download Galactical Freestyle.mp3
(right click to download)
i didn’t feel like taking the time to write decent lyrics for this one but the beat (by Tantu) is so good i just couldn’t ignore it… so I just freestyled on it for an hour and then edited the freestyle down to the parts i liked the best. then i spent all the time i saved by not writing a good song on making the video look like a video game. fuck it, i had fun.
i threw this together today mostly with the intention of driving traffic to the halloween video i made last year (which was a much more involved production):
download Old Swamp Ghost.mp3
(right click to download)
i know. halloween is just another silly consumeristic holiday which sells a lot of shit nobody actually needs, but it’s also the only holiday i know about that rewards self expression and monsters. so monsters win out.
…just try to avoid buying all sorts of candy with palm oil in it.
for your convenience, here’s last year’s video:
The Dark Grove.mp3
(right click to download)
This is part animation test and part rap video:
download Katana (Beat by Mike Kalombo – remixed by Historian).mp3
(right click to download)
One of the challenges inherent in animating really big slow moving characters in hand-drawn animation is that in order to make them look like they’re moving slowly, one must either draw a lot of drawings, or hold on each drawing for longer than one frame. If you hold on a drawing for more than one frame, the animation will look choppier than if you draw every frame… But drawing every frame takes a very very long time.
Most of the character in the above video is made up of cut out layers that are moved around and rotated in the computer, but for the perspective change on the bobbing head and neck I needed to draw the rotation of the characters face (well, faces in this case). So, in an attempt to get smooth movement in the slow parts of the walk-cycle without actually having to actually draw all of the in-betweens I drew ‘active holds’ on the key poses, and then deformed the key poses into each other using digital deformation tools. An ‘active hold’ in animation means drawing the same pose several times, so that even when the pose is held, the line continues to jiggle and pulse as a result of being drawn a bunch of times. By deforming active holds in the slow parts of the walk-cycle, I was hoping to achieve the look of individually drawn in-betweens while economizing the actual number of drawings I had to do. It sort of worked in some places, and but looks kind of wonky in other places due in part to the limitations of the deformation tools and due in part to flaws in my drawings. Anyway, it’s just a test, and what I’ve learned from it will effect workflow design for future projects (giant sauropod dinosaurs, of course).
Thanks for watching!
If you like how this looks and moves and you would like to see whole scenes of prehistoric animals animated in this style, then please do the following:
1) Post it everywhere, share it with everyone.
2) Give feedback. Your comments, critiques and ramblings will help me and my collaborators to improve as artists and deliver the best possible content.
3) Check out our Dinosaurs Reanimated production blog and subscribe to the RSS feed.
4) Subscribe to our Dinosaurs Reanimated YouTube Channel
5) Share it some more.
This animation was created by first making traditional hand-drawn 2d animation, and then by digitally animating detailed textures (both hand drawn and digitally painted) in such a way that they match the movements of the hand drawn animation. As far as I know, 2d animation has never been done in quite this way before.
This is my first test animation, and although the techniques and look of the animation will have to be refined with successive animation tests, I am really happy to have come up with something that I think works pretty well, looks neat, and is different than anything I’ve seen before. I am excited to continue to explore the possibilities of combining 2d hand drawn animation with digital tools, and I hope you will stay tuned and give feedback as things evolve.
that’s what this is:
download BATTLE ROAR!!!!!! (Beat by Steven Doman).mp3
(right click to download)
I was hanging out with my friend Steven Doman and he was playing beats that he made in high school. One of them was really bonked out and awesome and for some reason I just started freaking out and yelling things about time travel and shooting blood out of my eyes like horned lizards. So we decided we should probably record something over it, and a few weeks later we recorded the above video and vocals. Since then Steve went in on the beat and evolved it into what you hear in the video, while I drew pictures, animated and composited the images to match the stuff I’m yelling about.
