Joliv's Canvas

Recharging Batteries

Sammy’s recharging her batteries.

So I’m sure all of you know the issue with Tumblr right now so I’ll spare you the details. Some of you may be looking at the title of this blog and thinking why I am worried since I don’t really do any NSFW stuff. Well, there’s two reasons for that.

I never know what the future holds. I might do some NSFW content in the future, whether it’s a personal project or a commission from someone. Even though they are currently only targeting sexually explicit content, they may go after the more violent end of NSFW in the future (such as my Bendy commission from a year ago). However, the second reason is the most major one.

I follow quite a few artists on Twitter who use Tumblr quite often. Just about all of them have sent out some concerning tweets showing that a lot of their posts that aren’t even NSFW are getting flagged as well (most of them don’t even do NSFW stuff and are still getting posts flagged). So basically no one is safe from this purge, even if you don’t do NSFW stuff, because this new algorithm is just too inconsistent and... well... dumb.

Long story short, in such a short span of time, this site has become a bit too unstable for my tastes, and I might leave all-together, so I decided to make this post for those of you who only follow me here to let you all know where else you can find me (so I don’t just disappear on everyone). I probably won’t leave right away, or if things suddenly get better (which I doubt) I may not leave after all.

I’m more active on Twitter than anywhere else at https://twitter.com/JoliVector. As for blogs, I may be moving to Newgrounds, where you can find me at https://jolivector.newgrounds.com/. Of course, here are other places you can find me:

YouTube (though I’m sure this is where most of you know me from) - https://www.youtube.com/c/JoliVector

Twitch - https://www.twitch.tv/jolivector

DeviantArt - https://www.deviantart.com/jolivector

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/jolivector/

Facebook (I mostly just use this as an archive) - https://www.facebook.com/JoliVector/

JolivWizard

ProtonJon Animated: “Metal Clip Advance”

The best bug tester you never paid for.

So I was going to go back to Dokapon after that Chuggaaconroy animation, but around the time I finished, ProtonJon did a livestream on Metal Slug Advance and Metal Slug 3, which reminded me how much I love that series. Needless to say, I had Metal Slug on the brain for quite a while after that, so I decided to capitalize on my sudden memories with this animation.

As with most of his livestreams, Jon had co-comes in his livestream so naturally, they would be featured in this animation. I quickly realized that I had no idea what either Gex or Camille looked like so I had no idea how to portray them. For Camille, I based her appearance on a piece of stream art made by SmashToons that featured her (I’m assuming that was supposed to be her). For Gex, I had less reference so I gave him a mostly-faceless design. As for Jon, I decided to give his hair a bit of an update… :)

I continued my use of more simplistic backgrounds for this animation and started going for outline-less objects. In addition, I decided to make a bit more use of gradients, specifically black gradients, for smoke and darkness. While I’m on the subject, I decided to fully commit to removing gradients entirely from character eyes. Going back to my previous animations, the use of gradients for eyes looked a bit awkward, so beginning with the Masae animation, I started going for solid colors for eyes.

I also started using the Glow effect a bit more for this animation, although half of it is barely noticeable due to only being on screen for split-seconds.

Probably the most complex thing I did new for this animation is using imported video which I hadn’t done before. Since I couldn’t import with audio, I had to import the video and audio as separate layers and try to sync them together while also trying to sync them to when I needed them to play in the animation.

Chuggaaconroy Animated: “To The Dog Races”

RNG has come to haunt Chugga in more ways than one.

(I guess I just have Zelda on the brain)

There’s not really much to write about this one. The only thing I can say is that I had a bit more focus on frame-by-frame animation, specifically with the dogs. This one helped me develop my ability to see and determine proper frame rates for specific movements, again, particularly with the running dogs. And that’s about it.

Oh, and I just enjoyed how Chugga spent like an hour trying to beat the dog race mini game with the mask of truth, and Masae beat it in her let’s play on the first try just to show what the mini game was.

On a related note, this was the first project where I decided to livestream part of its production (specifically the beginning of its production). I thought about doing it again for the end, but decided against it since I thought streaming the end of the animation would be extremely spoiler heavy. I’m thinking of streaming for future projects, though I am not completely committed to livestreaming on either Twitch or YouTube, though I might stream on them both for different occasions.

Speaking of which, livestream archives will be going up on the channel, but they will only go up a few days after the respective project itself goes live to avoid spoilers.

https://www.twitch.tv/jolivector

Offline Screen...?

MasaeAnela Animated: “Yeti Ski Race”

A race between the derpy chibi and the... yeti... lady... thing.

So while I was watching Tom Fawkes’s livestream archive of Breath of the Wild for my previous animation, the Twilight Princess video by MasaeAnela for this animation showed up in the suggested tab. I guess I just had Zelda on the brain around that time. Anyways, this one was kind of a scheduling nightmare. Summer is always a pretty busy time for me with all of the family trips I take throughout the months. Even so, I managed to squeeze in just enough time in my current trip to finish up the last bit of this project.

