Dreams Should Be Grand

Well, my deviantArt journal is serving me quite nicely, so what is this blog still good for? Pipe dreams, yes. Yes, yes.

Unlike most individuals my age, I haven't had any interest in moving out into a house, apartment, etc. This changed when I found out about Tony Alleyne's Star Trek: Voyager apartment. I am not particularly into Star Trek (I've seen one episode of the original series and two films; that's it), but the place is absolutely aesthetically lovable. If I could afford an apartment and was able to make it look all awesomely futuristic, I'd do so in a heartbeat. I mean, it'd take way more than a heartbeat to move all my belongings, paraphernalia, and crap over to my world of tomorrow, but idioms rarely make sense when analyzed.

Then a few minutes ago I somehow stumbled upon THIS. Hitoshi Takahashi is some strange kind of hero to me; he built a fully functional giant robot beetle called Kabututom RX-03. It has a moderately spacious interior and, unlike that cheapo lifesize Gundam, can actually walk. It took ol' Takahashi-sama eleven years to build the thing, but I say it's time well spent. The YouTube video embedded on the site was removed for copyright infringement, but it or a similar video is still up here:



Watching that video, it hit me: the ideal home isn't a house or an apartment with a futuristic interior. It's a mobile giant robot with a futuristic interior. Some people have mobile homes; why not an awesome mecha version? The obvious answer is that, even if I knew how to make something of that sort, it would cost a porkload of money and apparently take over a decade to finish, but I already established that this is a pipe dream.

So there it is. I'm making it my goal to someday live in a giant robot with a sleek, futuristic interior. Or at least it could be my summer cottage or something.

This Isn't a Production Blog for Nicholas' Weird Adventures at All, Is It?

So it turns out I'm 19 and I haven't finished any other Flashes except Saunich der Hejhaug. I think it's the best looking Flash I've ever made, though I know I can do a lot better if I work on it for more than four days.

I'm learning Torque X 2D and C# now to attempt to make an Xbox 360 game to sell in the Community Games section. Please make a note of it.

Oh yes, and it turns out I'm still making YTPs... for now. I just made my first one in quite a long time last night after a long drought. I enjoyed making that one, but I don't expect to make frequent poops.

,,ɹoop s,uǝʌɐǝɥ uo ,uıʞɔouʞ,, ɹo 'puǝ ǝɥʇ puɐ buıuuıbǝq ǝɥʇ

Making Youtube Poops doesn't really hold much joy for me anymore. Currently I'm going through a couple of leftover jokes that I want to use, then I intend to retire. Consider this your warning, world.

Now, not only has it been nearly a year since I started Enthalpy, but I am almost 19 years old. Crot! I'm supposed to finish some kind of epic masterpiece by the time I turn 19! I wonder if that's the least bit feasible at this point.

I recently began to feel like I really want to make something very artistic and masterful and not just fun and silly like I've been doing. That's on my to-do list. My left eye itches. I recently came up with a great plot for a serious, short animation, but... for some reason, I don't feel like doing it. Yes, I love the idea and the story and everything, so I have absolutely no idea why I'm not that interested in making it.

I have the eventual goal of making an animation that breaks Ralph Bakshi's Lord of the Rings' record of being the world's longest animated film. Not that I'd want to pad something out just for the sake of having that record; goodness, no. Actually, it wouldn't be hard at all for me to fill up two hours and forty-five minutes with tons of story. It's really hard for me to write short things because all my ideas tend to end up epic in nature.

Wouldn't it be great to see a feature-length animated film with visuals made entirely in iClone and music made entirely in Songsmith? I think so. Not that it'd be possible for the end result to be taken the least bit seriously.

エンテァルピ

Technically, it's been almost a year since I started work on the first episode of Enthalpy. However, I didn't start any REAL work until May 5th, and never actually used what I made on February 25th last year, so I'm counting May 5th as the actual start date. I'm really concerned about the time it's taking me to finish this, as I don't want any of the future episodes to take nearly this long to animate.

Of course I haven't been working on the episode this whole time. I'd say more than half of the days of the year I haven't worked on it at all. I've spent a lot of time making other things, such as YTPs and computer games. Today is the first time I've made any real progress on the episode in weeks, but I animated a whole four seconds today. I'm going to try to stick to the Harvey Birdman routine of animating an average of four seconds a day... I meant to do that from the beginning, and indeed did stick to that schedule for a while, but then didn't.

