Meet the Captain! Though it’s slightly premature (and by slightly I mean COMPLETELY) to be introducing him, this is what I’ve been working on for the past few weeks. When we needed a character to animate for class, I figured I’d kill two birds with one stone and use him for my projects! It’s win-win. Except for the birds. Sorry, birds.

I know what you’re wondering. “JKR, how did you come up with such an AWESOME CHARACTER EVEN THOUGH I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT HIM BUT STILL HE’S CLEARLY AWESOME?!?” Or maybe you’re actually wondering if this is for FtM. I would probably wonder about the FtM thing first. To answer that inquiry, no, he is not in fact for FtM. “Then… wait… why did you make him? You aren’t starting ANOTHER series that you’ll neglect, are you? You better not be or so help me…” Um… I, uh… No, I… I…

Maybe.

Not really, though. See this is for a different project I’m working on, that isn’t a series or anything, but a one-time deal. It won’t be replacing Fred or taking over for the never-updated Kingdom Blue. It’s just a single-shot project that I’m enjoying trying out. The good news is that when it’s done, everyone can enjoy it! It will be released publicly, and I’ll be sure to post links here once that happens. WHEN that happens, who knows. Could be years, could be tomorrow. It absolutely could NOT be tomorrow, because tomorrow would be an impossible deadline. But still, sometime. Hopefully. I’m not trying to build hype for this, by the way, I’m just talking about it because it’s what I’m working on. Sharing, is all.

Also on the “What You’re Wondering” list might be “Why are there a dozen different versions of him in a bunch of colors?” Well the answer to THAT is that I have no idea what color direction to take him at the moment, so I tried out a bunch of schemes to see what worked and what didn’t. I don’t think I’ve found quite the right one yet, so I’ll keep experimenting. While we’re on the subject, though, which do YOU like? Leave a message in the comments and let me know, would you? It will help me get an idea what other folks think.

Have a great weekend, everybody!

Well I discovered in the comments of the blog that there is a Twitter account called “Cubetoons” that is apparently me. On Twitter. Which I was never on before, so you can imagine my shock to see how much “I” posted there.

*cough*

Figuring it wasn’t doing any harm, I’m not going to go after it or anything, but I wanted to let folks know I did start a REAL Twitter account that is ACTUALLY me, and you can find it right here.

I’ll update when I can, but I just figured I’d better have an official one so the fake one didn’t get out of hand. Spread the word. You know, to the two other people who might actually care.

I have a rival at my school. I don’t know if he knows he’s my rival, but he is. Because he’s better (and younger) than me. He’s good. Too good. No, not too good, but still, very good. So much so that I am forced to up my game if I am to be the best animator in class. You see, I can BE the best animator in my class because I have five years experience on everyone else. While they’re trying desperately to grasp what “easing in” and “easing out” are, I can cackle in my head and race ahead to craft what are considered brilliant works in a beginner animation course. Bwah ha ha! However my rival takes that ability away, for he can upstage me even without my experience! BAH!

So it’s a good thing. I imagine we all need rivals to push us forward. Look at Ash. I bet if Gary hadn’t been such a popular Pokemon master Ash would still be doing stupid stuff like LETTING HIS BUTTERFREE GO. IDIOT. WHY DID YOU DO THAT? IT WAS YOUR BEST POKEMON!

Sorry, tangent. Where was I?

Ah yes, my rival. So I have hatched a brilliant scheme to show him up on the next project. It’s a character head turn, which needs to include things like anticipation, reaction, and easing. I’m not certain I can do it better than he can, because while I have a very good grasp of movement, he is adept at movement AND has drawing skills to back it up. (My drawing skills are slim to non-existent.) Ah, but what he WON’T expect is my adding humor and extras into my head turn! Things not even on the project list! What was once a simple head turn will become an ENTIRE SCENE! HA HA HA! HOW WILL YOU FIGHT THAT WHICH YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW IS COMING?!?

Also I’m hoping he doesn’t read my blog. But I doubt he does, and by next week it will be TOO LATE. Then I will have crushed him in front of everyone and I will get the kudos I deserve! KUDOS!

Perhaps I’m being a little overly dramatic, but I’m now officially an animator, and it comes with the territory.

KUDOS!!!!!

It seems Fred remembered he made a Facebook account a while ago, because he’s returned to updating it. In fact, he sends out mass emails every time he updates asking if we’ve read it yet. Then he usually sends out a follow up email, asking if we got his last email. My inbox is really getting crowded…

Also he keeps asking me how to get more friends and I keep telling him I don’t know the first thing about Facebook, so if anyone has any tips for him post them in the comments or on his page or something. Maybe he’ll stop bugging me about it. (Unlikely.)

