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As astute readers may have noticed the Penny Arcade Expo was last weekend, and it took Seattle by storm. I attended with our fearless editors Chris and Jinny and was left as amazed and exhausted as they were by the whole event. I got to see some great games, stunning cosplay, and meet some cool new people.
As the exhaustion prevented me from getting into fresh new foods yesterday I humbly submit a few of my favorite photos from PAX in lieu of an article on cooking. Click through below to see my favorite photos, or check out my PAX 09 Flickr set - and of course check back next Tuesday for your regularly scheduled dose of dish!
It's been about two months since I declared my intentions to make a fully digital animation in Toon Boom Studio. So how's that going? Well, it's roughly 75% done. However now that summer has rolled around my initiative has been somewhat sapped. Not to mention work and trying to get this Filmmaking Club started at the University.
But just as an interesting side, I figured I'd post all of the backgrounds I did. You can find them all here on my Fickr Gallery.
Under the cut I'll show you the basic process I went through to make them.
As the end of the semester looms like a freshly detonated whale carcass on a nudist beach, I have decided to do an equally ambitious animation as my previous cel project. This time, however, in digital.
I am willing to paint you a ghost, in watercolor, and mail it to you. WHAT IS THE CATCH? You must immediately email afterwards and tell me HOW, WHEN, WHERE AND WHY this ghost died, and provide me with an EXTRA SPOOKY NAME for said horror. Image and description will then be published on a forthcoming blog!
These days the concept of a "hand-drawn" animation is quite alien. Even shows that still animate on paper eventually send everything into a computer program to be inked, colored, or composited. But there was a time when cartoons were inked, colored and composited painstakingly by hand.
As you may or may not know, I am a film student. Film is a very time-consuming, very difficult process. Even major studios take years and hire hundreds of people to make a simple two-hour movie everybody hates. Learning about it is even more daunting, and Dr. Helmig is competing for freetime I just don't have anymore.
But I'm not ending it. No! Instead I'm expanding what I do here at the Weekly Geek. The comic will update basically whenever the heck I feel like it and in between those sparse comic updates will be demos, showcases, and how-to's on video production, animation, and photography. Basically a dumping ground for all the things I learn and/or produce in film school. One week I'll show you how to animate on cell, the next I might show you how to do good green screen compositing, or I might just show you a funny video I made.
This all starts next week. Until then, I'll show you a little animation I did about a year ago. This was actually painted on cell, and shot underneath a 35mm camera.
Italian cartoonist Donald Soffritti is producing this series of heroes and villains in their later years. With Emerald City Comicon just behind us, these seem somehow appropriate.
From Trademork: On February 25, 2008, Twentieth Century Fox, producer and distributor of the TV show Futurama has filed to protect the trademark Slurm in relation to “carbonated and non-carbonated soft drinks; fruit drinks; fruit juices; mineral and aerated water; bottled drinking water; energy drinks; syrups and powders for making soft drinks and other beverages, namely soft drinks, fruit drinks and tea; coffee-flavored soft drinks; Ramune (Japanese soda pops); powders used in the preparation of isotonic sports drinks and sports beverages”.
I personally can't want to see what Slurm actually tastes like. I'm imagining a cross between Sweetarts Slush and melted lime Jell-o, or possibly the old (and divine) DnL.
posted by Chris on December 5, 2007 8:01 AM in Cartoons
TaleSpin, part of the Disney Afternoon "back in the day" (see: early 90's) was a strange sort of experiment. Featuring a re-imagined Jungle Book world filled with boat planes, art deco buildings and sky pirates, Baloo and Kit Cloudkicker ran for a grand total of 65 episodes and were single-handedly responsible for my current love of art deco/steampunk/sky piracy. It's one of those cartoons that you fondly remember from your childhood, but watching it now you realize how horribly it was animated. Unlike something akin to Thundercats, however, Talespin actually had quite the interesting plot based on the grand, sweeping storylines back in the Carl Barks days of Uncle Scrooge (which was later turned into DuckTales). TaleSpin also had some great voice actors in it, including cartoon staples Jim Cummings, Lorenzo Music, Tress MacNeille, Roger Bumpass, Dan Castellaneta, Frank Welker, Rob Paulsen and... Sally Struthers?
