#howdooyoodoo

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Inktober #22: On a 'trail' with the Howdooyoodoo, Rab Rab and Labbox!

[animatedaf]

New art of some of my dog-old characters from animated shorts I did back between 2005-2007, made for the Explore page (previously Tags page) which now has lovely big icons of each character to tap!

The Howdooyoodoo head-icon somehow evolved into a full illustration for the fun of it. Based on a sketch from a few years ago.

[animatedaf]

Everybody do the Michigan Raaaaaag

Just me and my characters hanging out.

[animatedaf]

Some quick doodles I did last night of some of my old characters, having a go at re-designing them: both from short films I made roughly 10 years ago (the latter of which was never completed).

The Howdooyoodoo was a pretty rushed film to get it done in time for the uni assignment (it was given in on time but with most of the colour missing) and looking back the character design isn’t really what I wanted: in my head he was always more of a mossy, over grown mass of plant life, with a bit of a Worzel Gummidge and/or Totoro rough but charming quality to him and big floppy feet like cookie monsters hands.

Rock Paper Scissors was storyboarded and animation was begun but I went about it all the wrong way and the character designs were a bit weak: in particular the ‘rock’ of the story who didn’t really resemble a rock at all. The scissors character is one I have been going back to time and time again since I made him up as a child and for the first time have tried to give him a body that makes sense, as opposed to arms and legs just kind of slapped onto his mouth. I’d still like to refine these guys more and come up with a new story for them one day.

[animatedaf]

The full storyboard for The Howdooyoodoo. 

[animatedaf]

The Howdooyoodoo is complete! Sort of..

So I finally found a way to line up all the characters colours with the line art for this film the Howdooyoodoo, after months of putting it off, thanks to Flash 8 which has a layer filter section much like Photoshop's for movie clips. This means I didn't have to line up the colour art for every single frame of the animation, so it took a small fraction of the time it was taking in Photoshop with film files over the summer holidays.

Sadly there's still one main thing I haven't sorted out for the film that I also won't have time for: the background noise. See, the film is set in the middle of London yet at the moment there is no crowds of people walking about, or even any moving cars on the road. I really wanted to have a mass of people in almost every shot, especially the one where the HDYD is walking across a road, but I simply don't have the time to animate them in at the moment, as to be honest I should really be working on my latest project Lucy Lolly. Once that is out of the way I may come back to add them in, but for now I'm just going to release it as it is, as everything else is now intact more or less how I want it. I swear this film has been the most un-intentionality time consuming animation I have ever done, everything just went out of it's way to suck time out of me. Really need to learn quicker ways of doing things like this..

Anyway, I've uploaded the film which you can see below, just pretend that the scenery is really busy for now and you'll hopefully get the idea. Thanks have to go out to Dave + Pat Long, Alex Underwood and Jack + Sophie Deen for helping out with the voice work, and of course John Agard, of whom's poem this is based on.

[animatedaf]

Quick update on the Howdooyoodoo.

Well, I presented and gave it in to Uni yesterday, and it's more or less done...almost. All the (limited) animation is there, as are the backgrounds and the soundtrack worked out really well, all that's missing now is some of the colour on some scenes, along with a lot of background elements like moving crowds, cars and some bird poo (don't ask!), which I hope to sort out soon so I can finally upload it online. It ended up being severely rushed out of the door though, as I ended up with only a couple weeks to finish it off. 

The whole soft, fluffy chalk look I wanted was thrown out of the window for a more conventional penned characters with photoshop colours approach, but even then the editing has been rather frustrating..chroma keying is difficult to get right. here are some screencaps of the film so far (ignore the pixelated junk at the bottom, that's a VLC player glitch).

[animatedaf]

The Howdooyoodoo makes a quick appearance in Kobun's short animation 'Let's Count' on DeviantArt. How cool is that? Also: the music is very catchy.