whole thing in Share Factory and release it on YouTube now, but I kind of ant to see if there’s still any bits that need cleaning first, we’ll see what I do tomorrow, Cheerio.

Production_Day.Numb{Syntax Error}: Text=Null_Value.

I took a break today

Although I did go through the whole thing once more and found nothing that needed cleaning up (yet), cheerio.

Production Day 37: Licensed Feedback

aah yes, today was quite an interesting ride

Production Streams

and then the licence expired for a bit

and this one came about at the last minute after a friend gave me some feedback (also I now realise that I didn’t insert “And Knuckles” in there, what a missed opportunity)

Reflection and Spine Feeding

well today certainly was rather bumpy, but also quite interesting as I actually had to be on my toes a little bit. What am I talking about? well you see, before the first stream happened, I’d gotten a warning that nboth the media player and Dreams PS4’s digital licences could not be verified and the apps would shut down in 15 minutes (that was the first warning), I didn’t think anything of it (sometimes my internet can peter out for a split second then come back) so I decided to push on with today’s first stream, until about a minute in where the game actually closed like the PlayStation said it would.

This is what all the Digital games (and the media player app) looked like while this was happening. This meant I could not go in the game and continue streaming

and If I tried to fix it I got this message (which didn’t help at the time but I’m sure in other situations it would more more useful, also hi Banjo)

After I tried fixing this nonsense myself I turned to the internet and it turned out I wasn’t the only one with this problem (lots of people were having this problem at the same time) so this meant the PSN (or PlayStation Network) was down. One guy suggested doing a system update to see if that fixes it (it didn’t, but bless the guy for trying to help out either way)

luckily, I had the perfect strategy to cope with this. I call it G. U. A. P. M. I. (also known as Giving Up And Playing Minecraft Instead):

Super Mario Bros. Map 1.12.2/1.11.2 for Minecraft - 9Minecraft.Net — Ha Ha, Mario in Minecraft go Whee

after I gave up and Played Minecraft with the Super Mario textures for long enough I decided to check back and found that the problem had been fixed (which meant there was some maintenance going on that they never even mentioned anywhere as far as I’m aware) thus allowing me to continue on (although I did have to reactivate my PS4 as the Primary one for some reason that was likely related to the maintenance I think)

So after that whole mess I actually got started with the next bit of clean up I wanted to do. I mainly added some motion blur to the part where the characters are running (and only the part where they’re running) because I wanted it to sort of mimic the smear effect you see in most cartoons (and I thought it looked a bit better) and I gave Voltrix a little bit more characterisation by having him point and laugh at Cartridge when Bitris 16 calls him an old man. The reason I did this was so that the characters would seem more alive. (unlike in SOME cartoons by a certain MacFarlane where everyone mostly stands around motionless, or OTHER even worse cartoons about a man who’s lips inexplicably become realistic whenever he opens his Clutched mouth)

And that’s where things would have ended, I would have blogged this up, stated what I’d be doing tomorrow and maybe even made a final joke (probably at the expense of PlayStation given today’s events), that was until a friend of mine knocked at my door while I was reminiscing about the LittleBigPlanet days. I showed him around, we played a game of gang beasts or two and I showed him the Captain Cartridge Cartoon. it was there however that he actually gave some feedback about it (I wasn’t even thinking about that part until that happened), his feed back was mainly about how the motion blur had made the characters faces difficult to see (given the way they run) and when Cartridge flew out of the airlock, he suggested adding an extra little “whee.” (although he though that the rope disappearing after Cartridge’s big gasp wasn’t intentional, so I had to explain that it was. to be fair though I can now see where he’s coming from given the lack of sound)

After he left I thought, “holy cow, I actually got feedback on my cartoon before it came out” and then I realised “hey wait a minute I could literally go ahead and make those changes like right now,” so I went and did exactly that. However, instead of making the exact changes he suggested I came to a middle ground by simply reducing the motion blur to just the part where our heroes are running past the camera (it wasn’t that hard really, just take the key frame and make it so that it only lasts for that specific shot) and instead of having Captain Cartridge say “whee” when he got sucked out of the airlock, I simply had him let out a scream of terror instead. (because this takes place in space)

so yeah, looks like tomorrow’s job will be to add a sound effect for when Cartridge breaks the rope. Hopefully Sony doesn’t randomly maintain their network without telling anyone in advance. Cheerio.

