CUPdate 32: Sculpting, Animation, and Music

So this time around I decided to do a variety of creative projects. These were mostly on Sundays, which is the day I like to dedicate to personal project creation.

I started out by trying out 3D sculpting in Blender. I haven't done character sculpting in years so this was just a quick test to re-learn how it all works, but I'd say it's pretty close to having functionality that ZBrush has and a really good free alternative that I can use now that I don't have access to ZBrush anymore. This was just a fun little Sunday project to test and see what I could do with it, and I learned some new things! This is my character Kali.

Then I decided to check out what the 2D animation was like in Blender. It still is a bit different from what I'm used to with Adobe Animate, but I was able to make a short animation in it. Just a quick transformation animation of Zandra for fun!

And for fun I decided to play around with BeepBox. I saw a video where someone recommended this site for making game music and I remembered trying it out once before. So I was playing around and made this short little loop. I also forgot I had a SoundCloud so I decided to make it be my first post on there.

I also made a quick loop in Bosca Ceoil. I was mostly just trying out some software and then found some old ones that I made and uploaded those as well.

I continued the Return to Mr Marcus World Nay Event where I did draw-overs of some game screenshots, so that was fun! The first one is Mikey and Gojo in How to Say Goodbye, and the second one is Arianna in Melatonin. I just drew the characters/drew over existing characters and added text, I didn't draw the other background and official character elements.

And then today ends September, so I finished my digital sketchbook page. I mostly just ended up drawing these on Sundays throughout the month, since I haven't had as much time dedicated to working on projects at my computer. But I managed to sketch a few more this week.

I also finished rewriting the SN World Festival Eventure that I started over a month ago. There wasn't even that much left, so I could've done it sooner. But I'm glad I finished that up!

So overall not a ton for this post, it was kind of just a variety of different small projects. But that's mainly because a lot has been going on in my life. Some health-related things, some traveling, and just overall a lot of things contributing to me being more tired, which leaves me with less energy to actually dedicate to bigger projects more consistently.

Hopefully I can be back to normal sometime in the near future. But the next CUPdate isn't for about a month, so we'll see what happens between now and then.

Exit 84: CCAD's 24-Hour Animation Contest

In March, I participated in the CCAD 24-Hour Animation contest, alongside 3 of my other alumni friends, Jinny Hinkle, Hillary Hastings, and Laura Mansfield. This year they let alumni participate, so we were excited to have the opportunity to participate, since it had been something CCAD started doing after we graduated.

Before I take you through the process behind our short film, I'll post the extended version (with additional credits and a custom title screen) that we created here:

Now I'm going to go over our process. The kickoff video in Discord started at 6:30 PM on Friday March 19th where we got the prompt, which was this video. And from there, we all hopped into a Discord voice chat where we brainstormed ideas. Our first idea was about someone watching movies on their TV in their living room while all of their food came to life. But then we came up with the idea where there's this afterlife that looks like a drive-in theater, where whichever food you eat, it makes you remember a different memory.

Once we had that idea, we started to draw concepts of the main character. Hillary drew our storyboard thumbnails and I timed them out into an animatic. Then Jinny started to create the color scripts while Laura drew more character concepts.

Here's how our storyboards, color scripts, and final animation compare:

We finished our edit of the color scripts into an animatic about 6 hours in, so we were ready to start animating and working on backgrounds! We figured out some final looks and color tests, so I made these color tests based on Jinny's color scripts:

Hillary and Laura went to bed at some point while Jinny continued to work on backgrounds and I worked on the sound design for our film. I made a shot list in Google Sheets for us to keep track of the progress of each of our shots.

In the morning around 7-9 AM, Hillary and Laura came back online to help out with backgrounds, while Jinny finished up the character rig that she created in Photoshop. From there, all of us animated various scenes and basically just kept revising as we went.

Around noon, we finished all of the animations and I put together a final edit while everyone went to grab some lunch. We wrote notes and make some final edits to adjust some of the timing and make final changes. Around 3 PM, we finished entirely and exported the final video and watched it a few times together as a group. And by 4 PM, I submitted the final short film for judging. Jinny and I ordered Noodles & Company, then passed out immediately after.

Here's an image I put together of our OCs before we worked on the project:

So overall, we had a lot of fun and were really happy with how it came out! For me, this felt more intense than Global Game Jams because animating is a lot of work, and also we had a lot less time to work with. But I would do it again! We all felt super motivated to work on our own projects after this, so it was a huge booster for us.

I also learned a lot while working on this. I hadn't done a lot of sound design edits on projects before, so to spend hours focusing on that, I had a lot of fun. And overall this was probably the largest Premiere file I'd ever created, with tons of sequences nested inside of each other. My main job on the project was editing, since we were constantly updating the film and needed me to do that almost full-time. I did get to draw some concepts and animate a scene though, which was fun!

And then afterwards, we put together a documentary where we talk about our process and the whole event!

So anyway, thanks for reading this post and watching our short film!

Check out Jinny's blog post here!

