This tumblr account used to be my old "reblogging" account where I just share random stuff I find interesting. But since my art blog is now just a regular blog, I'll use this one to fill up the Twitter-shaped hole in my heart and share the art I've made. Hi Tumblr, good to be back.
Hello, if you used to follow this account for the art, please follow this one I'm reblogging instead. That'll be my art account from now on and this one will just be a regular blog where I share paragraphs of random thoughts.
Something else I learned since 2018 is After Effects. I have a love/hate relationship with Adobe. Their products can be quite shit. Especially Adobe Animate. But that shit is very user friendly so it can be good shit and I use that shit every single day. After Effects is another program I recently fell in love/hate with. It's a very powerful animation software and you can do quite a lot of stuff with it. So this blog entry is dedicated to the things I've worked on using After Effects. I have less things to talk about here so this is just mostly show, no tell.
So I was contacted by Zach from the Long Gone Gulch pilot and invited me to do some compositing for the toon. I had donated to their Kickstarter campaign some time ago so of course I accepted the offer! Here are the pins and extra stuff I got from that Kickstarter:
It was fairly simple work, I just needed to put together the animation and the backgrounds along with some lighting effects. Sometimes there was some tricky masking needed and sometimes the layer count would go above 50 but it wasn't too bad. They also contacted me soon after to do compositing for another short film they worked on:
I've also been doing a LOT of compositing work for Smile Studios. I've worked with Alek for a long time now, probably one of the first jobs I ever did. I helped with animation for his lovely point and click game Tsioque some years ago. Anyway, I helped with a lot of projects, a lot of them for video games. They all go through similar processes so I'll just share them all here:
This one was extra tricky as I had to do some 3D work in Blender:
All these were more intense and involved working with very large Photoshop files and a lot of complex layers and effects. Which meant super long render times. Despite that, these were still super fun to work on and really pushed me to learn new things.
Anyway, that should be it. Like I said in part 1, I'll still be doing freelance work here and there, so expect to see more work like these and animations like the ones I did for Mashed. And definitely more stuff from myself.
Surely you didn't think that I made NOTHING these past few years since Episode 1 of Dark Harvest? Quite the contrary, I think I've made more minutes of animation than I did in my entire life.
So in the previous blog post, I briefly mentioned that I have been doing freelance work here and there. I kinda wanted to post about all of them because I've worked on a LOOOOT of things.
So first off, I've been doing animation for MASHED on Youtube. Maybe you've seen their videos. They do cartoon parodies of beloved IPs like Mario and Sonic. And Sonic, and also sonic (Okay I've done a lot of Sonic cartoons for them is my point). I'm pretty proud of all of these honestly.
This was one of the first ones I made. I'm not very good at muscular characters so this was a bit of a challenge. I'm only vaguely aware of Jojo's Bizzare Whatevers but I KNOW it enough just from exposure to popular culture. I made this during the COVID lockdowns. I live in the Philippines, infamous for having one of the longest lockdowns so this really was ALL I did during that time. That and playing some Animal Crossing and Death Stranding.
This is another one I made. This one and the previous one was already storyboarded. Didn't have as much difficulty with this one. I haven't played a single Zelda game besides Majora's Mask (and not finishing it) so I was hoping I didn't draw anything wrong or something. Spoilers: I drew something wrong. Or colored something wrong Idk.
This one's pretty cool, this was the first one I storyboarded and I had some input in the character designs. Really fun to work on but I barely made the deadline for this one and as I was finishing it, we were hit with one of the worst typhoons in the history of the Philippines. So that was a fun memory. Having no power and hoping to GOD that Dropbox finished syncing the video file.
This one was also very fun. I wanted to go for the "no-outline" look, kinda like Samurai Jack. I really like how it ended up looking. Definitely one of my favorites. I also got to use After Effects for the viruses.
Now, this one was a delight. I don't really have anything else to say, it's Thomas the Tank Engine fighting with Postman Pat. They asked me to switch the style to something anime-inspired for some parts which was definitely fun to do. So I can't draw anime for shit, but whatever I ended up drawing, I thought were pretty funny. This ended up doing very well that they wanted me to do two more:
I had a blast working on all these. Even though they were quite stressful sometimes but I'm here for it. There are still stuff I've worked on which I will discuss in Part 3.
Hey it's been a while. I don't really know why I stopped posting here since I quite enjoy writing long walls of texts and just sharing my thoughts and opinion on shit. Well, since I refuse to use Xitter, I've only been using Instagram lately and it's pretty decent but it's not really a good place to write stuff. So that's why I decided to resurrect this corpse of a blog and what better way to do that than to write about my plans for 2024 that are 100% going to go all according to plan and not go astray.
