Batman Hates Bronies

Check out our latest cartoon ‘Batman Hates Bronies’!

This one took quite a bit longer than my Pregnetheus cartoon. The ‘rough’ style actually took more work than my typical cleaner style oddly enough. I was initially thinking of doing something more in the style of Dark Knight Rises, but just decided to do my own style anyway. I’m happy with how it turned out, though I’m eager to get back to something tidier and simpler.

We hit a creative roadblock in the last few days of production. We couldn’t come up with any music to fit the first half. In the end I came across some Star Wars music (the Emperors Theme) and thought “screw it, lets just parody that”. So that’s how we ended up with a Batman/ My Little Pony / Star Wars crossover parody thing….

Hania worked her butt off on the score for this one. She did about 5 different versions of the first half, which was my fault. I was like “Needs more DUNDUNDUNDUN dun DUHHHH” and then “Can we pull back the “DunDunDun dunnn?” and then “……Maybe we should get rid of the DunDunDunDun….”

Jazza did a fantastic job as usual as Batman. It was my first time working with Josh Tomar (as the voice of the Brony), and he completely nailed it from the get go, I can’t wait to work with him again.

The bulk of production was done in Flash, for character animation. I used a lot of Photoshop for the BG art, and composited in After Effects to add some glows  and filters just to soften the look a little.

I’ve got a couple more ideas for some parody stuff, but we’re going to throw in some original stuff soon too just to even it out a bit more.

Pregnetheus

 

WARNING: It contains a lot of gore.

I saw Prometheus a couple of weeks ago and despite some clunky plot points, I loved how it looked. I haven’t really done much parody type stuff, so I thought I’d see what I could do with my own rendition of the cesarean scene. I’ve been dying to do a medium size animation for a while now, so here’s the result of two weeks of work. We wanted to get it out in one, but there were too many issues that extended the deadline. We’ll see how we go for the next one.

James Lee Animation on Facebook!

I now have an official Facebook fanpage. While there are already a couple existing pages for Tarboy, I really needed something more centralized to communicate with fans via Facebook.  Hit ‘Like’ to receive facebook updates from me about my new work and upcoming projects!

https://www.facebook.com/JamesLeeAnimation

 

I’ve just submitted my film ‘Short and Sweet’ to my various online channels! The original plan wasn’t to create this for Valentines Day, but with the themes, we decided to hold off and put it out on the day. Admittedly, this has been sitting on my hard drive for a long time, so I’m happy to finally have it out. You’ll probably recognise the style of the characters from 24 in 24. They’re from a series we have on the backburner called ‘Wods’ and we’ve got a whole universe of these characters planned out. Hania did a great job on the music, as always. Eric Gusky (who also did voices for Tarboy and Make Snacks not War) took care of all the characters’ little noises.

You can also view the Flash version of  Short and Sweet on my Newgrounds page here: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/590038

Mike and Christie’s Animated Wedding Proposal

I’m still yet to upload the full body of my client work, but one of my recently completed projects just went viral in the last day or so.  It was a small project I completed for  a client (Michael Reid) who wanted an interesting way to propose to his girlfriend Christie. He contacted me with a script he wrote, and I animated this little piece.

The video has been viewed on Mike’s personal Vimeo account nearly 200 000 times in the last day or so, and shot strait to the front page of Reddit. People are really interested in the personal story behind the piece. Congrats to Mike and Christie and all the best on their Wedding preparations!

24 in 24 Twenty Eleven is finally uploaded.

We’ve finally finished compiling and uploading 24 in 24 Twenty Eleven.

It’s been a pretty draining couple of weeks. We only got to our 20th animation on the day before we completely burnt out and couldn’t go on any longer. Over the next few days I was determined to finish off the remaining 4, but it was so draining even trying to completely a minimal amount of animation. I’m noly just recovering from a pain in the upp shoulder that I developed over the day from using the mouse for such a long period.

It’s a bummer that we couldn’t get them all finished in the allocated time, but we’re overall happy with the quality this year, even if some of them turned out rather cringe-worthy. Josiah Brooks did the male voices for the Toast and Cloud series, and he did a fantastic job. We used some of the left over audio to create other animations such as Gross Nyan Cat. Hania Lee did the voice for Toast’s daughter, Katie. We’ll probably do an extended version of Fez Guy at some point.

Doing this project was a reminder how much I need to start getting out a few smaller projects in between my larger films. Getting one film out per year lets me really focus on quality, but it’s not exactly sustainable in the long run unless I’m continuously growing my fan base by periodically releasing content.

I’ve separated out some of the videos from 24in24 and made them into their own submissions on youtube. One video contains only the episodes from Toast and Cloud, and another is just Gross Nyan Cat. They aren’t really substantial enough for my to post them as individual submissions on Newgrounds I don’t think. It’ll be interesting to see if it’s beneficial in the end.

Thanks to everyone who tuned into the live broadcast to contribute their ideas!

24in24 Live again this Saturday

  • Live from 8am, Saturday the 3rd of December, Brisbane Australia time.
  • Watch it on Ustream here http://www.ustream.tv/channel/james-lee-animation
  • Hania and I are once again doing our 24in24 challenge. For those who missed out last year, the idea is simple; we aim to create 24 individual animated pieces in the space of 24 hours. The idea was inspired by the 24 Hour Comic Day; an event started by comic guru Scott McCloud. All art, animation and music must be created within the day. Our viewers are able to communicate with us via chat, and give ideas on what they’d like to see animated. The interactivity aspect between us and the viewers played a major role and was a lot of fun last year.

    For everyone around the world, your local start time will be different. Here’s a few different times depending on where you are.

