Basement Busk is out in the wild!

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My newest feature animation has been released! 

Watch it here:

Basement Busk

Read my WIP post on this animation.

Woohoo, it’s done.

Creating a Patreon Campaign

Patreon is a way for people to support me directly by throwing a couple bucks my way every month. Although it was suggested by many who enjoyed my work, I’ve been eyeballing it for quite some time. Crowdfunding platforms have always interested me, since they put a lot of power (and responsibility) in the creator’s hands. My friends and I like to come up with business ideas and how we’d Kickstart them, but I’ve never actually started a campaign – until now.

Filling up my Patreon page was magnitudes more work than I’d expected. I needed to create a pitch video, goals/milestones, and multiple reward tiers.

Not that Patreon didn’t provide the tools. They actually did a great job providing resources and examples for making an attractive page.

The hard part was nailing down what I wanted to say. In order to be successful, a Patreon creator needs to state their mission in a way that is short and sweet. But for me, the process of getting there was long and bitter. Distilling my overall message, demonstrating my best work, and making promises to earn money was tough. Especially since I’ve been doing all this stuff as a hobby for years.

I should’ve expected it to be difficult. I just made an 8 minute long animation about asking for money!

Spiky Productivity

Just like all my other release posts, I’m gonna describe how the production of this animation went (it helps me see what’s working and what’s not). I started working on it a week after I had published the Smash Bros animation (end of April), and finished it in November. As expected, it was a 5-6 month long project, my average time scope. I seem to always take this long when going for max polish and pushing my skills.

Fun stats for Basement Busk:

• Animation length: 8.5 minutes
• 140 live streams (415 hrs, 28 mins of recorded work)
• 11730 frames of animation

And here’s quick graph so we can look at my major project milestones:

Notice how the burnout didn’t help my output significantly. It was still a magical experience though.

I intend to do a write up on the effects of burnout (it has a lot of upsides and downsides).

New Techniques

Skip this section if Adobe Flash puts you to sleep.

Perfected a couple new tricks to animating in Flash (er, Adobe Animate)! I oughtta publish an Ebook about em or something. Oh well. You can have them for free in the mean time:

Visual Metronome

Since many of my animations require carefully synchronized movements to the music, I created a visual “metronome” helps me time the animation for jumpy segments.

It’s simply a bouncing ball that hops around to the beat.

Glowing Highlights

By duplicating and flattening all the layers of a movie-clip, you can produce a neat glowing effect for your highlights.

Simply use the “Find and Replace” function on your duplicated movie-clip. What you want to do is to isolate the highlight colors by replacing all other colors with a transparent color. Make sure you only apply this replacement on the “Current Scene”.

When the duplicated clip is blurred (with an ADDitive blend mode) and placed on top of your original animation, it looks like the highlights were beautifully airbrushed. Gettin’ one step closer to 2D Disney every year! This is especially useful for making objects appear shiny. Which I’m all about.

Cookie Cutter Fill

This technique slightly speeds up the process of filling color into your line work. You must first fill all but one of the colors for your animation clip. For example, I would manually use the paint bucket tool to fill in green, yellow, white, and reds for Gildedguy, but leave the orange color of his armor empty.

Instead of filling in orange manually like before, I create a large square of orange on a layer beneath my animated layer. This orange shape serves as a large sheet of “cookie dough” in which I can cut out with my animated layer (the cutter). This is achieved by key-framing the entire orange layer to match my animated keys, then, merging the two layers via copy-n-paste. Finally, the excess orange shape (surrounding my character) is deleted through the help of editing multiple frames (onion skinning). The process is takes some time to get used to, but it truly saves time.

MeepMerger

Earlier, I quickly mentioned flattening and merging layers as single steps, but the actual action of combining layers in Flash is cumbersome. Instead of having to scrub through each frame, Selecting All > Cut > Copy in Paste, one can use the MeepMerger, named after it’s awesome developer PowerMeep (he also helped compose the opening score to Basement Busk).

This handy automation script will scan your current timeline and copy all the layers into a single layer, much faster than doing it by hand. It requires some setup so read the README, but it saved me many nights of hand cramps.

Click here to view and download PowerMeep’s Flash Layer Merger.

What’s next?

I’m currently working on a script/novel for my Falcomaster story. Writing is a pain! Despite that, I might commit all my efforts towards producing a pilot episode. Because working on a game after all these animations sounds very fun. But I also want to do more Gildedguy animations.

It all really depends on the response from my new Patrons!

Either way, I’m super happy to have finally launched this anim and my Patreon page.

Thanks for reading!

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