hoodyhoo

After many requests I have decided to use YouTube to upload the Knights of the Dinner Table movies. Although I had a long standing interest in animation, this was the first animation I had ever made, using Flash 3.

After the surprise success of the first cartoon, I was surprised to find myself making another, as well as finding friend to voice the other characters for me. I’ve had people write me to say they can’t read the cartoons anymore without hearing our voices for them now.

The shortest of the cartoons, this one required me to draw a new prop and a flame effect. The sound of the fire and shutoff button was just me making strange noises and then effecting and distorting the hell out of it in what was known as CoolEdit (now Adobe Audition).

With this episode I got more adventurous with the end-credit gag. I wrote it myself instead of adapting it from a comic. Erik Bouchard was kind enough to translate and voice it for me. It resulted in a gag many people cite as one of the funniest in the series.

In this one, I re-designed the credits, choosing different fonts and making a crest for the crew that incorporated the dice. The visuals accompanying B.A. description of the action we inspired by Everquest 1. The end gag is a parody of The Blair Witch Project.

A swipe at the gameplay of horror RPGs, the end gag was conceived along with Josh Marquat over a late night IM chat. The music at the end is just me singing and layering my voice multiple times, pretty much improvised on the spot.

The episode I’m proud of the most. This was the start of ‘Series Two’. The story was not one based on one of the comic’s stories, but one I had written myself, reflecting my long admiration for the RPG Paranoia. I am proud because I believe I managed to stay true to all the characters and yet managed to pull off a situation that had not been done before in the comic. I also redid all the artwork to make it smoother and to make it easier for me to add movement to the characters so they weren’t just statues with moving lips and occasional moving heads. This is also the longest of the cartoons, running over 3 minutes and 40 seconds.

The updates on the site have been staggered lately, mostly due to gears changing behind the scenes you don’t really see, so I’d like to fill you in on what’s going on:

• Something I’ve been waiting to do for quite a while is upgrade the ComicPress theme to 2.1, but I wanted to wait until WordPress 2.5 came out so I can do one massive update. The update went quite painlessly. There was on plugin I had to re-install, but there’s quite a few new features in WP 2.5 that allowed me forgo other plugins, like the gallery functions. WP 2.5 rocks, if just for the updated interface of the Dashboard alone. I’m writing this post now using the toggled full-screen mode and it really takes away from a lot of the distraction, allowing me to just write. It feels like I’m just typing away on a word processor. Of course, ComicPress had to announce that a new version is just about to be released..
• Thanks to the very excellent cformsII plugin, a graphic designer like my can now whip up something like a contact page! Should you need to write me about something and don’t want to leave a comment in the posts hoping I’ll get it (even though I personally weigh approval on all comments, which is why you don’t see any spam there) you can use this page now! cformsII absolutely rocks. There’s a small learning curve to it, but not by much if someone like me could wrap my head around it!
• For the longest time, the About Me page has been blank. I haven’t been able to get enough words together to get a bio up so I’ve gone and linked to my other web presences. As of this post, that’s my MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and Pownce pages. Actually, as much as I can’t seem to post regularly to the blog, I have no problem regularly updating on Twitter. I think because the process and scope is smaller, it’s easier to whip something out. I may just have to plug in Twitter Tools or something similar.
• I’ve added the Sociable plugin, so now there’s a bunch of icons at the bottom of each post that lets you share with one of the many sites people use to share such things. There’s a bunch of other sites I didn’t turn on, so if there’s one you want up, and it’s supported, let me know and I’ll turn it on. Hey, you can use my new contact page to do that!
• We have been moving things over to Mac for a while now. We have a couple of Hackintoshes, one of which I use now. TheJoe just acquired a MacBook Pro, and once the new iPhones come out we’ll all have one. Personally, I feel I have to be able to adapt to any situation, Windows, Linux, whatever. But I have to say, I’m happy working with Leopard. It’s really just a well-supported Unix system (BSD, actually). I work with Mac at work (We only have Tiger and CS2, while I have Leopard and CS3, haha) So I’m quite familiar with it. Plus, one of the cooler things, is that a lot of the open software I’ve been working with is still available for Mac, like GIMP, Inkscape, and Blender.
• If you’ve seen it at all, TheJoe and I have been working on a new website called TechnoChubby which we’ll use to post about whatever we think is cool, which usually revolves around tech stuff, but also media and games. We’ve already posted some videos on YouTube. We’re waiting on the release of VBulletin 3.7 which will become the backend of the site (and it’s SOOOO close!) TheJoe liked this cartoon based on a conversation we had, and the characters will become our avatars (now dubbed ‘chubbys’) and as of now, the plan is to migrate the cartoons over to that site, letting this site become my personal blog/Knights of the Dinner Table repository. I already have other ideas for cartoons with the chubbys, and this should help give Note To Self a little more cohesion.
• There’s a personal change in my life, but I’m going to save that for another post.

That’s what’s going on now. Despite the anxiety and confusion that comes along with it, change is good. What are your thoughts? Anything I can improve on or start up? Hey, you can use my new contact page to let me know your thoughts!

Probably the story I had the most requests to animate, the ‘gazebo’ story is a classic story supposedly based on an actual exchange at some gaming session from a long time ago. This version somehow became connected to the Knights very early on. This adaptation shows the relationship of B.A. versus the others early on, although I think it uncharacteristic now that Brian, the storehouse of knowledge he is known as, wouldn’t know what a gazebo was. Enjoy!