#my attempts to make a 3D background an anime background

[simsvaleria234]

Yes, that’s my first publication here.

I have some ideas of what I will publish here, but I need a little more time for this. 

[cy-cyborg]

Ok so the saga with my old PC continues and is only fueling my desire to get back into fanfiction lol because I found all of the files from my attempt at making a legend of spyro fan-game! I honestly thought they were lost, I'm so excited to see all this stuff again! This was the "logo" for the game (I know its nearly unreadable lol, so it says "The Legend of Cynder, Shadows of The Past". 14/15 year old me didn't seem to care much for readability, I think I'd just discovered photoshop's layer effects lol)

Here's a bunch of random stuff I found.

I'm defiantly going to do a redraw of that last one at some point. That was like, THE thing I remember being super proud of when I first did it. I think it was going to be part of the trailer my now-partner was putting together for the game lol.

Actually, a lot of these were actually just frames from animations, but either the files are either just corrupted, or high school me didn't know how to set fps and resolution properly in the output so I got a headache trying to watch them lol. It's probably the second one honestly. Also I remember my old laptop wasn't able to play back the animation because it would lag so much, so I just had to kind of...guess at timing, and that went about as well as you'd expect. It didn't help that blender used to have this bug where your audio would move around your timeline so it really was just random guessing. I'm amazed anything got done at all, let alone how far we actually got (that is to say, not far at all but we had something playable at least).

I also found the demo files and footage of the "game" running (running at 12fps but running)! I'm curious if they still work, I'll have to download an older version of blender to test them out!

There's actually a lot more but actually finding it is proving to be quite a challenge since this laptop seems to be the digital equivalent of an ADHD "doom box" - meaning nothing is sorted into folders that make even a remote lick of sense to me, it's all just kind of thrown in together lmao.

I wanted to post these though because even though I don't really do 3D stuff anymore, It still made me really happy to see how much progress I've made over the years and how far I've come. Also a few folks who worked on this project with me back on Deviantart have started finding me lol, so in case there's anyone else out there, hello! I'm not dead, I'm still around, I'm just a lot more (openly) queer now lmao.

Image descriptions:

[ID 1: A game title that reads "The Legend of Cynder, Shadows of the Past". The two lines, "the legend of" and "shadows of the past" are written in dark purple text. The purple material is supposed to look like liquid, but instead just looks hard to read. "Cynder" is writen in black, 3D text with red outlines, with the exception of the C. The "c" is modeled as a black tube instead of in a blocky style like the rest of the letters. The inside of the C has a red underbelly, and the bottom of the C ends in a tail, resembling Cynder's from the Legend of Spyro Series. There are 3 white spikes at the top of the C. /end ID]

[ID 2: a 3d render of 4 dragons around a christmas tree. A black dragon at the front, Cynder, is using her tail to hang tinsel, a pruple dragon, Spyro, on the left is reaching up into the branches of the tree. A blue dragon, Ignitus, is hovering behind the tree, his paws outstretched, implying he is placing the glowing star at the top. On his head is a silver dragon, Zerali, balancing on his horns. behind them is a series of floating islands. /End ID]

[ID 3: A render of Cynder with a darker colour pallet than the previous image and glowing yellow eyes, snarling at the camera, guarding a black gem. The sky in the background is blood red and the terrain is flat and barren. /End ID]

[ID 4: A render of an incomplete model of Terrador, a green dragon with brown horns and rocky shoulder decorations. He has no underbelly or wings. /end ID]

[ID 5: A render of a fan character named ekkosel, a blue, anthropomorphic dragonfly with an unsettling, uncanny face and green wings, T-posing. Her green wings are a blur /End ID]

[ID 6: two sketches of a anthropomorphic cheetah heads. One has long ears like a lynx and is labeled DotD design, the other has small, rounded ears like a cheetah usually has, labled TLoC design. /end ID]

[ID 7: A render of Zerali, the silver dragon from the second image, and ekkosel, from the 5th, playing together. In this image, we can see Zerali has a pinky-purple underbelly and shiny gold horns.]

[ID 8: A rendered scene showing a close up of blue ignitus with his eyes closed. He appears to be talking to Cynder, who is in the background, but blurry. The game's logo is visible in the bottom left of the image. /end ID]

[kawaoneechan]

Why I don't like Unity

There's three reasons, basically, besides my personal inability to get any custom character assets into Unity, Unreal, or Godot.

Let me tell you below the readmore.

Reason #1: it managed to fucking bluescreen my system just trying to start.

How do you fuck that up? I download an installer and run it. This gives me a launcher. From there, I'm supposed to install the actual product I wanted to begin with. That's bad enough, to be honest. But then the fucking launcher managed to break so badly, I had my first BSOD in several months. With all I do to my poor laptops, I so very rarely got crashes like that it honestly threw me the fuck off.

If the launcher is gonna play like that, forget about installing the actual product.

Reason #2: CPU pegging up the ass.

On my previous laptop, attempting to run basically any Unity-based game would peg the CPU, all cores, until the poor thing ran so hot within mere minutes, it'd commit preventative sudoku. Maybe if I was lucky, I'd get a chance to set all the things to "lowest", and that might let me, I dunno, play long enough to get through the goddamn tutorial?

And I'm not even talking about state-of-the-art 3D games, but simple 2D games with low-resolution pixel art. Why would those run a dual-core at 200% until it fucking kills itself? Makes no sense.

Now, Phil Fortier of Icefall Games is an acquaintance of mine via SCI shenanigans, and when he released Snow Spirit (soon to be rereleased as part of Chronicles of Cascadia), I lamented to him about how his use of Unity would mean I couldn't run any of his stuff. So Phil looked into it and found a Big Fucking Thing to optimize. This basically makes Phil's SCI games the only things made in Unity that I can personally trust won't Do That.

Reason #3: About those 2D games...

I'm gonna dip into my Twitter archives for a bit and repost some stuff for this part.

*wavy flashback effect*

This is Angel Jump, a simple little arcade jumping game that's available on itch.io:

It's delightfully low resolution and has like four seconds of audio all added up. Can't be more than a few MB, depending on which sane development framework they used, right?

33 MB, actually. Because Unity. Let's see how it breaks down:

Unity main exe: 623 KB

Main game assets file: 1.19 MB together

A folder full of support DLLs like terrain and cloth: 7.17 MB, 90% or more of them never called because this is a 2D pixel-art game.

Unity's default resources: 3.41 MB. Mind that of these, only the splash logo is actually used because Angel Jump was made in the free edition.

Mono embedded runtime: 2.61 MB, and each game gets its own copy, much like how Electron apps each have their own copies of Chromium.

And another 17 MB for the Unity Player.

All in all, 33 MB of files for a game like that. Why? Because Unity is a bloated crapsack, I'd conclude from a cursory study like that. Let's compare that to some other games.

This is Elevator Girl, which is not on itch.io.

It has a lot of different animations and three fairly long background music tracks. It's only one file, 18.7 MB. I'm willing to bet most of that is the BGM, but I can't confirm it because it's just the one file.

And just for some historical perspective, the entire Crystal Caves trilogy is 1.31 MB, including some chaff. Commander Keen 4 on its own is 740 KB. Now, Keen and Elevator Girl both have OPL soundtracks, but the latter's is probably streamed.

Noxico is only 1.25 MB to download as a .7z file. Its only optimization that I myself actively apply is that I crunch the PNG files. The rest is text, and since the game uses a .zip file by another name as a game data source... yeah. That's a cheap win.

