Wapsi Square Forum

shadowinthelight wrote:Kids can be so mean.

Depending on how the horns looked when they first started growing, you might be on to something.

Atomic wrote:Why does she remind me of McPedro....

Ach!

For some time I've thought the episode with the calendar machine being defeated would be something great to set to music, with a few effects thrown in, and made into a video. I was hoping someone would do that someday. Well, a while back I decided to give it a try and the results are now on Vimeo here: The volume is a low, so you may have to crank up it's audio setting, as well as your computer's. Best watch it while you can. Paul may consider this a bit too much for "fan art" and I'll have to take it down.

KnightDelight wrote:For some time I've thought the episode with the calendar machine being defeated would be something great to set to music, with a few effects thrown in, and made into a video. I was hoping someone would do that someday. Well, a while back I decided to give it a try and the results are now on Vimeo here: The volume is a low, so you may have to crank up it's audio setting, as well as your computer's. Best watch it while you can. Paul may consider this a bit too much for "fan art" and I'll have to take it down.

/Dave/ digs shattered fragments of jaw out of deep pit into which jaw has dropped, glues them back together, refits to rest of face.

WOW!

That's beautiful work! I'll have to watch it again with a better sound setup than I have here... definitely deserves it... a very effective choice of music!

If you don't mind my asking - how many hours of work did it take to get all of the effects and captioning done?

That was wonderful - what I could watch of it before Vimeo streaming died. I don't see why Paul wouldn't approve of that fan art production - you give him copyright and full art credit. Great Stuff!

And - finally got to see the last few minutes. Opinion has not changed - still awesome work!

Dave wrote:WOW!

That's beautiful work! I'll have to watch it again with a better sound setup than I have here... definitely deserves it... a very effective choice of music!

Thank you, that's kind of you to say.

Dave wrote:If you don't mind my asking - how many hours of work did it take to get all of the effects and captioning done?

It's hard to quantify how long what took since I did it a bit here, a bit there, over months. Most of the effects didn't take too long overall though. A couple were discovered by accident. Those planned were relatively straight forward and just amounted to grunt work (cutout, cleanup, import into place, re-size, alpha-channel, etc.). Some were canned like the page fold over near the beginning. That was an effect in "Videopad" (which I used to combine the individual scenes into a cohesive movie). The captioning took the longest mainly because I ended up doing it twice. The first pass was cutting out the individual sentences from the artwork and getting them to fade in/out and track as needed. But the result was not quite satisfying since the letters were never as clear as I would have liked, so I finally used a TT font editor (Typelight) and created a font set as close to Paul's as I could. After that it went quickly, simply typing in whatever size I needed where ever I needed it to replace the original cut and paste sections. Fortunately, the animation files used to manipulate the text didn't require any changes.

NOTDilbert wrote:That was wonderful - what I could watch of it before Vimeo streaming died. I don't see why Paul wouldn't approve of that fan art production - you give him copyright and full art credit. Great Stuff!

And - finally got to see the last few minutes. Opinion has not changed - still awesome work!

Thank you, I appreciate that very much.

If anyone has trouble viewing it, I can upload it to some file sharing service for you to download. Be advised though, I recorded the final product in HQ (1280x720) so the file is over 620M. I do have another file that is about half that size (854x480) that is nearly as good. I did it to that quality mainly to get the text to come out nice and clear, but it also helped in bringing out the artwork's shades nicely with good contrast range and clarity.

KnightDelight wrote:For some time I've thought the episode with the calendar machine being defeated would be something great to set to music, with a few effects thrown in, and made into a video. I was hoping someone would do that someday. Well, a while back I decided to give it a try and the results are now on Vimeo here: The volume is a low, so you may have to crank up it's audio setting, as well as your computer's. Best watch it while you can. Paul may consider this a bit too much for "fan art" and I'll have to take it down.

KnightDelight, that was INfrackingCREDIBLE. The visual effects you used were perfect and the inspirational and atmospheric music choices and placements hit all the right emotional cords. But the falling letters at 5:16 was just plain funny. I just have to tell you that you do some great work.

KnightDelight wrote:For some time I've thought the episode with the calendar machine being defeated would be something great to set to music, with a few effects thrown in, and made into a video. I was hoping someone would do that someday. Well, a while back I decided to give it a try and the results are now on Vimeo here: The volume is a low, so you may have to crank up it's audio setting, as well as your computer's. Best watch it while you can. Paul may consider this a bit too much for "fan art" and I'll have to take it down.

An epic animation for an epic encounter. Kudos, good sir Knight.

Applause, applause!

