Lots of news, this update. Now that a whole bunch of freelance work is out of the way, I would like to post more frequent updates and ideally, return to the days where this was a fairly regularly updated tutorial blog. This post is all about what I’ve just finished and what I plan to do in the coming weeks.

NG Tank

My Newgrounds Tank award arrived and it’s bloody awesome - not to mention heavy, being solid bronze on a marble base! This is without a doubt the best trophy I have ever received for anything. The quality is unsurpassed and I want to thank Tom Fulp for his attention to making this something I am intensely proud to own and display. This is the first annual Newgrounds Tank and it was awarded to “Waterlollies” as 2007’s Movie of the Year on Newgrounds. Thanks to everyone involved :)

BCA

On the subject of tutorials,  BiteyCastle Academy has a new Flash CS3 chapter which I decided to offer as another free download. As I said on the BCA page, everyone had waited far too long for that chapter so I didn’t feel like I should charge money for it. As huge as the chapter is and as much work as writing it was, it’s all about the Flash CS3 tools so it’s not really something that you’d want to pay for. All my animation secrets and FX techniques in later chapters however, I’m sure you can appreciate that they’ll cost a little something ;)

I’m finishing up Chapter 3 right now which is all about creating graphics in Flash. We’re looking at creating backgrounds, mixing colours and storyboarding which will all help us prepare for the animation and effects chapters.

I’ll announce updates to the BCA page here on the WoodenBlog.

Dungeons and Dragons

My work on the fourth D&D 4th Edition short “The Red Dragon’s Interview” was finished a few weeks ago and it has been well received by various RPG communities. Remarkably, 99% of their comments are about the characters and the writing, rather than the animation itself. I guess I can see this as a small victory, partly because while admittedly I’m a bit of a feedback addict, I’m a believer that the animation and the medium must never outshine the characters and story. An audience must never be distracted by the puppet’s strings.

Going OTT on animation & FX can be as distracting as bad animation, particularly if the characterisation is weak. The D&D characterisation is strong and the writing is good so the animation itself faded into the background. Well.. that’s what I tell myself as I cry myself to sleep each night :P

Kenny’s World

My ToonBoom work with Bernard Derriman on an Australian TV series wrapped up a couple of weeks ago. The production company flew Bernard and I down to Melbourne for the wrap party where we met the cast & crew, drank and played pool well into the small hours.

I’ve been on this health kick for the past 6 months, eating well and seeing a personal trainer. The party was the first time I’d touched a drop of alcohol in all that time, so the next day it hit me pretty hard. It’s a 90 minute jump back to Sydney but it seemed like a hell of a long time to me, hoping I could hold my guts in until I got home.

Anyway, Bernard and I are both back onto our personal projects and Kenny’s World has begun airing on Channel 10 - to mixed reviews, I might add. First episode was pretty good but personally I found the second episode quite boring, as did a lot of my friends and family.

The animation accounts for anywhere between 10-60 seconds of an entire episode and whatever people might think of the show as a whole, the animation, FX and backgrounds are something Bernard and I are quite proud of. It really was a fun project and thanks to that job, I learned ToonBoom from the ground up and discovered what a fantastic program it is.

As a reminder, my ‘Prison Construction’ video series (1-6) on YouTube is from the work I did on one particular Kenny episode.

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