Production Day 38: Ropes and Slapping Slap-stars

needless to say, I did more than I expected to today

Production Stream

Rongo-Flection

well folks today got rather busy in terms of the cartoon today, the main thing I did was add in some sound and visual effects to make it more obvious that the rope is suppose to disappear (although looking back, I can see why my friend from yesterday thought it was a mistake initially, I mean… it did literally just disappear before. Also I think the new editions make it look better), the hard part was actually trying to find the right sound effect (from my asset list I mean), so I settled on modifying one of the sounds from the LittleBigPlanet: Pirates of The Caribbean Pack (thus justifying Disney being on the Copyright part below the sound effect credits) to sound a little bit more like rope being torn. (not the most ideal choice but I didn’t want to add yet another set of sound effects from the Dreamiverse to the credits)

This wasn’t the only thing I did today (much to my own shock) as I also did a little thinking last night about how the “establishing shot” before we meet Cartridge seemed rather unnecessary in the grand scheme of things, so I decided to cut it out and see how things flowed. Needless to say, things ended up flowing slightly better than they did before because let’s face it, all that shot was really doing was establishing that this takes place in space. (which one could already infer from the title card, the font choice for the card and credits, the YouTube thumbnail, the designs of characters such as Voltrix, Randi, Sur-Vey and Bitris 16 and to some extent, what the characters themselves are wearing)

Another thing I was pondering about was how the stakes might be a bit too vague (or worse, non existent) to motivate the audience to actually care about the characters in the grand scheme of things unlike in Super Sheep’s Cartoon where the stakes were made clear as soon as The Night Pig saw that sign (and that one didn’t even have spoken dialogue), of course now it’s too late to rewrite the script, I’ve basically almost finished (so unless I can rewrite the script, re-do all the storyboards, reanimate the whole thing and redo the voice lines in the next 4 days, I’m out of luck), but it’s something to remember for next time at the very least.

I also decided to do some further work on the part where the characters are standing at the space lift to give Cartridge in particular a little bit more life (much like Voltrix), I figured “hey, what if Cartridge responded to Voltrix’s silent laughter by simply threatening to slap him silly? that’d be hilarious.” As a result, I also had to re-tool Voltrix’s animation a little bit so that he actually reacted to it. (because if he didn’t it would imply that Cartridge’s threat was little more than a joke to him) Overall I’m really liking how the cartoon’s coming together, although I think I should make tomorrow the last day for any actual alterations, the reason for this is because I feel if I don’t do this now, I won’t make my self imposed deadline. (or my Sunday release date which I decided on a few days ago) After that it’s time for the editing phase. (which shouldn’t take long considering I’m just cutting out potential load times) Cheerio

Production Day 39: Final Altercy

if this section ever gets sequels I might just skip right to seven

Production Stream

Reflecteroff

and with that, I’m officially done animating the cartoon, so no more streaming (unless I can broadcast myself using the Share-Factory on my Playstation to edit the cartoon footage I’ll be recording tomorrow), but that doesn’t mean I’m finished period (at least not yet) because now comes the editing phase, where I’ll be cutting out any possible load times from the footage I will have recorded earlier, of course in most productions that’s not how this phase is suppose to work (because by then you’re actually editing the raw footage by adding things like sound effects, voice-overs and even the music) but given the unorthodox way I’ve been doing things (and the fact that I used a video game to create this), it all ends up resulting in the editing phase turning into what I like to call “baby’s first touch ups,” and then after that I’ll basically sit on the footage until Sunday when I release the full Cartoon on YouTube, and considering how I’m restarting college later than expected, I might as well use the newly opened week to evaluate the whole thing. Cheerio

Production Day 40: Can we stream it? yes we can

although it did take two attempts to get it working.

Production Stream

The first attempt was so screwed it doesn’t even exist anymore

The Reflectors: Endgame

and just like that, we’ve officially finished production, now all that’s left is for me to release it tomorrow

as you can see, the complete video’s sitting on the computer, waiting to be uploaded to the internet

editing pretty much consisted of me searching for any long pauses between scenes and making them shorter by removing much of the unneeded space (including the stuff that accidentally got recorded prior due to how the PS4 works), this was rather easy to do considering the simplicity of the split clip function on Share-Factory.

