Here are a few screen grabs of some of the footage I’ve shot for the ‘In Mountains’ video:
And here is a recent collaborative track I did with a group called Weapon Mouth which consists of producer/forger of rhymes Mindscapes and his bloodthirsty lyrical skull stomper brother, Omega Hurtz. My verse is on third:
You can check out more of their music here:
Weaponmouth Youtube
Mindscapes Youtube
Omega Hurtz Youtube
Here’s a video explaining what’s up and why you should buy one of these CDs:
I am no longer offering hand painted copies of Earth Beasts Awaken, but you still want to support the project, you can donate any amount of money by clicking ‘Donate Now’:
You can still download my album Earth Beasts Awaken for free, but for a limited time I offered hand-painted copies of the album on CD to raise money to finish the long overdue music videos that go with the album. Each CD was unique, featuring different monsters and slightly different background colors, but they all looked something like this:
I will be making three videos to visually supplement Earth Beasts Awaken. While each video will have its own storyline, the three of them together will also tell a larger story. I will be making videos for the tracks; “In Mountains”, “Call to Awaken” and “Mowgli”. Here are some brief descriptions and images to give you an idea of my vision for each of these videos.
In Mountains:
Trekking in the high frozen mountains, historian discovers strange symbols painted in fresh blood on snow-covered boulders and trees. As he follows the trail of glyphs, the blood begins to tell a story leading him deeper and deeper into the very heart of the mountain…
This video will be shot in several locations in the mountains east of where I live. In addition to helping to cover transportation costs for me and my crew, your CD purchases and donations will also help to bring the creature painting the blood symbols to life:
Call to Awaken:
Their sleep disturbed, the mountains erupt, and numerous earth beasts burst forth. As the winged beast unfolds his wings for the first time in eons, ancient images scarred into their membranes are illuminated by the setting sun, hinting at the story of it’s violent past…
This video will be shot in two locations in the desert that I have scouted for their stunning and rugged igneous geology. I will be constructing several puppets for this video, and I will be putting together a small crew to help me puppeteer and shoot the sequences on location.
Mowgli:
In a dark forest something is stirring. An arboreal humanoid who’s skin changes colors to match its surroundings descends from the trees and begins a metamorphosis which ultimately leads us on a journey of transformation and renewal through and ancient forest, and an even more ancient concrete jungle…
This video is by far the most ambitious. It will feature two forest locations, live-action creatures, post production visual effects and miniatures. Although somewhat daunting, I am most excited about making this video, and I have practical plans as to how I will achieve each special effect, creature and environment on a small budget. Your CD purchases and donations will make that small budget possible, and the more generous you are, the more quickly these videos will be completed as I will have to cut fewer corners while also being able to afford the time to focus on finishing these projects.
I hope this little bit of production art helps to get you excited about these videos without giving too much away. I really appreciate the support and encouragement thus far, and I hope this project seems worthy of your continued support.
Either way, I am fired up about finally finishing these videos. I hope you’ll help me make that happen.
Thanks,
the historian himself
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!
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.
Anyway, pachycephalosaurs are awesome.
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!
Thanks for reading. If you have the time, check out our production blog – we need your critical input!
Dinosaurs Reanimated Production Blog
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.
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.