Now, back to Angel Jump. I went through the game's own resources to see what size it could conceivably have if it was not made in Unity. 54 textures, ten of them actually used. Tiny font stored in a weird way, possibly for distance field trickery which has no business in a 2D pixel game if you ask me. 921 KB of WAV files, high-quality bleepity-bloops, two of them jingles. 4.22 KB of PNG files, crunched like Noxico, for all but the creator's logo and the font. 973 KB for a copy of SDL, and I'd estimate at worst two MB for the main EXE.

The entire Angel Jump game could be no more than 4 MB and a half-dozen files, It's actually 33.2 MB, 92 files.

There's a more general computer programming issue that this reliance on Unity for even the simplest, smallest games seems to spring from: the bigger and better the computers get, the more lazy the developers get. Only have like four MHz, 640 KB of RAM and, what, 720 KB of diskette space, and no guarantee of an HDD? Better make the most of it, developers! But now the pressure's off and there's no more reason to exert any effort into keeping small games actually small.

*sigh*

[canmom]

How aren't mediums fungible? Any art history class would teach you they very much are.

what, has 'the medium is the message' gone out of fashion now or something?

but to explain what I'm trying to get at, since there's a good chance I misused the word >< - each medium brings its own set of affordances and emphases. if I see a CG animation I pay attention to different things than if I see traditional animation or stop motion or what have you.

for example, we could have a look at the animation of Hiroyuki Okiura - say, the introduction to the Cowboy Bebop movie, or his work in Magnetic Rose. Okiura is one of the most renowned realist animators, someone whose drawing style, camerawork etc. hews very close to live action film. his exceptional sense of perspective and space is remarkable in traditional animation. by contrast, you 'get it for free' in CG and stop motion - you will always have perfect linear perspective unless you go out of your way to break it. however, CG rarely captures the exact qualities of Okiura's animation, which come from the sense of drawing principles - how to simplify shapes, 2D spacing etc. and by making it something constructed, the way characters move through space, the way a drawing can suddenly feel 3D, becomes foregrounded - it's no longer incidental but now a core part of what Okiura's animation is expressing.

so, 'live action into anime' is kinda what the AI style transfer tools are going for. in the technique from the recent paper, you start with a static drawing of a character and some animation data (likely mocap), and the program will generate an animation. that's similar what Corridor Digital attempted a few months ago, using a neural network finetuned on Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, and applying 'style transfer' to live action footage they shot. the results were, viewed as rotoscoping, kind of hideous, with shapes constantly flickering and turning into mush. the new paper I linked offers some techniques to improve the temporal consistency of this type of AI rotoscoping which should make it look a lot less bad, though it remains to be seen whether it works in situations other than 'well-lit fullbody shot'.

still, even if Corridor's video was a lot more technically solid (and give AI development a few years to iron out the kinks, I'm sure it will look downright quaint), it doesn't provoke the same response in me as Okiura's animation. the process of drawing something involves a lot of artistic decisions about what to capture, simplify, emphasise; for all that it is 'realist', Okiura's animation likewise has a particular feeling to the way characters move, the way they interact with light, the use of line, etc. which in some large part arises from how it is produced. so much of that is all but impossible to capture in words.

but also - knowing a bit about how it's made, and having my own experiences of animation, gives me an angle to appreciate what Okiura is doing. a drawing of something is a way of drawing attention to the specific details of the subject. two people drawing the same subject will never draw it the exact same way. one of the joys of going to life drawing is seeing how many different ways people can approach the same subject in the same ten minutes - inflected by different media like charcoal or watercolour pencils. one of the great things about anime is the space it gives key animators to bring their own sensibility to a particular shot.

I certainly accept that is inevitable that mediums will evolve with time. anime looks very different today than it did 30 years ago. part of of that is evolving sensibilities, partly the slow-motion collapse of an overstrained industry, but also a lot has do with the fact that every studio has switched to digital compositing and digital background painting. it's possible through painstaking effort to fairly closely imitate the look of cel animation on a computer, but you really have to go out of your way, and it's rare to do that.

and I do feel like something has been lost with the death of cels - qualities of line and colour, the difference between digital bloom and backlight animation. but something has been gained at the same time: maybe we've gradually lost the traditional skills for drawing layouts because the conditions of production made it so that skills weren't passed on to the current generation of animators, which sucks, but we have simultaneously gained the ability to merge 2D and 3D animation with tools like Grease Pencil, to use the camera-like digital compositing effects of directors like Naoko Yamada and Makoto Shinkai. it's not better, just different.

this isn't to make the boring argument that AI art is soulless, or lacks the magic human touch, or whathaveyou. it's just a different medium. nor would it be right to say that there are no connections between media - literally right now I'm modelling an arm, and my experience of drawing arms is directly influencing how I break down the forms and all of that. AI generated images derive in obvious ways from traditional animation and CG and photography and all that, AI engineers study these media in great detail as they develop their programs; our knowledge of those media can inform how we respond to AI.

honestly, CG that aims to replicate the look of traditional animation, such as in the games of ArcSystem Works, or the works of Orange like their Houseki no Kuni, is something I actually find very interesting. not because I think it could or should replace traditional animation; it just reveals fascinating things about both media. the same can be true of AI, I think. like what do you learn from what a neural network is able to capture, and what it isn't? and what does studying neural networks tell us about human brains?

if the development of AI and the accessibility of new tools leads to a flourishing of interesting new animation, I'll be happy. I just don't see it as a replacement for traditional animation and 3DCG. if anything the future of animation will probably look like a hybrid process taking advantage of the best features of all the different media we've invented - insert the usual spiel about Arcane and Spiderverse here. AI is currently very immature, we're still figuring out what it's good for and the hype drowns out everything, but I'm sure it will find a comfortable place, and I'll be interested to see how it all shakes out.

but what I meant with 'not fungible' is that, if you try to replace one medium with another, you will inevitably change the qualities of what you make. nowt wrong with that. like, just because you can adapt books into films (and vice versa) doesn't mean books are obsolete. some things are easier to express in prose, others in film. you can have prose that's informed by film, and film that's informed by prose. everything's talking to everything else, it's great! but the tools you choose are meaningful, and interesting. not just an irrelevant detail to be swapped out when "superior" technology comes along.

[weirdagnes]

Hello! I am here for the Art Ask Game! ^_^)

How many different sketches do you usually have until your piece is finished?

A piece from this year that you're really proud of?

Something you would like to improve on?

What's something you hope people notice when looking at your art?

ooo i love answering asks >:] 💜 Thank you for sending some! (warning: long post)

1. How many different sketches do you usually have until your piece is finished?

If it’s a commission (that doesn’t require drawing the exact reference), I have 4 stages of sketching:

Stage 1. Ideas sketching. I do stickmans and general shapes that are most understandable to me. Doesn’t have to be clean, just enough for me to understand how I will place my elements in the paper, how movement flows, how the posture will look, etc etc. Here are some of my stage 1 sketches:

This one’s for a collab painting I will do with a friend. That’s our sketches while conceptualizing.