I MUST finish this episode by the beginning of May. I'm still sticking to my plan of not releasing the first episode until I've nearly finished the second one, and BOY do I hope the second doesn't take nearly as long to finish as the first. It's certainly not as elaborate in terms of what I'll have to animate, but the fact is I'm not just making two episodes. I have scenarios written down for over THIRTY episodes that I intend to make, so I'm going to be occupied with Enthalpy for the next several years at least. I hope to eventually be able to afford to have an actual animation studio animate the series, with me animating the parts that I need to have done a certain way, but I don't see myself being able to afford something that expensive in the near future.

History of Internet Flash Quality

After making my previous post discussing Flash animation and tweens and such, I remembered my fourteen-year-old self being annoyed when people on Newgrounds criticized certain Flashes (particularly those made by Legendary Frog) for using "too much tweening". I didn't think tweened Flashes looked worse than FBF Flashes at all; they were just "different".

I knew I wanted to get into Internet animation when I was 13 years old once I saw The Return of Ganondorf. I was really into Ocarina of Time at the time, which made this video really stand out to me. You can view it here. Not only did I find the video hilarious, but I thought it was amazing that it was animated entirely by one person. The best Flash cartoons I had seen in the past had animation like this at best:



I still find the video pretty hilarious, and the animation gets the job done as well as it needs to, but it's nothing special. Note, however, that I said the Flashes I had seen were animated like that at best. They were usually much more simplistic and had absolute minimal movement. Unfortunately, the joke sites I visited back then are no longer in existence now. I was able to view gotlaughs.com using the Wayback Machine, but none of the Flashes were available and, sadly, I can't find them anywhere else. Most of those crappy short 'toons seem to be lost in the mists of time...

Anyway, my point is, I thought that The Return of Ganondorf's animation was amazing. I scoured the rest of Newgrounds for more Zelda animations, but was rather disappointed that none of them seemed to be nearly as high quality in terms of animation (and most weren't nearly as funny, for that matter). See, back in 2003 and earlier, Legendary Frog quite possibly did put the most effort into his Flash animations. Making a Flash frame-by-frame was completely unheard of. However, as time went on and more and more people started using Flash, more people started putting more and more effort into their animations. Countless people could make Legendary Frog-quality Flashes and higher. From what I remember, the first people I saw truly transcend the 2D motion-tween style were John and Richie Zirbes, the creators of Perfect Kirby. The first two episodes (broken up into six Flashes) were nothing that special in terms of animation quality (though I still found them pretty funny), but with the appearance of Perfect Kirby 3.1, the bar was definitely raised. No one (on Newgrounds, at least) had tried to give the impression of 3D movement using shape tweens. In fact, it was so unheard of that many people assumed a 3D program was used for a large quantity of the animation. It was, however, made entirely in Flash, which was pretty mind-blowing.

Looking back on the animation of Perfect Kirby 3, the animation is still really smooth, but the drawings themselves are generally pretty bland and amateurish. The limb joints don't fit together that well, and the 3D tweening often distorts. At the time, however, it was the epitome of great Flash animation. It remained that way until Fallen Angel: Teaser came along in 2004.

The animation was still mostly motion tweened, but a lot more detail was put into the individual drawings than in most Flashes. The first Flash I remember seeing that used a lot of frame-by-frame animation was part 2: synj vs horrid, which can be viewed here. The drawings were rather simplistic, but the cartoon had a lot of fascinating environmental effects, the likes of which I had never seen in an Internet cartoon before.

Of course, that meant I had missed the animations of professional Disney animator Adam Phillips, whose cartoons were the most widely acclaimed on Newgrounds. I didn't think that much of them at first, but after viewing an editable .fla of a scene from Prowlies at the River, I was in awe as everyone else. Phillips mainly animated environmental effects, so that's where his greatest abilities were. Pretty much no Internet Flash animator has surpassed Phillips' abilities yet except Phillips himself, who puts more effort into every Flash he makes than the previous one.