So here’s the deal: I’m fucking bored with all the CG dinosaurs running around on the TV box these days. So I’m teaming up with some dino buddies and we’re making a spec doc that we’re going to try to develop into a TV series. I’ve created a blog where we’ll be putting various production materials and giving/getting feedback. Check it out, read our mission statement, RSS it, and let us know what you think as we put stuff up. We’re open to ideas and we hope you’ll hold us to a high standard of quality and scientific accuracy:
Dinosaurs Reanimated Production Blog
Yeah, yeah I know, CG dinosaurs sometimes ‘look cool’ but very very rarely move well or act like real animals. Furthermore the docs that feature the CG dinos often present speculation as fact, make stupid shit up, and just strait up get stuff wrong. I call it ‘bullshitting’, and I generally don’t like motherfuckers who do it, especially to children.
Turns out, I’m not entirely alone in my weariness of CG and bad paleo docs. Paleontologists galore are also often regularly frustrated and disappointed by the shows they often advise on but have too little say in the creative process to be able to do anything much but blog about it. They work hard to discover rad stuff, and then give their time and energy advising on documentaries who often ignore what they say or even actively misrepresent them. It sucks.
On top of that there’s a diversity of talented animators out there who are skilled in a variety of mediums, who understand behavior, story and the drama of survival, and who could make much more interesting animation than the void-of-substance CG that has risen to ubiquity in recent years. With the advent of digital technology the push has been to digitize as much of the workflow as possible, and aim at an impossible level of ‘photo realism’ instead of figuring out interesting ways to hybridize and streamline beautiful traditional techniques with digital technology to (perhaps even more efficiently) present original art to the public. And that’s the thing – it’s all just ‘art’. It’s never going to look like the real animals because nobody’s ever seen the real animals. And from what I can tell, the only visual goal of ‘photorealistic’ CG is to try and look like something real THAT NOBODY’S EVER SEEN. That’s just fucking dumb. Stop wasting all that time and money.
Ultimately, what compels me most is that there are more certain truths about dinosaurs and other extinct animals that these docs could elaborate on in a gripping way, but that are completely overlooked in favor of that ever elusive “cool factor”. What I’m talking about is the fact that these were real animals, that went through gnarly harrowing shit in order to survive for millions and millions of years. They were parents, hunters, victims of natural tragedy and witnesses to the incredible beauty and vivacity of life. They struggled with so many of the same basic challenges that we do; trying to find food, a mate, a safe place to live, and they dealt with these challenges in amazing brilliant ways, many of which are actually recorded in the fossil record!
And yet when depicting with the Permian Mass Extinction, arguably the greatest and most dramatic tragedy (followed by one of the greatest triumphs) that our planet has ever experienced, Discovery Channel’s recent “Dinosaur Revolution” chose to show two Inostrancevia roaring at each other in a landscape exploding with lava, then running from the lava as big firey exploding lava globs fell down and blew them up.
Really motherfuckers? That’s what you show for the fucking PME? Splashy glowing orange lava and poorly animated roaring Inostrancevia who are somehow oblivious to the burning landscape around them? Not only is that just incredibly unlikely, bizarre animal behavior, but the Siberian Traps were HUGE basalt flows that took thousands of years to flood across the land, and they didn’t make Inostrancevia extinct by bombing them out! Most of the large animals likely got out of the way of that slow burning mess long before it incinerated their neck of the woods. The reason earth nearly died was because there was such an incredibly mega super vast amount of gassy lava that the whole atmosphere got poisoned! Why not illustrate that?! It’s a hugely important thing for people to know about and could be AT LEAST as visually stunning!
Even technical criticism aside, the point remains that the PME wasn’t a ‘cool’ action-packed thing. It fucking sucked. It was a miserable depressing die off that poisoned the planet for a long long time. What was cool happened afterwards, when all the toughened archosaurs and bizarre surviving mammaloids came out of the woodwork, while the oceans detoxified and repaired themselves resulting in new explosion of diversity in the Triassic. That could’ve been illustrated so beautifully! Imagine the transformation they could’ve shown – from a wasted dead landscape and poisoned sea, to the sprouts of new life taking hold, to what’s this?? A slender head on a graceful neck emerges from a bank of ferns and snatches a dragonfly from it’s perch… Ahh i could go on… Deep is my love for lava rocks sprouting bits of moss…
By the way, read Peter Ward’s book ‘Gorgon’ and/or watch his Ted talk here:
And when you’re done, check out our production blog – we need your critical input!
