Posters Galore!

Hi there Ricketeers!

This week I'm finishing up the storyboards. Hopefully finally. If I finish them all I'm throwing my self a "Yay me" Party with cake and everything. Then I can finally start on the animatic!

Also, if you've been following me on twitter or the facebook fan page, (which I'm sure you all do) You'll already know that I'm making mock movie posters of all the noir movies I've reviewed. This might take some time, but hopefully I'll get to a point where I'm caught up and with each new movie review comes a new poster! Wouldn't that be something? Anyways, here's what I've got so far:


I really like this one, even better than the original. It just works so well in high contrast. And the best thing about it is since everyone where's gloves, it could be anyone's hand! And in this version, does M stand for mouse?

This one I'm still working on. I think the problem I have with it is that I tried using solid blacks with no value. You can see the original here and a crazy colored version here.

I REALLY like how this one is coming out. I decided to go old-school shading with it, and I think it works out well. I changed the composition from the original a bit to make it work with the characters. I could have put Rickety in the main character seat but I wanted to see Stumbles as a boxer(Didn't Goofy do a boxing cartoon?) and I wanted to bring Blusto back.

The more I do these posters, the more I wish I could make little mock-movies, but alas, I feel that would be WAY too much to put on my plate. Maybe somewhere down the line I'll do it as a promotional tool when most of the animation is complete and I have time again.

No Noir review this week; I'm going to hold off until next week when I'll have most of the posters done. Plus, I haven't seen any new noirs lately.

See you next week folks!

Rascals repeating himself

So this week I have another short animatic for you! If it's too small here, then you can see it HERE. It's Rascals saying one line four different times! I'll be using it as an animation test in the coming weeks.

Also, because of a few people have been badgering me about how to do it, I'll be doing a video tutorial about how to make those nifty looking textures in Flash. I'll be doing at least three of them. One showing how to draw with the line tool quickly in flash, another showing how to make the textures, and then another showing how to use those textures in animation.

And perhaps if I figure out something new and exciting or if someone is wondering how to do something, I'll do more!

Stiiiiiiillllll doing Storyboards. Actually I kinda had a halt because I was working on the title sequence animatic, but I'm gonna have to start back up again if I want to get done before never.

This week I wanna talk about two Noir movies! Double Indemnity and The Singing Detective!

I'll start off with the classic, Double Indemnity. And it is! This is one of the most suspenseful noirs I've watched, especially for a story where the main character practically tells you the end at the beginning! It's about a fed-up wife getting an insurance salesmen to help her kill her husband.

There are so many moments where they almost got caught and your heart just stops. That is how you define suspense. The dialogue is incredible; one of my favorite bits is when the wife and the hapless insurance agent are flirting and comparing the whole thing to speeding tickets. Seriously, THIS is how dialogue is done. Fred MacMurray does a wonderful job as the narrating insurance agent, and Edward G. Robinson steals the show as his ranting raving boss. I completely recommend this to any noir enthusiasts.

And then there's The Singing Detective. It has Robert Downy Jr. as a burn victim who's a famous pulp writer, Mel Gibson as a eccentric doctor, Katie homes as the hot nurse, and Adrien Brody as a thug. It's got fast dialogue, plenty of gratuitous sex, a nurse accidentally "getting off" a burn victim, and on top of all that, song and dance numbers. All of which I had no problem with. What I had trouble was the nonsensical story. There wasn't any real big mystery, no real suspense, and you never had a sense of what was going on. And there were a lot of things that just never got explained, like why he got burned in the first place. Apparently it was based on a BBC series, so I'll have to check that out. It's a quirky movie and definitely not for everyone, but, uhhhhh where else are you going to see a burn victim in a dance number?