Animation production on “The Last Copy” is now complete. Whew! Pending any tweaks here and there, Phil and I will have the final build composited by tomorrow. From there, we’ll hand it off to sound engineer extraordinaire, Joe, for him to put his touch to it. Its gonna be a busy weekend what with it being July 4th (yikes! its officially the 4th right now!), so hopefully expect a final build by early next week!

Waaaalllleeee!!!

Whoa. It’s been a little while, yes? I’m not going to lie. I haven’t worked on the new short for two weeks. I spent the week before painting a skateboard for the 3 Feet High show which was a lot of fun. Then last week…well a certain game came out that I’ve been waiting for three years to come out called Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. It’s pretty rad. On top of the fact that my back was shot last week, I basically played MGS4 practically nonstop. I had to otherwise I would’ve lost my mind. Now I’m constantly thinking about it (and how great it is), but I feel confortable in the fact that I can move on in life now that I’ve run through it at least once. I certainly plan on playing it to kingdom come.

However, the past few days have been pretty productive on “The Last Copy”. Phil and myself spent a majority of the weekend and tonight working on it. Out of 39 shots only 6 are left. Most of the remaining shots are pretty easy, but there are one or two left that are a little more involved. However, they shouldn’t be too hard to pull off. Above is a final still from the ending. Its getting there!

So MGS4 is about 36 hours away for most of us and we here at Shamoozal are chomping at the bit to get our hands on it. While our faithful GFGames viewers are waiting for Episode #3 ‘The Last Copy‘ to be released, we wanted to take this opportunity to revisit GFGames #2 “Tactical Espionage Retail Simulation”. Here’s a handy little Gamevideos.com version embedded for your viewing pleasure. You can also cruise over to our Episodes page and download a 720p Divx version to playback on the Divx-enabled device of your choosing. We’re also recording the 2-year anniversary edition of Shamoozal Radio Podcast this weekend (Saturday June 14th at 8:00 PM EST) which we’ll be streaming live on ustream.

Also, if you’re in the mood for more funny, hit the jump for GFGames #1 “Rated M for Molester”. Then check out Shamoozal’s archive of cartoons featuring Grey, Jacquo, Man-bot and the Zoinks!

Hey all. Hope everyone had a great weekend. We had a real scorcher up in our neck of the woods…it was up to 95. So, after putting the ol’ AC unit in the window, I hunkered down this weekend for an animation marathon. I was able to put maybe 15-20 hours into it which is some decent time considering I only get about 2 or 3 hours a night during the week days.

The short is really starting to shape up ad come together well. I spent most of my time drawing and animating…well, a certain body part on Jacquo to put it as spoiler free as possible. I actually found myself laughing at it as I went along, so hopefully everyone else will get a kick out of it, too.

Last night around 11:30, I saw Jim “Sithlord” online. So I stopped working on the short and did an illustration for a t-shirt that Jim has been asking for some time.  I got that off to him, so hopefully we’ll see a new t-shirt in the store soon. I’m out for now…WHOOSH!

Production is moving along at a nice little pace this week. This weekend I plan on making a big push to get as much done as possible. I can’t promise that it will be done by Monday (in fact, I know that simply won’t happen), but we hope to have a large majority done. I’m aiming to wrap it up in time for the podast on June 14th…and before MGS4 comes out so I can devote all my being into playing it.

Above is an image from the new short. Since it was an extreame close-up of Jacquo, I gave him a little love and added some extraneous detail that normally wouldn’t work in a wide shot. I was trying to give his eyelids some subtle movement here, but for some reason (surprise!) Flash kept fighting me. The inbetweens kept falling out of whack, and I’m not totally sure it came out how I wanted it to. Maybe if I get time I’ll give it another pass.

Ah, the soft warm glow of monitors in the night. I kind of like being in the dark, and one of the best things about the Cintiq is that I’m finally able to draw with the lights out. I realized that I’ve been a little quiet here on the Shamooz’ lately, though thankfully John, Frank and Steve have been adding some great content over the last few weeks. Frank has been doing some great things with GFG#3 and has been sharing some awesome insight that I hope aspiring Flash animators are taking note of. Unlike me, he actually works in the biz, so listen to what the man has to say.

I’ve spent more time than I should have over the last few weeks giving some old Shamoozal characters a bit of a face lift. You’ve already seen Plum, and I’ve given you a taste or another one above. There’s one more left, and anyone with half a brain should be able to figure out who the other character is by this point. Anyway, we put a deadline on this next episode and I’m all about hitting it. Hell, we have to hit it because if we don’t things will start slipping into MGS4 territory, and we don’t want that now do we? I didn’t get as much time as I wanted to work today, but at least I spent a good chunk of the night hammering away at things. I’ll finally be able to move onto the meat and potatoes of this project after tonight. About damn time.

I’m happy to say that animation production on the new short is under way. We spent the last week or so doing some prep work on the characters, building a new BG that I posted earlier, and making sure the animatic worked. I showed it to a few friends of mine and they got some laughs out of it, and that’s all that’s really important.Today, I’ve been working on a shot that is a bit more drawn intensive. When I board the shorts out, I try to keep them as ecomonical as I can so that we can get them done, however I try to put one or two shots in there that have a bit more meat to them. My aim is to make the shorts have a certian level of quality to them so that they bear repeated viewing. Most shots are really just shot-reverse-shot of a talking head or maybe an arm gesture to accentuate a line of dialog. Its nice to be able to pick a moment or two someplace in the story to say “here’s a spot that I think can use some love”, and then devote some time doing something a bit more fleshed out. In the last short, it was the shot when Hipster shoves that accusatory finger in Grey’s face as he rudely spits out his name.

One of the biggest mistakes I often see in animation production is not picking your battles. You can spend an eternity noodling a scene and still not get it right or have it be to your satisfaction. In this light, I can understand why George Lucas has the ever consuming need to fiddle with the Star Wars trilogy. I know damned well that I’ll look at our work and think to myself that I should’ve done something different here or there, or maybe spent more time on a shot. However, what I’ve come to see is that that you have to let certian things go,  accept them as they are, and learn from it.

Here’s a new background for the short. A good deal of it is going to take place behind the GFGames store by the garbage.

So, Phil and I went over the animatic for the next GFGames episode, and we’re pretty happy with where its at. The last short had around 16 shots, but this one has 39. That sounds like its a lot (and it is), but its run-time is still on par with the others in at around one minute and twenty seconds. The reason there are so many more shots is because of how we chose to cut this one up to play the joke out. One of the things we were getting a bit wary of was repeating ourselves a bit too much with the “annoying customer” setup, so we tried to approach it from a differnt angle. I think it works well. Also, I’d like to do a live UStream sometime this week or the next, so keep your peepers peeled for more updates soon.

Production on the next short is moving a little slow, but as you all know Plum is set to return after a year long hiatus. I figured now that Plum’s new look is nearly nailed down, why not show her off and get some feedback?

I have always pictured Plum being on the punk side, but when I did her original design I guess I made things a little too simple, and a lot of those ideas never really came across. I think of all the redesigns, she is without a doubt the most drastic in the change department. In fact, she almost looks like a completely different person, but I thought it was okay to take her this far since she was only in two of the previous shorts.