Now, Prowlies at the River was released in late 2004. A bit over a year earlier, The Return of Ganondorf was the epitome of webtoon animation quality. But Prowlies COULD have been made in 2003. The technology was available. No precedent existed, however. Most people were used to seeing stiff, minimal animation in Flash cartoons, so most people didn't aspire to do that much more than what had already been done. Thus, Flash evolved over time based on the fact that people gradually tried putting more effort and time into their work.


Now, it wasn't until very, very recently that I found out that John Kricfaluci was, in fact, the person who made the first ever Flash cartoon. Before The Goddamn George Liquor Program, Flash was pretty much just used to make banner ads and simple games. Macromedia continued to develop the Flash program based on Kricfaluci's input, and he help shape Flash into what it's most known for today: making Internet cartoons. Of course Kricfaluci dislikes most of what's done with Flash today, but he still uses it. To quote his blog:

Flash looks like Flash no matter how hard you try to hide it. At least so far. It is basically an inbetweening program, not an animation program. The inbetweens - like in all computer programs are too mathematical. Hand drawn inbetweens make your animation feel more natural, because things don't move mathematically in real life.

Flash is only as good as the drawings you put into it- and how many good drawings. The less you do, the more fake it looks. Ever since I started using Flash as a necessary evil, I have been trying my damnedest to make it look as little like Flash as possible. If I was able, I would go back to the 60s system of limited animation. The reality of the situation today is that there are no animators capable of what the animators in the 60s did. We have not done animation in the country for 35 years now so no one even knows how it works.

Generally, I concur. Boy, would I love to make traditionally animated cartoons, but it's just not realistic. I have no budget whatsoever and no animators working for me. I have to make the whole thing myself, and the only way I can do that is in Flash. If I want to actually finish more than one Flash a year, I have to use tweens.

However, I disagree with John K. on a couple of things. For one, he mentioned that he prefers 1960s Hanna Barbera limited animation to Flash. As I've said before, I just can't make myself see what he likes about The Flintstones. While the character models themselves can look rather appealing, the animation just hurts. I definitely prefer the animation in The Return of Ganondorf.

For another thing, he said "Flash looks like Flash no matter how hard you try to hide it." It's very, very rare for me to see a Flash cartoon that I don't realize is made in Flash as soon as I see it. However, I occasionally do. For example, I had no idea that those Cocoa Puffs commercials were made in Flash before I read that they were. Another example is a Flash version of the theme song to Azumanga Daioh!, "Soramimi Cake". The person who made the Flash version just traced the original version of the theme song in Adobe Illustrator and made the final product look... exactly like the original. I can no longer find the Flash itself, but here's a link to a blog entry from the person who made the Flash version which shows several screenshots detailing the process.

This post was supposed to be about tweens vs. FBF, but before I got into that I felt I should post this stuff. My next post will be about what I meant for this one to be about.

Wii Wiill Waiit a Whiile

I came upon a fact a couple of days ago that threw a wrench-type dealie at my WiiWare plans. You know that menu that comes up whenever you press the Home button on your Wii remote? The one that shows the buttons asking if you want to return to the main Wii menu, reset the game, or view the operations manual? It turns out that the only way to implement that menu is if you have the official Wii development kit, which I don't. And if you want to get something published on WiiWare, Nintendo has sole discretion as to whether your title is made available or not. Of course they're not going to avail a game that was obviously made using a freeware homebrew development kit and doesn't even have the same Home-button menu that every single other Wii game ever made has!

That is why I've decided to return to DS development for now. I'm more familiar with DS programming anyway...

Since I never got past pre-production, I now intend to develop Enthalpy: Detectiventure for the DS. I figure it'll have enough gameplay that a buyer wouldn't be disappointed (I'm expecting/hoping that it'll be released as a "budget title" anyway); I also read IGN's review of the Shaun the Sheep game for the DS a couple of days ago, and it apparently only has about one hour of gameplay. IGN gave the game a 6.6 out of 10. While I'd hope for my game to get a better score, at least that shows me that my game won't be the shortest.

I'm not starting development on Detectiventure just yet, though. Back in October (I think), I entered DA YCP MAKE A VIDYA GAEM CHALLENGE, intending to make a 3D computer game to teach myself to use Torque Game Engine. A lot of slacking and a lot of problems/glitches led me to decide to make a simpler 2D game instead. I still want my game to stand out, though; thus, I am making the game for the DS. It'll also be a good learning experience, as I'll be teaching myself how to do certain things along the way.