The Revenge of Gert

I decided to make this short video on a Sunday afternoon. One of my first RPG Maker 2003 games was about a bad guy named Gert, so I randomly decided to bring that name back for this short "movie trailer" that I came up with. The quotes are from various video game screenshots I took.

The Revenge of Gert from Michelle Rakar.

And here's a gif of the beginning:

Sprite Animation Edits

I coded a website with some custom-created sprite edits. I found a bunch of video game sprites and edited them to look like my characters.

Piko using a Piccolo sprite from Dragon Ball Z: Buu's Fury

Scott using a Neku sprite from The World Ends With You

Gair using an NPC sprite from Final Fantasy VI

Grenna using a mix of the imp and Magus sprites from Chrono Trigger

RoaR using a zombie sprite from Zombies Ate My Neighbors

Spicco using a Toejam sprite from Toejam and Earl

Mikey using a Magikoopa sprite from Mario RPG

Improvement Movement: Gif Turnaround

Barely finished April's Improvement Movement prompt in time! This one was probably the most difficult so far since it involved a lot of drawings and keeping a character on model. I chose Zandra since she's easy to draw!

So here's the final gif!

And then this is a process gif to show a bit of the process. I ended up just erasing lines on the original sketch layer to clean it up so I don't have quite the whole process documented, but still fun to look at!

Chozu's Like 30

I made this for my brother's 30th birthday, which was a few weeks ago.

We've both been playing VA11 HALL-A a lot recently, so I recreated some of the scenes from the Shard of the Orient Eventure in the style of VA11 HALL-A.

Chozu's Like 30 from Michelle Rakar on Vimeo.

Here's a gif of Moz in full quality.

And here's a still of Rosie.

Pubby & Lonny Reunited Eventure [Interactive Story!]

Every year for Christmas, I make a small project related to The Nays as a present for my brother. This year I decided to do something a little different than the usual animation and made a website that visually tells the story of one of the Eventures that we wrote.

I planned to make it a lot more interactive than it is, but I ran out of time and ended up making a bunch of illustrations and a few animations. Some images are even still in a very rough storyboard state, but I plan to make this a working project where I can continually update it as I draw more content relating to this Eventure. I want to create more of these for the different Eventures we've written because I feel that it's one of the best ways to tell the story.

I'm still unsure if Wix is the way to go, but I do like having a way to interact with the elements. I even would love to have mini-games involved if possible. This is kind of an on-going idea I've had and I think these are just the first steps towards a much bigger project.

Check out the website here!

And here are a few of my favorite drawings from this project:

Gair Vs. Veetoff Dream

One night the other week, I had a dream that Gair and Veetoff flew into each other like the beginning of the fights in DBFighterZ, so I made this illustration based on it! I decided to spend a bit more time on this one to make up for missing a Concept Sunday to participate in the Global Game Jam. I'm going to count it as a Concept Sunday drawing even though it wasn't on a Sunday.

Here's the final drawing!

Since it was an action scene, I decided to animated it a bit as well.

Here's a gif of the process.

And the process explained:

It started with the basic sketch.

Then I cleaned up the lines.

I decided the action lines were a bit too distracting, so I took them out.

I added the basic colors.

Then I created a background to indicate the impact.

I rendered in the shadows.

Then I added some color to the lines.

I blurred out the background to make it feel like it was in motion more. I also added some blur on the characters.

I adjusted the blurs so that their faces and hands were in focus.

I added in the action lines, but this time I made them white, blurred, and transparent, so that they don't take away from the illustration. I also moved Gair's position back a bit.

And for the final, I overlayed some darks and lights!

Bobolo River Eventure [Stop Motion Animation]

This year for Christmas, I worked on a very ambitious stop motion animation for my brother. I actually started this back in October, when I planned scenes, created props, and recorded the video. I ended up finishing the project in whole about a week before Christmas, so it was nice to take a break from looking at it constantly before watching it on the premiere date.

Since this video is GIANT, I don't want to upload it multiple places.

Please check out the video here though!
(the video unfortunately couldn't be uploaded at full quality because the file size was too large, as well)

In whole, the project took me 94 hours and 40 minutes to complete. And it's 38 minutes and 54 seconds long in total. This is definitely the longest video I have ever exported out of Premiere, which is why it took about a day to actually export. Also I didn't even export as the highest quality, because that probably would've taken another full day in addition.

The opening was one of my favorite parts because it involved a lot more drawing rather than pure video editing. I tried to make it look like an actual TV show opening.

I initially wrote this script in September 2016. This Eventure felt very contained and like a complete story on its own, so I thought it would work best for one video that I could share even with people who aren't familiar with the whole story.

This project has a lot of silly things like my voice acting and weird action figures to represent them, but it was very reminiscent of where The Nays actually started. It started out with us playing with action figures to create a story. We pretended our original characters were these action figures and we would play with them in various places of our house.

And now I want to share a few individual still images from the full video to showcase some of the best parts. Please excuse some parts of my house that can be seen in the background, I tried to cut most areas that weren't props out, but some scenes it just couldn't be avoided.