It's bitching up time again!

December 1-7 was a busy week (Yes, I wrote all this at the end of that week but couldn't be bothered posting it, so ha!):
Melbourne officially became a Sayed-free zone (yay!) to the delight of the tourism deparment, and I had my housing inspections done (boo). So, you can imagine I've had to tend to my backgarden, remove what appears to be faeces in the rear walkway (Eeeewwww), clean up the mould/cobwebs in the bathroom, fix up the kitchen vent, clean my room, get the inspections done, all with my stupid grinning naively happy smiley face, check my bank account, visit an old friend in zone 2, see Sayed off, give up my cat to a local animal shelter (*sob*) and then... Jeffrey comes up and wants me to do the anime. Great. Bossy bossy bossy.

Well, I've been able to at least add sound to it, although for some reason the anime did start to slow down a bit during certain frames (an anime that LAGS?! What the hell?!)

So now to keep everyone happy (except for sayed, who's probably sleeping comfortably on his emirates flight as I type this out in draft), I've got to blog about an update to the anime. Luckily for me, that update happens to be Ean. Hehehe...

So anyways... these are the anime eye samples that I made using digital painting techniques in photoshop:


Well, I can't really have Ean as an afro'd blue-eyed damsel, but hey, this is the world of anime. It just wouldn't be right for an anime if everyone sported lush dark brown iris's (Yes, you are all boring and meaningless people).
Coming up next we have the animated Ean files! Hosted off of hotlinkfiles.com! They'll delete these files after 30 days of inactivity, so whatever:



Sooo, what works? Should I use this thick 2.5 pixel outline or the hairline outline? Most anime's use hairlines or 1px. I made expression transitions from Ean_cembetut (I dunno how to spell that in Bahasa but SH might be able to fix it) to Ean_mencret (what's the word for smiling while constipated? hmmmm...). I love how I get mesmerized by the way his hair bounces. Oooh, bouncy, like boobs, only... hairier. And... on a man. Yuck.

And one, last, teeny weensy afterthought... the anime dimensions are 550 by 400. Yep, I'm keeping it small, since I can't be arsed to make one high-def anime for y'all; plus, now it won't kill your bandwidth, so you should all praise and worship my divine foresight. And the artwork isn't my best. I just started out thinking I could do everything by animating symbols and making it all look 2.5D, but it turns out that for complicated full head turns, I'll just have to settle for painful, onionskin-guided frame-by-frame animation. Ouch.

So, does Ean approve?
Instructions: Pick the desired eye/head outline thickness, add any additional statements about the personality/expressions used by your anime avatar, leave to simmer for about 25 days, all while pestering Victor at intermittent and totally annoying times (take notes from Jeffrey's post), and maybe bitch and plead in the process.

For best results, consult your everyday anime references and maybe find fangirls to cater to Victor's every whim (Hey, I've been busy the whole bloody week, so gimme a break!!!!).

Anime's usually take a couple of months to complete. I'm making something amateur-ish, yeah, but I don't want it to be just another thing cluttering up my 'meh' bin. So I guess I'm going to redo a few things and give it my all.

PS: I probably won't ditch the 'unapproved' candidates for the eyes. You got lucky since I had to blog about something, so whichever eye you pick is yours for keeps, but the others go to their respective fosters, Kay, Sayed, SH and Jeffrey. Speaking of which, what the hell am I going to do about Kay's voice?!

Oh, and I've got a music intro loop for the anime's Pilot episode, but I haven't gotten past the first bloody minute! And I've had to redo a few things in scene 1!!!
The thing about proper animes is, you've got to storyboard and plan ahead (and, preferably, have a graphics tablet!). You need a graphics artist to be able to draw some of the backgrounds and props you need, and you need to be able to animate everything in such a way that it all flows seamlessly into the 3rd dimension. So don't expect mine to be all that good. After this, I think I'm just going to let the anime wither a while as I experiment with another one.

So have a 'lil appreciation, folks. A little animation like this, without a drawing tablet or actual team, sets me back a week. A busy week. On a side note, the bouncy hair did make my day. :D Oh, and when I had Ean turn his head, he started to look like a geisha, so I had to redo that too. Hehehehe ... Geisha.