The game is still planned to be called Saunich der Hejhaug and feature that creepy Sonic doppelganger guy. I've already finished the opening splash screens and title screen (music included). I'm pretty sure I can finish this by Christmas.

Currently planned game timeline (subject to change based on my decisions as well as those of others):

-Finish Saunich der Hejhaug game for the DS by Christmas and release it for free as homebrew
-Make a 2D Enthalpy game, also for the DS, and contact O3 Entertainment or another company of that sort. Release it as a commercially available game in stores and such.
-Form an actual company (a sole proprietorship, of course) and apply to be an officially licensed Nintendo developer.
-Buy a Wii devkit, most likely using money obtained from sales of the Enthalpy DS game.
-Hooray! I can make Wiistuffs now (and by now I mean in the semi-distant future).

Irrelevantly, shortly after my previous post, I started feeling like I was being too hard on automatic tweens. I'll talk about that in either my next post or the one after that.

Determining What Constitutes Good Flash Animation

Flash animation is often criticized for being cheap and limited. And, indeed, it often is. Ever since Mucha Lucha came on, more and more Flash shows have made their way onto the air. Why? Because Flash is much cheaper and easier than the traditional pen-and-paper method; you draw directly into the program, move stuff around using automatic tweens, and voila!

Unfortunately, most Flash animations take advantage of this for the sake of time and money and at the expense of quality. The truth is, you can animate pretty much anything in Flash (anything 2D, anyway). For example, take a look at this Cocoa Puffs commercial:



Just by watching this commercial, I had no idea it was animated in Flash. It wasn't until reading about it at Cold Hard Flash that I found out how the commercial was truly made. Why? Because the cartoon doesn't use any automatic tweening... or if it does, it does so very surreptitiously. More television Flash cartoons should be animated like this: frame-by-frame. It's still way cheaper than traditional cell animation, and it's pretty much indistinguishable. Instead, television studios usually just take the easy route and automatically tween practically everything along a 2D plane, and when something has to move along a 3D plane, they make the movement as quick and jerky as possible:



Mikey, supposedly animated in the "American" style, is super-duper 2D, and his motion primarily involves sliding his limbs around using automatic tweening. The Japanese characters, supposedly animated in the style of "Japanese animes", are animated frame-by-frame. However, their motion is pretty minimal and, when they do move, it's obvious that the animators don't care about going off-model. In fact, there doesn't even seem to be a standard model that the animators stick to. Yes, anime generally has a lower frame rate, but more detail and care is generally put into every frame. The animators of Kappa Mikey try to emulate anime style and fail miserably.

Here's an example from the first episode of the anime Death Note. Yes, yes, the English voice acting is awful and it ruins the whole show and all that. Just focus on the imagery.



There are several points during this clip in which there is little to no motion at all. However, it still looks good because each still frame has a lot of detail. Every shot is well-composed and dynamic, even if it's barely moving. Camera movement also helps add a sense of motion to an otherwise static picture. Sure, Death Note certainly had a higher budget than Kappa Mikey does, but the point is that even when Death Note used limited animation, it was still done with a sense of art and purpose.

And you know what? That Death Note clip could have hypothetically been animated in Flash (minus the 3D flythroughs; you'd need a separate 3D program for that). Heck, not just Death Note or another show which uses limited animation, but any cell-style 2D cartoon could hypothetically be made with Flash. Sadly, the fact that Flash makes things easier tends to make animators lazier. They resort to using practically nothing but 2D tweens instead of using them to supplement frame-by-frame animation. Frame-by-frame animation in Flash cartoons also tends to look like it was done by people who don't know how to keep the proportions the same between keyframes. This is probably because animators who learned Flash in animation classes and whatnot only learned how to use Flash's functionality, not basic-intermediate drawing and animation principles.

Now, do I think that a show that mostly uses tweening is always bad? Certainly not, as long as the tweening looks natural. Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law wasn't exactly perfect at making tweened animation look natural, but they often did a pretty good job within their limits (only two months to animate a single episode):



I think that clip looks pretty good. In fact, I'd say that, since Harvey Birdman had a very limited budget, its animation quality benefited greatly by moving to Flash. (Actually, in the first one and a half seasons, before it used Flash, Harvey Birdman looked a lot more like a classic Hanna-Barbera cartoon, partially due to the fact that the animation was so limited).

