Who doesn't love a good parody?

If you love games like Animal Crossing, as well as online cartoons, then look no further!  A few days ago, one of my personal favorite online animators, Max Gilardi, aka "Hotdiggetydemon," posted his new cartoon, titled as "Isabelle ruins everything."  It parodies the popular Nintendo 3DS game, "Animal Crossing: New Leaf," by showing what would happen if the player's second in command, Isabelle, takes charge over the town.  The hilarious dialogue between the mayor and Isabelle entertains the viewers by basically explaining why a Marxist government wouldn't work in today's world.  I found it to be rather smart, as well as pretty adorable.

Gilardi has been known in the past to be rather controversial in his subject matter, and many of his cartoons involve explicit material, such as violence, swearing, and sex.  This animation, however, is oddly innocent compared to many of his other past creations.  Other than a few moments of light police brutality, the cartoon overall felt very refreshing to watch compared to many other popular online animations out today.  It was mostly dialogue that consisted of little swearing, and a more informative commentary.  The animation is also superb, and the little quirks, such as the way their mouths moved, made me fall in love with this.  If I ever had the opportunity to work with an animator like this, then I would do it in a heartbeat.

Taking inspiration from video games

I've been working on my title sequence project a little bit everyday and so far I've found there are a few extracurricular sources that have really helped me in working out the finer aesthetic details. As I mentioned last week I'm going to be doing a cut out title sequence to the critically acclaimed animated miniseries "Over the Garden Wall". The greatest challenge I've faced so far, beside the laborious never ending tedium that is fiddling with the after effects interface, is combining my onscreen elements in a way that looks and feels like the real show.

In researching this I turned to one of my favorite video games of all time: Paper Mario 2:

Now if you're like me then the very mention of this game is enough to fill you to the brim with excitement and nostalgia. This game stands alone in it's excellence because it masterfully combines fun gameplay with a timeless art style and wraps the whole thing up in a unforgettable sound track. While there are so many things I love about this game, on my most recent play through I tried to focus more on it's paper aesthetics in hopes that I might me able to glean so insight for my own project.

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Among many other elements I noticed that it was the perspective of the world that really brought it off of the page. Any time you move the background moves with you in a sort of layered paralax that really draws you in. Also the way that many of  these set pieces are shaded really adds to the illusion. Overall I'm really exited to keep working on this project and if any of you have any game or tutorial recommendations please don't hesitate to drop me a line!  

Evolution of Link

Recently I started playing the Legend of Zelda: Majoras Mask and started thinking about how the game has evolved throughout the years and how Link in particular has become more human and lifelike with every different iteration. If you start looking at the series from his first appearance as an 8-bit character you can see his face and legs but that is about it. As he grew into the N64 and graphics got better he started to take full form. In the Ocarina of Time and Majoras Mask you really get a sense of who Link is and what he is all about.

This shows Link as he was during the N64 days. You can see that he is very blocky and not entirely fleshed out. As the console generation changed nintendo went into another direction and made him more cartoony which did not fully suit Link, but worked for the game. But as Nintendo was moving from Gamecube to Wii they released a Zelda game that really showed Link to his full potential. The game showed Link as a full person and brought him to life showing his hair and a very detailed look at what Link should look like.

As the games keep evolving and graphics continue to improve Link will continue to look more and more human. We can only assume that a few years down the road and Link will look just like he is there in the room with us as a normal human being.

Majora's Mask

As many of you probably know, I'm a massive fan of Nintendo's Legend of Zelda series. This past Friday, Nintendo released a remastered version of the game for its mobile 3DS platform 15 years after the original was released. I've been playing it pretty much non-stop all week and while I've been going through it I was really interested in how, 15 years ago, the base game was created. For the time, this was a really complex game, not to mention having only been made start-to-finish in a year.

Majora's Mask was Nintendo's second game using 3D graphics and they did use a lot of the character models from Ocarina of Time in order to meet their one year deadline. The remaster has added a host of new features and they're just as impressive as the original game.

When people talk about 3D Graphics and Animation, and the evolution of those, video games are frequently overlooked. I definitely recommend at taking a look at the original game if you haven't before, and if you have--the 3DS version is a new improvement to an old classic.

A Look at the New Super Smash Bros

Hey everybody!

