Haven't done this in 6 years. But I'm opening art commissions again! Please read the instructions, and thanks for the support!

-Bryan v

2024 (Part 3/3) - After Effects and Compositing

Something else I learned since 2018 is After Effects. I have a love/hate relationship with Adobe. Their products can be quite shit. Especially Adobe Animate. But that shit is very user friendly so it can be good shit and I use that shit every single day. After Effects is another program I recently fell in love/hate with. It's a very powerful animation software and you can do quite a lot of stuff with it. So this blog entry is dedicated to the things I've worked on using After Effects. I have less things to talk about here so this is just mostly show, no tell.

So I was contacted by Zach from the Long Gone Gulch pilot and invited me to do some compositing for the toon. I had donated to their Kickstarter campaign some time ago so of course I accepted the offer! Here are the pins and extra stuff I got from that Kickstarter:

It was fairly simple work, I just needed to put together the animation and the backgrounds along with some lighting effects. Sometimes there was some tricky masking needed and sometimes the layer count would go above 50 but it wasn't too bad. They also contacted me soon after to do compositing for another short film they worked on:

I've also been doing a LOT of compositing work for Smile Studios. I've worked with Alek for a long time now, probably one of the first jobs I ever did. I helped with animation for his lovely point and click game Tsioque some years ago. Anyway, I helped with a lot of projects, a lot of them for video games. They all go through similar processes so I'll just share them all here:

This one was extra tricky as I had to do some 3D work in Blender:

All these were more intense and involved working with very large Photoshop files and a lot of complex layers and effects. Which meant super long render times. Despite that, these were still super fun to work on and really pushed me to learn new things.

Anyway, that should be it. Like I said in part 1, I'll still be doing freelance work here and there, so expect to see more work like these and animations like the ones I did for Mashed. And definitely more stuff from myself.

Until next time.

2024 (Part 2/3) - MASHED!

Surely you didn't think that I made NOTHING these past few years since Episode 1 of Dark Harvest? Quite the contrary, I think I've made more minutes of animation than I did in my entire life.

So in the previous blog post, I briefly mentioned that I have been doing freelance work here and there. I kinda wanted to post about all of them because I've worked on a LOOOOT of things.

So first off, I've been doing animation for MASHED on Youtube. Maybe you've seen their videos. They do cartoon parodies of beloved IPs like Mario and Sonic. And Sonic, and also sonic (Okay I've done a lot of Sonic cartoons for them is my point). I'm pretty proud of all of these honestly.

This was one of the first ones I made. I'm not very good at muscular characters so this was a bit of a challenge. I'm only vaguely aware of Jojo's Bizzare Whatevers but I KNOW it enough just from exposure to popular culture. I made this during the COVID lockdowns. I live in the Philippines, infamous for having one of the longest lockdowns so this really was ALL I did during that time. That and playing some Animal Crossing and Death Stranding.

This is another one I made. This one and the previous one was already storyboarded. Didn't have as much difficulty with this one. I haven't played a single Zelda game besides Majora's Mask (and not finishing it) so I was hoping I didn't draw anything wrong or something. Spoilers: I drew something wrong. Or colored something wrong Idk.

This one's pretty cool, this was the first one I storyboarded and I had some input in the character designs. Really fun to work on but I barely made the deadline for this one and as I was finishing it, we were hit with one of the worst typhoons in the history of the Philippines. So that was a fun memory. Having no power and hoping to GOD that Dropbox finished syncing the video file.

This one was also very fun. I wanted to go for the "no-outline" look, kinda like Samurai Jack. I really like how it ended up looking. Definitely one of my favorites. I also got to use After Effects for the viruses.

Now, this one was a delight. I don't really have anything else to say, it's Thomas the Tank Engine fighting with Postman Pat. They asked me to switch the style to something anime-inspired for some parts which was definitely fun to do. So I can't draw anime for shit, but whatever I ended up drawing, I thought were pretty funny. This ended up doing very well that they wanted me to do two more:

I had a blast working on all these. Even though they were quite stressful sometimes but I'm here for it. There are still stuff I've worked on which I will discuss in Part 3.

2024 (Part 1/3) - The Dark Harvest Updates

Hey it's been a while. I don't really know why I stopped posting here since I quite enjoy writing long walls of texts and just sharing my thoughts and opinion on shit. Well, since I refuse to use Xitter, I've only been using Instagram lately and it's pretty decent but it's not really a good place to write stuff. So that's why I decided to resurrect this corpse of a blog and what better way to do that than to write about my plans for 2024 that are 100% going to go all according to plan and not go astray.