So, yeah... I think that Harvey Birdman's Flash animation works for it. It's practical and, while not entirely natural, it still works pretty well. In Kappa Mikey, the clumsy animation distracts me from the story and the jokes (which, in Kappa Mikey's case, is probably a good thing).

But what about Internet cartoons? Surely a single person can't be expected to constantly churn out television-quality animation? Yes, for Internet animation, I can understand lowering one's standards. Animation considered great for a Saturday morning cartoon could seem cheap and bland if used in a theatrical cartoon, and in the same way, animation considered bland for a television cartoon could be considered great for an Internet short animated by one person. For example, Fallen Angel currently dominates Newgrounds because of its fantastic animation (it must; the story has no originality so far and the acting is atrocious). But if it were shown on television, the animation would be considered sub-par.

But wait! Less cinematic Flashes would still seem to fit in pretty well on television, as is evidenced by the fact that the Nicktoons Network shows so many in their film festivals. For example, TANKMEN is primarily motion tweened with a bit of FBF animation, but since it's so simplistic, the tweening works rather well. It doesn't aspire to be very dynamic, and thus the simplicity doesn't hurt it. I don't think I ever found the jokes to be that funny, but apparently a lot of people do...

In truth, I like the visuals of TANKMEN more than those of Fallen Angel. Fallen Angel's animation aims for a lot of detail and cinematic quality. But because it does such, a lot of flaws stand out at me and distract me from what's supposed to be an engaging story. I know that's not how most people feel about it; they just admire it for what it does accomplish. I suppose that's part of my "condition".

Anyway, as for Enthalpy, I'm trying to make it look as natural as I can within reason. Yes, it uses a lot of tweens, but I'm hoping they don't look awkward like they do in Kappa Mikey. It also uses a whole lot of frame-by-frame animation, and that takes a very long time. If I had a team of talented animators working for me, of course I'd prefer to have it done mostly or entirely frame-by-frame. As it stands, however, I have to use a lot of tweens if I want to finish more than one episode every couple of years. I'm hoping that the still visuals are engaging enough that the limited animation isn't distracting, and that the tweens move in ways that you'd expect them to actually move.

If I didn't care how long it took me to finish a cartoon, and I wanted to spend upwards of a year on a five-minute short, I truly feel that I could make cartoons as lavish as those of Adam Phillips (see Waterlollies, for example)... however, whereas Phillips likes to animate on threes and fours and add as much shading and detail as possible into every keyframe, I'd go for the route of making the animation look smoother before adding porkloads of shading levels. Personally, I'd prefer to have two layers of shadow animated on twos than four layers of shadow animated on fours.

Before concluding this blog entry, I'd like to muse about Superjail for a moment. Superjail is animated entirely in Flash, and it's animated almost entirely frame-by-frame, which is practically unheard of in Flash television shows (especially for Adult Swim, which has a notoriously meager budget). However, despite the smoothness, the show's visual style has a lot of not-caring-about-staying-on-model. Characters' proportions often change as soon as they turn around, and the drawings themselves aren't exactly technically marvelous. I can't really decide whether I consider the animation "good" or not by a television standard.



The visual style is engaging to watch, and it'd certainly be considered great animation if it were an Internet Flash animation, so I suppose I like it... still, in stuff I make, I'd prefer to stay on-model and have fewer drawings that each look good than to have a lot of sloppy drawings. Superjail's drawings are indeed rather detailed, but they're still sloppy.

ADDENDUM: Another thing to take into account is that certain styles of animation work for different styles of cartoons. For example, while the animation in the Cocoa Puffs commercial is great compared to the majority of Flash cartoons, it would be incredibly out of place if used in Death Note. Death Note has great drawings (for the most part), but its visual style would be very out of place in Harvey Birdman. Motion tweens work well for Harvey Birdman partially due to the simplicity of the characters. I wouldn't say that the motion tweening always looks terrible in Kappa Mikey; what's annoying is that Mikey moves smoothly along a 2D axis and "pops" into the next position whenever he should be rotating in 3D.