Mark N wrote:KnightDelight, that was INfrackingCREDIBLE. The visual effects you used were perfect and the inspirational and atmospheric music choices and placements hit all the right emotional cords. But the falling letters at 5:16 was just plain funny. I just have to tell you that you do some great work.

Thank you, I'm glad you enjoyed it. I had a lot of fun making it.

Yes, I had that little words dropping thing planned pretty much from the beginning. I'm just glad I could pull it off considering the relatively primitive (meaning, free) software tool I used to create the individual scenes.

MerchManDan wrote:An epic animation for an epic encounter. Kudos, good sir Knight.

Atomic wrote:Applause, applause!

Thank you both very much.

KnightDelight wrote:

Dammit! You just had to do something to totally blow my "8-bit" animation out of the water, didn't you? How the hell am I supposed to reclaim the (self given) title of Lead Animator after that?

Seriously, awesome work. VideoPad is what I used to piece together the parts of my animation but I didn't even begin to explore all the tools it has.

shadowinthelight wrote:

KnightDelight wrote:

Dammit! You just had to do something to totally blow my "8-bit" animation out of the water, didn't you? How the hell am I supposed to reclaim the (self given) title of Lead Animator after that?

I'd say the bar has been set up pretty high! How about doing Katherine and Atsali's Big Adventure, in a reasonably realistic motion-capture animation (not necessarily Avatar-grade, yet) with the characters skinned using artwork in Paul's own style? This latest arc is just full of highly-exciting scenes which just cry out for full-motion animation.

Doing it on a PC... probably a two-pipe problem, Watson!

Dave wrote:

shadowinthelight wrote:

KnightDelight wrote:

Dammit! You just had to do something to totally blow my "8-bit" animation out of the water, didn't you? How the hell am I supposed to reclaim the (self given) title of Lead Animator after that?

I'd say the bar has been set up pretty high! How about doing Katherine and Atsali's Big Adventure, in a reasonably realistic motion-capture animation (not necessarily Avatar-grade, yet) with the characters skinned using artwork in Paul's own style? This latest arc is just full of highly-exciting scenes which just cry out for full-motion animation.

Doing it on a PC... probably a two-pipe problem, Watson!

The real adventure would be to make it into a motion comic like what DC has done with Superman: Red Son and Watchmen: The Tales of the Black Freighter. (only with better voice work than Watchmen motion comic preview on that disk.

Garg!! Everyone's comments are making me super curious about this video you put together, but I only check Wapsi at my office...where it would be frowned upon for me to sit and watch a video (and probably to check and post on these forums, but that's easier to not get caught doing). I'll have to see if I can watch it on my lunch break now...*schemes and plots*

KnightDelight wrote:For some time I've thought the episode with the calendar machine being defeated would be something great to set to music, with a few effects thrown in, and made into a video. I was hoping someone would do that someday. Well, a while back I decided to give it a try and the results are now on Vimeo here: The volume is a low, so you may have to crank up it's audio setting, as well as your computer's. Best watch it while you can. Paul may consider this a bit too much for "fan art" and I'll have to take it down.

KnightDelight that was so impressive I had to log back in to tell you how much I enjoyed your production. Thank you for the time and energy you put into it. Paul's work inspires creativity, I know I wouldn't have done any colorings and fan comics without Wapsi and Jabberwonky's stuff. I'm greedy dammit, I want MORE. Another comic I read had some of the fan base do the script as a radio program with voice actors reading the script. I just imagine what your's would have sounded like with voices edited in. I hope you set Paul's wheels turning in his head. Disney made a lot of money with straight to video stuff. Damn, I like this comic too much. *goes and gets coffee at Confusion corner.

Okay, lets put all the replies into one massive missive. . . .

shadowinthelight wrote:Seriously, awesome work. VideoPad is what I used to piece together the parts of my animation but I didn't even begin to explore all the tools it has.

Thank you for your kind words. Videopad is a great (and free) tool. Especially the multitrack audio mixer built right in. It allowed me to overlap music tracks to blend them for maximum effect, and the same with sound effects. You can even control the level of any track independently from moment to moment. Video overlay, plug-in video effects, great stuff.

Dave wrote:I'd say the bar has been set up pretty high! How about doing Katherine and Atsali's Big Adventure, in a reasonably realistic motion-capture animation (not necessarily Avatar-grade, yet) with the characters skinned using artwork in Paul's own style? This latest arc is just full of highly-exciting scenes which just cry out for full-motion animation.

Doing it on a PC... probably a two-pipe problem, Watson!

