I was in a creative accident!

Post by Renato Vargas. Follow me on Twitter.

I’m fine though, don’t worry. I hope you are doing great too. I just wanted to let you know that Sbass and Monica from The Inkwell Alley were kind enough to let me share some thoughts with their readers on Feature Friday. They are creating an awesome community of artists that want to make their creative dreams come true under the motto Is not who you are, it’s who you can become. A writer and an artist, these two great women have been very busy promoting their relatively new iniciative, that I know will be a great success. Make sure to check out their blog at http://inkwellalley.blogspot.com.

If you are coming from The Inkwell Alley, welcome to I’ll tell you a story…. In this blog I share the things I learn while trying to figure out how to make drawings come to life through 2D animation. Since blogs tend to be a bit difficult to navigate, I thought I’d show you around. You might enjoy these posts:

Creativity development

How I’m fighting the animator’s block

The Importance of Staying Creative

The production process

Building Character is not the Same as Character Development

From A Forgotten Piece Of Paper To Life

Illustration tips and tricks

Creating Stunning Backgrounds with TBS!!!

Animating Effects: The Best Form of Procrastination

Backgrounds: Getting your perspective right with Google Sketchup

Backgrounds: From Google SketchUp to Toon Boom Animate

I hope you enjoy this blog as much as I love writing it, but above all, I really want you to find it useful. Any thoughts? Make sure you let me know in the comments. Have a great day!

To do list

Post by Renato Vargas. Follow me on Twitter.

Hello everyone. I have a few things that I want to share with you (although I won’t just yet). First of all, I want to show you The Deadly Truth. Its release is loooong overdue. I thought that was going to be an easy thing, but once again, having a demanding day job and (yes I know) not enough discipline has pushed that deadline endlessly. The purpose was not perfection; just mastering Toon Boom software. Shame on me. After my work trip to Holland, I came back to a lot of backed up work that just had to get done. Things are more relaxed now, so I’ll get right on it. Along with The Deadly Truth,  I want to share a series of posts regarding the various stages I went through to create it (including all the things that should have been done in another manner). In The Netherlands, I met with fellow animation enthusiast Voynitsky, so in the following days you’ll see a post about our conversation and some of his work. Great guy. In the past days I’ve been getting a lot of traffic directly from gooogle, and the search terms that keep coming up are “toon backgrounds” and “animating water”, so I decided to write detailed tutorial posts on how I go about doing those two things. Even if it’s only from my amateur experience.

My purpose is to make this blog as informative and useful as possible so that animation enthusiasts everywhere can benefit from my learning process.

So, over the next couple of weeks you can expect the following:

1) Completion and release of The Deadly Truth.

2) A series of posts about The Deadly Truth’s production.

3) My conversation with Voynitsky and  some of his work.

4) Tutorials on “toon backgrounds” (indoors and outdoors) and “animating water”.

[Update:] I don’t like posts without visuals. After all , this is a blog about visual storytelling, so I want to show you the animation that got me started with this hobby back in 2006. It was done for a challenge at animationforum.net, run by Greg Kapersky. The challenge was called Dance Off and we were given a one minute piece of audio called Lalla, from the album I Have a Small Penis by M. J. Katamajäki to which we had to draw a character dancing. Go figure. I did it in Flash MX and had a lot of fun doing it, so here it is (opens in a new window):

 

Dance Off by Renato Vargas. (Click on the image)

I want to thank everyone that has kept coming back to this blog. It’s been great having you here. Don’t be shy, leave a comment .

Because stuff happens

Well, Sunday has come and The Deadly Truth is not finished. This may sound like a “my dog ate my homework”  type of excuse, but these past two days were extremely hot where I live (not in the sexy way) and my computer couldn’t take it. Apparently, something overheated (past fry degree) and it won’t start. Now I have to wait until Monday to take it to the repair place and hopefully, it’ll get fixed over the course of the week. I have another computer (an old laptop), but since it doesn’t have an NVIDIA card that’ll satisfy system requirements, it won’t work with Animate. Luckily I always return the licence after every use (due to fear that someone will break in and take the computer), so it’s not locked in there with the broken down machine. Hopefully the hard disk isn’t damaged and my files are still there. If things aren’t fixable, I’ve been toying with the idea of buying a MacBook Pro, ever since I read this post from the one and only Chris Georgenes, who recently “made the switch” from Microsoft to Apple. This might just be the signal I needed. Anyway, this is going to be fixed in the next couple of days, so I’ll move the release date for next Sunday. The idea is to work fast and not worry about little details. Of course, your computer not working isn’t one of those :-S.

The Deadly Truth

Release date: Sunday, June 7th, 2009.

In the meantime, take a look at this character update I posted on Twitter a couple of days ago:

What about a real site?

I have been considering turning this blog into a standalone website, and now that installing (and maintaining) Wordpress has become easier, well I went for it. Guess what domain I bought? Yes, you got that right. For the moment I’m fiddling with the overall look and feel of things so it’s not operational, but Wordpress is up and the theme and theme manager are working. I’ll move this blog there and I’ll add a new feature, that I hope you (and some more peolple outside the current reach of this weblog) will like. I can’t wait to show you some new cool things. Hopefully, you’ll have a nicer visual experience, coupled with the high quality posts you’ve come to expect from “I’ll tell you a story…”. Keep checking for updates here.

In the mean time, take a look at this background I did some time ago, when I started this project. It was done in Flash, and I like it a lot, although the original .fla file was lost in a very very stupid way.

Background done with Adobe Flash.

P.S. A lot of you keep contacting me on my e-mail address. Not that I don’t appreciate your input, but I would rather see it in the comment section of every post, so that everyone can join in on those nice conversations about animation as a hobby. Have a great day!