Made these fliers for bands I REALLY, REALLY LOVE. I was stalking Noun's Facebook for tours and eventually saw them post about how they were looking for people to help book them between certain dates. I attacked my friends at BravoArtist and a few months later, I am sitting here way too excited to see them. The flier is based off this image I dug out of Google. One of their songs is about dogs.
I like A Lot Like Birds a lot, and last year I almost did a flier for a show they were set to headline. Things didn't work out last year but fortunately ended up working out this year. There was a quick turnaround for this, so I spent a few hours after work pulling this together.
July '13 I came across a video that I thought was brilliant - Every Metalcore Vocalist. I never thought I'd have one of those moments where I feel more like the target audience. It was sent around to my friends, especially those who I remember spending late teenage hours drinking Rockstar energy and watching videos along the same vein with.
At the time, I was a month away from finishing an animation about a cow hardcore dancing. I was poking fun at the same demographic. I took this as a weird sign from the scene kid gods and gave the guy a shoutout.
Now it's 2015 and Jarrod Alonge's YouTube channel has over 115,000 subscribers. He kept making videos, notably expanding on the "Every ____ Vocalist" series, to the point of creating 7 parody bands/an Indiegogo campaign for an album that shot $5,500 over it's $12,500 goal!
He came to me to illustrate the album art with the idea of "Beating a Dead Horse". Don't let Peta know, but we essentially wanted a photo of him beating up a horse with all his band names tattooed all over it. Here's some of my sketches and an early comp:
After some polishing and revisions, here's a screenshot of what we ended up with:
Couldn't be more stoked to have worked with Jarrod. As a teenager, I religiously watched Warped Tour Pit-Blog videos every summer (where a cool guy or gal basically totes a camera all around every date of Warped Tour and captures tons of little moments of fans/bands/shenanigans, vlog-style). Just a week after the album art was posted, he announced that he was going to be a Warped Tour pit reporter this summer and I couldn't be more happy for the guy. Check out his stuff if you're any bit of an ex-Alternative Press subscriber like me.
So happy to finally get this animation done: Angst Shorts 2. It's the second of what I hope to be a handful of animations that match some silly comics I have been working on (here's this one)(I printed out a bunch for a zine swap - here's a photo from Instagram of that + a ridiculous batch of another thing + a sad strawberry sitting in a backwashed margarita).
After finishing my undergrad and taking some time to reflect on just how much time it took me to make a thesis animation (over a year), something seemed to stand out. So many ideas for animations have never had the chance to get realized. My friends from other majors had a lot of different pieces to show after 4 years, and in comparison, I didn't feel that animation students had a lot of material. The argument usually boils down to the process - the general rule seems to be: "animations take forever!" and "wow, you must have no social life."
When thinking "animation" it might be typical to instantly think Disney features, television shows that owned our childhood attention spans, etc. - pieces of art that have so many hands in them, so many hours, skills, time (and money) thrown into the mix. Animation exists as a pretty weird form of art.
Angst Shorts are just glorified sketchbook ideas/an effort to keep practicing storytelling and animating without the weight of the ideal "short film". I don't really want to spend my whole animation career strictly slaving over a few ideas - I am just trying to have fun. In the summer, I made storyboard thumbnails (this is the second out of three) and scanned those into the computer. I traced the keys and tried to hold back on animating much beyond those poses. Took one night to slop together some backgrounds in Photoshop. Had my friends throw some voices into a microphone. Voila - after spending an afternoon clicking through an audio library - I finished an impromptu soundtrack (some are mega buried/there's definitely a woman saying "please leave a message" at the first close-up of the cat's face)(I also did a lot of extra screamy screeches into the mic for her at the end).
The process took longer than I anticipated. The goal is to get much faster at these - to have more focus on what makes the story clearest in the least amount of time. I really just want to break down the limiting idea I have in my head that animations are always daunting, time-sucking forms of art. The best part of doing these is that when I go to start my more serious short films (I started one as soon as I finished this), the process seems so much less overwhelming and more manageable.
