BAM

Bambi Meats Anime Hell from tohoscope on Vimeo.

Sonovabitch. Vimeo doesn't play back for shit. Frames are skipped every freakin' where. Dammit! Ok. It plays fine on the desktop. So, let's tweak the settings and try again. Reloading the file to Vimeo isn't working, so let's give them a different file. Ok, re-encoded the mov at 30fps with a keyframe every 8 frames (I just found out I could do that.) It's a bigger file, but it looks the same on the desktop. Vimeo's choking on the file, re-upping it. Ok, now it's looking better, but it's still skipping frames. Re-encoding and re-upping. Ok, it's not perfect, but it's better. Talk about annoying.

If you've never seen Marv Newland's Bambi Meets Godzilla then this will mean nothing to you. In this age of youTube I'd be surprised. After all, it's only been around since 1969. Here's the Wikipedia entry with a link to it on youTube:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bambi_Meets_Godzilla

I got the idea to do this while I was animating the Godzilla-esque monster attacking the city part of the Anime North video flier. So, I watched Bambi Meets Godzilla over and over and tried to break it down. This is my take on the original gag, and It's almost how I wanted it. Ideally I'd like to add more frames and slow down the title crawl to fit the music, but I'm outta time. It's gotta go up today or it's pointless.

You may notice that the animated dude isn't animated in my usual squigglevision. I'm not sure what they call this technique, but it's actually less frames then the squiggle line way. I'm drawing a frame and then holding it. I'm only actually animating between the held frames, so it looks like little bursts of movement. It looks like there's more animation then there actually is.

And the funny thing is it was easier to animate the dude then to animate the title crawl. The title crawl took three nights to figure out.

Well, that's it. Now to finish up the OtakuHELL/Mondo Inferno opening for next week's show. And then, who knows? I'm getting better and better with this, and I'd like to find something I can do to keep animating and get better and challenge myself. Because once I'm done with the Hell promos/OtakuHELL opening and bumpers I'm outta work. I'm out of a goal. So, what do I do? A music video? An animated video podcast? Something? What? No, not something major. No, I'm talking something I can use to work up to doing a serious shot at a short. Something to strengthen and stretch my animating skills. I need to develop this.

Despite this short not being perfect, I am kinda happy with it. I have a feeling of accomplishing and meeting a goal. And that's pretty good for now.