Overall not much of note happened in this phase so I’ll use this part to mention some stuff I forgot to mention yesterday.

So yesterday, I pretty much made some last minute alterations, mainly towards the rope when Cartridge gets tied up (which before then looked like little more than a rope coloured cylinder), I altered the rope by using the sculpt tools to remove some of the surface area from the cylinder in order to make it look more like an actual rope would (what with all it’s curves and bumps), I also turned on the soft blending feature so that the edits didn’t look too garish or sharp, this was rather simple to do as all I was really doing was editing a model slightly (as well as changing the fleck type using the style mode in order to pronounce that rope like texture), the other thing I did was add a little bit of music that wasn’t composed by me at all (because again, I want to release this on Sunday and there’s no way I’d be able to compose a new piece in the time I had left), the music I chose was actually part of a bigger song called “bouncer” by the dreamer known as Duckenomics (although the ending part I used was actually released separately as “you lose”), the only alteration I made to this piece was replacing all the instruments with SEGA Mega Drive ones to keep with the theme of all the music sounding like it would fit in an old SEGA game, the hardest part was actually getting it into place (although even then everything worked out well in the end), and because of the fact I used Duckenomics’ music I also had to stick em in the credits around where the music was. so yeah, I can’t wait to release it tomorrow, Cheerio.

The Finished Cartoon

Some Evaluation

well gang we did it, we finally got Captain Cartridge the cartoon he deserves (pop the campaign boys), now for this part, we’re going to do some evaluation, where we look back at the full production of the cartoon and find out what went well and what went wrong. So without further a-do, let’s hop right to it. Starting with…

The Script

ok, so here there might not be much to say here considering I simply re-used the original script from the first time I tried this project. The only things I would say is that I could have done a bit of a rewrite (even if it does mean I lose a little bit more time) so that I could alter certain lines of dialogue, mainly the one about Cartridge needing to save his life story for the big screen:

Trolls World Tour gets a new poster ahead of VOD release — because given the financial success of the Video On Demand release of both Trolls World Tour and Scoob! during lock-down and given how even the new Spongebob movie is skipping out on a theatrical release everywhere despite being delayed to 2021 (except in Canada where, as of this section, it’s currently playing in cinemas as we speak), I wouldn’t be surprised if it meant the end of cinemas as we know them, thus ruining my dreams of getting Super Sheep, Captain Cartridge and friends in cinemas before they even begin (unless Film Theory is somehow right about the stadium thing)

so yeah, maybe a rewrite could have ushered in some better jokes as well if we’re being honest.

Now what went well was that having the characters say their lines went off without much of a hitch and I even got to do the odd bit of ad-libbing here and there, which is always a plus in my book. (mainly some subtle changes to the dialogue here and there)

now let’s move on to…

The Storyboards

aaah yes, the storyboards. re-doing those was a blast because it netted me the opportunity to make any changes to the visuals that I needed to (like changing certain camera angles, for example: when Cartridge is yelling at Bitris 16, I made it so that the shot doesn’t change to an overhead shot so that you could see his face better) and doing that may have saved certain shots (such as, once again, Cartridge yelling at Bitris 16):

in this version you can see the face a lot easier
and while I think the variety of angles here is rather neat, I just don’t think the overhead shot is necessary looking back

one thing I wish I did was create an animatic (and more storyboard frames), especially because cartoons are all about how each character moves and doing an animatic probably would have helped me gain an Idea as to how I should time everything:

much like this clip does (as you can see, it’s a different version of the scene. And in terms of the inconsistent voices it’s because they switch between the scratch voices and the final audio due to the way this is being shown after the film was complete)

I recommend going 32 seconds in and starting the comparison from there

just putting this here for completion sake

the animatic version of the clip(s) you’ve no doubt watched are important because they help the animators and artists know what the rough aesthetic of the film is as well as how to time everything out. (even though the drawing quality for these usually isn’t that good due to their throw away nature) The least I could have done was get some robots to do the scratch voices (just like I did for a certain Radio Drama I made a while ago) because that would have meant not doing 9 million takes for some dialogue that may not even make it in (although that will probably still happen), another important thing I should note is how I used the storyboard as a form of quick rewrite for the project (changing minor bits of dialogue here and there as I went), this is something I’ve done for previous projects in the past (not a lot of those previous projects made it past the storyboard phase before basically being unceremoniously cancelled) and I believe it helps me improve things before I get to work for real because I can try out different versions of a particular scenario before coming to a final decision. Now that that’s been cleared up, we can move on to talk about…

The Concept Art

and now we have the Phase I didn’t even think about originally until it randomly popped into my head one night, ladies and gentlemen, the Concept Art.