As a kid I always wanted to fly on an airfoil like Kit Cloudkicker.
A few years back, Cartoon Network was enjoying a huge surge in popularity. At least, it seemed that way to the outside observer. They were running tons of classic popular toons as well as really starting to create and air lots of great new originals. During this time, CN had an amazing string of "bumpers". That is, little bits between shows that weren't exactly commercials, but just promos for the channel you're already watching. Everything from Aquaman explaining why the channel was the only place where his aquatic telepathy was a useful job skill, to Wonder Woman using her golden lasso of truth on various CN stars, to famous cartoon characters interacting with each other and live people at the "real life" Cartoon Network headquarters.
One of my most favorite bumpers was a little ditty sung by several toon stars such as Brak, Daffy, Johnny Bravo, and Space Ghost. It was a fun arrangement of several names of well known and not-so-well known cartoon characters in groups of rhymes or alliterations. Watch it!
One of the more amusing aspects of post-Garfield existence is understanding the "correct" way to read a Garfield cartoon. Basically, one just ignores everything Garfield "says", and focus on the fact that Jon is clearly insane. Beginning with Jon cavorting around in tights and an elf outfit (complete with jingle bells), and featuring a visit to his bizarrely dysfunctional family (featuring Jon's rarely seen brother, Doc-Boy, voiced by none other than SQUIGGY, and PAT FUCKING HARRINGTON as Jon's dad), this is one of Phil Roman's more ludicrous outings.
In true Christmas Special fashion, the Jon Family allows their cat to sit at the table and then proceed to sit around it on only one side, a la the Last Supper. Jon's mother is blind, by the way. Jon's grandmother, who seems to be wearing Homestar Runner's shirt, and delivers the greatest line of this monstrosity: "How did you know I needed a kitty in my lap?"
As we delve deeper into Jon's schizophrenic behavior, we learn that it's genetic. Grandma proudly exclaims that Grandpa was a sociopath except on Christmas. Don't miss the highlight of the piece, Jon's father reading their sacred religious text, "Binky, the Clown Who Saved Christmas".
Not exactly Lorenzo Music's best work, but I imagine it would be just as much fun with Bill Murray in a giant foam Garfield suit and ping-pong balls on everyone's eyes. Garfield gets particularly maudlin in the third act (as if that's in some way possible for Garfield to get MORE maudlin than he usually is). Between Jon's delusional behavior, Doc-Boy's perpetual adolescence and male pattern baldness, and Grandma's intolerable hatred of Jews, this is possibly the worst Third Act ever.
One of several Super Mario Christmas specials that will grace the table during this Festival of Low Lights, Cave Christmas arrives rather late in the franchise's NBC career, after Princess Peach met Milli Vanilli and ostensibly before the incredibly ill-advised guest appearance by Barbara Fucking Bush, this season dispatched utterly with Toad and replaced him with an obnoxious cave-boy named "Oogtar". Did they bother to get a new voice actor, though?
No.
Oogtar is the exact same voice as Toad, only a little gruntier. I wouldn't mind Oogtar so much if he wasn't a blatant rip off of an already RETARDED character, Bubba Duck.
Anyway, the plot here is relatively simple. Oogtar enjoys bullying Off-Model Yoshi. Mario decides to pump some Biblical Consumerism up their asses. Bowser and Morton Koopa Jr. (or Koopa and Bully if you're a retard) interject. Wackiness and big Peach hair ensues. Painful.
One question... what does Peach's enormous jewel on her dress do? Is it the source of her power? What is she doing in Dino-Land? Is Toadsworth staging a coup d'etat? So many questions. Too little gravity control.
Not many people remember the Free Willy cartoon. Not many people remember being circumsized, either, but it's just as painful. We kick off the Terrible Christmas Cartoon Advent Calendar with a tale of a disturbed boy, a whale, underwater space pirates, a loose seal named "Lucille", thinly veiled homosexuality and a terrible theme song. Best part of the deal? Socially relevant climate change issues!!
On the plus side, the secret weakness of middle age hippies is revealed.