My cold/sickness dealio appears to be fading, so I’m happy about that. I’ve been living on soup and Jello, and I’m looking forward to getting back to real, solid food again. Maybe pizza tomorrow. Mmm… Pizza…

I know a lot of people think I get sick constantly, but this time was not my fault! Yes, my defenses were low because of all the stress that’s been going on, but I sat across from a kid in my animation class who clearly should not have come to school. He did nothing but sneeze, hack, and sniffle the entire time. “Allergies” he said. Sure, man. Sure. That’s why I spent all weekend in bed feeling like a sack of wet, drugged kitty cats. Clearly I’m not yet recovered, because that was a pretty bad analogy right there. Kitty cats?

Anyway, I’m taking it easy today as I continue to try and feel better. I really hate lounging around doing nothing, but it’s what my body needs, so it’s what I’m trying to force myself to do. It doesn’t help that there’s some sort of major construction project going on nearby (not sure where) which the noise of is preventing me from sleeping.

Many many moons ago, I talked about a book I was writing. I doubt anyone remembers it (hence the link to the post to jog memories). I happened to find a copy I had printed out and put in a binder while packing boxes, so I left it on my desk to revisit a bit. Wow. I had forgotten that it was SO BAD.

SO BAD.

I’m ashamed that the words on the pages were even written by me. It’s absolute drivel, and some sort of insane cross between poetry and actual storytelling. What was I THINKING? The writing drawls on like I visited the thesaurus every two sentences just to make things more complicated. And truthfully, I DID do that a lot! Awful, awful stuff.

But the bones. I see good bones in there. I still love the story, and I think the characters, with a little more polish, could be exciting to follow. It’s just the first half is soooooooo slow that no one in their right mind (including me who WROTE THE DARN THING) would ever, ever want to read it. The second half, now that’s something worth reading. It’s fast paced and interesting, and the sentences don’t contain so much fluff that it’s like you’re wading through a pool of wet, drugged kitty cats! (Whoops, there’s the sickness again…)

So, armed with a few highlighters of many colors, I set out to try and fix the book. I’m only through the first three chapters, but it’s something. It’s rather amusing (to me, anyway): I have a purple marker for things that are important plot/character points, a yellow marker for passages I just like personally, and a red line for all the things that desperately need reworked. So far (three chapters in) there are about four yellow marks, a ton of purple highlights, and nearly every single line is red. Almost every single one. I had to stop myself from scribbling in the margins “What were you thinking, you idiot?!” I’m trying to give myself constructive criticism to work with, but it’s just so terrible that the entire thing needs re-written. Which I suppose makes sense because that part WAS done, what, seven years ago? I’ve come a long way since then.

My favorite revision is a paragraph I marked in red and in the margin wrote “NONSENSE” in bold letters. Because that’s what it was. It was utter nonsense. I literally don’t know what I was thinking when I wrote it.

My hope is that one day I will fix the book, publish it, and people will like it so much that I can auction this rough copy off to charity. Or at the very least it will be a testament to “Why you should always, always revise your work.”

The good news is that since the last blog entry I wrote about it, I’ve discovered HOW one goes about editing. Before I had no idea what to do. Now I think I’m on the right track. Ideas have been forming on what to do to make the first half of the book suck a whole lot less. Vague ideas, right now, but I’ll take what I can get. Here’s hoping!

We recently held a fund raiser to help with the Gulf Coast oil spill cleanup. Have I mentioned this? I feel like I have. Eh, it’s several clicks to find out if I already spoke of this, and I don’t feel like doing that because it sounds like work, so instead I will continue as if you have all never heard of this topic before.

I came up with a rather clever poster involving a sad sea turtle. You can see said poster here. Sadly, it was vetoed by the other members of the club holding the fundraiser, and so a different poster was made. I thought mine was amusing and emotionally enticing simultaneously. But alas, I am not bitter.

*cough*

Anyway, here is the rough version of the turtle.

For the full poster, all prettied up and inked in Illustrator, you can just click this link you’re reading right now!

Well, things have been crazy and rough and weird, but the world keeps on turning and I continue to animate. Actually, animating frame by frame by hand (with these crazy “pencil” things they must have recently invented to someday replace computers and Flash) has been very therapeutic for me. When I’m sitting at a light table doing hundreds of drawings, my brain seems to be able to relax and be calm for a bit. It’s rather nice.

I thought I’d share what I spent the last few days on. It’s short, so don’t blink! For class, we had to do a bouncing ball test (kind of the “Hello World” test all programmers go through, but for animation). The ball was to bounce twice, the first time not morphing and the second time using squash and stretch. Then we had to do another “creative” version, where something unique happened when the ball bounced the second time. As I love animating, I did THREE creative versions. And yet mine was still not the best in the class. That honor belongs to a guy who has studied Disney his whole life and is absolutely amazing. Next time I’m going to have to work harder!