No kidding, good luck with that. Such a thing would require a good deal more involvement from the artist though. One thing I wished I'd had on my project would have been separated artwork (as well as higher res art). With the characters separated from the background, I could have done much better on the staging of the scenes and characters for video. I'd love to re-do it starting with that sort of thing. At least the artwork on line is at a fairly good resolution to begin with though.

It's amazing what one can do with just a home PC though. This incredible video: http://archive.org/details/TheHunt was done over a decade ago using just a single Pentium class desktop PC with considerably less memory and raw power common today in even cheap computers.

Wdot wrote:KnightDelight that was so impressive I had to log back in to tell you how much I enjoyed your production. Thank you for the time and energy you put into it. Paul's work inspires creativity, I know I wouldn't have done any colorings and fan comics without Wapsi and Jabberwonky's stuff. I'm greedy dammit, I want MORE. Another comic I read had some of the fan base do the script as a radio program with voice actors reading the script. I just imagine what your's would have sounded like with voices edited in. I hope you set Paul's wheels turning in his head. Disney made a lot of money with straight to video stuff. Damn, I like this comic too much. *goes and gets coffee at Confusion corner.

I'm glad you enjoyed it, and thanks so much for your comments. Paul's work does, indeed, inspire creativity. The story has soooo many possibilities and branching story lines inherent in it. I think about how it would have been with voices as well, but I would not ever do it without professional actors to do the voices. Using fans is workable but just usually falls flat. It's like trying to make the characters "move" by simply cutting them out and making the figures go across the screen. It looks so cheesy. Unless I was going for a cheesy or humorous effect I would never do that either. Still, there's something to be said for putting the dialogue in via text. It allows for methods of expression difficult to do with voice. Plus, since this is done using stills, it just fits better overall. As I mentioned above, if I'd had separated layers of artwork, I believe I could have used the text more effectively than I did, playing with placement and timing to a much greater degree. One of the great things about making a video of it is the ability to have a back and forth between characters, difficult in static comics. That way, the artist also doesn't have to put in walls of text or have to draw many more panels, to get in all the dialog he wants.

Wow! Knight that was amazing. Not just the animation, I took a run at doing something like that a year or so ago(it's not posted for a reason) so I know how much work went into that. But the sound is what blew me away. The music choices were fantastic, and the atmospheric stuff even better. The whispering in the temple room and the reoccurring Grandfather clock gongs.
Amazing...

Dave wrote:Bwahaha!

Sing it out, kid! ♪ The dills are alive, with the sound of music! ♪

*smacks you with a pair of mackerel* Pay up!

Dave wrote:Doing it on a PC... probably a two-pipe problem, Watson!

[/quote]*whistles*

I've been looking at pipes lately(as the one in the pic was borrowed), because he is debating on going as Holmes again. He's also asked me if there's any way I can redo the Invernesse in Black Caviar Wool(so it's also a functional Winter coat), and get him a top hat to recreate a Jeremy Brett styled Holmes. He also asked for a Churchwarden Pipe if I did do that. I'm in so much trouble...or at least my CTS-plagued wrists are.

Jabberwonky wrote:Wow! Knight that was amazing. Not just the animation, I took a run at doing something like that a year or so ago(it's not posted for a reason) so I know how much work went into that. But the sound is what blew me away. The music choices were fantastic, and the atmospheric stuff even better. The whispering in the temple room and the reoccurring Grandfather clock gongs. Amazing...

Thank you, it was fun and a great learning experience. It's hard to let it go and do nothing now so I've been thinking about doing a "Blooper Reel" of it. I haven't been able to think up very much yet, just a couple of scenes. The folks here, yourself included, are great at coming up with humorous (and downright hilarious) take-offs and rewrites of the Wapsi comics. So, if anyone has ideas for "Bloopers" using the comics in the Calendar Machine series of episodes presented in the video (as well as putting in other characters and scenes from other episodes), I'd welcome any suggestions. For anyone interested, I'll probably have a test video up by Monday or Tuesday to give an idea of what I'm talking about. I'll be happy to give you a credit for your ideas.

While I'm at it, please understand I have no interest whatsoever in making this video some sort of money making thingy. I'm not promoting it on Vimeo or anywhere else. That's just a place to post the video. I don't care about likes or comments there or anything. I'm just having a great time doing it. It's for the myself and the other fans. If it also helps promote Wapsi Square in some fashion, that's great too.

Wow! KnightDelight's video is a tough act to follow! Very spiffy! I once saw a similar style animation for Tron using HTML5. I'm afraid of the amount of work it must take to do such a thing. That's a tough act to follow but...

Paul once drew a sketch of Monica in a wetsuit for an ice cream cone fishing pinup. I've been tinkering with the idea since! ^_^;