I'll update about my flash animation soon, in a later entry. For now, here's moar gems! Oh, this guy is pretty talented for his age. Nothing he's made so far really qualifies as a gem in my book, but I expect great things from him in the future. Also hoping for this guy to create some more cool stuff. This person deserves a lot more fans as well!

I felt like doing another one of those gem hunts. This is what I found:

Hmmm, it's mildly disappointing that I cannot strike text in my blog posts. I was planning to use it as a method to mark stuff "done" on my former entry. I should really think about creating a spiffy header for my blog entries too. If anyone's interested, I wrote an amateurish greasemonkey script for Newgrounds. Apparently it doesn't import, so you're going to have to open the .js with notepad and copy the script to greasemonkey manually :/

Anyway, I am now done sketching the entry for the Girl In A Room Collab II. The real scary thing about that is it's 2 minutes long. It should be compelling enough to keep people interested though. I'm also done designing most characters. There's one character I was a bit clueless on, but I've got a pretty good idea on how to draw him now. So yeah, I guess I'm at step 3 now; audio design. I'm also going to need to write a bit of a script, and then see which voice actress can help me with that. Here's the progress so far:

[X] 01. Designs
[X] 02. Sketching scenes
[ ] 03. Audio synchronization
[ ] 04. Animating
[ ] 05. Color, Shading and Style Choice
[ ] 06. Backgrounds
[ ] 07. Gradients, Masks and Filters
[ ] 08. Final Audio Mix

Oh hey also, NATA sent me a postcard :3

Halloween Halloween Halloween.
I love Halloween.
We don't even cellebrate Halloween where I'm from. We have shitty St. Martin instead. I mean, I like the story behind this holiday, but it certainly isn't as atmospheric. So yeah, I do my part to cellebrate Halloween the best that I can. I watch one horror movie a day throughout the entire month of October, play a couple of horror games, decorate the room, make audio playlists, and of course I plan a little get-together. This year I wanted to make a horror animation. I finished working on my sheep collab entry, so it's finally time to get started on A Girl In A Room II.

1. First step on my list is to design some characters. There's not a lot of them, but still. The environment also needs some designing, I'm thinking of using riveted metal and a faded white for the walls, or maybe use white with shadow for contrast. There's probably a lot of interesting things you could do with the lighting here.
2. Sketching the scenes will take some carefull planning, like angles and body language. That's usually the biggest hurdle for me. Everything runs pretty smooth once I'm done with that though. I usually sketch on one layer: Starting with characters, which I then put in a group. I do the backgrounds afterwards and group those as well.
3. Next I go on a hunt for some fitting audio and sync it to the movie. I only edit or design noises if I absolutely have to. It's more of a final step sort of thing. Also, I add footsteps at the end, when I'm done animating.
4. Then I'll start animating, in no particular order. Sketches are nice guidelines, but they can be too rough. Sometimes the anatomy isn't right, or certain shapes look off. In that case I have to go back to fix it, which is a pain in the ass. Eats up a lot of my time. Usually I add color as I animate, but during the spaceboy animation I decided to leave everything white until later. Picking colors while animating is a great way to waste time. I'll keep it for later
5. At this stage I figure out how to do my backgrounds, and what color scheme to use for my animation. Also, shading and gradients. I might want to go and create a new pallette for this animation. That way I can experiment with it as I go through stage 1.
6. Time for backgrounds. At this point I deleted the character sketches, but the backgrounds should still be there. I could either draw them in flash, or export as png and open in photoshop. I will be doing the latter.
7. Semi-final step; adding gradients, masks and filters. I think I will just use the gradients. Nothing more.
8. Finalizing the audio. I'll use a different software to synchronize the noises, mix them, pan them accordingly and run them through filters to create the illusion of accoustics. Along with optional music, I will master it to the best of my abilities, and export it as one single wav file which I import to flash.

Yup. That's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna take my time with this, but I hope to finish it when October starts, so I can save time enjoying the holiday :)

I thought I'd make an update here. There's a couple of collabs I'm joining, neither of which I've actually started working on so far. There's the Sheep Collab, which'll be a day's worth of animating. And then there's the Girl In A Room Collab, which will be a bit longer. Girl In A Room is a horror initiative that started last year. The results should be very interesting. Also, tomorrow is the deadline for the NATA finals! I'm very excited about what StejkRobot and Butzboprud will be throwing our way.

I bought an Akai EIE Pro earlier this month by the way. Good buy, it's a real fun piece of hardware that lets me record stuff from my synthesizers. Finally. Music's such a joy :) The only downside is that its drivers are conflicting with my Sitecom N900 wireless usb device. I tried updating both devices but it still happens. Now, whenever I make music, I have to disable my internet first or else it'll crackle :/ Anyway, last month I had this rack set up for my synthesizers to sit on, so my studio has been taking shape quite nicely.

Earlier this week I reinstalled windows. Normally that'd be no sweat, since I have everything set up in several partitions; I just reinstal windows and be done with it. But this time it was different, since I have a partition set up for personal projects (such as music, animation, art projects, photoshops etc.) and it was getting full. In other words, I had to expand my disk space. All of that's done now, so expect new projects :)

Funny how everything you connect to a computer works on USB these days. I actually bought a PCI card with 4 extra ports on it (external USB-hubs are a bitch imo). Let's see, there's my mouse, keyboard, game controllers, audio interface, midi, external hdd, scanner and tablet. It was getting pretty full. In the future I'd like to use this computer only for music production and leasure activities such as gaming and surfing the internet. I'm planning to build a second computer for all other projects, such as flash, art, story writing, designing, etc. It won't have any access to the internet so that I can work without any distractions. Plus I want to put all my art tools there, such as the scanner, tablet, printer and traditional media tools.

The results of the NATA novice rounds are in. I didn't make it to the next round, but Oryozema did! Hope all goes well for him in the next round of the competition. In the meanwhile, I might go find a PO4 partner. I probably want to enter as a musician and soundeffects guy. Also, I haven't forgotten about the project I've been planning to organize this year, but I have to check with Rig first. Get it rolling :)

Tom still has to make an official post about this, but the NATA results are in! I went to the next round apparently. Now I'm in a pool with oryozema (entry) and LazyModeComics (entry) - both amazing animators! I feel like I'm the weakest link here, but I'll try my best. This time I want to have an actual script going before I start. Can't wait for them to announce the new theme.

EDIT: The new theme is "Through The Eyes Of A Stranger".

In the meanwhile, here's today's gems. I'm a sucker for spam and choppy stuff that reminds me of the early Newgrounds days. Sorry about that.

So yeah, I joined NATA 2014 and made this:

All of the entries are now up on the official NATA website as well. Speaking of which, they're still in the process of  collecting prize money. You can donate some of your own by going here.

Haven't been looking for any gems lately. If I'm out of NATA I'll get back to that.

EDIT: Couldn't help myself and went on a gemhunt anyway.

Happy Pico Day everyone! The background art looks amazing! Keep your eyes open for the Pico Day Collab by ForNoReason. It should be hitting the portal today. Also today it is Kingsday in Holland. Pretty mad :)

I haven't been glancing at the portal much lately. Still, here's a few gems I've seen. Enjoy.