You may note this animation is up at YouTube, and not FtM itself. That’s because it’s an AVI file, instead of a swf. One day I’ll figure out how to make SWFs into AVIs without horrible things happening to the audio or loss of movie clips, and then I’ll put more Fred stuff up on Youtube. For now, here’s what I’ve got.

Click here to see the bouncing ball animation that took me HOURS AND HOURS to do.

(Take special notice of the 4th Take. That water effect you can barely see took me so, so long.)

I received the news that my dad died. My uncle told me on Saturday that he wasn’t in good shape, and I had planned to go visit him. I missed him by a few hours. It’s hit me a lot harder than I ever expected.

My dad never took care of himself the way he should have, so I feel like I’ve been preparing for this for fifteen years. It didn’t make any difference though. All the thought I put into it and preparation I did meant very little when it actually happened. I’ve been in pretty bad shape for the last two days, and I didn’t expect it quite like that.

It was cancer that technically finished him, but in all honesty it was smoking and lack of being healthy that was the real reason. I’ve learned more from my father than most people I’ve met in my life, but in different ways than a lot of people. I learned so much of what not to do. Not just what not to do. Other things, too, like how to bowl and garden and fish, but so many shining examples of things to avoid. Smoking. Alcohol. Being stubborn. He directly made me who I am today by making some huge mistakes so I never had to. And I’ll be grateful for that for the rest of my life. I wanted to tell him that stuff, but I didn’t get the chance to. He knew I loved him, though, so I’m happy about that.

I hope through me he can be an example to others, too. Take care of yourselves. Toss out the bad habits now so that later the people you love can spend that much more time with you. If you don’t want to do it for yourself, do it for them. But you should want to do it for yourself. You’re an important person who is important to other people, even if you sometimes don’t think that way. He often thought less of himself because of the mistakes he made, but every day is a new chance to make new choices. Every minute, you can decide to change. It’s hard, but you can do it if you try even harder.

Growing up, I always thought my dad was really strong. He seemed to be able to lift anything and nothing was heavy to him. I felt like I’d never be as strong as he was. By the end, he was very weak, from being sick. And I don’t know how much it was my perception of strength it was when I was young, but it’s inspired me to be stronger. I want to be better in that regard. I’m going to start trying to build my own strength.

The reason I’m JKR and not a “real” name is because of him. He insisted I take the family name that he inherited from his father. I am Joseph the Third. Yet because there were already two, people decided to call me JKR instead. It was easier than keeping track of which Joseph you were talking about. So despite the name on my birth certificate, I’ve not been called that a day in my life. It truly has shaped who I am. Going by initials your entire life changes you, because it’s different. It altered everything about my childhood. One seemingly simple choice, a huge, HUGE change in the future. What my life would have been like if my mother had won and called me Michael, I’ll never know.

It always amazed me how many people my dad knew. I never really understood how, but it seemed like walking down the street everyone who passed him knew who he was and said hello. For all the stubbornness and negativity I sometimes dwelt on about him, he made connections with people very easily. He was always kind when it mattered most.

My dad always talked about God, even though sometimes I think he ran away from Him and didn’t listen to what He had to say. I believe he’s with God now, so I don’t cry for him, but for me who has to go many years without seeing him again. I think that when I do see him again, he’ll be strong again. He’ll be the best of all those times in his life that never seemed to sync up when I was around, but made him who he was. And in the meantime, I’ll take every lesson he gave me and try to use them to their fullest. I’ll take this experience and try to make myself better because of it. And I hope that would have made him happy.

I won’t go into details right now, but the next week or two are going to probably be pretty rough. More so than usual. I’m going to do my best to keep upbeat while a lot of things attempt to drag me down, but it’s going to be a difficult collection of days ahead, I think. Really, really difficult.

More as it develops, I suppose.

Well after my sweet old tennis racket went and broke in half (randomly) I resorted to using a Wilson N5 that we normally have for guests to use. Try as I might, I couldn’t adapt to its style of play. Nothing worked, and I’d miss normal shots again and again. Finally, I gave up and decided to get a new racket. I play tennis much too often to suffer through using something that is horribly uncomfortable to me. Plus I nearly sprained my wrist using the N5 since it’s much heavier than rackets I’m used to.

Today I picked up a shiny new Wilson K-fierce FX from my local tennis shop. I’m excited, because of all the rackets I demoed this one just felt right. I’m anxious to get to the court and try it out, considering for the past week I’ve been using Q’s racket instead, and it is also very unsuited to my style of playing. (It was still better than that blasted N5, though.)

And of course, it is now raining. Sunny all day, picked up my racket, now pouring rain.

Of course.