a quick test of the new tablet pressure sensitivity in ASEPRITE, a feature i had looked forward to for quite a while! i drew a nemitz first because anything i made after that could only be an improvement.
“quick” as in i probably meant to draw one frame in ten minutes that transformed into two hours
Unfortunately the way pressure sensitivity is implemented in the program is, so far, more of a detriment to me than help except on larger objects, like the tail here, so I have had it turned off for most of the process on what I did next! The way that works in clip studio I like much better. but if i ever get back to my so ill it transcends pandemic-fated doom-engine-based-construction i may be able to create animated sprite graphics faster for that; I draw them large and have them scaled down in the game so to minimize pixelation
aseprite is the same program I used to make [most of] the other pixel animations that would be found under the “animation” tab had I updated at all recently and not only haven’t I, the stuff that used to be on it no longer shows up because I linked to them from my deviantart account because they were already THERE and I could. That evidently is no longer the case. Ewps. I will hopefully tend to that before 2021.
regrettably i have not been able to give this the attention it needs — i don’t like those static poses during the zoom in– because i want to conclude the terrible “free sketches-turned-needlessly-elaborate-digital-paintings I have been doing through twitter and shouldn’t need more than another two weeks for that, but this at least expresses the general idea of what this “scene” is. i will have to add more clutter and possibly draw it from different angles. i probably spend more time drawing backgrounds than animating at this point.
the recording is not good but circumstances are not always convenient for messing with noises! It at least is adequate for matching visuals to it since I presume (which usually means i am wrong) that re-recordings will have sufficiently similar pacing that the mouths won’t match any worse than they presently do.
Now that i see how pathetic that imp looks getting slapped around i want to give it a higher pitched voice. yesterday i inadvertently found a late 2016 digital interpretation i made of its vague paper sketches that i presumed existed but was not able to locate when I finally, actually got around to starting this in 2019, whose design differs from this one, so I ought to sort of which is the real one before going further. but will I? if it is a good idea, probably not.
the initial piece of animation for the third “first beet” cartoon. Hardly anything happens here. I had been intimidated by the thought of drawing this part for quite a while, more than two years evidently, even though it is not necessarily of great overall importance. Nothing beet-related is! It always looked like this in my mind, except the smoke was different and all the striking objects had spear-points, so it had to be made and included. There was not supposed to be a yeep in it, but i noticed a yeep was perched up there at the end of the second cartoon, and it is meant to transition directly into this one so this is how that went.
The view is supposed to immediately pan up to where the chains are being launched from rather than dwelling on this view, as indicated by the extremely legible scrap of a layout, but i have not drawn that part yet!
for the first time in 15 years I didn’t make a “year in pictures” post and did this instead. I got up to april and realized I didn’t have enough posts with good pictures in them to make that workm since almost everything has been a digital drawing or a comic book page with mostly the same characters on it, and making a video out of all of those seemed more logical. I of course made it a most illogical task and spent nearly two days on it, and it only looks THAT good. If you were in my house today or yesterday and heard me shouting at something, there is a 65% chance it was this or influenced by this. Also I am hopelessly obsessive compulsive and will probably force out a “year in pictures” post anyway!
An animated icon for nafradorf fumblewip.
I made this also some time ago. Presumably it sums itself up.
i thought animating like this would be easier than the other way, a thought which meant it wouldn’t be, but if I didn’t have optimism that a thought which has been wrong every time in the past would be right this time i would probably never try anything new!
Which I mean not to indicate that the thoughts I express at length are wrong; I think these thoughts are generally very right, but there may be no place for them that I have access to. Most people only care about thoughts that are expressed in venues where thoughts can only be expressed in stupid ways. Which makes me angrier, which makes the non-stupid thoughts more complicated and less feasible to complete, even though when they are completish they are guaranteed obscurity so it really isn’t necessary to increase the difficulty factor.
The drafts heap up. One of the drafts there is actually about animations i made or was expected to make for other people who lied and treated me horribly and it is my intention to not drift into that topic while discussing the one up there (a similar thing occurred when I posted the previous icon I made for nafradorf (also the rubber creep sent me ANOTHER message some time after I posted that and I am not afraid of him but he really is horrid). This one took just as long as the ones I am not talking about today but I don’t have ill feelings associated with it. I know this one is the end and I won’t have that specific problem again, because if somebody asks to try it I will see it coming, and I only did it this time because i offered it! And so I won’t get tricked and I won’t have to never finish writing about it!
oh fleeps i just noticed that the yeep momentarily re-appears in the air after it gets shot down, and seems to suffer from that.
