Here’s the complete cartoon with finished audio, as it was presented at the grad screening. Matt and Rob did a great job touching up the color and getting all those nice sound effects in there. I had a lot of fun on grad night, although I’m not too keen on writing anymore speeches. The class reserved the whole upper story of Ceili’s pub and then somehow we ended up going clubbing when we had a perfectly good pub right there all to ourselves. And then I went home and watched British sitcoms at three in the morning with my roommate and some friends from classical animation. The landlady complained about all the British the next morning. Anyway, here’s Wasabi Guy.
I wasn’t going to post this cartoon until the final audio was in place, but I think I’d like to take advantage of my site’s seemingly enormous web traffic. I just submitted my final project “Wasabi Guy” to the CG Students Awards, and I need your help in getting a ton of votes so I can win lots of cool stuff. And all of that cool stuff can be used to create more cool stuff for this site down the road. Everybody wins!
This just happens to be one of those weird dates I remember regarding my own work. At some point, I remember looking up the source files of the original Ducktalez cartoon to see when I’d made it and that date turned out to be February 14th, 2001. So I’m guessing on Valentine’s Day ten years ago, I randomly screamed into a microphone and spent an hour drawing Ducktales characters in MS Paint and testing out the animation on my Klik ‘n Play game engine – which is a weird thing to do on one of the few Valentine’s Days where I even had a girlfriend. But I think this is interesting because this also means that I’ve been an animator for ten years straight now.
Back to Ducktalez, it’s no major feat that in ten years, I’ve only been able to create five badly-animated episodes, so it’s nothing to write home about. But since this is my most popular series and people still send me e-mail about it, I figured I could post an image preview of Ducktalez 6 and provide some answers to frequently asked questions. I’ve taken a short break from “Incinerations” to get D6 out the door and here’s what I’m working on right now.
So yeah – as many have surmised from the teaser, Darkwing Duck is in this one. DZ6 is actually the third part in a four-episode story arc I’m planning right now. As I work on it, I’m finding it’s not my best work. It’s not the epic follow-up that people have been waiting for since DZ3, and it’s not going to challenge people to think sixth-dimensionally like DZ5 did. But at the same time, I think it’s still a necessary stepping stone in the series for the pay-off yet to come.
Anyway, here’s a few things to expect from it.
-The length of this cartoon will actually be closer to 20 minutes. That wasn’t intentional – I wanted 15 minutes tops just so I could fit it under YouTube’s length requirements. At the moment, I’m presently 6 minutes finished. I already cut out a lot of scenes and did some major editing to the script, but there’s no way to get it shorter. And the reason for this is:
-Lots of dialogue. Darkwing is a wordy guy. He has to be – he’s your classic in-the-shadow crime-fighter archetype. But when I have to build comedy around his over-the-top exposition, the minutes start packing on. I already cut out most of his Rorschach-style soliloquies, but otherwise, wordiness in this cartoon is just something I’ll have to bite the bullet on.
-Also don’t expect any super-fancy well-animated 3D characters this time around. There’s nobody new like Vegeta, Doctor Who, Buzzkill, or the T-Rex. I wanted to keep it on the ducks this time and build their world and characters just a little more. Besides, bad animation takes long enough to make as it is.
-We now have shadows and lighting. I figured you can’t do a Batman parody without shadows, so I made the city of St. Canard the only place in the Ducktalez neighborhood where things actually have shadows. It’s kind of tricky to do with these characters, but it’s been a fun challenge.
-There’s a musical number this time. I destroyed my throat recording it, along with any chance of me performing in that Ducktalez Broadway musical in the near future.
Also, sorry, but Scrooge still isn’t back yet. I know this is the major complaint I keep getting about my cartoons, but just hold out for a while – I’m going somewhere with this. It’ll be awesome. If it wasn’t awesome, I wouldn’t be so pumped to get started on “Ducktalez 7.”
All these years of watching the same reruns and seeing the same clips over and over again, and not once did I ever realize that we kept catching snippets of the same McBain movie. “Simpsons,” you’re the gift that keeps on giving.
So what’s on my slate these days? What’s keeping me from going out and leading a healthy social life? What’s quickly sapping me of my sanity? What’s gluing my butt to a chair and causing my legs to fall asleep on a nightly basis? The answer: both of these. Neither are anywhere near finished, but enjoy the trailers nonetheless.
I think I’ve found a new holiday tradition alongside watching “A Charlie Brown Christmas” and “It’s a Wonderful Life” – watching Team Four-Star’s new special: “Christmas Tree of Might.” Something about it just keeps me laughing while filling me with Christmas cheer. Also, figgy pudding FTW.