This animation and the premise provided by the video it’s based on, gave me a chance to experiment with camera movements and fast-paced movement. As a result, there was a lot of 24 fps movement in this animation, at least more than my previous animations. As I mentioned in a previous project, I prefer to use 8 and 12 fps for more casual and slow movements, while reserving 24 fps for fast-paced movements. This would save time while still looking visually pleasing. Even so, the fast-paced action in this animation required a lot of 24 fps movement. Particularly taxing was the hair movement and snow shredding as the characters slide throughout the race with only a few stops throughout.

In addition, I experimented with camera movement a bit, which I’m still questioning even now that the project is completed. The characters looked a bit stiff staying in one position, even as they tweened into new positions, as they were skiing, so the constant camera movement during these clips gave them a somewhat more dynamic look.

Rei “Sammy” Kenjima

Tom Fawkes Animated | “The Spear Saga”

I know your pain Tom… well, except for the drunk part…

As I mentioned before, I decided to take a break from the Dokapon series. If I’m completely honest, I was beginning to feel a little burnt out with the series so I decided to break away and animate something different. And I ended up here. I remembered watching Tom’s Breath of The Wild livestreams and one of those streams really stood out (as you can tell from the animation, because he was drunk.) That whole stream was just golden, but there were far too many nuggets to put into one animated video, so I decided to focus on a major event in that stream, what he referred to as the “Spear Saga.”

This animation had the most “cutting” and “tossing” I’ve done for a project yet. Typically, when I gather audio files to animate for a project, I usually have around 8-12 and toss out around 3-5. But this time, I ended up with about 25 different audio files and tossed more than half of them. There were just too many moments and most of them could be cut since they were mainly repeats of other files. In addition, many could also be cut since there wouldn’t really be any context lost.

I ended up doing a bit more with the backgrounds than previous animations because of the scenery in Zora’s Domain, mainly that tall wall of bluish rock around it. Just to add more to the nature of the setting, I also added a fog effect to far-off background assets rising from the water in most of the clips.

Probably the hardest thing for me in this entire project was figuring out how to draw Tom’s head and face. I thought Jon’s hair was the hardest thing to portray in cartoon form, but Tom’s face was a giant question mark for me (I seriously considered just drawing him as his “TomFace” for his head and animating that at one point).

Fun little tidbit, when I finished the final scene for this project, iMovie would not open up for some reason… so that was a thing.

Commission: Bendy & The Ink Machine Animation

Commissioned by FGT3500.

So, as I promised in yesterday’s post, here’s my commission that I had been working on throughout March.

This is my first animation commission, and it was commissioned by an old college buddy of mine who now does YouTube.

After greenlighting this project, we agreed that the animation would be purely voiceless and only visual. I was sent a rough description of what he wanted the scenario to be. According to him, the scenario he created is meant to be a symbolic prediction of the upcoming fourth chapter of Bendy and The Ink Machine.

For this animation, I made a heavy use of gradients in an attempt to capture the dark visuals of the game. In addition, I only made use of black and a slightly altered shade of yellow for the entire animation, also to coincide with the game’s aesthetic. You would think this would save a lot of work, but in actuality, it created a bit more work, namely the fact that because there were only two colors, it was easy for things to blend with each other. In certain scenes, I had to give the characters yellow outlines to make them visible when standing with a black background. In some occasions, the outlines had to be redrawn frame by frame if the character moves.

The fact that this project is meant to be a prediction of the upcoming chapter 4 created a bit of pressure in my mind, since the final video would have to be posted before the chapter’s release, otherwise the video would be pointless. It had been several months since the third chapter was released, and as someone who also works on games, I knew that it was only a matter of weeks before chapter 4 is released. When the trailer dropped two weeks ago, the pressure was really on, as at the time I was only a little over halfway done with the whole thing.

It got to the point where I started skipping to the more important scenes in the script and saving the less important scenes for later, that way if we decided to cut a few things out to release the video sooner, the major scenes would be in the video, getting the point across.

Since this was a commission for another channel, it will not be posted on my YouTube channel. In addition, the version above is only the 720p version. However, the final, 1080p version can be viewed on FGT’s channel below, along with some commentary from him afterward. Keep in mind, his channel is a Spanish-speaking channel. For those only interested in the animation, it plays from 0-3:24 of the video. For those who do speak/understand the language, he does talk about the project afterwards.

The Runaway Guys Animated | Dokapon Kingdom: Episode 7 - “The Hunters & The Hunted”

It’s hunting season.

After spending about a month working on a commission for an old college buddy (which I’ll post here soon) I got back to working on personal animations and… holy shit this one went by fast. According to my spreadsheet, this animation only took 11 days to finish, making it the fastest animation I’ve made so far. I don’t know if that means I’m improving or if this animation had less of a workload.

While it is not much, this is the first animation where I actively edited the audio from the original video, moving lines of dialogue around for single scenes, particularly in the Kira scene and the last scene in this video. Essentially, I did this to create lines that fit better with the sequence that I had planned. I am not gonna lie, the sequence I came up with, particularly with the last scene, was mainly inspired by a new track I found while browsing, “Evil March” by Kevin Macleod. (Yeah, I’m doing this again: making an overly long scene just for a new awesome track I found that I fell in love with. I have a soft spot for this type of music. As before, I’m beginning to question if it was the right call.)