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the general layout of a too long overdue replacement for a visually very boring part at the beginning of the first first beet cartoon where it absolutely should not be boring if I want people to watch the whole thing! People with standards, I mean, not us.
i still need to sort out the backgrounds and draw the leaves on a lot of those beets/red balls, make sure nothing is going out of frame — the dominant aspect ratio has changed considerably in the 13ish years since i started it — , make sure the motion tweens aren’t screwy — the way adobe animate handles them is drastically different than how flash handles them and absolutely unintuitive to figure out, even though if adobe wanted to screw with flash’s design they should have included alt-key eyedropper functionality like every other image editing program in longer than I have been working on this cartoon — and definitely definitely redo the singing. the old voice goes painfully flat in one place and is higher pitched than it should have been since i initially used the same voice that i did for greegorp, since i didn’t initially realize i would be including greegorp singing something in the second part
even if i never finish part 1 i ought to replace the youtube video since its video quality is watery and its resolution very “i don’t have good enough internet to watch anything stronger than this, much less upload it” which is no longer the case.
I have been playing these cartoons on the monitor screen at my art shows and increasingly bothered at the static first scene and bad singing. I at least have the power to improve one of those things now! Also this gives me another excuse to not start drawing the animation for part 3 since i may subconsciously be terrified of attempting to, and the best way to deal with something like that is to not deal with it and let it become more intimidating as more time elapses.
elpse will NOT have any speaking lines and i am not speaking to elpse either.
2-24-2009
11-6-2019
glad to see I have spent ten years well
the first one to me is funny, but the second one actually looks painful and makes me feel bad for the dope! even though the dope LIKES being beaten up by elpse. It also likes when I feel bad so then then I don’t but the dope also likes when I don’t feel bad and that isn’t fair! I do NOT authorize the dope to share in my non-misery! arrrrrrrrrrrgdopes.
Did I have a broken video here for the past 5 days? I thought I switched it to one hosted on my own space but I must not have saved that. Whoooooopth.
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A person identified as pinderhooks recently alerted me to this. Somebody uploaded the full film without permission from the copyright holder Pulse Distribution and I then likewise edited it without permission from that person.
“Hercules” is a low budget cartoon from 1997,that probably has only about a standard tv time slot’s worth of animation which is stretched, sometimes painfully so, out to 48 minutes so it can occupy an hour block and present itself as a feature film instead. I assure you, the cutting room floor was EMPTY. Everything they had went in here and it still wasn’t enough. Consequently its most striking feature is the profoundly horrid editing; at points there is up to 12 seconds of no/barely any motion before something happens. It has a look like it is animated by the company which did robert smigel’s “saturday tv funhouse” cartoons with assistance from the cdi-Zelda gang for closeups. The only indication that you are seeing the film as intended and not an insulting edit like this one is that the music keeps playing and playing and playing unbroken. I really should have had the sound muted while making this since that dorky trumpet fanfare is haunting me now
I watched it once and had the terrible idea to cut out and assemble all the stupidest parts. Completely on a whim when I have obligations stacked higher than the person who storyboarded this I decided to spend several days making a cheap movie that nobody cares about look even cheaper and less worthy of interest. I initially endeavored to maintain the spirit of the original cut when altering the film but when it came out to over ten minutes, nearly a quarter of the full film’s running time, I wondered if it would even come across that I didn’t extend the length of those scenes myself, and in the event of such a perception, why had i chosen the most boring parts to do that in? Somebody thinking sensibly could probably get this under nine minutes but every time i go looking for stuff to cut out i remember another thing from my initial viewing that might be worth squeezing in there. Somebody wishing to only show everything important and not waste time could probably get it to five minutes.
At times the film resembles a bad stage play, in which actors struggle to remember their lines or read off of cue cards. I wonder if the dialog was recorded live, like an old popeye cartoon, with the actors watching the cartoon and waiting for the right time to say lines, but with a considerably lower production budget and no ad-libbing. At one point you can even hear a character, the boss hydra head, start to say “oh shut up” while the character is off-screen, then seemingly realize it, and wait for the scene to change to complete the line. It is not in this edit; eventually I considered that the significance of that would not come across due to all of my deliberately bad editing.
There are a few moments which could be seen as vulgar and uncharacteristic of what I usually produce but once they suggested themselves to it seemed pointless to not use them. They are vague and might not be apparent anyhow.