These are my concept sketches for the recent splatoon commission I did. For commissions, I always do 3-6 sketches of different poses when given freedom, which I will then present to my client and see which one they like best and I’ll go with it (bc I’m indecisive too LMAO)

Stage 2: Presentable concept sketch. When I have these ideas pinned down, I’ll make a more presentable version of the sketch to send to the client. That means visible body shape & posture, key facial expressions, mvt indications, etc. Following the splatoon commission sketches, here’s their stage 2:

Stage 3: Initial sketch on paper. When the client chose which posing is best, I’ll sketch it down on paper. I use rule of thirds, mark the margins, make sure the proportions are aligned and correct before I do the last stage (bc it’s going to be tedious to readjust everything once I’ve noticed it’s not centered or smth like that). I forgot to take a picture of the other posing’s stage 3, but it’s like this!

Stage 4: Lineart sketching. DO NOT jump straight to hard lineart, it will leave marks or stains when you erase. Sketch lightly first with an HB or 2B or any B pencils, honestly it’s in your hand’s pressure control and how you hold the pencil, but personally HB or 2B is good. This stage can be messy as long as the main lineart is shaping.

After that, I can start 1st stage of lineart! But this is all when I do commissions or serious pieces tho. If I’m sketching for fun, I just do 1 sketch then straight to lineart ^^

2. A piece from this year that you’re really proud of?

Honestly, I’m still proud of my concept art projects for my 2D and 3D animation subjects! When I look at it, it makes me feel like a professional concept artist☺️ It’s a warm feeling seeing my old OCs drawn like they’re posted in artstation or something hahah.

3. Something you would like to improve on?

I would like to improve on a lot of things, but getting started & staying consistent is mostly my obstacle when I want to improve. I want to learn how to draw:

Hair and different types of it. Hair is the thing I hate looking at in my drawings bc I can’t get it to look how I want it to.

Backgrounds - landscapes, cityscapes, seascape, etc (and how to be patient drawing it bc I always give up halfway LMAO)

Reflective surfaces

Different textures (fuzzy texture, chrome, rough, etc)

Bokeh & blurs (traditionally, on paper)

Shadows of two or more light sources crossing together.

Plants and flowers. Always so embarrassing to draw a piece with flora in it bc they look so elementary level LMAO I absolutely love flowers, but god have you seen my “Unbosom” artwork, I was NOT proud of how I drew petunias ;w;

Animals. I will not be showing my pathetic attempts in sketching a horse from memory, but you can imagine how horrible it was for me to want to improve on drawing animals.

Musical instruments. Still a struggle, especially when instruments are drawn from a different angle like that one time I did the Issei Noro digital fanart.

Fire and water.

4. What’s something you hope people notice when looking at your art?

I hope people notice the composition! I’m trying to be mindful of space, visual weight, and shapes of the movement or the posing, they contribute a lot to how to make a drawing less static or empty looking. But honestly, if the viewers didn’t notice, that’s fine ^^

[sunthroughtherust]

tell me more about blame! bc i tried ten chapters and struggled to get into it but your take on it in the tags have made me curious to try it again

It's a manga about stairs

Ok that’s (kind of not really) a joke, but seriously don’t read it expecting a character or plot heavy story. The characters are basically just vehicles for the readers to experience the world and the plot exists…. Sometimes….. In its own way….. On its own schedule…….

The main draw for most readers (including myself) is the gigantic megastructure. In story humans created the megastructure and controlled it in the netsphere with their net terminal gene, a gene only humans had, but something happened and the gene began disappearing and humans started being hunted by the safeguards of the megastructure. Most of the places kyrii walks through are enormous but empty and ragged and old every room is so old and run down, but fun and interesting in a way. someone on tumblr once described the megastructure as like a forbidden playground not built for humans and i have to agree, every panel i see i just want to climb inside and explore. that’s kind of the fantasy for me, being able to walk around with no one else around me as i explore a long ago--maybe never even lived in-- abandoned city.

I will admit the plot leaves a lot to be desired especially whenever nihei writes like…. Explicit worldbuilding, at some point alternate dimensions came up so a character could body-hop into their own body again and it was…. Confusing. So much of the plot and miniplots and arcs are very confusing which can lose the gravity the series tries to go for, but honestly i find it funny in a very engaging way.

As much as i said the characters are just vehicles for the world, it would be better to say that nihei simply doesn’t want the story to be character-focused because he cares more about the architecture. the characters are plenty interesting but the story just doesn't make a habit of caring for their emotions. For example cibo once had to come face to face with an atrocity she caused and then it was never brought up again (but we stand an unethical girlboss scientist). Sanakan had a very in-the-background arc about becoming more human and essentially learning to love. Honestly love is such an important aspect to all of the characters in the series even if it doesn’t seem obvious at first and it's so human in so many ways despite only a few ‘real’ humans appearing in the series. Anyway im just rambling now, but basically nihei just writers things and it's up to the reader to accidentally stumble upon an obsession

ok that was a lot and i don’t know if i even explained the draw of the series, but if you really want to try and get into blame! i’d really watch the 2017 movie before attempting to read the manga again. It's a pretty watered down version of the actual story (since it actually went for a plot rather than just focusing on architecture lol) and it follows one of the arcs with people in them. Also you get a better understanding of the backstory which will give you more of a reason to stay with the manga. At least that was my experience with watching the movie without any prior knowledge of the manga and immediately being like MOAR!!

The only thing i have to say is that the 3d animated movie ‘cutiefied’ the characters too much in a way that i felt took away from the grittiness of the setting, but that’s personal opinion. Another personal opinion is that you should watch the movie simply for cibo’s introduction sequence because holograms being mistaken for ghosts fucking rock

[k00297230]

Hello you candescent candles!

I finally finished my animation and I'm quite happy with it. I added some Foley sound art to go with it on Premiere Pro which the animate workshop helped with because I would've lost otherwise. I had fun messing with different sounds that I recorded using my bath and sand on a tray. I also have ocean sounds I had my sister record from Australia playing as a background clean audio.

Before this I had revisited my 3D hand piece which I have pretty much given up on. I did attempt the wax photos attached to it but It didn't turn out as I hoped it would. I feel I could still try to make it work if I tried but I'm just not happy with that whole piece in general, although I did learn a lot and enjoyed working with different molds and materials.

I feel like I could've pursued the idea of projected the photos onto the wax hand and taking photos of that instead but I was happy working on other stuff.

The clock also finished up this week. I added tickets along the side which you can see close up above, done on Illustrate. I feel I could of gone further with this piece and added more to it. Alas, I started constructing it too late but had fun making it none the less.

[mliter]

Hi-Fi Rush.

Revealed during some showcase Xbox was having that day, this surprised literally everyone when we learned that it was available right at that moment. No marketing. Any nay-sayers were immidately shut up because the game was right there to play. It was a real ballsy move.

Due to how Forspoken soured any attempt at comedic writing in video games around the time, i immediately turned off the trailer for this game the moment i heard "Yup, that's me." My attitude would quickly change after pressing the play button by accident again.

I had an extra code for 2 months of Xbox game pass (christ this is a good service) & downloaded it when it was available. Immidately starting the game, i'm introduced with a well animated intro cutscene that seamlessly transitions to the beautiful cel shaded visuals.

At this point, i realized that everything in the world is synced to the beat. the player character's footsteps, his jump (if you can time it right) and almost everything working in the background. After stepping out, i truly recognized how much style this game got.

For one, the character design & art. Look at this!