So first off, Dark Harvest Episode 2. I feel like a broken record always saying "it's coming" or "I'm working on it." Well, right now's no different, buddy. I'm still working on it. However, I'm proud to announce that Episode 2 now has a release date. Well, sort of. On Instagram, I regrettably posted a teaser for episode 2 with "Q1 2024" as a caption. In retrospect, this was incredibly foolish of me as estimating when an animation will be finished is never that simple. Idk, I want to tell you to just please ignore that release date, sorry. I really just meant to say "2024." First quarter? Late 2024? I DUNNO! But definitely coming this very year.
I'd like to go over some of the reasons why this thing has taken this long. First off, I consider myself a somewhat fast animator. Like I can do a complete 4-5 minute animation in 3 months if I really want to (I'll get back to this one in my next post). The reason is the way I animate, allowing me to do it pretty fast. To keep it short, I don't draw every frame of the animation and I recycle a lot of previous drawings. HOWEVER. These aren't really simple character designs and animating them can be tricky. They're not like anime but they're also not simple cartoons. I don't really consider myself a good animator because of this. When I get to a rather complicated scene I can get stuck for days sometimes. I also like to push myself when it comes to my skills which is why I include complex scenes in my cartoons just to kinda force myself to be better. And yeah, there's a bunch of it in this one. There's also more polish in this one than the previous.
Reason number two is that this one is just a long one. First episode was around 6 minutes or something but a lot of it was dialogue too. While episode 2 also features extensive dialogue, there's more action in it. 9 minutes is a pretty long video for internet animation standards and it's the longest animation I've ever done (besides "Bliss" but that featured a lot of recycled scenes).
Reason number three. I simply am not working on it all of the time. Ok, I'll be serious right now. I'm an adult with responsibilities and bills to pay. I need to work and I can only work on stuff like these on my free time. When I was working on the pilot/episode 1, I was still in college. I had a lot of free time back then. I even get to draw everyday. Quite a luxury these days. Episode 2 has been worked on ever since I finished the first one. That makes it around 5 years old now. And I agree that this is totally unacceptable. This is unacceptable TO ME. I hate that it takes me this long. My schedule is a regular 8 hour job on work days, and then on the weekends I do freelance work. And then whatever time I have left, that's for my own work. Which means I virtually have zero time for my own projects. And truthfully, I love what I do too much to keep this up. I love this cartoon that I made and I got so many plans for it. Which is why I recently made the very difficult decision to do quit my job so I can work on my own things. I know very well of the risks involved but being able to finally work on things I'm incredibly passionate about is worth it to me. I still got my freelance work so I can make some money, but, this way, I can be flexible with my schedule. I've been doing this for a couple of months now and I made significant progress with this episode, despite still having side projects. It finally feels like I'm not stuck on this episode and things are finally moving again. Which is why I am now confident in saying that this will be done this year. Sometime this year, but definitely this year. I'm also in the process of writing the script for Episode 3 and 4. So, wish me luck.
So that's really the only thing I wanted to get out of my chest. One last thing I'd like to address: I'm barely present online these days. There's been some few attempts to post consistently but I just can't. And I'll just accept that. Look, I don't like social media. I tend to avoid it as much as possible so it can be difficult for me to keep people updated. But I made something that people like and expecting people to just wait for it isn't good I think. But I also won't force myself to post something just for the sake of it. So what am I saying? I don't really know, just don't act as if I've canceled my projects just because I haven't posted in a month. Seriously, it gets old.
As I've said, I do not use Twitter anymore, I will only be using Instagram (and now Tumblr too I guess, at least for extra long announcements). Recently made an official Instagram page for Dark Harvest here: https://www.instagram.com/darkestharvest/
Also my regular Instagram is where I upload random artwork I make. So that's about it. I do want to talk about the stuff that I've worked on since Episode 1. But I'll save that for part 2.
Heyo, been a while. So my last update was probably a year ago, I don’t remember really, 2020 went by so quickly. I’ve uploaded a short clip from episode 2.
So, this will probably be the only clip that I can upload for now or maybe until the episode comes out. I just can’t show too much of it. But the animation you’ll see is from months ago and features a scene from the 2nd episode introducing a new character, Clair de Lune. Anyway, I’m here to talk about stuff most people aren’t probably gonna read so here goes:
Firstly, episode 2 is coming along just fine, albeit still incredibly slow. I’ve been experimenting with my workflow to maybe get work done faster, some successful and some not. For instance I tried to be “organized” and worked on a scene in its own separate file so I won’t have to deal with Adobe Animate crashing or just glitching, but turns out it’s too tedious so I just scrapped that.
