Future Imperfect Motion Comic Feature Presentation

It's a motion comic, so it's not exactly comic nor pure animation, kinda in between. Thus when I usually watch these things, it's a lukewarm experience, but I did enjoy Broken Saints which was an influence. This was a lot of work but the challenge was worth it and taught me a lot about narrative. It was suppose to spearhead an edlab educational initiative where teens would use media technology or something like that. So I had the protagonist armed with a digital video camera. It was suppose to lead up to some sort of contest, but the AfterEd channel directive began steering away from ventures such as this and thus we had to leave audience in a cliffhanger.

I wrote, drew, colored, animated produced, and did most of the sound. I was fried. I couldn't have done it without my two gurus. Skye MacLeod and Josh Anderson were a tremendous force in helping me animate this mini-epic. Josh also contributed some of the music tracks. Much thanks goes to Joachim Castellano who had the vision to suggest something like this as well as the guts to push for it. I hope you enjoy. Below are the episode which are stitched together with new title animation I made. Each title is a play on words of certain sci-fi movies.

My students whom I showed it seemed to enjoy it and still remember it. They still ask about it and are expecting me to finish it because they want to know the ending. So maybe somewhere in there we did something right.

Episode 1: Closely Encountered
Episode 2: Late to the Future
Episode 3: Space Oddity
Episode 4: No Silent Runnings in the Hall
Episode 5: Cafeteria Event: Horizons (Season Finale)

Below are some of the storyboards...

Eduwonkette Animation & Storyboards

It was a great honor for me to co-produce an animated piece on Eduwonkette! Her site can be found here. Simon Doolittle came up with a fantastic script and from there Istoryboarded and then with the virtual viglante's blessing herself, I dove into much drawing and animating. Much thanks to Skye MacLeod and Josh Anderson for their expertise with Anime Studio Pro and making her type and walk with a natural gait. And Josh with his great narrator voice and fine tuned music, along with Simon's fantastic nerdy voice I think we came up with something entertaining. Much thanks to Simon for helping get the rhythm of the yawn down. (Another week another tweak!) Thanks to Joachim Castellano for the help with the sound and getting that voice echo modulation.

Super teachers: KLONA!

The one that started it all! I believe this piece was what helped us get work with Eduwonkette! This one a bit tricky to write because I was trying to make the deadline so I had to make sure I had to make sure I kept the dialogue from going father than our resources. With a couple of late nights of drawing and working on sound, our motley animation studio was able to pump this out in less than two weeks thanks to Skye MacLeod for the huge amount of animation work, Josh for the voice of the narrator, and some animation for the wristband console and the amazing theme music, James Phillips for some of the backgrounds, the logo, the copy machine symbols and also for that awesome console design, Evan Weintraub for great image research and vectorizing of backgrounds and objects, Joachim Castellano for audio feng shui, and the intro animation, and to everyone who contributed to the script. Let us know what you think!

Live Action Enhanced with Animation--Teacher Spotlight: Jordan Sonnenblick

I had the great opportunity to collaborate with Simon Doolittle on this piece. This teamwork helped inspire me to come up with different art techniques for the drawings in this piece. This was a more subtle piece because of the much slower pacing than usual, yet it I enjoyed the creation of the pieces immensely. Simon is a fantastic editor and great to work with. Josh Anderson did his usual wonderful job on the music.

Eduwonkette Reveal from Comic to Animation

I had the honor and exciting opportunity to work with the annonymous blogger. This web comic was posted on her site as part of her revealing herself to the rest of the public. I sent a scripted storyboard and she liked it and with a few edit changes we came up with a comic which Jennifer Jennings posted on her Eduwonkette site. Then I broke it up the pieces and found the music and sound fx for Skye to put together and animate, and with his great work we were able to pump out an animated comic in a week! The comic and animation differ because the viewer controls the pace of the comic and participates more in the imagination. The animation, though, provided us some little extra goodies to implant in the work. One works better than the other in certain aspects.

LOOSELEAF REPORT

The one that started it all...Joachim Castellano being the visionary that he is came up with the idea for Looseleaf report and from there we have collaborated on them ever since...
Drawing for this segment has always been fun and at times challenging.