VideoGameArt&Tidbits on Twitter | Mario, Retro, Game concept — aaaah yes, back when New Donk City was supposed to have more Mario-esque humans with Mario references before they decided to change it for realistic aesthetic with Donkey Kong references

Overall I had a lot of fun making the concept art (even if the art itself isn’t very good), I’d say my favourite concept art to make was for the Generive Lounging Quarters:

ah yes, this fine piece (in comparison to my other works)

the reason I ultimately like this one the most is because it got me thinking about how I could improve on backgrounds in general (and it gave me the Idea to washout the background colours so that the Characters could stand out in a 2D cartoon) and it has a nice 3D illusion to it (even though it doesn’t look good it doesn’t necessarily have to look too good considering how, similar to storyboards, they’re designed to be thrown away if they need to be)

of course the approach I took with the Concept art isn’t the only way to do this:

Toy Story - Concept Art | Pixar concept art, Disney concept art, Concept art — This piece for example was carefully painted

Toy Story 2 concept art | Pixar concept art, Disney animation art, Disney concept art — this piece was done with those sweet sweet water-colour pencils

A History of Toy Story | Retro Junk Article — this piece for Tempas from Morph (later swapped to Lunar Larry, and then Buzz Light-year) was done using regular pencils

Lego — Asavari Kumar — and this piece uses flat colours (reminds me of Kurtzkezart)

as you can see, there’s thousands of approaches I could have taken with it (although I don’t think I’d be good at a lot of them besides the pencil and flat colours), but I kind of like the relative simplicity of my approach (where I do a bunch of lines using the line tool and then colour the whole thing in with the fill tool), now that that’s been finished, let’s discuss…

The Asset List

now here, what went well was the organisation of the list into several smaller lists (mainly because I wanted to easily keep track of everything), although there were still some assets that I didn’t quite account for (I.E: the paddle balls) but other than that, we’re good it also helps that I actually did it the asset lists AFTER the storyboards (not like LAST TIME), now we can move on to…

The Animation

and so we find ourselves here, talking about the actual animation phase. This part was the bit I enjoyed doing most because I was more or less in my element (especially once I brought in the production music) getting all those characters into motion and bringing everything to life. Although I did kind of skip a certain phase which is rather important, The layout. now what’s a “layout” you ask. well it’s here you take the character models and you move them around to get the timing right, but you don’t fully animate them yet. you want some examples, lemme show you what I mean:

now typically with these things the lighting and sound are either non existent or temporary due to how early we’d be in the animation process at this point. This scene also demonstrates different ways that a modern CGI animator would typically block out the movements (for example, one minute they’ll simply snap the character to the next key pose and the next the model will be sliding around all over the place)

This one from The Incredibles 2 is a little bit more indicative of what a typical layout would sound like, where they use mainly temporary sounds (if they have sounds at all)

The reason I didn’t do this particular phase was because I was doing the animation rather quickly (which unfortunately meant I cut that oh so important corner)

I’d say the hardest part I had to animate was actually whenever Randimeer was attached to Cartridge’s back because I had to find a way to make Randi move with Cartridge (and that’s because trying the obvious way of simply sticking the two models together caused Cartridge to bug out) without much clipping going on (but as you can see in the final version, there’s still some clipping going on there)