Conversely, I updated how my character rigs work and that one definitely helped speed up my process, so I’m excited for that. But despite that, I’ve only managed to do around 29% of the animation so far. Which is fine, but it’s far from what my goal was. But I am a very busy person. Including this, I also work full time at a studio and also do freelance sometimes. In fact, here’s a bunch of stuff that I worked on in 2020:
I worked on Long Gone Gulch as one of their compositors:
Other compositing stuff I did for a project called “The Oyster”
I did 2 animations for MASHED:
And loads of stuff that I do at the company I work for. Sooo yeah, I have a lot on my plate. But recently, I’m trying to keep a schedule so I hopefully can have work done consistently. Been doing it for about a couple months now and I’ve definitely improved and we’ll see how much work I can get done this year. In fact, I’m really hoping episode 2 comes out this year. But that’s not a promise, it’s just a goal and I don’t know for a fact if I can do that but I’ll sure try.
And now secondly, I’ve been thinking about the future of this series. The first episode came out 3 years ago and the thought of that makes me bummed out. I have A LOT of episodes planned for this and at that pace, it’s just unrealistic to think that I can do them all myself. Of course, I already considered hiring a team for this, but honestly it’s just too expensive at the moment. Episode 2 right now is fine, I think I can handle it myself, but for the 3rd episode and onwards, I will definitely start hiring other people to help out, maybe background art and some animation and hopefully I can grow from there. But I guess that also depends how successful this cartoon is going to be. I never expected the first one to reach a million views and I’m still amazed by that number. The really vague teaser from last year also did well, it had around 100k views for something that’s about...well, nothing really. So, I am truly grateful for all the people who like my stuff. So to sum it all up, Episode 2 MIGHT maybe sorta come out this year but if it doesn't please don't hunt me down thanks. I'm also beginning writing episode 3 and 4. And I guess that's it. Thank you for sticking and look forward to more content soon!
Follow the official Dark Harvest twitter. I put a progress percentage in the bio so people are more informed of the progress so far. I'll try to be more active there but honestly I just have no idea what to post lmao.
Also follow me on my main twitter account and instagram where I'll post art sometimes. Bye for now.
Hey y’all, it’s been a while since I uploaded that teaser. Just wanted to put out an update just so people won’t think I stopped working on it (yes, I still get people asking me if it’s canceled or not). It’s been a really busy year for me and I’ve worked on several projects as well as my job so there hasn’t been too much work done. But since this clearly is going to be the norm for me, I thought I might as well put up constant updates and WIP for episode 2 just to remain active on social media. With all that being said, I HAVE finished some chunk of animation already, most of it’s gonna be in a minute-long preview that I’ll be putting out probably early next year. But yeah that’s pretty much it, thanks for your patience. Expect more updates in this tumblr blog.
Hi. It’s been a while. I almost forgot my Tumblr password. Well anyway, I’m here to talk about the state of my cartoon “The Dark Harvest.”
Many months ago I recorded myself talking about this very thing and it was supposed to for YouTube to kinda update people about what I’m doing but I never uploaded it because I hate the sound of my voice (yes, really that’s the reason besides almost forgetting about it from time to time). So I’ll just say them here instead.
Okay so what happened. I made Dark Harvest around 2014-2015. Took me a while to develop the show and characters (and I still am) and finally got to working on the Pilot, or Episode 1 as I just called it later. Finished it around the end of 2018 and it did okay. Got around 10,000 views and then that was it. People liked it, some people didn’t. So to me, I wasn’t really in a hurry to make the 2nd one. Of course I would’ve loved to keep working on it but stuff like college or working jobs slowed down my process. I decided to just work on it when I can, it was basically on hiatus as far as I know. Fast forward to a few months later the fabled “YouTube Algorithm” recommended the cartoon to a bunch of people and it got like 2000% more engagement. It was insane. I can see that a lot of people were looking forward to the next one which made me feel a little guilty for having nothing to show yet. Was still working on the script around that time which still wasn’t even finished. A lot of people even thought the channel was dead because the last upload was a year ago.
Well, during the past few months I have been working on it for real. I’m finally at the process of animating them and making backgrounds and stuff. And also: I know a lot of people already know this but I know some who don’t so again, I am just ONE person making this cartoon, besides my voice actors. I have to write the script, make storyboards, edit the audio, animate the cartoon, make the backgrounds, do after effects for post-editing, create the music, and finally compile them in Premiere. That’s a LOOOOT of work and such a time-consuming process so it’s GONNA TAKE SOME TIME TO FINISH. In the future, I’d happily hire artists and animators to help out, but right now I can’t do that for financial reasons and other stuff too. Someday I might, but for now, I’ll stick to doing everything myself as it’s also a way for me to get better at what I do.
