Wednesday, February 27, 2008

The Week Before Break

Hello all! Long time no see! And I do apologize for that. JJ and I have been working our asses off lately trying to get sequences done. We're still on schedule, but GEEZ! we have a ways to go.

In order to get this project all done we have enlisted the help from a couple of our friends in the grades below (Don't worry, they came willingly to the project) and some of these guys are amazing. One of our longest shots (a full twelve seconds) was animated by our friend Brenden and it looks fabulous! The character model is rough though so it makes my job a bit hard. At the same time, the primary animation within the scene needs to be cleaned up well to do it justice. The scene is 174 individual full bodied frames of David running (among other things) and will be a pain in my side for the next week or so as I slowly chip away at it.

Speaking of next week, Loyola Marymount has Spring Break starting this Friday! I will be in San Francisco until Tuesday at a journalism/cartooning thing and then I will return to LA and throw my nose to the grindstone. JJ and I will be going all out. Hopefully a lot will get done.

Anyway, next week we'll have a fun media update (aren't they all fun?) that doesn't have much to do with HoF, but will have to do with the Hammerfist characters. Until then, here's Dave doing what he does....action poses!

Thursday, February 21, 2008

Update, kinda

Eh, not much to say. I met quota, Matt's right on track. Things are sexy! We have four sequences in the film.

Sequence one is the intro, about a minute. Sequence two is more like Act 1, and about 2 and a half minutes. Sequence three is definitely Act 2, and also about two minutes. Sequence four is Act 3 and the resolution, which covers another two and a half minutes.

Total, we've got about eight minutes.

I'm about thirty seconds from the end of Sequence four, and then I'm going back to animate Sequence three.

Out of the total, we have four and a half minutes roughed, which includes all but one of the hardest scenes!

I hope this update interests SOMEONE. Until the next post...

-JJ

Sunday, February 17, 2008

Oh man!

Hey everyone.
I'm really tired, so I'll make it quick. So far, I'm about 4 shots away from being on track for this week. That's about... eh, 12 seconds of animation left in order to meet my 45 second quota. Meeting this week's quota means that I've hit quota every week, or made up the slack if I didn't make it. Thought you'd might be interested!!!

-JJ

P.S. I just did a really great scene of David. He's very sad in the scene.

The Tuesday/Saturday post

Yeah, so we didn't update on Tuesday....so sue us. Anyway, part of the reason we didn't update was because there isn't much new to tell you guys about. Not that there isn't any progress, it's just more of the same. JJ is animating and I am doing cleanup. Currently my folder is full of about 31 scenes that need cleanup. Almost all of those are cleaned up and will most definitely be clean by the end of Sunday. Unfortunately there are about 150 scenes....so....we have a while. But it'll all get done. Most of these have been done in the past 3 weeks so I think I'll be ok....

Although there is always the chance that I am just lying to myself. While I was doing my cleanup tonight I got to a pretty fun picture of the Steve character. I thought that I'd just share that with you guys.


With Steve we are having lots of fun animating him. He's a bit squirrelly, but man is he funny.

We'll be back on Tuesday with a nice little progress update.

Sunday, February 10, 2008

Spring Cleaning

Hey guys! Matthew here with the Saturday media update (on Sunday)! Tonight I'll show you an example of cleanup from me. So here's JJ rough that I got (I've adjusted the levels a bit in Photoshop to make it more readable to you.



and then here is my final cleanup without our final background (we'll get to that later).




So yeah...some of JJ's roughs are a bit cleaner than others but since we are under going to be constantly under the gun until due date it really is up to me to be speedy enough to make these final frames look fabulous.

See you guys on Tuesday!

Thursday, February 7, 2008

Not a whole lot to say...

Hey everyone, thought I'd give a little update. Animation has slowed lately. I've been working on some sequences that really, REALLY suck. A lot of running/fighting in perspective. If interaction between characters wasnt hard enough, doing it in proper perspective is 10x worse!

That said, these scenes are looking really good once I get em done. I also think I'm finishing up the second to last of the really hard ones. Seq04_scn10 is going to take a few days though. It's got David running to camera in a sideways banana pan, the running up a slope in more perspective. Pain in the hiney! But it's going to look sooo cool!

I was chatting with Matt, and we're thinking that you'll see a trailer up by the end of February, so keep your eyes peeled on that last Saturday of the month!

Enough procrastination. I've got some running to draw!

-JJ

Saturday, February 2, 2008

The Final Countdown

No, I'm not talking about where we are in the production schedule, I'm talking about our special surprise today.

Ladies and gentlemen, after many many delays I present to you

David Hammerfist: The Final Countdown!



Just a bit of back story, this is the first appearance of our hero David Hammerfist and it originated as my 220 film here at Loyola Marymount University. It's not very good to be honest with you, but there are some great ideas and some pretty well executed dialog if I do say so myself. The film was created entirely by me. I animated. I inked it. I colored it. I cast and recorded the voices. The only things that are not by me are the couple of stills during the closing credits. This film was first created in the Fall of 2005, but this version is brand spanking new. I fixed some weird camera moves and re-edited/re-made the ending using new footage from a flash game version of the story that I made in Fall 2006. The game experimented with some 3D effects that I think looked much better. You decide on the results, but I assure it is superior to what was there. So while this film still may not be Disney-hell, not even Hanna-Barbera quality, it does have some life to it. As well as an early Steve: The Indecisive Tile Customer. Whom I just can't get enough of.

So I really hope for two things by posting this. 1) It will hype everyone up for HoF and 2) All of you will share it with your friends and spread it around the net.

I think the content already posted on this site already shows how much better Hammerfist of Fury will be than The Final Countdown so I hope you will all stay tuned.

Oh, and make sure you watch all the way through the credits for a classic David rant about America.

-Matthew