I do not actually hate the film, even if Hercules himself is dull and conspicuously beardless, since the primary marketing strategy for this sort of product was to get their product mistaken for the disney version, even if the actual content is quite different, and that second fact works in its favor, I think. Apart from calling every character by their Greek names except for Hercules, but that convention predated Disney’s version. Eurystheus’ voice amuses me. There are numerous bits of weird animation and dialog that I like just as they Are. The film is broken and confused, and I relate to that. It screws up and skews the myths but not to the banal extent that disney did. Hercules, as a “hero” who murdered hundreds of people, including his first wife Megara and their children, and had considerably more male lovers than female, chief among them Iolaus, his companion in this film and nephew (and also recipient of Megara as a re-gift-wife in versions of the story in which Hercules only kills their children and not her), is never going to be a g-rated 1990s role model for children. Hercules’ murderous fit of madness is actually alluded to in this film but you only see a ruined city and it is said that only one person was killed, and that person is not even really dead.
Everything i know about the disney version is from contemporary advertisements for it and a description of Danny Devito’s character that I read on a burger king cup around that time (as with the nuggets, Burger King didn’t bother to not give the cartoon-branded products to regular customers) and what I read on wikipedia just now, but I know it depicts Zeus as monogamous and Hera as Hercules’ biological, non-hating mother. Zeus’ infidelity to Hera and Hera’s utter hatred for Hercules is at the very core of the Hercules story. And making Hades the easy bad guy dumps all nuance of just what the god of the underworld is. He isn’t Satan: he does not buy souls, he doesn’t trick people, He isn’t evil, he just happens to preside over the dead. The Greeks had this idea millenia before mopey nerds started obsessing over the idea of misunderstood sad monsters. Mopey nerds who of course only consider the disney versions of anything so they think this concept is new. Hades does covet the souls he has and takes revenge when people try to cheat death but all the gods are covetous and vengeful. Anyway Hades does not appear in this Hercules film so that is unimportant.
Conceptually, this only took about 5 seconds.
A hurried animation example that nonetheless required days to assemble.
I will probably at least fill in white behind the moving objects and add more pauses, maybe some zooming and panning so it is less confusing, but otherwise this is not designed to be “finished,” not for a long time, anyway.
Also I would greatly appreciate a vector video format similar to flash but without all the proprietary technology and “not supported on any mobile platform” rubbish since exporting something like this as a gif is a miserable process.
I made some music that caused me to think of hats, and made a picture to accompany that. Then I thought I should have a little animation for it since I have not posted any in a long time. Then I decided to spend three days straight cramming as much stupid trash in there as possible, then spent two more days on it. Then youtube played a series of tricks on me resulting in a “final” product with a number of anomalies that I could fix but don’t want to reupload and make re-public after three past attempts the same day. However they occur too near the end to be at fault if anyone shuts the thing off in disgust.
Then after nearly a week I put up another version
Also it is a bit long and I couldn’t choose from the two closers I considered. A sensible person would split this into two videos and solve both problems. Indeed.
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artichoke this website is a mess. On tuesday i am going to upload another version of the same dumb video and actually look it over properly, in the intended context. And pog willing it will be acceptable and I won’t have any major reservations about its state that allow my mind to justify spending more days making “last minute” revisions after quickly sorting out the one thing I was actually supposed to be doing.
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I have now updated the video and believe that I will not do so again for a much longer period than elapsed between its other updates.
a just barely edited video to show the latest developments in degeneration. I have not spent the time to make a proper video to share on websites other than this one since the dopes still have the same bland green cheerio attack and terrible sound effects from eh fifteen years ago, and the last part has even more stuff that has to go, including the boring old “weapons,” but I was bored of that ugly test room. I intend for there to be at least THREE ways to destroy dopes but these at least do as many things as the old dopes did, apart from attack with their umbrellas, since they no longer have umbrellas since there are too many existing characters which attack with umbrellas, and that was so even before i gave the first dopes umbrellas!
a bonus that i missed at first: the dope at approximately 29 seconds melts without being hit. It is so: these dopes are SO DUMB that after doing their STUPID dance they RANDOMLY DROP DEAD! Unfortunately I fixed that and it won’t happen again. I wouldn’t mind it but they still have the ability to take regular damage and then start walking around again so that is just confusing! I COULD set them to randomly drop dead and stay that way but that is too stupid to do on purpose.