So first off, Dark Harvest Episode 2. I feel like a broken record always saying "it's coming" or "I'm working on it." Well, right now's no different, buddy. I'm still working on it. However, I'm proud to announce that Episode 2 now has a release date. Well, sort of. On Instagram, I regrettably posted a teaser for episode 2 with "Q1 2024" as a caption. In retrospect, this was incredibly foolish of me as estimating when an animation will be finished is never that simple. Idk, I want to tell you to just please ignore that release date, sorry. I really just meant to say "2024." First quarter? Late 2024? I DUNNO! But definitely coming this very year.

I'd like to go over some of the reasons why this thing has taken this long. First off, I consider myself a somewhat fast animator. Like I can do a complete 4-5 minute animation in 3 months if I really want to (I'll get back to this one in my next post). The reason is the way I animate, allowing me to do it pretty fast. To keep it short, I don't draw every frame of the animation and I recycle a lot of previous drawings. HOWEVER. These aren't really simple character designs and animating them can be tricky. They're not like anime but they're also not simple cartoons. I don't really consider myself a good animator because of this. When I get to a rather complicated scene I can get stuck for days sometimes. I also like to push myself when it comes to my skills which is why I include complex scenes in my cartoons just to kinda force myself to be better. And yeah, there's a bunch of it in this one. There's also more polish in this one than the previous.

Reason number two is that this one is just a long one. First episode was around 6 minutes or something but a lot of it was dialogue too. While episode 2 also features extensive dialogue, there's more action in it. 9 minutes is a pretty long video for internet animation standards and it's the longest animation I've ever done (besides "Bliss" but that featured a lot of recycled scenes).

Reason number three. I simply am not working on it all of the time. Ok, I'll be serious right now. I'm an adult with responsibilities and bills to pay. I need to work and I can only work on stuff like these on my free time. When I was working on the pilot/episode 1, I was still in college. I had a lot of free time back then. I even get to draw everyday. Quite a luxury these days. Episode 2 has been worked on ever since I finished the first one. That makes it around 5 years old now. And I agree that this is totally unacceptable. This is unacceptable TO ME. I hate that it takes me this long. My schedule is a regular 8 hour job on work days, and then on the weekends I do freelance work. And then whatever time I have left, that's for my own work. Which means I virtually have zero time for my own projects. And truthfully, I love what I do too much to keep this up. I love this cartoon that I made and I got so many plans for it. Which is why I recently made the very difficult decision to do quit my job so I can work on my own things. I know very well of the risks involved but being able to finally work on things I'm incredibly passionate about is worth it to me. I still got my freelance work so I can make some money, but, this way, I can be flexible with my schedule. I've been doing this for a couple of months now and I made significant progress with this episode, despite still having side projects. It finally feels like I'm not stuck on this episode and things are finally moving again. Which is why I am now confident in saying that this will be done this year. Sometime this year, but definitely this year. I'm also in the process of writing the script for Episode 3 and 4. So, wish me luck.

So that's really the only thing I wanted to get out of my chest. One last thing I'd like to address: I'm barely present online these days. There's been some few attempts to post consistently but I just can't. And I'll just accept that. Look, I don't like social media. I tend to avoid it as much as possible so it can be difficult for me to keep people updated. But I made something that people like and expecting people to just wait for it isn't good I think. But I also won't force myself to post something just for the sake of it. So what am I saying? I don't really know, just don't act as if I've canceled my projects just because I haven't posted in a month. Seriously, it gets old.

As I've said, I do not use Twitter anymore, I will only be using Instagram (and now Tumblr too I guess, at least for extra long announcements). Recently made an official Instagram page for Dark Harvest here: https://www.instagram.com/darkestharvest/

Also my regular Instagram is where I upload random artwork I make. So that's about it. I do want to talk about the stuff that I've worked on since Episode 1. But I'll save that for part 2.

Announcement: Dark Harvest Episode 2 Update

Hi. It’s been a while. I almost forgot my Tumblr password. Well anyway, I’m here to talk about the state of my cartoon “The Dark Harvest.” 

chill.wav

hi, havent uploaded here in so long

The Dark Harvest Episode 1

Oooohh snap, it’s finally done. 

So as you may know, I’ve been working on this shit since the dawn of man. Took me a while to finish it because I’ve been working on college stuff and also I’ve been animating for Tsioque. Hell, I’m surprised I finished it at all this year. I didn’t quite make it in time for halloween, but that was my fault because the cartoon was already done but I refused to upload it because I keep seeing small mistakes here and there....oops.

more of these darn sketches!!1

sketches

more commissioned stuff...

Some commissioned works I did last time

(Aug 3, 2018)

Hey guys, I'll be doing commissions once again!

Here are more examples of my works: http://roastedstix.tumblr.com/tagged/art/

Again, I’ll have limited slots, but I’ll probably open more if I feel like I’m still up for it. Please read full details: http://roastedstix.tumblr.com/commissions

T H A N K :>