Oooh me back.

Remember that light at the end of the tunnel I mentioned?
Only turned out to be a f#cking freight train coming the other way, didnt it?
The wail of the freight train is actually me realising I'll have to render some filler material to pad out some of the scenes.

Currently piecing the movie clips together and adding the soundtrack which is a pretty major job in itself. It's looking good though (I think)

Hardest bit, like I said is getting the pacing right. Fortunately (cunning blag #415) I built in an extra few seconds at the beginning and end of every shot, so Its not too traumatic for me when I need to make a scene last a bit longer. Only slightly.

Its times like this where you really wished you'd done an animatic to get an idea of the flow (next time, next time).

Well, it turned out the freight train metaphor was justified after all.

In an hilarious twist of fate, as I ran for a train last week I was struck down by a crippling pain of biblical proportions. Turned out I had trapped a nerve and was unable to walk for a week or so. Oh how I laughed.

Oh how everyone else laughed at me.

Still, a steady diet of Jeremy Kyle, Trisha and This Morning without Richard & Judy coupled with some mind altering drugs (Free from your loccal GP!) seems to have worked.

Unsurprisingly, since I have been flat on my back (and not in a good way) - no progress for the next few weeks I think.

Cue Music

Music. That's always a sticking point, particularly good, affordable music.

There're plenty of companies out there who do 'buy out' music - that's one upfront fee, then use the music for anything you like with no further payments.

Which is great, if you want your production to sound like Blakes 7. They are nearly all Cheese.

However, I have discovered a small web company Q-Music, who have an extensive back catalogue of extremely good buyout music for a very reasonable fee. Yeah, there's some corporate stuff in there to keep your suits happy, but there is also a lot of really good, useable music in there too. I can't recommend them enough

Okay Ive tried that. The dancing girls looked ridiculous and Im not spending any more time on them. So bullets, dogs and collars it is then.

The light at the end Of the tunnel is there. I can see it. I bloody can...

Have some ideas for the opening credits. I was going to go with a huge Bond-like opener, all silhouetted dancing girls and abstract fiery patterns. We'll see.

Shit, it's the pigs.

And it quite literally is. The police arrive, and they are indeed pig-based in their appearance.

They're technically proving to be quite awkward (actually my understanding of multiple characters in Character Studio is proving awkward) so to keep deadlines realistic, I have reduced their role in the tale, giving the majority of their parts to (applause from the back) the good ole martians. But Im running ahead of myself.

Mars Attacks

Aaah martians, I miss those guys. They're much easier to animate, what with having rollerballs instead of legs.

To liven things up, I made the boss martian green and his lackies white. Unfortunately Ive rendered a few shots and already managed to mix the texture maps up so martians obviously have chameleon like skin qualities. That's a fact. Look it up. Go on.

In the truest aspect of cutting corners, and because they are martian after all, the martians just make weird garbled gibberish sounds and we put subtitles on screen to translate. Aah what the hell, why not? They don't have any great lines to deliver.

Theres a large explosion about halfway thru the animation, where the police arrive. In true lo-budget style (and since I have no explosion footage) I have cunningly blagged #410 using an array of particle generators, excessive camera shake, and sudden overblown volumetrics. The same short 'explosion' shot from 4 different angles. Cheap and cheerful, but looks the part no end.

'Am I a victim of society or…'

Alright, Ive reached a particularly tedious bit. Sick stands up and gives a long rambling speech on crime, society and the right to drink beer in the free world.

Problem is, its just one very, very long dialogue shot - that's a lot of lip synching, even for a blagger like me.

I guess you can't always blag your way out of everything.

To speed up development times, Ive been utilizing cunning blag #406. Where instead of rendering out the whole environment, render it once then map that picture onto a flat plate which you drop behind your characters. Works fine for dialogue shots, just like a cartoon. Or Crewe panto. With Keith Harris and Orville.

I hate that duck.

Guns don't kill peopla… I do.

One of the problems I had with the previous script DRUGS was that once the story was underway, there was no one around for Sick to bounce conversation off. I didn't want to have to render lots of extra characters throughtout, you see.

So, neatly sidestepping the issue, Ive given his gun a character. She's called Bess, she's Sick Puppys gun and they may or may not be lovers. Though how THAT works exactly is up to the viewers imagination.

Now I can have someone with Sick to talk to at all times without having to animate more characters. Ha! Blagged!

In fact I like the little fishy guy so much Im rewriting the script to give him a bigger part (fnar) Ive recorded the voice for the barman - its me of course, squeezed with ee lek tron ik trickery.

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First barman talky bit is done.
(cunning blag#407) My luddite approach to lip-synch goes something like this: You've watched the Muppet show, right. You like Kermit, or Fozzie or Gonzo. Look at them, their mouths have an open state and a close state and that's it. Apart from when Kermit scrunches his gob up on occasion, but you know what I mean. It looks fine as long as the timings right. None of this morph targets for each vowel nonsense.

I have no interest in photorealism, if I did, there wouldn't be an animation of a dog drinking beer and pulling a gun on a shark, would there?

Im more than happy with the my Shark character. So happy in fact Ive decided to re-use the shark model (cunning blag#405b) and use it as the local yocals who try to start a fight with the pup.

Real inbred local types: the big bruiser and the skinny idiot. They're classic archetypes. Yes, they are. See screenshot.

Eye candy

The bar looks a bit drab so Ive decided to add some animated advertising boards on the walls. Ive used Flash to build small animated posters, than output them directly out as AVI's. Then just map the AVI onto a board and Bobs your cross-dressing-aunt. The camera is never going to get THAT close to them, its just eye candy, really.

The bar is finished. Ive added some volumetric lighting to make it look good. (cunning blag#409) The drawback of course is increased rendering times, but at least for the start of the animation I'll use volumetrics a lot. Then cunningly use less and less as the story progresses.

It's a long shot but it just might work…

Okay so the martians gone. He's been replaced by one of my new creations: a pathetic shark with a bad attitude. That's much better. Screenshot available.

I was going to have a martian as the bartender in the bar. No reason why, just that martians featured quite heavily in my previous Sick Puppy short and I missed em.

Having just built a new martian and dropped him into the scene I must say it looks crap. Hmmm….

The good thing about this, of course is I can re-use the bar that I partially constructed for Channel4: Frank Aardvark. Light it differently, make it a touch bigger, add a stairwell… And that's the set finished - cunning blag#405

Sick Puppy: Drugs will be used one day… I have rendered the first minute or so after all. Just the ending needs to change.

Back to the drawing board.

Thought about it for some time, and Ive decided to shelve Sick Puppy:Drugs as the first story animated in favour of Sick Puppy:Beer.

It's a simpler tale, a 'bottle' episode I think they call it - it all takes place in one location, the inside of a rundown bar. Its straightforward, doesn't involve a cast of thousands(not talking ones anyway) and I think is more in the true spirit of what Im trying to achieve. A lone dog wants a cool glass of beer after a long day… but things are never that easy for Sick Puppy.