I do not know if this counts as progress but it seems worth[less] mentioning
What is WRONG with those things? They just want to follow me around, to CHASE me, and for WHAT? Just so they can do THAT? I want to KILL those things. Unfortunately i have not drawn new destruction frames for them yet and so can only get angry at them. What is especially infuriating is the red dopes: they will be OBSESSED with locating the player dope but then turn around, go into their STUPID dance and just FORGET they had a plan. I didn’t see any red dopes for a few minutes and then found them all staring at the same empty corner. what HORRIBLE dopes.
this trashy video is meant to display some stupid yellow creature that throws a bowling ball, but since I have not yet made level spaces well suited to that, I ended up using non-ideal sample areas that happen to also be the ugliest areas i have yet made.
I am quite sad to say that as lame as i imagined this looked, i imagined i was exaggerating to try and set myself up to feel better when it actually does not look so bad, but this does in fact look quite bad. even in these brief samples meant to display a single object, that I admittedly have not yet made appropriate landscapes for, I see an inordinate number of unchanged graphics from the original Doom game and amateurish non-original game graphics that I mean to remove.
The original “plan” called for the bowling imps to be placed beside stacks of bowling balls but I discovered that it did not look terribly “wrong” for them to just grab the balls out of the ground so that is how things presently are.
I show it here because I spent so much of the last two weeks getting this to work that I have nothing else to show! it feels like too mundane a creature to spend that much time on, but the time has been spent. I drew it throwing the ball from 8 angles, when most people would just do five, even though that motion takes 15 frames. and STILL is somewhat jerky. that is 15×8, 120 frames, not including the just standing there and “hey stop shooting me” frames, ALSO drawn from eight angles instead of five. I merficully allowed to accept a single angled “death” animation because it just turns into globs that would not necessarily be noticeably not rotating when walked around.
None of the monsters die, they just fall over and look sad, unless they melt. The few non-goop monsters that actually can bleed still have their eyes open when they get disemboweled. I want to hurt them, not to kill them. I want them to think about what they did.
i made this one into a goop monster that melts rather than an “organic” one that simply falls over and looks sad since it is uniform of color and unclothed which suggests goop compatibility, even though I only have three non-goop ones so far, and two, based on lope (pathetic blue lizard) and nemitz (incorrigible orange imp), have to be redrawn to NOT look like them since the theme has become more specific than “weird junk in doom” since I first implemented them roundabout 2003-4ish,, and I cannot imagine lope being any good in a fight anyhow, assuming it would ever be even willing to fight. Also, chronologically speaking, nemitz should not be present at this point. Yes you will believe I have a serious timeline for this “story” even though it is ludicrous broken garbage that will always be somebody else’s game even though I guarantee you I wasted more time from my life than id software collectively did while developing doom and the predecessors it follows from. I MUST justify the time spent, by spending yet more time on it. I might have justified this paragraph better by actually including those two IN the video but I mean to assure you that they are nearby since I can hear their noises.
a video compilation of animated icons, mostly (but not entirely) commissions, that I spent entirely too much time on irrelevant aspects of. The music is an acquired taste that you will probably want to misplace.
I had to stop doing commissions entirely because THIS really is what I have to show for it! As I have become more obsessive compulsive I have run out of time to do anything else. The only real animation I have done in a year is that irrelevant bit at the end.
Two more 100×100 pixel animated icons, for Malkaiwot, showing Mallorie Koopa, who seems to be adept, possibly overconfident with unusually-sized carpentry tools. And also Goshi, who is purple. The official version that I post on other websites will have horizontal non-dithered background lines because they were requested when I showed this alternative but I am keeping the alternative for here in honor of I think I use those horizontal lines too often and also I uploaded it here before I asked Malkaiwot’s opinion on it. I tried vertical straight lines and they look awful.
These will be last such icons for a while, I think. The one on the right (or the one underneath depending on your view resolution) works better, even though i spent much less time on it. It works better probably BECAUSE I spent less time on it. I wish could say it was because I knew spending less time on these things was the secret to doing better with them but I am simply tired from not doing better!
Gosh there are five colors on the red side and only four on the blue side! Ordinarily such asymmetrical oversight would be unforgivable!
Elaborating on my reason for not accepting more general offers is not effective in my current state, so it might be better to wait until I am no longer thinking about it to think about it. I spend too long articulating depressing things about how I spent too long making dysfunctional things.
For the time being, it is better to get nowhere making a few big projects for myself than a load of small ones for other people that will not make a great difference in their lives.