download The Herd From The Lake (Beat by Zambobeatz).mp3
(right click to download)
My friend Steven Doman helped me shoot this. Check out his work, he’s a great musician and sound designer who has a lot of interesting music up on his Soundcloud for free. We recorded the this video live with just the on-camera mic for vocals (my fault), and in the process I learned that my new camera’s mic is pretty useless. Anyway, I hope its enough to tithe you over (and hopefully scavenge some new viewers from this youtube “MC showcase” thing) until I can finish some of the larger projects I’ve got in the works… Also check out Steven’s stuff, its recorded and mixed much better than this.
Finally finished this:
download Zephyr (Beat by Third Eye Focused).mp3
(right click to download)
I’ve been meaning to post this illustration for some time. Seeing Mike Taylor’s collection of illustrations featuring sauropods smashing theropods on SV-POW reminded me.
This illustration was also inspired by a discussion about Shunosaurus on SV-POW, which featured some great skeletal reference. Also, Mike was nice enough to clarify the exact structure of Shunosaurus’ tail club. It is often depicted with varying numbers of stegosaur-like spikes, when in reality it had some nice bony knobs on the dorsal surface, but no distinct evidence of spikes. I think that makes a lot of sense. Stegosaur tails are relatively short and stocky as compared to sauropods’ more whip-like tails. I can envision a stegosaur driving a spike deep into an opponent and then pulling it out, because there’s not a bunch of extra slack in the tail to pull strait before the spike is pulled. I imagine a spiky thagomizer on the end of a more whiplike sauropod tail would get imbedded, but would be difficult to remove, as there appears to have been very little musculature towards the end of sauropod’s tails. A thick knob of bone on the other hand, would handily deal out blunt-force trauma with less likelihood of entangling its owner with the attacker. That was the idea behind this illustration anyway.
The environment was reconstructed after fossils from the middle Jurassic of China. The Ginkgo is Ginkgo yimaensis, but reconstructed after Ginkgo biloba, which were kind enough to survive into the present so I could reference their beautiful gnarly structures and branch arrangement. The meat eater is some kind of middle Jurassic sinraptorid theropod. I’ll refrain from ascribing an exact species because there’s a smattering of incomplete theropod remains from roughly the same stratigraphic and geographic range as Shunosaurus, but there is some uncertainty to as which genus/species are legit and which should be consolidated. They’re all pretty similar murderous-looking mid-sized allosaurs similar to Sinraptor. Ultimately it doesn’t really matter to me what the official literature calls them…
I like them all.
Serious paleo warriors know about prehistoric fish (and that they’re awesome). Either way, I’ve got good news for you. This previously undescribed Lepidotes sp. that I illustrated alongside Cladocyclus pankowskii a few months back…
…has been formally described in the current issue of Paleo Electronica. It now bears the specific name Lepidotes pankowskii (again, after Mark Pankowski who bought and donated the type specimen). Nice.
If anybody else has new species that have never before been illustrated (or named yet) get at me. I’m here for that.
In other prehistoric fish related news, some species of prehistoric fish never went extinct, and can be bought at your local pet store for $5.49. I just got a Polypterus senegalus (aka Senegal Bichir) – cogenerics of which have also been found in African Cretaceous rocks. I have it in a tank with a Xenopus frog (also cretaceous), and it’s been really fun to watch the two of them lurk around and eat earthworms together.
The polypterus uses it’s big front pectorals to sort of hover across the bottom or to weave its way through aquatic vegetation and up the water column to investigate delicious smells. It seems to only use it’s caudal fin for bursts of speed when attacking prey or evading a perceived threat (usually me maintaining the tank). It’s really fascinating to observe a working body plan derived from somewhere near the base of the branch on the tetrapod family tree that would eventually give rise to all terrestrial vertebrates.
I love that there are a few extant species that have remained virtually unchanged for millions of years. I like to think of them as some kind of an ‘entry point’ into imagining the ancient world. I feel like if I can understand these animals, then I can begin to take steps away from them, towards the more mysterious creatures they shared their world with that have left us only fossils.