Aria

It's been aggravatingly-delayed but book two of the Throat graphic novel trilogy is now out. Huzzah!

Granted, the whole story has been self-published for over a year now, but these editions are the ones that actually make it in stores and on Amazon so I've been a little worked-up waiting for things to sort themselves out. Anyway, the log jam has finally cleared and it's available to buy now, so please do grab your sexy selves a copy!

As with book one, this volume comes in both a colour (right) and, for the cautious spenders amongst you, black and white (left) edition, both with extra, exclusive material. In this case it goes into the production of the animated trailer, which I've finally put up to mark the book's release:

Most of the animation for this was done nearly a year ago with some fine folks pitching in, particularly my wonderful friend Luca. It was an interesting way to work with these characters that for so long just existed as still drawings - seeing them move is still a little odd for me. The idea is for it to function as a 'teaser' trailer, with the hope that it intrigues potential buyers.
For absolute clarification, this book isn't a sequel to Throat. It's highly doubtful there'll ever be a sequel as the story was a complete one-off. This is the second part of the three-part, serialised version of Throat (in other words, the middle bit), following on from Throat: Coping Is Coping which came out last year. If you have the original, independently-released version of Throat then you have the whole story already, though by all means if you fancy buying these version too that'd be mighty divine of you. They make great Christmas presents, I hear. In case you were struggling for ideas for people. Just saying...  
Buy Throat: Manageable Unease (colour edition)
Buy Throat: Manageable Unease (black and white edition)

Cover your damn mouth...

More line tests for the “Throat” promo. I’m not sure if calling them ‘pencil tests’ would really apply as the lines will still be penciled in the final animation. In fact to match up with the style of the book, the line quality is actually being coarsened and made scratchier rather than being cleaned-up, so if anything these tests are smoother than how the animation will eventually look when it’s done.

This one was really fun to do, especially the extreme poses:

Once it was all timed-out it made for some pretty interesting in-betweens.

In my head this shot would’ve been one sweeping hand motion, picking up the glass along the way to throw the contents in her face. This is how the panel looks in the book, as you can see there's not much to go on:

In reality to do that in one single move would be a borderline physical impossibility, so I acted out a few ways to go about it and came up with this fairly obvious breakdown:

This last one’s pretty basic, although the motion of the hands pulling up the sheets is a little too mechanical so I’ll probably add in a couple frames to the final animation to give it more of a natural settle.

That’s all for this post, so I’m going to stop writing. That’s how I roll. Though by all means, feel free to watch these all night if you like. Nobody judges here.

Return of the Magical Moving GIFs

It’s that fabulous time again: Line test season! That wonderful stage of an animated project (the animated "Throat" promo in this case) where the awful things I draw obtain the glorious power of movement (and with it, I can only assume, hopes and dreams). I’m a little miffed to note that Sitesled, the site that had hosted all my prior line test GIFs, decided to disappear without a trace taking all my files with it.
Those wonderful, glorious bastards.
While I’m sure they’re backed up somewhere it’s gonna be a pisser locating them, re-uploading them and fixing the embed links in all the prior blog posts. Which doesn’t mean anything as fair as these new ones go, I just like to complain because I’m a big complaining complaineypants.
On with the pixelly-pencilly stuff:

There’s something vaguely eerie about watching these characters trapped in their limbos, doomed to constantly repeat the same handful of seconds over and over until the end of time. By ‘eerie’ I really mean ‘gratifying and immeasurably pleasurable’; I’m so horribly empty inside.

Back to the Box

While “Bullies” is progressing in a more or less entirely digital manner, a thought occurred recently that a potentially effective way to promote “Throat” might be to put together a teaser trailer for it. After contemplating the motion graphics angle briefly, I figure it would be better suited to proper, traditional animation so as to be truer to the overall look and feel of the panel art. Which means it’s time to dust off ol’ Molly the lightbox (who’s served me well as a very effective coat rack since I bought Cindi the Cintiq) and get back to some lovely, ol’-fashioned pencil-on-paper animation. The idea is to pick several excerpts from the book that might translate effectively as brief 2-5 second animated vignettes, edited together in a way that doesn’t reveal much of the story but hopefully percolates the interest of people who haven’t read the book yet. I’m still in the throwing-stuff-against-the-wall-to-see-what-sticks phase but here are some sample layouts:

As mentioned above, “Bullies” has been pretty much a completely Cintiq-centric affair, but in keeping with the old-school theme, here are a few pencil sketches on which some of the layout and background work will be based:

And with that I think I feel the familiar twinge of carpal tunnel coming on. How I missed it so!