Base14

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!

Graphics extraordinaire and good friend of Base14, Eli Glasch has released a trailer for his upcoming animated short Peabo. Eli made a huge contribution to Ara as a lead animator and to Duck ♥ Teslacoil as a co-producer and production artist. In fact, aside from myself, he is the only other individual who produced visual art for DHT. But in contrast to my 2D Flash animation, Mr. Glasch specializes in 3D Maya animation. Take a peek at what he’s been cooking up!

I also understand this might screen at the Purdue Digital Cinema Contest this year?
Best of luck, Eli!

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.

Now this is why I came to SCAD! Professional-grade production facilities at my finger tips to make my movies shine. Earlier this week myself and sound designer Alan Koda reserved the Foley studio to record audio for Duck ♥ Teslacoil, and it was very cool. The fun thing about Foley is inventing creative ways to simulate the sounds you want. We found that socks in the dirt pit made great audio for Monster’s walk cycle, and drumming my fingers in the dirt was Duck’s run cycle. I also realized if I wear my coat inside out, I can simulate the texture of Monster’s fur while hugging Duck’s head (in this case, a balloon). We’ll be mixing the sound this weekend and shipping the first cut of the film on Monday! Woo-hoo!

Things are really shaping up for Duck ♥ Teslacoil. Now that we’re in the final weeks of development, it’s time to break out the polish and really make every little detail shine. Last night I revised the design of the bus in the story, and was completely surprised at how well it came out! It’s amazing what a few gradients, glows, and drops shadows will do for an drawing in Illustrator.

Today I’m hard at work on the lightning for the film, which is proving a bit more challengeing than I would like. Instead of using effects generators in After Effects, I’m animating it all by hand, frame-by-frame, to match the rest of the movie. When it finally gets done, though, the result will be well worth it.

Stay tuned for more updates!

We’re in the home stretch now! Here at SCAD, it’s the last week of our Winter Quarter. So that means it’s time for all the final projects to come rollin’ in! To start the week off, I’ve uploaded the final project for my Animation I class. As the Flash test demonstrated last week, the mission was to animate a flour sack interacting with a box. Well, my real project is a bit more refined. I still planned much of it using Flash, but in the end, everything you see was drawn on paper. That comes to over 300 pages! Hey, no one said animation was environmentally friendly. :p

Overall it came out pretty well, I’d say. Onward to 2D Character Animation I!

The Wiggler has so many uses…