Month: June 2012

Button Brigade Trailer

DEBUT! I made this trailer for Axis Sivitz’s game, Button Brigade. This is the most up-to-date Innuendo Studios has ever been: the trailer was finished two days ago.

I met Axis a little over a month ago at a Boston Indies meetup. This is his second game, and as it’s almost done, we’re talking about possibly working on something together, possibly [redacted]. In either case, Axis is a cool guy, so I made this trailer! Then immediately some time-consuming paid work came along and I ended up having to cram this in during my scant free time. But as I am wont to do, I still gave him the works – voice-over, lots of edits, and really down-to-the-wire I threw in some animation. Got to break in my new Snowflake mic, too.

Go check out the game! I look forward to playing it on my housemate’s iPhone.

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ESL Panda Promo

A promo I did earlier this year for ESL Panda.

When animating, I’ve mostly stuck to rotoscoping, so this is by far my longest and most complex work that is predominantly cartooning. Oh, there are rotoscoped bits peppered throughout – all the buildings, the world map, the panda – but I enjoyed mashing up a lot of different techniques. Trying to make a style that matches that of my high school drawing book – and keeping it consistent – was something I’d never done before.

With my critical eye, there’s a lot to pick apart. For instance, this is really a 1-minute promo in 30 seconds. There’s simply too much information. Even 30 seconds of animation can take so much work, so much time, that it’s easy to forget just how brief the finished product will be. It became most clear near the end when I listened with the voice-over, and it was dense as a neutron star – a neutron star made of information. I re-wrote the script to cut out about 1/3 of the words and slacken the pace, but that only achieved so much.

But let me be honest: this is, flat-out, the best animation I’ve ever done. Collating all my work on one site for the first time, it’s clear to see. A lot of time went into this, and I was ecstatic to see it finished. Warts? I don’t mind a few warts.

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twenty-four magazine

(I made a magazine.)

twenty-four magazine is sort of like a game jam, only you make a magazine. You pack around a dozen creative professionals into a Brooklyn apartment and make a magazine in 24 hours. This was started by my friend Sara Eileen earlier this year after a successful Kickstarter campaign.

I was not on staff for the first issue, and it’s only because she and the rest of the Issue One staff have agreed that I’ll say out loud – the first issue looked a little amateurish (nevertheless impressive for 24 hours). She invited me on the staff for Issue Two and she and the other organizers tweaked the process a bit to help make the magazine better. Last Friday at 10am we started, and by (er, roughly) 10am on Saturday, we had a magazine.

Forgive my Anglo-Saxon, but I am so fucking goddamn proud of what we made.

Myself, I interviewed Scott McCloud (author of Zot! and Understanding Comics, and the creator of the 24 Hour Comic) and James and Lisanne of Indie Game: The Movie. I also wrote a piece on science, did some of the online documentation, and showed up in a few photos. The Scott McCloud interview ended up being the front-page article, and I’m like holy shit.

It was a fantastic weekend. Everyone’s contributions were amazing, not least of all Jack’s layout (Jack being one of only 3 people that made it the whole 24 hours without sleep – I crapped out in the last 90 minutes). Please do click the link (oh look here it is again), you can see a few pages of the magazine for free (it is so pretty). The PDF version is only $3, so by all means, check it out!

And I’ll be on staff for the next one. Boosh!

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Climblapse

Hey, this is a thing!

AmeriCorps Year of Service, 2009-2010. True story. I did after-school programming with low-income kids through the Providence Children’s Museum. A portion of my 1700 service hours went to a Museum Enrichment Project where we documented the construction of the Museum’s Luckey Climber. We set up a camera in the building next door and it took a picture every 20-or-so minutes. We never exactly found out why the camera kept stopping, and it was apparently getting bumped by the cleaning staff, so there are large gaps in the timelapse and the angle keeps changing. Regardless, I was quite happy with the finished product, though it drives me nuts that we missed the cone going up!

I did the first pass on the editing, but most of the credit goes to Melinda Rainsberger – she provided the camera & the timelapse program, she did all the motion graphics and color correction, she finagled a friend to submit the soundtrack, and did a pass on the edit after I was done which markedly improved it. And she did it for credit and some museum passes. She’s a classy lady.

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