Base14

I hope everyone had a good Fourth! Here at Base14 we wanted to celebrate the holiday by tossing our hat into the ring of recent political activity. The result is the comic below.

Today’s comic probably took longer to make than any other Base14 comic prior, but the extra effort shows! What also shows is the effect my 2D animation classes are having on my drawing abilities. Compare today’s comic to that of the typical comic from last season. There’s a very noticeable improvement in character aesthetics, line quality and three-dimensional forms.

This comic also marks the first time I’ve used Photoshop CS4 to produce a strip. Already I’m finding a few new time-saving features to be well worth the upgrade:

• Canvas Rotation – Allows me to draw from angle angle I like. For example, I tilted the canvas 15° to draw the birthday cake. From my point of view it was level, but when the canvas was righted again, the cake was tilted. Nice!
• Brush Resize – There’s a new, super slick way to resize brushes on the fly. Now with the brush tool selected, all I need to do is hold down Alt/Option and drag horizontally with my right mouse button. And if that wasn’t handy enough, I can also adjust the hardness of my brush by holding down Alt/Option+Shift and dragging. It’s way faster than the old bracket keys.
• Birds-Eye View - Several tools in Photoshop CS4 now are spring-loaded, meaning if you hold down a shortcut key, you will switch to that tool only as long as the key stays down. Then you switch back to you previous tool. This is how panning has worked with the space bar forever, so Adobe added an extra function when you hold down the “P” key. It switches to a “Birds-Eye View” of the entire document, allowing you to reposition your screen like on the navigation panel. This is very useful when I’m colorizing, and need to jump around to different parts of the document to sample colors.

Certainly Photoshop CS4 will be a boon to drawing Base14 Comics in the future. Now I just have to wait for SCAD to put it on all the lab machines, so I can utilize it on those lovely Cintiqs!

This has been a terrific week for Base14! We were  officially invited to two major film festivals this week on opposite sides of the country!

On the East Coast, we will be featured at the Animation Block Party in Brooklyn, New York. This the self-proclaimed premier animation festival of New York City, and features the work of some legendary contemporary animators from around the world, including one of my favorites, Don Hertzfeldt. In fact, his work was such an inspiration to the comedic timing of Duck ♥ Teslacoi, his name appears in the credits. The Animation Block Party runs July 24-26 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Cinématek.

On the West Coast, Duck ♥ Teslacoil will be showing at the Feel Good Film Festival in Hollywood, California. As soon as I heard about the Feel Good Film Festival from a friend (Thanks, Kate!), I knew it was a perfect fit for Duck ♥ Teslacoil. I mean, the film was made to leave you feeling warm and fuzzy! Well, evidently the festival programmers agree. It’ll be held August 7-9 at Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre right on Hollywood Boulevard. Classy!

Well, I’m absolutely thrilled with all the exciting places Duck ♥ Teslacoil is going. With luck, we’ll be make it into a few other film festivals. And maybe if I can scrounge up some money for travel expenses, I’ll even visit a few. Strangely enough, I still haven’t experienced a large venue showing of Duck ♥ Teslacoil yet!

Duck ♥ Teslacoil took home its first two honors Saturday night when it swept the Iris Film Festival at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. The film got a terrific response from festival goers and judges alike, winning it the Honorary Audience Award as well as the Overall Jury Award! Wowzers!

I have to admit this is a pleasant surprise and very encouraging first step for our latest film, and we are certainly looking forward to seeing how it fares in additional venues across the country. Still no word yet on future showings, but I expect to hear from some additional festivals later this month, so hopefully we’ll have more good news for you.

Until then be on the lookout for production tidbits from our new live-action film, “Brian Paulson: Tree Dropper.” Yes, we still make live-action movies. And this one will be no doubt the most elaborate one yet. In fact my grade depends on it!

Happy May Day folks! I thought I’d take a moment to pause from whatever one is supposed to do on May Day to dish out some leftovers from the past two weeks. It’s all the news that’s fit to print when bunched together in one big super-post!

First off, Duck ♥ Teslacoil got some press this past week after its world premiere at the Digital Cinema Contest Award Ceremony. The site LafayetteOnline featured the results of the contest and not only mentioned DHT, but also provided a direct link to our blog! Update: We were also mentioned in a Purdue News press release which basically said the same thing. Actually to be fair, I think it came first.

