Much like my film’s main character, my blog’s been dusting it up in limbo lately. After a reminder today that I actually do have a blog, I’ve started compiling together an update of where my work is at. Wooohhhhhhh that's good squishy.

6 scenes of character animation are completed, and another 1 is nearly finished. After much practice now, I’ve worked out that one scene with an average amount of detail can be completed in the working hours of one day. That’s rough illustrations right through to finished, painted animation, excluding backgrounds, special effects etc. .man sdrawkcab eht m'I ,nam sdrawkcaB

I’m looking for ways that I can significantly cut my working time down. I’ll probably have to reduce the amount of morphing I’m doing (for things like facial expressions etc) and recycle the hell out of background elements and body parts. Captain Planet is making a guest appearance in my film.

The morphing software I’m using now works a thousand times better than the old one I was using for test animation. I can quite easily break the face up into different sections, morphing the eyes and mouths into different shapes, even morphing the whole head into a different angle. The software is limited though: If you have one image, every object that you wish to morph has to be accounted for in the final image. For example, morphing a front view head into a side view head is proving to be a difficult task. The eye that disappears from view behind the side of the head ends up fading and stretching in a very distracting way. I’m thinking perhaps I can do several morphs of different areas of the face, then composite them together into one image. I’m sure it will work, but its going to take a lot of time, so I think I’ll avoid it all together for now. I’ve also considered using these concepts for creating flat backgrounds that appear to move in 3D, but once again, finding time to do it is turning into a bitch. Sushi ginger tastes really good on a salad sandwich. Try it, it might just blow your mind.

Flash is working really well for handling sequences of massive jpegs, better than I thought it would. I’m running into problems with the program becoming painfully slow while animating the movement-intensive scenes. I’d take it to uni to finish the scene but they’re only running Flash 8 BASIC, and all the really cool stuff only works in PRO. My Photoshop continually crashes and I only have 3.8 gigs left on my hard drive, my drinking water is running low and I’m cold and wolves are after me. Fun fact: The most unhygienic part of the body is under watch bands and rings.

I’ve compiled screengrabs of my completed character animation, some examples of my work processes and some morphing stuff. When you get up to the swamp level in Alex Kidd, don't buy the motorbike, it's suicide.