I've made a few DVD menu's for the short film compilation series "Everyone is Kung fu Fighting," each of a different style and medium. First off was KFF2, which was real actors in front of a drawn background. The second, KFF3, was crayon drawings animated. This current one, which has been in my head almost a year now (KFF4) was planned to look like an 8-bit 1980's Nintendo game. The intentions were to take the simple movements of NES games and mix in billions of bad guys, some wacky violence and some energetic 2-D camera movement.
The music is already done by techno guru DeadMau5 (Deadmau5.com), there is a cameo of comic character "BUNNYWITH" in the works by underground art guru Alex Pardee (eyesuckink.com) and the majority of all the characters have been desgined on paper. The big problem, then, comes in with actually drawing these things. I've spent the past half year studying (yes, studying) old video games, how they move, how they're drawn, their themes, etc. But when I started drawing them (using MS Paint and Photoshop), I became extremely frustrated at how such ugly little graphics were so hard to come up with.
Fast forward half a week to today. I skipped school out of determination/anger to get the main character (fuzzy ninja) to look right. I could not. So I step back and think of alternatives. I couldn't bail on the 8bit idea, cause Alex Pardee is drawing an 8-bit bunnywith. So I figured I could have fuzzy ninja get a mario-esque mushroom and hallucinate. The hallucination would be funny and allow me to use different art mediums aside from MS Paint to create drawings, with the added benefit of making the piece more original and surprising. While it'll add a bazillion hours to the production time (for a giant, big, scary 90second end result), it'll at least be more fun that slaving away on a mouse for 10,000 years. And so the lesson of this update is this: Creativity and endless frustration, not money, is how you come up with new ideas. I could just pay some graphic designer to draw all the graphics for me so I could jump into animating. And that's an idea a smart person would do. But I'm not smart and I'm poor, so there goes the origin of a new dimension to this project.
Now the new issue is balancing this animation, finishing UNDERCUT; my live action ninja movie (which just needs some annoying sound mastering/original music which is being made as we speak) and co-writing/doing cinematography/learning a Vietnamese accent for Eric Jacobus' San Francisco short. Thanks to this work load I've dropped all but 3 classes, and .3 is on it's way out.
Posts: 146 | Location: Dublin, Ca, US | Registered: June 02, 2003
Studentfilms.com Filmmaking Forums 
