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JayTim Week Day 3: Shooting Star/Eclipse or Time Travel

Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 5 | Day 6 | Day 7

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is a dream a want

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the initial D stage 3 movie is peak

like, it's got the classic stage artstyle but with CGI that doesn't look like it was done on an Amiga Video Toaster

but more importantly, it is where the animators just went "fuck it, we skippin the gay subtext and goin for DOMTEXT" cause at less than 10 minutes in, it gets so fucking gay that even his coworkers call him out on it

the plot is basically: Takumi has Difficult Feelings™ for Ryousuke but Ryousuke asks him out and gives him his number, and says he'll basically be Tak's sugar daddy all next summer,

and then he spends the entire rest of the movie grappling with imposter syndrome and, also, feeling like a hypocrite because he broke up with Natsuki for having a sugar daddy and now he's finna do the same thing

and then realizes that he wasn't mad abt the "sugar daddy" part, it was the "cheating and not telling him" part so it's fine, but they talk it out and he realizes you can still be friends with your ex if you're bisexual

also they gotta add in an almost-rape scene to indicate that he's straight cause it was 2001 and they needed to beat The Allegations™ to seem hetero, except for the fact Keisuke saves a completely random girl in the exact same situation in the manga but just dumps her at the nearest gas station afterwards cause he's gotta focus Only On D

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this drunksuke in my puter from a year ago

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Xiaoge's patented Wu Xie Is In Danger Radar may, in fact, be a little over-active...

From the Restart: Daily Life manhua. Translation is my own, please correct me if there are any errors!

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the only way to escape batman is to confuse the hell out of him

(i couldn't stop thinking about this bit from psych - under the cut!)

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I thought what if Tom and Harry grew up together and were inseparable. So that Tom did anything to bring Harry to Slytherin.

I find it funny how the Hat just sends Harry to Gryffindor just because he has already seen Tom’s thoughts and like “Nope, that pure boy has to run away from that son of the devil”

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he’s been down bad since the 50’s idk what to tell you

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I don't know if they thought curly hair was too complicated to animate or something, but for some reason, ALL the clones in TCW have straight hair. It comes off as a simple stylistic choice with the standard crew cut, but then you have characters like Tup and Hunter. And since Trace Martez exists, we know they CAN texture curly hair now, and it doesn't look like it was all that complicated either. I guess in the case of Tup and Hunter we have to chalk it up to mutation in-universe.

Alright. Here’s an image of Trace and Rafa Martez.

I’m gonna say this kindly as a curly haired individual: I would not say Trace has textured curly hair in the show. She has a textured hairstyle meant to represent curls.

Rafa has some waves in her hair that do end in a little curl, and while in real life I would say she probably has one of the “B” classifications for curly hair and appears to have a stronger curl pattern than Temuera Morrison. That said, the animation is still fairly blocky and only represents her having curls.

This gif even shows it: Trace’s hair just... doesn’t move. It’s completely fixed. At least Rafa’s has a bit of sway and bounce at the bottom ringlet.

My honest opinion? The actual animation program itself is not designed to handle curls. What we see with both Martez ladies is that the CG part of their hair is very blocky, but the “texture” comes more from the hand-painted look.

This is something Filoni pushed from the start: CG animation was the new thing in 2005 and George Lucas wanted to use it for the show, but Filoni was a hand-drawing artist. He worked on Avatar the Last Airbender, for example. The way he could keep that feel with Clone Wars was to paint each “panel.” Thus, you had a merging of the two. Here’s a segment of a direct quote from Filoni, taken from this article.

“I wanted it to look like a painting— you see a textured, hand painted style on every character. I have texture artists who literally paint every character right down to their eyeball, because I wanted that human touch on everything.” -Dave Filoni

I actually looked into what program they used (at least for the earlier seasons). In 2008, it was produced by a company called Autodesk, and here is the announcement of them using the software. In the announcement, it mentions that one of Autodesk’s first (and main) developments is AutoCAD, and that their programs are meant to simulate real-world developments. Yeah... AutoCAD is an engineering/architechtural program. It’s very formulated and rigid because so are the materials it needs to simulate.

Here’s an example of a plant designed using a more recent version of AutoCAD (from the Autodesk website). Even with basic colors, it’s clear to see how its older versions would be best for a show full of armored troopers, ships, destroyers, walkers... pretty much every part of Star Wars except for the people, tbh.

The program, and thus any later ones developed off of it, was not equipped to program curly hair. It’s not in their coding.

The other problem is Lucasfilm was outsourcing the animating for most scenes to a team in Asia (as per the linked announcement). That’s not cheap. When you introduce a character like Tup, who is a smaller supporting character, it’s far easier to just use the already developed clone CG model and have his hair tied back so it lays flat. It’s logistically not worth figuring out curls for him.

Hell, look even at Anakin or Obi-Wan’s hair in the first seasons (just search gifs on tumblr tbh). It moves together in chunks, if at all. The last season does have more improvement, but by then 1) it’s ten years later, so animation programs have evolved significantly, and 2) they’re at Disney.

I may hate on Disney for a lot of things, but Disney and Pixar have pioneered so much for digital animation, including hair actually (i.e. Tangled & The Incredibles). And... it’s Disney. They’ve got some of the best technology out there, even if it’s just for a TV show. 

But, back to the clones. Take a look at any of the Sideshow collectible figures available for the clone troopers from the show. Even the short haired troopers have wavy definition to their hair, and for Tup it’s pretty clear he has a curl texture, just that it’s been tightly combed back into a bun.

To help, here’s a trio of images: the left is Temuera Morrison around when he was in Star Wars. The top right is the Showtime collectible of ARC Trooper Fives. The bottom right is Fives in the show. It’s clear they attempted Temuera’s curl texture on the figurine. If you look closely at Fives’ hair from the show still, it still attempts to show that but flat painted on the CG hair panel.

And here’s the clearest image I could find of Tup’s hair. Again, they tried to show his texture with the flat hand-painting.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ They tried. Kind of. It just doesn’t translate well.

So, to sum it all up: the clones don’t have pin-straight hair. The animation makes it look that way because it is limited in its coding. But for the more realistic versions of the troopers, they’re shown to have some hair texture.

I don’t think they were being purposefully ignorant or racist by keeping the clones’ hair straighter. The style of animation chosen really was just not equipped to handle any type of curly hair pattern.

[For those of you wondering why they chose it though, one of the main reasons for the style was because they wanted motion capture for battle scenes. And y’know... after seeing the Ahsoka vs Maul fight in the final season... yeah, valid decision on that end.]

That said, something that was within the animation team’s control that we should be angry about is how they lightened/whitewashed the clones and Boba Fett in the series.

But that’s some tea for another time... ☕️🦅

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sesame mochi

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And then they started a book club.

((Click for better resolution!!! otl))

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A disconnect, somewhere.

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Sometimes you buy someone a chili dog and it is a totally normal and fine experience . and other times you buy someone a chili dog and realize you are Down Bad

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😍 i love them. I love Tim and Jason having the annoying diving dynamic but also will do anything ….

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Some DMBJs from recent 8/17 merch and stuff