Since we’re on the topic, let’s talk about the last scene in this animation… I knew this was what I wanted the introduction of the Darkling to be like: in shadow and revealed by the light of lightning. Here’s the thing about the Darkling. Because there are parts that move, and parts that don’t move, and the parts that move are animated independently of each other, the entire character is divided into 7 layers: one for the head, one for the torso, one for each arm, one for each wing, and one for the eyes. I figured I could just use one layer to cover the Darkling in shadow and mask it over the 7 layers so that the “shading” layer perfectly matches the shape of the complete Darkling… unfortunately, I discovered that while creating masking layers is possible, it is not possible to mask a single layer over more than one layer. That is a feature exclusive to the more advanced editions of Toon Boom Harmony, Advanced and Premium, whereas my edition is Essentials, the most basic of the three editions. So, I had to figure out some other way to get the desired shading effect for covering up the Darkling and lightning him up when the lightning strikes, and I did… it was tedious. I have no idea how to describe what I did in words, so what I’m about to write might end up not making a lick of sense, or might seem all over the place, or both.

The Runaway Guys Animated | Dokapon Kingdom: Episode 6 - “The Shark Bros.”

It’s time for some questionable haircuts.

For this animation, I decided to update the eyes for the characters. This was primarily inspired by the creation of the character, Carly, whose eyes looked a bit higher quality than that of the guys. This is what led to me giving the other characters a slight upgrade for their eyes.

In addition, I’m still experimenting with how to draw backgrounds. I mentioned before that I’m more of a character artist than a background artist (...f**k backgrounds...) so they’re always a challenge in every scene. Continuing the theme from my previous animation, I’ve continued to try and go for more simplified backgrounds. Halfway through the animation, around the third scene, I’ve started using more straight lines for the backgrounds, similar to Samurai Jack, using the Line Tool, and occasionally using the Brush Tool to manually draw backgrounds… exactly how I decide what should use straight lines and what should be manually drawn, I still haven’t figured out.

The Runaway Guys Animated | Dokapon Kingdom: Episode 5 - “Steve’s Journey”

After immortalizing an old friend, Chu- I mean, Steve must continue his journey and overcome the obstacles laid before him in his new form.

With all of my December plans done, I was able to go back to animating, although I still have a few distractions here and there.

This marks the first “skip” I’ve done with The Runaway Guys’ Dokapon let’s play. This video is primarily based on episode 7, skipping 5 and 6 (although there is one bit from episode 5 at the end).

This animation pretty much reminded me how much I hate drawing backgrounds. I spent several days watching other animations to see how other people handled backgrounds. I saw quite a lot of animators on YouTube use very simplified backgrounds, compared to the more complex characters throughout. In the end, I decided to stick with basic shapes for much of the background. In addition, I also decided to ditch giving backgrounds outlines and only gave outlines to the characters and foregrounds. I kind of like how that decision turned out.

I’m baaaaaaaaaaaaack... no, seriously. I’m back from my vacation.

With my studying done (for now), my test done (for now), and my traveling done (for now), I should be able to get back to animating soon, but not before I share this... thing. A few days ago, I tweeted out a sketch of something that I just randomly got the urge to work on. The full story can be read by clicking on the link, but overall, it was just me suddenly wanting to create an avatar with a bit more personality. As I mentioned in the link above, I’m not sure why I wanted to do this in the first place, I just did.

Miiverse Drawing Remake: “Sword Kirby”

Yet another “remake” of an old Miiverse drawing. This one is based on Kirby’s Sword ability.

I remember drawing and posting this while playing Kirby and The Amazing Mirror, which is easily my favorite Kirby game and my favorite metroidvania-style game. With how open that game is, in being able to go to whichever world you want in any order you want, finding and defeating bosses in any order you want, and optional power-ups scattered everywhere, it really was the Breath of the Wild of metroidvanias.

I’m pretty sure it was intentional, but Kirby’s sword ability reminded me of Link from The Legend of Zelda (probably due to the cap), which is probably what prompted me to draw this in the first place. In addition, the explorative nature of the game, and the fact that I posted this with a screenshot of Kirby standing outside a temple, further created that parallel with The Legend of Zelda. Other than that, there wasn’t much else to this drawing, at least as far as inspiration goes. It’s just a fun little thing I thought of doing at the time.

Miiverse Drawing Remake: “Nayru’s Wisdom”

I recently got my Miiverse post history, and it instantly brought back quite a few memories, even though I didn’t really use Miiverse at all after the first couple of years. I had forgotten about half of the random drawings I made there, but I remember this one being my favorite, and it still is.

This one is based on the character Nayru from The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages. I don’t really remember what inspired this drawing... especially that quote next to Nayru that I don’t think she ever actually said. The only thing I remember is that I enjoyed doodling on the Wii U gamepad because it was cleaner than pencil and paper, which always left a mess on my desk (this was before I got an actual tablet to draw with).

Shortly after receiving the email, I got the idea of “remaking” at least a few of them. I decided to start with this one since it’s my favorite Miiverse drawing.

As I said on Twitter... I was such a dork four years ago...