It’s me again. This week, I won’t be talking about a show, but this time rather, a video game. I’m pretty sure everybody who grew up with a Nintendo 64 will know what I’m talking about when I mention the new Super Smash Bros game. This is a game that I grew up with and my childhood, and back when this game was new, the graphics weren’t very sophisticated. Now with this fourth sequel, the scenery looks like something out of a storybook, and the characters look even more real; You can see Charizard’s arm flexing as it prepares to attack, you can see the stitching on Mario’s overalls as he runs, and you can see the newcomer, which is the new Pokemon, Greninja (who is awesome and is the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle that I always wanted) move it’s body like an acrobat and so fluidly. The camera angles makes the action seem so much more intense and almost 15 years ago, graphics like these were a complete pipe dream (pun sort of intended because Mario used to be a plumber). The graphics for this entire commercial is absolutely incredible and this is definitely something I would love to do for a living. If you’re a video game kind of person, it would be a sin for you to not give this game a look.

Twitch Plays Pokemon

     What do you get when you combine random people from the internet and a 90's video game about little fighting monsters? Well you get Twitch Plays Pokemon. But first what is twitch and maybe even what is Pokemon?
     Twitch/Twitch.tv is a site that streams live video that focuses mostly on e-sports (organized computer game competitions between professional computer gamers) and general video gaming. The website was created in 2011 from Justin.tv. Justin.tv was a site that offered different content, but it's most popular was gaming which inspired the spin-off site twtich.tv. Twitch gets 35 million unique visitors a month where the adverage viewer watches about an hour and a half a day.
     Pokemon is a role-playing-game made for the Nintendo GameBoy that was created by Satoshi Tajiri and was released in the United States in 1998. The game focuses on a world that is inhabited by creatures known as Pokemon. These animals for the most part resemble animals and objects in the real world. The goal of the game is to capture, raise, and battle with other trainers.
     The Pokemon franchises was and still is extremely popular with kids and people that grew up with the games. Now with the addition of the internet things are getting strange. It wasn't unheard of for people to stream themselves playing Pokemon on Twtich.tv, but before it was simply just watching others play or battle. Twtich plays Pokemon now puts the controls into the hands of the viewer and expects them to be able to work together to beat the game.
     The idea is pretty simple: You enter the control you want to see happen in game in the twitch chat box and after some delay to process the request the action will take place in the game. It sounds simple enough, but this series has become extremely popular now. The number of people currently watching as this blog post is being typed at 6:40(EST) on a Friday night their are over 75,000 people watching and imputing commands and there has been over 21 million total unique views on the stream. This makes it extremely complex to complete even the simplest tasks in the game.
     Do to the interesting actions that the character is forced to make the internet has created a story and two rival religions. The random action also cause a lot of tragedy and strangeness. Multiple Pokemon that viewers grew attached to were released into the wild and causing the more popular religion of "The Helix Fossil" to blame the the religion of "The Dome Fossil".
     Among the the chaos and confusion there is an option for order. One of the commands that can be enterd into the twitch chat is "Anarchy" or "Democracy". Anarchy is the preferred method of play in which players post their command and eventually it will be entered into the game. If Democracy wins the tug-of-war style voting then for 20 seconds viewers will input their desired command and the highest voted one wins. By most viewers this is considered to be the easy way out and not as much fun.

     The game so far has been going on for almost 9 days now and the thousands of players are less than half way done. We will have to wait to see if support for this very strange idea will run out before the players can finish the game or if this will result in some new internet fad in which one game is played by thousands at the same time.

                                                             A 90minute Timelapse of Play 
                                   

Nintendo Controller Animation

This is a nice little animation I'm a real fan of because of its simplicity and cleverness with fairly simple materials. It is an animation following the evolution of consoles on Nintendo systems. The killer effect here is that all of the buttons never go away, but are modified in each transition so it appears that one controller flows seamlessly into the next. Its an effect I've seen a bunch of times before, and I assume its done with just a lot of work with keyframes. If you look closely frame by frame you see that the elements actually turn into little droplets as they change places and color. This lets the animation have its "flowing" feel that it does.

I also really like the transition effect for the body of the controller itself, because each time the animation has the body turn Z 90 degrees so the controller becomes essentially not there, and then when it passes 90 degrees it becomes the next controller. A similar transition was used on the last one, where the controller becomes a single rotating line, and then that line expands out to become the next one. Overall a really nice example of simple and elegant design.