The other main challenge came after I’d finished the basic animation. And that was lip-syncing, the reason for this was because before now, I haven’t ever had to worry about lip-syncing in the past, mostly because I never animated back then (outside of College stuff, and even then I didn’t really need to lip-sync because most of the time the characters are either grunting or silent), although there were some slight hiccups that I never addressed (likely because of the way the key-frames for the different mouth poses sometimes over lapped slightly) I’d say the lip syncing came out quite well, even if it could be way better, but that’s something I can address in the future (and who knows, maybe I won’t even be playing video games to animate by then)

likewise, the easiest things to animate were actually the running cycles for the characters, the reason for this is because I only had to animate one actual run-through and set that on loop (while making sure the beginning and end frames are the same for a clean, seamless loop) and hey presto, instant run cycle. And then at that point all I had to really do was move the character models while the animation plays and the characters appear to be running (it even works when the background and floor are doing the brunt of the movement while the characters stay still)

now that we’ve looked back, let’s talk about…

The Feedback

the main bits of feedback I got were actually about the sound mixing (mainly how you couldn’t hear what the characters are saying over certain sound effects), so while I was doing this evaluation, I added subtitles to the video to make it easier to understand what Cartridge and friend are saying (with a little humour thrown in for good measure), in fact, the reason the rope pieces even exist is because when I showed a friend before release, they thought the rope disappearing was a mistake. (glad they mentioned it in time for me to fix this at the last minute) But before then, I wasn’t even thinking about how I’d get feedback to be honest (but thank goodness I got it in time or else the project would actively be worse than it was) so this has been quite a lesson in the importance of that phase of production.

In Conclusion

I’m glad I was finally able to properly bring Captain Cartridge and friends to life (the original 15 second version no longer counts, but it is at least an important stepping stone for getting some experience), maybe I could do this again next year if any of my projects happen to suffer a similar fate to that of Captain Cartridge the first time around, plus it made good practice for when I get into level 3. And with that:

But first…

Storyboards: re-boarded

We interrupt this Program to bring you a project management update

We now return you to your regularly schedueld program

So I did some conceptual thinking

What is this, “concept’s art” and where can I find some?

let’s get on with the show

We once again Interrupt this program to bring you another project management update

We now return you to your regularly scheduled program…

Asset-ing the situation

Asset 1: Commander Sur-Vey

Production Streams

Sur-Vey Reflection

Asset 2: Cans with Labels

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Reflective Cans

Assets 3 and 4: Boxy and the Post

Production Streams

Box-tastic Poster reflection

Assets 5-5.5: Compact Discs and composure begginings

Production Stream

Reflection.MP3

Assets 5.5-7: More Music and now Cartridges

Production Streams

Relflection.Executable

Asset 8: The Generive Lounging Quarters

We Interrupt this Program once more to bring you another project management update

Production Streams

Construction Reflection

Asset 9: Insert Cartridge

Production Streams

When Cartridges reflect

Asset 9.5: the hallway

Production Stream

A hall of mirrors

Asset 9.5: The Hallway 2: The Squeakquel

Production Streams

Another Hall of Mirrors

Assets 10-15: Locations, Grades and a wee bit of music

Production Streams

A reflective stew

Assets 16-18: a garbage problem and We’re Dinny Done here folks x2

Production Streams

When notes reflect

We interrupt this program to bring you another Project Management update

Assets 19 and 20: Logos, Paddle balls and a few modifications

Production Streams

Another Fun Filled Reflective Stew

Some more last minute stuff (or just Production day 0)

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The Finished Images

Reflectional feelings

Production Day 0.5: finishing that intro off at last

Production Stream

Reflection

Production Day 1: now we’re using integers

Production Streams

Some Cold Hard Reflection

Production Day 2: finally some Voice acting

Production Streams

*Insert Unfunny Reflection Pun Here*

Production Day 3: some bulk acting, some further animation and a few technical difficulties

Production Streams

Reflection Injection

Production Day 4: realising it was actually NEXT Monday, not this one

We Interrupt This Program To Bring You Another Project Management Update

Production Stream

Rev-lection (ha, Car puns)

Production Day 5: finally getting to the end of the scene

Production Stream

The Mighty Reflections Win!

Production Day 6: We’re Back: A Cartridge Story

Some Jazz I forgot to mention on Day 5

Production Streams

We’re Back: a reflect-osaur story

Production Day 7: gee, it’s been a week already

Production Streams

Reflection deck

Production Day 8: an attempt at hilarity

Production Stream

Insert Unfunny Reflection Pun Here

Insert original paint related reflection pun here