    8:00 a.m. Saturday December 3, 2011 in Australia/Brisbane
    9:00 a.m. Saturday December 3, 2011 in Australia/Sydney/Melbourne
    5:00 p.m. Friday December 2, 2011 in America/New_York
    2:00 p.m. Friday December 2, 2011 in America/Los_Angeles
    10:00 p.m. Friday December 2, 2011 in Europe/London

    You can work out your own local time here http://www.timezoneconverter.com/cgi-b in/tzc.tzc

    The format the same this year, but hoping to improve on the overall quality compared to last year. We’re aiming to do more voice work and reduce the number of ‘filler’ pieces that we did last year. We’ll be trying our best to end it with something great, as opposed to last year’s lackluster 24th animation.

    We’ll be keeping names of people who contribute as we go, so that we can place the in the credits at the end once it’s all compiled. While we’ll make every effort to note down everyone’s name, due to the time constraints, it’s very easy to have someone slip through the radar. As such, we can’t guarantee that everyone who contributes will end up in the credits, but we’ll do everything we can.

    Last year we broke our promised to have the final piece compiled and up on Newgrounds and Youtube within 2 hours of completion and got it in late. We aren’t making that promise this year, as we’ll be so fatigued at the end that it will be too easy to mess up the final release due to a stupid tired mistake. We’ll try and get it out the next day, but allow up to a week if there are any technical difficulties during compositing.

    We hope to see the same faces from last year, as well as some new ones this year. It’ll be fun for all, so tune in and help us out!

    Here’s our 24in24 from last year.

    Tarboy 2 – Rigging Nash

    Creating a rig that’s suitable for use in Flash is always a balancing act between functionality and expressiveness. You might spend your time creating a rig that works with all of Flash’s strengths and limitations, only to find that you can’t do anything with it besides generic looking symbol animation. On the other hand, you may have decided try for a rig that’s more expressive. You’ve separated your rig into a millions pieces; you’ve even got shape tweening for individual strands of hair. When it comes time to moving the character however, it becomes too cumbersome and you’re forced to compromise on all that detailed animation you planned for. A good rig should be a fine balance of both and appropriately detailed to the scale of the project.


    Flash is very capable traditional animation software, so why use a rig in the first place? The number one reason for me is time. While symbol animation compromises on finer detailed movement, it makes up for it in economy. To make a film like Tarboy, symbol animation is much more practical to my workflow.

    For the characters in Tarboy 2, I wanted a higher degree of flexible movement, such as movable shoulders and a bendable torso. I also wanted each of the joints in the arms and legs to be able to rotate a full 360 degrees, so this needed to be factored into the design of the character. This meant that each of these joints needed to be a perfect circle, so no angled joints in the elbows, shoulders or knees. The benefit of using this method, is that if I wanted to really lift the arm, I wouldn’t need to swap out a new arm symbol once the joint reaches it’s limits. Because the arm has a 360 degree range of motion, I’ve removed all shadows from the arms and legs. Otherwise, once the symbol rotates 180 degrees, a shadow that exists on the under side of the arm would now be on top. If I wanted to, I could make several variations of this symbol with varied shadows, and swap them out depending on the angle of the arm. In the end, I decided it would be too messy for a detail that would be barely noticed.

    The torso is broken in to three segments; the hips, the waist and the chest. At the ends of each symbol are more ball joints, that allow me to create rotating arcs in the body. For Nash’s character, I wanted him to have a strong hunch, but wanted the rig to be expressive enough that it could bend in the opposite direction if his mood was to dramatically change. The shoulder area is another place I wanted some control, so that when Nash raises his arm, it can flow properly into the torso. I can also raise or lower the shoulders to make him seem tense or relaxed.

    In the end, it takes a bit more time to move all of these parts around in Flash, but the degree of control I have makes up for it. I’d like to use more hybrid techniques, using more traditional animation for some of the features. I’m trying to bring something new to each shot to keep the drawings fresh, as symbol animation can look a bit repetitive after a while.

    Tarboy 2 is nearly 50 percent complete, and so far we’re on schedule to getting it released this year.

    Tarboy 2 Update

    I’m getting close to finishing the first of the four main sequences for Tarboy 2. Pre production is well and truly finished now and it’s just a matter of grinding through animation and backgrounds.
    The first sequence is mostly comprised of background art, which isn’t a strength of mine, so I’m looking forward to getting stuck into the second sequence and animating the character rigs which took so damn long to complete.
    There’s a lot more detail this time around, as I’m trying to focus less on designer-ey style graphics, and more towards something which gives a bit more dimension to the robot world. I’m running into problems with the output severely lagging now, as I’m not too willing to compromise on all the effects I’ve loaded into it. I’m at the stage where I have to decide whether I’ll be rendering out as video; embedded in an SWF for Newgrounds release, or whether it’ll be a hybrid of vector graphics; with the more detailed scenes rendered in video.
    We’re aiming for a release later this year, so hopefully too much doesn’t get in the way in the mean time!

    Purged has been released

    We just released our film ‘Purged’ on youtube. The film was completed before I started work on Tarboy, and I figured it was about time I packaged and released it. It was my third year animation project in college and the first larger scale short film I completed. It was also the first project completed that Hania and I collaborated on.

    My overall pipeline for animation looked something like this:

    1.Draw images on paper.

    2. Scan into Photoshop for digital paint.

    3. Bring into morphing software for head turns

    4. Export into Flash for character animation.

    5. Export into After Effects for compositing.

    6. Export into Premier for Editing.
    I’m thinking this will receive a mixed response, but at this stage I’m glad it’s finally out.

    Hope you enjoy it, check out the ‘making of’ videos below if you want to learn more about my messy pre-production process. :P

    You can also view Purged in Flash format on Here on Newgrounds and Here and DeviantArt.