New film

So I decided to take a break from games for a bit to work on some other things I've wanted to do for awhile.

I'm currently working on an animated film which was originally for school but the classes weren't structured in a way where I could finish an entire 4 minute film in time. So here is a WIP that I intend to finish in the near future! I'm using music from a guy named Dan Johansen from the Audio Portal. He hasn't officially gotten back to me about whether he approves or not but I figured I'd post about it anyways since I'm not making money off this :P

The story is based off a video I saw about the living bridges of Meghalaya, however I wanted more of a story so I've begun storyboarding out more of a plot of conflict and other crazy stuff. My goals are to practice the workflow of going through and making a storyboard, painting backgrounds, animating the characters on keys and adding inbetweens, developing some sort of character relationship, animating other movements besides run cycle and fight scenes, animating special effects (with the help of Adam Phillip's online course), and merging Flash animation with Photoshop backgrounds, and 3D elements. In addition, I wanted to try my hand at the traditional look of animations these days. I know there is great potential in experimenting with what can be done with animation, but I just wanted to do this for fun as an homage of how I started "animating" 10 years ago. It's a lot of things I want to work on but I haven't made a movie in awhile so it'll be fun.

You can see in one scene there is a short cut of an unfinished 3D bridge. Here is an album on imgur with some zbrush sculpts I've been working on. It's quite a long process to texture and render out lit scenes but I'll be working on this too. The goal right now is to render out shots and photoshop them into other painted elements of the scenes so that I don't have to repaint a complicated bridge for every camera angle I want. It'll be a challenge to get it all looking cohesive but the reason I'm learning 3D is to try new things like this.

It feels good to be learning more art techniques and breaking out of standard workflow!

PS. I may or may not need someone to do sound effects, ambient or whatnot. I really don't know yet, but if you are good at engineering good outdoor sounds, water, fire, lightning, subtle footsteps, scuffs, scrapes let me know. Like I said, I don't know if I'm even going to be using sound at all, but I'm making it without at first. We'll see how it holds up and whether or not I should pull the volume of the soundtrack down to allow for more fx.

Closure related News

Humble Indie Bundle 7 just came out a couple hours ago and is just about to break 60,000 copies sold. Pay what you want for a group of great games (+ Indie Game the Movie), 3 of which came from developers from this site! Great gift for the holidays, and you can choose a % to give to charity. Tell all your friends about it!

It's so amazing to have potentially this many more people playing our game. It was kind of crazy going from millions of people playing my Flash games as a teenager to mere tens of thousands of people playing a game I spent a few years on. I'd always expect a game for sale to have far less players than a free online flash game, but this bundle is super exciting because I just want more people to play!!

Have a good holiday, merry christmas, etc!