Secondly, there’s been a bit of new animation I’ve been pumping out for my 2D Character Animation I class here at SCAD. In Character Animation I, emphasis is put on designing strong character key positions, mapping breakdown positions and interpolating character inbetweens quickly and on model. There’s a head turn we did based on Mushu from Mulan, a take with some generic dude no one’s heard of, and then most exciting of all is the weighted object assignment where we could chose who to animate. Of course, I went with my favorite, Donald Duck. Donald was not an easy character to draw or position, believe me, but I think it turned out good enough for a first try. And it was kinda cool to be animating my childhood idol. Thanks, Don!

This is certainly some exciting news! Thanks to some top-notch work by Alysha (acting as one of our co-producers), the Purdue Digital Cinema Contest has graciously agreed to screen Duck ♥ Teslacoil this Thursday, resulting in the official World Premiere of Duck ♥ Teslacoil! The DCC Award Ceremony will not only screen DHT, but also all the winning films from this year’s Digital Cinema Contest. It should be a great show down at the Lafayette Theater! I’m very glad we found a venue to screen the film for Purdue audiences before the semester ended.

So if you’ll be in the greater Lafayette area this Thursday evening and in need something to do, here are the details:

What: “Duck ♥ Teslacoil” World Premiere
When: April 23rd, 2009 7:00pm
Where: Lafayette Theater, 600 Main Street, Lafayette, IN
Admission: FREE!!!

We’ve also got our second screening coming up in Bloomington, IN at the Iris Film Festival on May 2! It’s all neatly tracked on our new Tour page. As we are admitted to more festivals, they’ll be added to the schedule. So check back often!

This is gonna be good!

The power of Flash, that is! This weekend was the fourth annual Savanijam, a 24-hour animation contest held by the SCAD Contemporary Animation Society, and Base14 was well represented! In a rather unexpected turn of events, I won Best of Show for my 1-minute abstract music video “Power.”

At 5pm Friday evening, the theme of “power” was announced, and contestants had 24 hours (until 5pm Saturday evening) to create a short film using any animation technique they desired. After spending the last two weeks slaving over Duck ♥ Teslacoil, I was seriously backlogged with work from my classes, so I couldn’t justify going the whole 24 hours. Thus, my plan was to stay the evening and make a little something just to say I participated.

I felt like taking a break from characters and decided to experiment with some abstract animation, transforming shapes and forms to a hip beat. And when it comes to hip beats, you can’t beat Justice. Thus, I produced the above video in under 9 hours, and by 2am I submitted my film and headed for home. At the screening on Sunday, I was quite surprised when my video took honors for Best of Show! Apparently the judges appreciated the piece for its consistent quality and finalized look. I guess the hundreds and hundreds of hours producing Biological Warfare Ain’t Easy, Ara and now Duck ♥ Teslacoil have given me quite the knack for producing fast, professional animation content in Flash. Good to know it was worth something!

My thanks to Contemporary Animation Society and all the other hard-working participants! We’ve got a very talented lot here at SCAD!

I am very proud to announce that our long-awaited animated film, Duck ♥ Teslacoil, has finally been completed! As promised, we mixed sound and finished pick-up animation over the weekend, then shipped off the final cut of the film early Monday morning! Woopee! I am so proud of our talented and dedicated crew and supporters. We couldn’t have done it without you all.

This is only the beginning, really. Duck ♥ Teslacoil is undoubtedly the best motion picture Base14 has ever produced, and we have big plans for it. Over the next several months we will be submitting it to a variety of film contests and festivals. This will be your chance to get out, mix with some culture, and see just what all the hubbub has been about! And I mean your only chance. Since Duck ♥ Teslacoil is touring the festivals, it will not be available online for some time. So get out and see it on the big screen, like it was meant to be viewed. (We produced it in full HD, dontchaknow).

Where and when are these festivals? Good question. We don’t know yet! I all depends on who accepts us. But as we get offers to show, we will be building and maintaining a list of tour dates right here on the Base14 site. So keep an ear open for show announcements! And if you want to make sure DHT comes to you, send me an email and let me know you want it nearby! Hopefully there’s a festival we can submit to that will bring it right to your doorstep.

And if you still can’t wait ’til then, remember that the teaser is always up on YouTube.