You might remember a couple days ago was the Halloween day of the year. I made an animation for such a day and you can go and watch it, that'd be cool.

Watch Skeleboneman.

The story behind this one is I drew a skeleton and I liked how it turned out and Halloween was coming up so I recorded about 3 minutes worth of audio but then I cut it down to 2 because there's no way I'm doing 3 minutes in a month and I was barely able to pull off 2 so here it is.

I also wanted to figure out a way where I could work on a cartoon while being away from my computer. Obviously theres the traditional route, but that would require more time than I've ever spent on an animation and it'd be tedious and boring. So I went with this cut-out style that's kinda like old South Park. I'd draw each character and body part separately on a piece of sketchbook paper and scan them into Flash to animate them (pictured below). At first it was pretty tough to adapt to because when I was working strictly Flash I could always make an immediate change if something was off or missing. But when drawing on paper first and animating after, there was no way for me to know if it was screwed up so I'd have to keep going back and making small changes and scanning it in all over again which was a bit of a hassle. I picked it up pretty quick though everything went great.

Until it came to exporting. By the time I finished all the animation it was about 10PM on October 31st and I really wanted to get it uploaded by the end of the day. I woke up at 6AM and worked on it for like 18 hours straight just to finish in time. If you've ever used flash you know it doesn't take much to piss it off, and when you've got 20+ 1.5mb jpegs and 100+ symbols, you're lucky if you can even copy and paste without it crashing. I originally planned on exporting as a single .swf with a preloader and everything but I quickly realized that wasn't going to happen. I contemplated cutting it up into multiple .swfs and putting them all back together with Swivel becuase you can do that but then the audio would be all screwed up because it wasn't all one track. So for some reason I opened up After Effects which I had never used before and knew very little about. I decided to export each character's layer as it's own .swf, covert it to .mp4, load it into AE and color key out the background color so I could throw them all together in one movie file. At the time I didn't know this but 4 separate 2 minute long .mp4s all stacked on top of each other is a lot for any program to handle. When I tried to render, I didn't even get to see the ETA go down once, it was at like 4 hours and growing when I hit cancel. By that time it was around 11:30PM and I realized I wasn't going to have it done and I spent the next couple hours coming up with more stupid ideas on how to export this thing. Took me an entire day to realize that all I needed to do was export the sound separately from the rest of the movie and it'd be fine so pretty much all that extra work was for nothing and I probably could've had it all done by Halloween. But oh well it turned out fine and I'm happy with it.

Geez didn't mean to write a fuckin essay about it.

Upcoming stuff includes a funny thing with Emrox and other things that I haven't thought of yet.

Anyway here's what one of the sketchbook pages looked like before I went in and cut out all the parts. This was the part when the one guy throws the spray paint can.