Everyone's has a look that i would see at 6:00 PM on Teletoon. Everything that happens makes me think of something that would be written by man of action. Makes me think of Slugterra. Storm Hawks. This type of Disney XD Awesomeness character design is distinct and it blew my mind to see it return in such a fashion. I don't see it that often and i hope this inspires more to look into it. I know it did so for me.

The presentation is some of the most consistent and high quality i've seen in a video game. I felt the same wonder i felt seeing the Lego Movie for the first time while running through this. The animation, both 2D and 3D is outstanding. Hi-Fi Rush likes to flip between the two on a dime, without warning. The cartoony artstyle and how they utilize it is exceptional. Radical color changes, motion lines, visible effects straight out of a comic book, expressions that snap on a dime, allowing for gags to be easily pulled off with little use for realism logic. The cutscenes like to jump to an fps of 24 to keep it up. The sound effects and things that happen within them are all to the beat. There is an insane amount of detail and polish here. This is a playable cartoon, through and through. There's very little to break the illusion they're selling you. There's even animation of both Chai and 808 messing around as you transition to the other part of battle. They don't have to do that, but they did. There's so much love in this project. I see the vision and you will as well. I played the entirety of this just in awe of what i was looking at. This is what happens when you let creatives just. go wild.

As RANK10YGO put it, everything about this game feels like a can of Fanta on a hot summer day.

The combat is masterful. I hear that people that were involved in some of the greatest character action games were on this project. You've got parrying, movement, and allies that you can swap in to extend combos and disarm specific enemies. The combat isn't really deep, but good lord is it fun. Also, take all of that and put it to the beat of the music.

Exciting camera work, explosive effects, an energetic UI, voice acting that gives everyone life, everything on the screen is moving. All to the beat of Shuichi Kobori's glorious compositions. This is the exact stuff my mind dreams up of when i space off.

The boss fights are absolutely jaw dropping by the way. You think it's gonna go the way you think it is, but it doesn't. It's something different every time, some of them aren't even fights!

Even after finishing off the great story, i unlocked some extra features and a postgame that encouraged me to play again on harder difficulties. Character customization, a model viewer with a wealth of character information & a music player was immediately available to me. Most AAA games like to lock that content behind DLC or pre order bonuses. I thought i was missing out on not getting the deluxe edition. but i felt like i wasn't. The game isnt really that long as well.

It's clear that this game was designed with fun in mind. Profits probably came second, but Tango Gameworks clearly wanted to create something fun and memorable. This is a title that i would've seen in 2010. Not 2023. I had not one bad experience going through this title. It felt like there was absolutely no corporate meddling, nothing holding the team back as they developed it. This shit is what dreams are made of. It's been years since i've been taken in and enamored by a video game like this. I had so much fun. I love Hi-Fi Rush with all of my heart. I'll never forget this.

[vergess]

(reposted because??? tumblr ate or deleted the first post???)

So. Lots of pain meds at the moment, so this is a little bit nonsensical, but, I have been playing the newly released video game I was a teenage exocolonist (available on steam, not linked because tag visibility) while I am laid up in bed.

Lots of opinions, basically all positive. There’s a specific thing I want to talk about in more detail, but this post got too long so I will just link a future post on the gender politics of nature, nurture, and future as presented by the twins Dys and Tang.

So instead here’s my Most Recommendable Qualities (mostly free of spoilers):

Native linux compatibility:

you know how I am about that. I cannot believe I’ve become the very linux guy I so hated when I was working retail…

Upsettingly beautiful art

2D gaming is my first love but man the medium has come a long way since needing a flashlight to play pokemon. Sometimes I forget how far, and then games like this pop up with the gorgeous art and expressive characters, and I inevitably find myself wondering why the “”“"mainstream”“”“ video game market (in as much as such exists these days) focused so obsessively on photo realistic 3D when inevitably a well directed art style is what matters most.

The backgrounds and environments in the game are all extremely lush, with a gorgeous, colorful style that if I had become an art critic instead of a writing critic I would probably have better terminology to describe. Like, uh. Water colors or some shit. Stained glass. It’s all very luminous fuck dude I don’t know, the closest I’m going to get here is to write a poem and I’m not going to write a poem where the fuckign developers might see it. I need to be sober for that.

Characters:

I’m a character driven asshole, we all know this. It’s why I read so much fanfiction and play so much melodramatic fantasy and spend several hours of my life openly sobbing about a single fucking issue of Sandman. So, you’ll understand when I say, "people keep recommending me dating sims and I keep bouncing off of them because the characters never Do A Thing,” what my major criticism of a lot of Large Cast Of Dateable Character games is.

None of those issues arise here. I’ve played a few runs now, making a conscious decision on each to focus on a specific character. One. SIngular. Except, the thing is, you can’t do that. Not in the sense that the game won’t “let” you. You could certainly just dump all of your time into skills and one character. And the timeline of the game would change to reflect your isolationism.

Characters you don’t interact with during runs have their own “autonomous” storylines written, and each divergence your player character makes has its impacts meticulous tracked to create different character experiences every time, even as each character holds very tight to a narrow set of repeating traits. This only further emphasizes the fundamental strangeness of the player character, as the only one capable of being fundamentally different across timelines.

Also all the dateables are just, oh god, SO cute. And, by the time they are capable of fucking, very fuckable. Extremely attractive designs. Honestly everyone is super cute. The whole cast is magnificently designed. And that includes…

Monsters & World Building:

First of all, let’s get the important personal opinions out of the way. I think I would fuck the antagonist….uh….commander, whatever his title is. He looks like a fucked up centaur and I’m into that. There are also Adequate Amounts Of Tentacles. If you’ve known me long, you know that is a high bar, but the game clears it admirably and with diversity!

The alien fauna are all very FUCKING COOL. There’s a bit of throwaway dialogue from An Adult (your dad?) that talks about expecting the planet’s ecosystem to be ‘more alien’ than it is, and I respect the space program’s attempt a tpreparedness but for me, the whole uhhhhhh. Situation. With regards to the alien animals is PLENTY alien, and SO satisfying.

If you’ve ever been like, “god, I wish someone who wasn’t orson scott card would do all the cool shit they did in fucking speaker for the dead” then by GOD is this the game for you.

Accessibility:

The content warnings are extremely detailed. I reviewed them all, and having seen several of the ones I was most worried about, I feel they accurately described the situations without spoiling them. I did end up upsetting myself rather badly with one thing which happened, but it is hardly the developer’s fault that I misunderstood the context in which the “teenage pregnancy” CW would apply. I personally want to specify that (IN THE ROUTES I HAVE SO FAR PLAYED) the pregnancy is a very wanted, safe, and cherished.

The game players very well on controller, which is a must for me. There are a handful of UI elements that I have not yet been able to access by controller, but I think this is more a factor of my being bad at remembering buttons than the game’s design. If you have a mouse, that will solve the issue entirely. My GF speaks highly of the keyboard and mouse gameplay.

Turning off screen distortions and weather effects generally made the game very visually understandable for me, with large, clear iconography. If you have significant visual impairments, I don’t know if this is a good game to play. Picking up items on the ground can be tricky in some cases and there’s nothing for eg a high contrast or greyscale mode if you need that kind of thing.

Stability.

It’s easy to forget that near-launch properties are supposed to be complete games that function well. This game is very complete (VERY, INTRICATELY, COMPLETE) and very stable. With as complicated as the sets of cause-effect-timelines are, I expected it to be much easier to create minor paradoxes in dialogue.

