Failure to launch.

Anyone who's done a little freelance is used to having jobs fizzle up and dissapear. It happens for a number of reasons. An agreement for money/content cannot be reached, artistic differences between the parties and sometimes for mysterious unknown reasons the job will simply vanis *poof* like Kaiser Soze.

I'm used to it, I don't get bent out of shape or upset. The only reason I'm bringing this up is because a job which seemed like it would be honestly FUN to work on pulled the vanishing act. And I'm a little sad that I wont get to follow through with all the idea's that bubbled up while planning the project.

Anyway, here's a page of sketches I did while brainstorming.

Some more designs.

There's been a fairly large change in plans for me, and it's going to affect whats happening with Upon Animation.

I'm currently teaching animation at Algonquin College here in Ottawa, It's a part time gig which leave me plenty of time to work on something else. However it looks like that something else is going to be more of a buisnessy thing and less of a online animated series thing.

So I'm going to keep developing, it might just be a longer development cycle than a year. I've also been bandying around the Idea of doing an online comic instead (Much more managable.)

Point being, plans have changed, but I don't intend to stop creating.

On the horizon

Here's a preview of whats next for Upon Animation.

Monday Morning.

Music Video is complete.
Music by: Kupek.
Download the album for free at www.radiomaru.com

Here are the last couple of shots from the Music Video, before it's completion this weekend.
I've played around with lighting and atmosphere more than any project I've ever worked on before. It's a lot of forethought and tough work, but it adds SO much to the final project. (I think anyway.)

More images from the music video.

The music video is quickly reaching it's end. I've blown through almost half of the finished BG's and I'm putting them into the scene's and adding some lighting effects to help the overall look of the piece. It's coming together quite nicely.

Screen cap from music video, with the final background added and lighting added. (The BG was acctually too small when I imported it, so it's a little fuzzy. I'll be using a higher DPI version in the final export.)

Clean version.

Another rough piece for the music video.

This is a piece of rough work from a music Video I'm finishing up with all of my sudden free time.

Hello old friend.

Well it finally happened.

Despite what we sneered at our teachers saying: "I'll never need math in real life" Math just saved my ass a bunch of work. I did a bunch of art assets in Flash, and then exported it to Toon Boom. Now the stuff in Flash was done in a 12fps timeline and my toonboom work is in 24fps. Needless to say, things were right cocked up.



Luckily I realized I could just double all the frame counts and re-work the stuff in flash lickity split. Saved me having to scrub through and find all the key points again.



So there you go math, you get my grudging respect.

Toon Boom and the UA podcast.

So anyone who's read the blog knows that I'm a fan of the Toon Boom family of software. Currently the best digital animation software to be had IMHO.

My rampant fanaticism has resulted in them making me their first user story for 2008, a very nice birthday present indeed.
Check out the article here:
http://www.toonboom.com/products/toonBoomStudio/userStories/2008/?id=Sloan

I come off pretty harsh on flash, I must have been having a bad day or something when I did the interview. I'm seriously not like, gunning for the overthrow of flash. It's an amazing piece of software that runs circles around Toon Boom in area's like application development or website production, I just hate seeing people blindly tied to it as an animation platform.

We've been recording a podcast the last few weeks at our production meetings. There's no real form or anything to them yet, once we've got a grip of them under our belt I'll start to dish them out on the site.

...

Oh the site! still not updated you say? Well Andrea, our webmiester general, has gotten a little upset at the fact that We've been featured on CHF and now as a TB User of the month, and the site is still under construction. So MAYBE just maybe early February will see a more robust webpage.

~Steve.