So… what’s the status of Episode 2? Like I said, I’m beginning to animate some parts of it. I definitely learned a lot from animating episode 1 and I’m willing to make shortcuts and overall just do everything I can to lessen production time. Episode 1 was kind of an experiment on what I can animate and effects I can do and what I can get away with. I read a lot of the comments people made on the first episode and try to improve the problems with it in the 2nd episode. This episode has a lot more dialogue, which means a lot of it is pretty easy to animate, but also more intense animation, so I hope I can manage that. I plan to finish it by the end of this year (ok, maybe that’s too much wishful thinking, but a man can dream) or possibly around middle of 2021. To be honest, I don’t know when I’ll finish it but I’ll get there when I get there. So…. hope you enjoy this small sneak peek of episode 2. I know it doesn’t show a lot, but that’s as much as I can show at the moment. Don’t worry, I’ll get to working on the preview soon. So, thank you for reading and thank you for liking the stuff that I do.
So as you may know, I’ve been working on this shit since the dawn of man. Took me a while to finish it because I’ve been working on college stuff and also I’ve been animating for Tsioque. Hell, I’m surprised I finished it at all this year. I didn’t quite make it in time for halloween, but that was my fault because the cartoon was already done but I refused to upload it because I keep seeing small mistakes here and there....oops.
Look, I’m just gonna get out the self deprecation part right now because I always say the same thing...so, yes I think the plot could be improved and the dialogue and whatever akfjaksfj...I do like the visual a lot, however, so there’s that.
So okay, onto production. I started writing this episode in 2015, and began to animate it by the end of the year. The script went through many revisions before turning into the final thing. What sucks is I kept changing stuff AS I’m animating it, so I had to cut a bunch of stuff and re record lines and whatnot. Sometimes I even had to improvise and use existing recordings and just fit it in the scene with my dark magic...There’s a lot of unused dialogue and cut scenes because of this. I might upload the original animatic so people can see the difference and so the extra recordings won’t go wasted. My voice actors Anairis and Patrick did an amazing job and really brought my characters to life with their talent, and I love them both!
This time, I drew all of the backgrounds in Manga Studio this time, to make use of textures to achieve that painted-looking style, which was what I was going for. A little similar to the backgrounds in Samurai Jack actually. Originally the episode took place when the sun was still up, but I changed it so it take place at night so there’s a bunch of backgrounds that went unused. It’s a good thing I like drawing backgrounds, otherwise I’d just curl up into a foetal position and cry.
I also changed Markus’ design in the middle of production. I changed his jaw to be less pointed. It’s a good thing I animate using symbols instead of frame by frame so all I had to do was update the head and all the other scenes would use the new model.
I feel like I’ve been animating so much faster but at the same time slower because I think I have a really good workflow now that I can animate a scene in a short amount of time, but at the same time I keep animating more details and secondary movement, which is a good thing, I suppose but it takes longer. I’m pretty proud of the animation in this, though I wish the poses and angles were more dynamic. Still learning how to do that...I made all of the music here too. I think I’m improving, but I still wouldn’t call myself a musician.
I have been working on this on and off, which is the main reason why it took so long to finish. I had to constantly put it off so I can work on either college, or the game I previously mentioned or just to do commissions so I’ll have money. I’ll be finishing college this December (that’s the plan, anyway), so next year hopefully I’ll have more time to work on stuff again...unless I run out of money and I’ll have to find work idk.
Something I want to try is bringing more people on board especially animators in order to speed up production. And since I’m broke as fuck, I won’t be able to do that yet, but it’s something that I’m always open about.
I’ve already been writing the next episode since last year. I’m trying my best to make it more substantial than the first episode. It features a new character, Clair. It’s going to be more action-heavy which I’m dreading, but hopefully it’ll look cool. Here’s concept art for the next episode:
Hopefully I’ll be working on it for real soon. I’ll be posting updates when I can!
Fully rendered with line art ($30, +$10 per additional character)
Fully rendered with no line art ($40, +$15 per additional character)
+$15 with background.
NEW: Background art ($35 each)
Here are more examples of my works: http://roastedstix.tumblr.com/tagged/art/
Again, I’ll have limited slots, but I’ll probably open more if I feel like I’m still up for it. Please read full details: http://roastedstix.tumblr.com/commissions
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