So far, the only time events have seemed to happen slightly out of sequence due to relationship progression or what ever else, was when I made a conscious effort to be as obnoxious as possible at one point just to see if I could make it misbehave.

I haven’t been able to make it crash from within the game so far. I’m hardly a Q.A. tester anymore, but I do tend to be pretty aggressive to my games, so I feel confident in saying it’ll run steady for you if you get it.

Politics etc:

The queerness is all very excellent, super queer in very believable ways, especially given the cultural aspects of the worldbuilding. Characters behave queerly outside of just all being bi-for-the-player. The trans characters were all extremely appealing to me with strong characterization that included but did not obsess over their genders. There are at least 2 trans teens in the player character’s peer group and 2 trans adults of very different ages and character types, and there’s even a cute little intergenerational trans solidarity bit you can get sometimes. In addition, of course, to the ridiculously complete gender personalization.

You would not believe how many games forget that “bro” and “cowgirl” are gendered terms, but this one remembers.

The racial politics are, from my perspective, adequate to not interfere with my gameplay experience. The human characters do consistently refer to the environment and native animals in very colonialist terms but they’re literally colonizing the planet so…. The point is, there is not a native people being eradicated, though there are… territory wars(? I guess.) with both wild animals and antagonist peoples.

If you’re particularly sensitive to colonial narratives, handle with care, but I felt the writing in the routes I’ve seen so far handled most of the issues well. Plus I mean. THe title. Is “teenage exocolonist” like. I think the whole “colonialism is a major narrative theme” ituation should be made clear by that.

In terms of the human diversity it’s pleasingly broad. There are characters of all ages, builds, complexions, races, personality types. There’s a massive range of disabilities both physical and mental, as well as plenty of fun sci fi accomodations.

I mean just among the dateables I can remember top of the head, theres:

ambiguously asian twins who really said Autism Has Two Genders,

ambiguously brown fat girl with developmental disability,

ambiguously brown Gym Bro (derogatory) who is, and this is true, literally named 'ambiguously brown

ambiguously white farmboy who has clearly been eating his space wheaties and also helps invent space cannabis with your dad

unambiguously black girl who looks the autism twins dead in the eye and said 'no autism has one gender and is me’

unambiguously white tomboy who goes full samus

A dog (human)

Hatsune Miku (gender neutral)

Venom (twink)

There’s something here for everyone, all of these characters are super fascinating concepts honestly. I know I keep harping on that but it’s true so there.

Scenario writing:

It’s a bit difficult to separate the player character writing from the scenario writing for reasons that rapidly become clear in the game. Both are very good, though, so that’s fine. The writing is just really very good.

The variations on the timeline that you are able to uncover through repeated play are fascinatingly diverse even as certain events remain immutable, and the whole thing really plays with the concept of time travel and the other-self so beautifully. Really one of my very favourite explorations of the topic already, and I’ve only seen… IDK 4 endings along 2 routes? And there’s 29 endings???

It’s very good. The point is that it’s very good you should go play it.

It’s on steam. It’s app 1148760 on steam and it’s very good, it’s definitely worth more than what they’re charging. I mean have you seen what a $60 console game looks like these days, and then this is like. $25 and SO very much.

[your-local-uwu-artist]

What Are your opinions on the amazing digital circus

-wasn't real into it at first but than brainrot randomly hit

-pretty vibrant and expressive for 3d

-sillyyyyyyy<333333

-kinger and gangle are iconic duo

-some of the visuals could use improvement, it's hard to focus on characters when the background is brighter than them, some of the attempts at more cartoony visuals could use a LOT more stylization and stretch and squash etc, they look to rigid at times. the character sizes are a little too vast,like ragatha and pomni look awkward next to each other because ragathas head is so much smaller than pomnis, it's like boss baby. while I ike caines design but the animation on the teeth is too distracting, your instinct is to look a character in the eye but the movement of the mouth makes it so some peoples focus goes everywhere.

-voice acting TOP TIER

-music wonderful

-i enjoy how silly it is

-silly

-i do think it's a little to blunt on the pschogological horror side of it's premise (instead of show and tell its more like show a little and tell lot) but i can excuse it sense it's a pilot and it does seem like it's leaning farther into the comedy side

-I really like the concept of a character having entered the circus as a child, I've seen some people hc that with jax and while I'm pretty sure all the characters canonically entered the circus as adults I just find the concept very compelling. also comedic potential: imagine a pair of like 10 year old twins entering but than one of them starts aging and the other doesnt fnajsdka

-I want it to lean more into found family so bad

-or i guess more like a play on found family like 'no i didn't choose these dumbasses to be my found family but too late i got attached'

-I like jax and kinger best i think

[gabrielandworms]

It's Day 247 of the migraine that never ends, and any plans I had to clean or maybe (finally) finish the painting I have sketched out on my drawing table's surface are just not happening. I'm going to be lying in a pile of blankets playing one of the lower energy rpgs I have. I might even get some real writing done if I can trust my brain enough with any of my drafts.

But I realized I can probably trust my brain enough to rec some of my favorite rpgs for sick days like today. Something without a complex plot or a need to stay focused. Something with fun design and, if you're really lucky, big numbers.

Also some (one? two?) of these are on the 3ds. It's probably a good idea to look into them now since the shop is closing permanently towards the end of the month.

So here's my little list of suggestions. This definitely isn't just an attempt to get people playing things I like. It's also an attempt to get people to suggest their own preferences.

Dragon Ball Fusions (3DS): I know Fighterz is the crowning achievement of Dragon Ball games, but I don't like fighting games. Meanwhile this a fun little rpg where you can make your own OC and get other fighters to join you with one of the most enjoyable combat systems I've ever played. The fusion mechanic is also really goofy and a delight to mess around with.

Legend of Mana (PS1): Well, originally a PS1 game. I think the remaster is pretty much everywhere. It's always been my favorite Mana title, and I'm glad to see it getting attention now. Unlocking every quest is a pain that requires a guide, but the combat is very "no thoughts, head empty" and the game's backgrounds are some of the most beautiful I've ever seen. Also I haven't watched it yet, but there's an anime adaptation of one of the major arcs now. Story is a bit heavier than the others here though as it digs into "love can both nurture and destroy."

Fantasy Life (3DS): There's a second one coming, but if you don't want to wait the first one was a lot of fun. The class system in this game is a lot of fun, and I think it's the only game I've played that let me even run around trying to become a Master Cook. You can also have your friends jump into your game and run around together, but that might be restricted to local play now.

Pokemon: Heart Gold and Soul Silver (DS): Or any Pokemon title, really. Heart Gold is just my favorite, but I also thought the Sun/Moon titles were underrated. Pokemon's base line has never been complicated. It's just running around with little magical animal critters, and maybe if you're lucky you're playing one of the gens that lets you pet them. Or have them follow you around.

Magical Starsign (DS): Legend of Mana's younger sibling, and a great deal more linear. But it has a lot of the same visual charm paired with a setting both fantasy and sci-fi. Like Legend of Mana, it also gets a bit heavier with its story. Some of the subplots do not end on happy notes.

Okage: Shadow King (PS2): Maybe the least "head empty" of the bunch, but grinding is an option, and grinding is one of the most "head empty" things you can do in an rpg. I wanted to include it though because it's visually fun and has a wonderful little sense of humor. As a bonus, it's available for digital purchase on the sony store. A lot of these are old and only available in physical versions unless you put in the effort to find other, Totally Legal methods.