There are no snowmen in Puget Sound this year, however: "We're desperately low on snow this year, so I made one out of PINECONES."
posted by Grant on November 18, 2007 12:01 PM in Cartoons
We're just one episode away from the Day of Black Sun and Team Aang is getting ready to invade the Fire Nation. They find the spot where they plan to meet in the income Water Tribe fleet. It's 4 days before the invasion and they have some time to sit, relax, and do some last minute planning. But knowing the big day is so close, Aang starts to get anxious and bad dreams invade his attempts to sleep.
Every time I hear Steve Conte's version of Rain I have to turn the volume way up. I just can't get enough of his voice. His voice has a quality that his female counterpart, Mai Yamane, lacks. Steve's version of Rain wasn't played in the TV series or Movie, so it can only be found on the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack.
The video has lower quality in some parts, but all that matters is the song, anyway.
posted by Grant on November 13, 2007 11:17 PM in Cartoons
Now that good ol' ASN has some nice screenshots for me to steal, it's time for a discussion of the latest episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender. A bit late after Halloween, we get a nice spooky episode to enjoy. Once again, on the outskirts of a Fire Nation town, the crew are hanging out in a forest, trying to remain inconspicuous. And this time, they're telling spooky stories. Katara actually comes up with a good one when suddenly a mysterious old lady appears and startles everyone. Who is this lady? And what's been going on in her town? Click on in for spoilers, spoilers, and more spoilers!
Let's face it, the 90s Batman cartoon was friggin' amazing. It was just such a radical departure from any other cartoon of the time. One of the main things that set it apart was the music. It was one of, if not the first cartoons to have new music composed for every single episode. Most of the scoring was composed by the late Shirley Walker. Most of the music was based on the original theme that was composed by Danny Elfman for the Tim Burton Batman movies. The main title theme was a direct variation of that theme, condensed for the opening of the show. Probably one of the best cartoon openings ever, it never even said the name of the show in the sequence. It just used the visual and musical cues to set the mood. I've just always loved this theme.
The latest installment of Avatar: The Last Airbender starts off with the often-used gimmick of having something shocking start off the show that we're right in the middle of, and then cuts to a "X days earlier" scene. It's a little clichéd for Avatar's style, but I really can't think of many sci-fi or fantasy shows that haven't used it at one time or another. So anyway, Toph is suddenly captured by the local authorities and we see that Katara is the one who turned in the little blind Earthbender. Oh dip! What could have brought this on? Why, Katara? Why? Toph doesn't smell that bad, does she?
In the latest episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender, we get a huge load of expository back story which adds a great deal to the story that's going on presently. Both Aang and Zuko learn about their forebears and see how it affects their present day lives. We're really starting to get into some serious stuff here, so you should really only click the jump if you've seen the episode for spoilers lurk within.
It's time once again for a little spoiler filled discussion of the latest episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender. We switch gears this week and focus primarily on the main antagonists: Zuko, Azula, Mai, and Ty Lee. Do we get to see them rain destruction on the Avatar and his buddies? Are they planning their next moves for world domination? Not yet! Right now, it's time for a beach party!
The journey into the Fire Nation continues! But Sokka's feeling bummed. All his friends can bend, but he can't. What's a 5th wheel to do? And what the hell has Iron been up to?
After leaving the Fire Nation school with a severe case of happy feet, our heroes move deeper into the land of flames. Encountering a river full of sludge and gunk, they find a small village atop it, and learn about the mysterious Painted Lady
What's going on in this quiet little villa? And who is The Painted Lady? If you love spoilers, be sure to click the jump!
The journal into the heart of the Fire Nation continues for our plucky heroes on the most recent episode of Avatar, titled simply The Headband.
Aang and the gang come inevitably come across a Fire Nation city, What will happen when they start to infiltrate and subvert the all-powerful Fire Nation?
posted by Grant on September 22, 2007 9:01 AM in Cartoons
For those of you who have been paying attention, Amy and I got all caught up on Avatar: The Last Airbender a few weeks back, via DVDs borrowed from friends and rented from Netflix.
Well the time has finally arrived for the new season to start up. Book III: Fire picks up a few weeks after the last chapter in season 2. What has become of Aang and his crew? And did the show live up to the high expectations it has created for itself? Hit the jump to find out.
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