World Domination Made Easy

The Uchukira Corporation is proud to announce that How to Assemble Your New Doomsday Device has won first prize in the animation category at the Take 5 Film Festival!

Here are some production notes if you're into that kind of thing.

How to Assemble Your New Doomsday Device

Congratulations on your new Uchukira™ Doomsday Device! Here's a handy video on how to easily and quickly assemble the most reliable planet killer on the market today. Brought to you by the Uchukira Corporation.

Uchukira: World Domination Made Easy™

This is a project that I've been working on for the last few days. The student film festival from last year is coming up again, and I managed to find out about it a whole week in advance this time!

I decided to do the animation in PowerPoint again, because I'm still pretty familiar with the software and I don't animate enough to buy any actual animation software. Here's a slide from the original PowerPoint and another excellent case study of why PowerPoint is not made for animation.

The film festival is on April 4th, so I'll let you know how it turns out. Wish me luck!

Janice Did Not Die in Vain

It's official! Last night at the film festival, Paradium and You won 1st Place in the Animation category and the overall People's Choice prize!

I wasn't able to make it to the screening until about an hour in, so I missed the third- and second-place winners in animation. I went in not knowing if I had received a previous prize or if I had even been considered for the category. Seeing my name and the title of my animation up on the screen was an absolute shock, and I'm still sort of riding that phenomenal buzz today.

This is really exciting. I was honestly not expecting to win - not for lack of trying, but for lack of time. As I've previously mentioned, I found out about the festival three days before the deadline and I was using probably the worst possible program for the job.

However it happened, I won, and I'm pretty darn stoked about that.

Just so this whole thing isn't text (or at least type), here're the production notes. I think it's kind of cool to see what certain bits look like in relation to the finished product, so if you're into that too, here's my brainstorm process. If you're not really into that, there are some doodles of Janice in there too. Your boat floats in a manner known only to you.

And yes, I am aware that my handwriting is a masterpiece of typography. Please stop flooding the comments with your praise.

Paradium and You - The Citizen Guide to Safety

A short public service announcement on the dangers of paradium. Three days from start to finish, then another two days to make it not look like garbage. Or look more like garbage. I distorted it a bunch to make it look sixty years old, so I'm not sure if that's really an improvement.

But yeah, here.

It's Done! Sorta!

Paradium and You has been submitted to the film festival with fifteen seconds to spare.

The reason you're getting the world's least enticing spoiler gif instead of the finished movie is because I'm not quite happy with how it looks yet.

The animation's done, the voice work is done, but there are certain elements of theming that still need work. It just doesn't quite look and feel like a 1950's PSA. I submitted what I had because the deadline was literally seconds away and it is, more or less, done.

You might be wondering why I don't just give you the version I submitted and call it quits. Not a single one of you has even the remotest chance of giving me an award, and in that way you're pretty similar to the film festival committee. But there is a difference about you, my site audience, that entitles you to the absolute best I can give you.

You don't put deadlines on me.

I'll have the movie up tomorrow, when I feel like it, maybe, whatever.

Janice, the Paradium Gal

Posts are probably going to be a little scarce for the next few days. I want to make this animation for the film festival look good and I don't have very much time to do it. Also I don't know much about animating. I've got my work cut out for me, is what I'm saying.

So for a while at least I'll be putting up work-in-progress updates like this one as I go. Meet Janice, my attempt at a fifties-style cartoon character.

It's a good thing I have confidence in the script or this project would be pretty much hopeless.

Paradium: The Threatening Threat

Poster from a short film I'm working on right now in a futile hope that I can get it done before midnight tonight. There's this student film festival I only learned about today, which gives me about four hours to make a six minute film. Unfortunately, I happened to blab a bit to some folks about possibly entering, so now my back's against the wall. Minimalist animation ahoy!

Update: Deadline was just pushed back three days. Now I feel like I can actually put some serious effort behind this! Here's a shot of the "poster" in "action" which is really just a "rushed photoshop job."