Sonic Chronicles: Dark Brotherhood (DS): Look, I'm going to be honest. I remember nothing about this game. I had the flu in college and fever-induced delirium wiped out my memory of the whole damn time. But apparently? I played this? And according the save file I completed it? Which means this has to fit the criteria of an rpg you don't have to think too hard about. Which it's a Sonic game, so I can't imagine the plot is complex.

Fable 3 (Xbox 360): I know it's the unfavorite Fable for people, but I had a lot of fun with it. It also looks like it's available digitally. This game doesn't demand much, and honestly it's pretty easy to sidestep the instance when it does try to make hefty demands. I don't know how accessible co-op is now, but this is a game made better when you're running around causing chaos with friends. It also let me marry a pink-haired cannibal, and how many games even have that option?

[emmacornell]

What is your favorite animation style and why? :3

OH MY GOD HOW DO I PICK THERES SO MANY

also this got so long i’mma put a readmore here 😹

It’s actually easier to say what animation style I DON’T like.

Motion tweening.

I cannot STAND motion tweening on most days and it’s mostly because a lot of furry art became over saturated with it and because a lot of people are real lazy with it?? Like some people attempt motion tweening art and they don’t put in the extra work to build their in between frames or clean up their transitions or just make sure the body parts aren’t clipping through anything c’mon if your gonna animate put in the work to make it not an eye crime.

Now when motion tweening animation is done right it can look great! I’ve seen some motion tweening animation that looks almost comparable to hand drawn animation! You can still pickout the mechanical squash and stretch motion tweening does but that can be masked better when you actually put in the work.

In my opinion motion tweening is best meant for subtle or background animation. Like falling leaves or that shoulder movement meant to simulate breathing that Live2D used to oversaturate their marketing with 😹

I guess if I really had to choose a favorite I’d pick traditional hand drawn animation but especially the style that blends 2D on 3D environments! Think those super late 90s early 00s animated movies like Treasure Planet and Spirit: Stallion of the Cimmaron. I miss this style of animation cause it felt so unique seeing standard cartoon figures suddenly zoom out to a sweeping shot of this elaborate stage with all these parts moving independently and with such depth it makes a nice mouth feel for the eyes.

Stop motion is also pretty near and dear to my heart for the genuine dedication you have to have for this craft and the time you spend on it to get everything just right 👌🏾👌🏾 Like I’m always down to watch Coraline or Chicken Run or Paranorman or Kubo or Isle of Dogs

Also this style of using 2D effects on 3D models and environments has me losing my mind over how GORGEOUS it is Into the Spiderverse my absolute BELOVED like I deadass saw that in theaters three times because it is so BEAUTIFUL on the big screen trust and believe I’m going to se the sequel in theaters even if theaters in a post pandemic era still scares me

Rubberhose animation is good of course but very few that try to emulate it truly put in the work for it. Rubberhose is supposed to be all wiggly and bouncy but some that try to emulate it only go as far as extreme squash and stretch. Cuphead actually GETS it and the work they put into that game’s animations paid off. (I know Bendy and the Ink Machine has some tiny animations too but eh)

Lord this post is long 😹 I’ll finish by saying CGI can be great but too many sources focus on the high fidelty of the graphics and less the quality of the animation. I don’t care if you can see the character’s pores or the individual strands of their hair and I don’t want animation to be indistinguishable from Live Action I wanna watch the silly cartoon men. Hotel Transylvania is so pleasing to the eyes in how it manages to emulate 2D squash and stretch with 3D models and the extra work the animators put in to sculpt those additional models for the inbetween frames to create the squash and stretch we expect from cartoons is big brain.

I can and will talk forever about animation I didn’t even get to named styles like Don Bluth or Genndy Tartakovsky or Ghibli or Studio Trigger 😹😹

[canmom]

Animation Night 133: Disney, Dreamworks and the Emperors

Hey everyone, happy Thursday! It’s Animation Night. Come, have a seat~

We’ll get to you, Iron Giant. Hold on.

Earlier this week, I got fixated on writing a post attempting to figure out my answer on the question of why the big American animation studios abruptly turned away from traditional animation in the early 2000s - a subject previously visited, if briefly on Animation Night 31 and Animation Night 49. A string of high-profile 2D and 2D-in-3D failures, such as Treasure Planet, set against a string of 3DCG successes by Pixar, Dreamworks and increasingly other studios may have been the justification for executives claiming audiences no longer want to see 2D animation - but were they really the reason? Did the higher-ups deliberately sabotage 2D with (for example) scheduling decisions in order to make cheaper, non-unionised 3D films?

I’m grateful that people seemed to like my post there, but I actually don’t think my argument is quite satisfactory. I argued CG films by the same studios weren’t cheaper to make by and large (and also aren’t entirely non-union), but I only pulled up a handful of data points to make that claim. A more thorough investigation is due.

But in the meantime, it’s Animation Night. When I made that post, I was critical of the artistic decisions made in the post-Prince of Egypt films of Dreamworks, such as Spirit and Sinbad, which we watched back on Animation Night 43. I speculatively extended that to The Road to El Dorado, which I haven’t seen, and was promptly challenged by fans of that movie to give it a fairer shake. Sorry guys!

Let’s put that right. Tonight we’re going to be taking another look into that era. You’ll get to see this gif...

...and this one...

...in their original context.

But this is Animation Night, so we’re gonna be putting some Context down.

The first decade or so of Dreamworks was defined by sour grapes. To summarise briefly, Jeffrey Katzenberg left Disney after a bitter falling out with Michael Eisner over succession following the death of Frank Wells. Instead of promoting Katzenberg to Wells’s position of President, Eisner took over Wells’s duties himself, in part at the behest of Walt’s nephew Roy E. Disney. A furious Katzenberg, who was already not loved by many animators for his heavy-handed meddling in the direction of films, departed and founded a new company with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen. (He’d also start a lawsuit with Disney, eventually settled for hundreds of millions of dollars. It was bloody!)

Thus began the years where Dreamworks seemed to be trying very hard to show up Disney and Pixar - although Katzenberg always denied this and insisted the similarities were coincidental. This was primarily true on the CG side, with movies like Antz targeting A Bug’s Life (much to the upset of Pixar’s John Lasseter) and Shark Tale targeting Finding Nemo.

But the year 2000 also saw a battle of traditionally animated films on the subject of the Maya and Inca, both with the conceit of someone assuming the position of Emperor. Disney released The Emperor’s New Groove, while Dreamworks released The Road to El Dorado. Whether these films were intentionally similar is not entirely clear, but Disney certainly thought Katzenberg was copying them, and both studios ordered their animators to race to get their movie out first. (In the end, Dreamworks won by some margin, releasing in March.)

Since these two movies deal with at least superficially similar subject matter, coming from the same era and animation tradition, it’s interesting to contrast them. Disney’s character designs are highly graphical and stylised, pushing into more angular shapes and generally very broad, exaggerated movements. To an extent its characters share some DNA with Mignola’s designs for Atlantis: The Lost Empire. The backgrounds are just as stylised, the stagings more flat and theatrical.

Dreamworks, meanwhile, takes the same semi-realism approach as all its other designs in this period; its cinematography is a little more towards the live action end of the scale with more close-ups and a stronger sense of space, the proportions of its characters a bit more grounded.

Beyond the setting, the major similarity between these movies is that both were conceived initially as a dramatic story, and retooled into a comedy during production.

In the case of Groove, the story goes that Lion King director Roger Allers was called into the office of Thomas Schumacher, who proposed making a film about either the Maya, the Inca or the Aztecs. Allers liked this idea, and set about drafting a film that would be called Kingdom of the Sun, drawing on 1894 novel The Prisoner of Zenda. An outline of this film is available (ty wikipedia)...

Kingdom of the Sun was to have been a tale of a greedy, selfish emperor (voiced by David Spade) who finds a peasant (voiced by Owen Wilson) who looks just like him; the emperor swaps places with the peasant to escape his boring life and have fun, much as in author Mark Twain's archetypal novel The Prince and the Pauper. However, the villainous witch Yzma has plans to summon Supay (the evil god of death), and destroy the sun so that she may become young and beautiful forever (the sun gives her wrinkles, so she surmises that living in a world of darkness would prevent her from aging). Discovering the switch between the prince and the peasant, Yzma turns the real emperor into a llama and threatens to reveal the pauper's identity unless he obeys her.

During his time as the emperor and doing Yzma's orders, the pauper falls in love with the emperor's soon to be fiancée Nina who thinks he is the emperor that has changed his ways. Meanwhile, the emperor-llama learns humility in his new form and even comes to love a female llama-herder named Mata (voiced by Laura Prepon).[12] Together, the girl and the llama set out to undo the witch's plans. The book Reel Views 2 says the film would have been a "romantic comedy musical in the 'traditional' Disney style".[13]

However, after Pocahantas and Notre Dame failed to make the stonks go up enough, Disney got cold feet about another movie with such dramatic scope. First, they called in Mark Dindal of Cats Don’t Dance to co-direct; then, worrying about making the summer 2000 release, Disney producers Thomas Schumacher and Peter Schneider ordered that the animation team would split in two and fight to the death each produce its own proposal to fix the film. Dindal proposed making it a straight-up farce; Schumacher and Schneider liked this and Allers quit, rather heartbroken at having spent four years of his life on the project.

Thus, starting in September 1998, with about a quarter of the film already animated, the project was extensively retooled on pain of cancellation. The basic premise (evil witch, emperor gets turned into llama) was kept, but the tone changed, and the animation was to be made simpler. A number of people left, notably animator Andreas Deja supervising Yzma, who went to work on Lilo & Stitch. You can read this grisly details here. The whole affair was documented by Trudie Styler as a condition of her husband Sting providing music, which is probably why we know quite so much about it. Sting actually also intervened in the story, demanding a rewrite of a planned ending where the emperor Kuzco, restored to humanity, bulldozes a rainforest to build a theme park (idek).

The movie that resulted from this tortured production process is basically a long string of rapid-fire visual jokes in the manner of a much older cartoon; it didn’t make a lot of money, but nevertheless gained something of a cult following. Which is also something that can be said of Road...

The story with Road is not quite so messy but still pretty messy. While Disney steered well clear of having any Europeans involved, Katzenberg decided to set a film during the Spanish conquest of the Americas, contemporary with the invasion of Hernán Cortés. Cortés, exploiting the tensions created by Aztec imperial rule over the many other peoples like the Totonacs and Nahuas, pursued a divide-and-conquer strategy which resulted in the Spanish and their new allies sacking the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán, thus installing the Spanish as the new imperial rulers... who unfortunately turned out to be even worse than the last guys. In place of the Aztecs’ system of tributary provinces and spectacle of human sacrifice, the Spanish brought in hundreds of years of genocide, epidemic disease, brutal slavery under the encomienda system and indoctrination to Catholicism, which would in the end constitute one of the largest episodes of mass death in human history.

Somewhat fraught, you might say. However, it doesn’t really seem like anyone did say.

The impetus for this movie came from above: Katzenberg summoned two of his screenwriters and said (this is definitely a direct and real quote) “here is a book about the Maya and the Conquistadors, write me a movie about this kthx”. “How about,” said Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio, “a spin on one of those Road to... movies from the 40s, a buddy comedy with a guy following a map to a mysterious city of gold?”

“Great!” said Katzenberg. “Sounds like another grand, dramatic animated film like Prince of Egypt! That’s the kind of movie I like.”

“What if it’s a kind of white saviour thing where our guy, who accidentally becomes Emperor, goes on to save the Maya residents of a fictional city from Cortés? And we’ll make it horny, we’ll have a Maya princess love interest who doesn’t wear a lot?”

“Mm, sounds good.”

“OK, cool. Yo, Will Finn and David Silverman - direct it! Elton John, get us some of that Lion King score magic, eh?”

Time passes. The Prince of Egypt is well underway, with all of Dreamworks’s best animators, such as James Baxter, drawing it.

“Actually,” says Katzenberg all of a sudden, “I’ve changed my mind. We need a comedy to follow that. Movie’s on hold. Rewrite it to be funnier. And that’s too horny, let’s keep it PG-13.”

“Oh.” say Finn and Silverman. They leave. Finn writes to Katzenberg to try and smooth things over, but Katzenberg brushes him off. “You don’t quit Jeffrey.” said one unnamed source. “If you do, he closes the door behind you.” Instead, the film goes to some guys called Eric “Bibo” Bergeron (no idea where the nickname comes from) and Don Paul.

Katzenberg’s micromanagement seems to be the throughline for a lot of this. At one point, he was so overbearing that James Baxter had to intervene:

In one meeting, character animator James Baxter, a normally shy and bashful Brit, stood up to his boss in front of the other artists and told him to back off.

“You don’t know what you’re doing.” Baxter said. “You’re too involved. You’re losing the respect of the artists.”

Katzenberg, who respected Baxter, had seemed to listen. For a few weeks, at least, he kept a greater distance from the production. But soon, he was back to his old habits. 

The other notable development in this movie is the increased use of painted CG sets, similar to the tech Disney would use on Treasure Planet. A contemporary Animation World Network article talks about it in detail, describing how the film’s backgrounds were completed on computers by the new generation of ‘tradigital’ artists - so for the first time you couldn’t hold a painting in your hands to review it. As well as a shortcut to complex staging in 3D space, the new technique allowed economical reuse of background elements in different shots. Further digital tricks could be used to add small amounts of animation to background characters without increasing the drawing count. The character animation pushed for naturalism and subtlety to suit the ‘buddy comedy’ tone. And judging by the tone of that article, Dreamworks had high hopes for the reception of this movie.

But on release, the movie was met with... a pretty lukewarm response. Mainstream critics were dismissive of its animation and found its characters unconvincing. Indigenous organisations were especially unhappy; Olin Tetzcatlipoca of the Mexica Movement, appalled, compared it to making an upbeat film about a guard in a Nazi concentration camp that doesn’t mention the Holocaust. Audiences, for the most part, paid it little regard. So, like Groove, it dropped out of history, only to be rediscovered decades later and gain a small cult following who declared it a hidden gem. (A large part of the reason likely being that the main pair is eminently shippable.) A couple of gifs were extracted as memes, as seen above.

What do I think? Haha, well, I haven’t watched it yet. But this is going to be an interesting review to treat after we have.

Now, I’ve covered Disney and Dreamworks, but there was another player in the 1999-2000 period who’s relevant to the story. That’s Warner Bros., and director Brad Bird, who would in the future go to direct The Incredibles and Ratatouille at Pixar; his 1999 movie The Iron Giant is as I recall a good film, and interesting as one of the very few animated films to address a cold war setting and the terror of living under nukes. (We watched another, When the Wind Blows, on Animation Night 26). That’s a story worth telling, but with an eye on the time, I think it’s going to have to be told another night.

So, if you will join me, tonight we’ll be watching Groove and Road. Are they indeed forgotten gems that did not deserve their dismissal? Are they just shallow comedy? Big racist messes? Let’s go and find out.

Animation Night 133 will be going live shortly at twitch.tv/canmom, and we’ll be screening movies in about half an hour (22:20 UK time roughly) - hope to see you there!

[goose3gg]

What new animated Christmas specials are missing, and the nostalgia factor of the classics.

After a night spent watching Claymation and animated Christmas specials with my family, I couldn’t help but reflect on why we return to the same novelty films every turn of December. Tonight, we chose to watch “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” and “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” which are two must-watches on our list. When approaching an animated attempt at creating a classic, I think a certain novelty effect that older films have on us is imperfection. When using modes of creating like Claymation or sketching each frame in an animation, certain elements such as a snowing overlay or repetitive background choices are simplified. This adds a childlike element to the creation, adjacent to bedtime stories fading in and out of clarity while listening. This adds a sparkle of humanity, which with the uncanny valley and 3D aspect to new animations lack when trying to redo classic films with character. The uncanny valley truly takes away from the enjoyment of watching the film, which I think the industry thought they could get away with due to the terrible animation from 2000-2010. I didn’t forget about the remake of Peter Cottontail. I think in movies like “Toy Story,” the uncanny valley added to the experience and added to the toy experience, or the uncomfortable and weird line between toys being alive; overall this style was unsuccessful in all the holiday categories, but especially with Christmas. Even the transition from the old “Rudolph” to the new sequels is extremely sloppy and lazy, which feels ridiculous knowing how much work used to go into this type of design. Kids are smart and love to ask questions, and even more so love explanations which is why I think the movie “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” is so wonderfully and thoughtfully done. It bases the plot around common questions kids would have surrounding Santa and confidently gives a backstory while calling back to those questions throughout it. These classics acknowledge the intelligence of their audience and know that not only children will be watching them. In today’s animations made for the holidays, they’ve inherited almost the Dora style of framing the story, which is asking their audience questions to ensure they’re still listening, which no adult or anyone over the age of ten is interested in involving themselves in. I was reminded how much I enjoyed the individual characterization of each person in “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” In today’s cartoons, I see too often when scrambling for diversity and marketability, characters have snowballed into these weird advocates for their culture, favorite fruit, color, etc. I really miss when characters could be layered or extremely simple which I think a lot of people search for in classics they go back to every year. Contrasting this, “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” simply focuses on how people want to be good people or to be bad people, or people who don’t realize they’re being treated poorly. I think this is also a great take for morality and children, as in this film a ‘bad guy' turns into a ‘good guy’ by the end, to show it’s simply a choice that some people make, and some people don’t. I think this perspective is good, especially in hindsight with how anti-semitic many original villains in classic cartoons are, but also not to make the plot so easily predictable in these stories. I think other Claymations have similar elements which also make them enjoyable as a classic, like “A Year Without a Santa Claus,” and “Rudolph.” When watching Christmas specials with your family this year, I encourage you to reflect on what you think makes these classics, classics. I remember waiting for the specific day in the viewing schedule for certain favorites amongst my family, in the pre-streaming days. I still love returning to these classics and thinking about how we can create even better classics in the future.

[niamhsglobalproject]

WEEK 5

Before starting the avatar creation scene, i remembered Chris Hendrick’s YouTube account. Chris hendricks worked on the creation of club penguin from may 2005 and has many videos on his input on the project, the process and issues faced. 

Club penguin was made with flash, however as flash no longer exists, the information and methods used would have to be transposed.

While club penguin was on a more isometric perspective, they used a 3D model for their avatar. The colours and clothes were all overlays and animations were made in a software called swift3D. This was so that it could be pre-rendered and put into flash meaning it didnt matter if there were loads of faces on the object. 

As i didnt have access to my computer all of this week, I picked up some of the digital art tasks to take some pressure off the others in the group and to ensure i was still being productive. I let the others know i was able to make some art for the head teacher that welcomes you to the school when you first arrive off the train. My vision behind this was to create a hybrid character that was both a nightingale and a lion. This took two attempts as my first attempt didn’t have the right proportions and was looking very flat. To combat this, i decided to use a rough template to get the proportions and positioning of the character’s head/ eyes. Below are pictures of my first attempt vs final attempt.

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Towards the end of the week i also decided to move on from the login menu. As i was having difficulty using firebase as an Authenticator, i thought i would come back to it once other progress had been made. Therefore, i tried to start the avatar selection menu. Using the similar methods to club penguin, i made some sprites from lace’s avatars that meant the character and the clothes were separated. I also used Layla’s background that was intended for character creation and got to work. So far, i was able to make the base buttons to choose if the player would like to be a nightingale or lion and then buttons for a selection of the clothes. What i think i will find difficult with this part of the game creation will be programming the buttons to work as intended. Figuring out how to split off between the lion and the nightingale and then how to show the correct set of buttons for each outfit. 

Due to the difficulty I’m having learning the software, i emailed the lead for the games development course to see if he had any resources or had any students that would be interested in collaborating. This would just be for the fundamentals and hopefully to give a more hands on approach to learning Unity. 

My aim for next week will be to finish the avatar creation menu and to complete the plan and first section of my essay. 

On Monday we had a good catch up as a group, we were able to call lace in the afternoon to see where she’s at and we’re able to make a to do list after having our call with Ukraine. Layla was able to share the feedback that we have received to far on the survey and this confirmed that our concept meets the wants of the students in Kyiv. 

Introduction 

Why chose and why it links to needs of client and brief 

[wwwdenise]

04 - Repairing and Completion

The last stage is mainly about solving the problems encountered inside the blender. And thinking about what to do with my background. I decided to illuminate my character in the form of a flashlight to highlight the darker surroundings and show that the attack was taking place under unknown circumstances.

The general expression of the video:

The game starts by firing a bullet to activate the camera and hopefully opens the shot by shooting the character's standing sign.

The camera then reverses and goes inside the ship. The attacker played light-hearted music in an attempt to imply that the event had a high success rate and was short-lived. Due to unstable signal reception, one man was shot and another escaped. There is physical contact during the chase, which ends with a man being shot and kicked out of the ship to roam the universe.

Reflection:

I felt that in my 30-second video the pacing was not precise enough to make the story clear. I'm wondering if too many elements or colours might feel a bit cluttered. In video expression, the use of camera lenses is also very important.

I chose to do this group work alone because I wanted to try more new things. By watching and learning from video tutorials, I learnt how to build 2D paintings in blender, albeit simply.

This time I also have a deeper understanding of the difficulty of animation drawing. It is really a hard job, and the coherence between each action requires a large number of pictures to show. The establishment of 3D models increases this convenience, which I think is a better aspect. Although the difference between 3D animation and 2D animation is very big, it is still very convenient to use 3D models as an auxiliary in the painting process.

The other party's emphasis on embodying more emotional changes in the piece was, in my opinion, very difficult and demanding in terms of character dynamics and the pace of the story's plot. I chose to use music to allow my story to show the process of tension. Although it may seem a bit odd that there is no sound behind it. But I felt a little more tension when I was watching it myself.