School is FINALLY slowing down. This week is my last week until a two week break. Thankfully I just finished some major projects so I should be able to work a lot harder on some flash in the near future.

LFD2

Lip syncing is going well. My goal is to finish that in the next few days so I can get back to sketching out/animating the fight scene, which is the majority of the movie.

Part 18

I took another part in the "Prayer" by Disturbed Collab. The parts I wanted were already taken and I did not feel like competing for a part. However I am excited to animate this part. The lyrics were able to provoke a pretty good image in my head, so that's what I'm animating. I already have it sketched out and have pic to show everyone to prove that I'm not dead.

Other News

A quick, though probably useless plug considering his movie is on the front page. ColdReaver just released his new movie a few days ago. Go check it out. I highly recommend it.

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/
473517

Now for a pic of Part 18

School has stolen my life. When I get a break from homework or studying I have to use it to work on the musical(and tech week is this week), or I sleep...because I have lost a lot of that. So while flash ideas have been bouncing around my head for weeks I have no time to work on them.
But when I finally get the chance, you will see a lot of good shit from me. I have many ideas for new movies, new shorts, and new styles to work in. I probably have enough content stored inside my head to be productive for months, maybe years, but it's useless until I get time to work.

Once this musical is over Im going to try to get busy again without staying up late. I really hope I can get something done, because I really hate these types of newsposts.

Though a big shoutout to YungJazz for leaving his mark on Newgrounds for his Necropolis series. Lets all wish him the best so he can get it done. I can't wait for all his new movies.

Now I do have some new content to post here. A poem for the love of my life, Amia Davis, known here as islandchick (get some content honey).

I usually hate poetry. I hated learning about it in school, analyzing shit that I swear the teachers were making up. There have been a few gems that I have liked, but for the most part I dislike poetry.

Funny that I would date a woman who not only loves poetry, but kicks ass at writing it. I've read a few of her poems when she lets me, and she knows how to write. Im not saying that just to be nice either, or because Im the boyfriend, I mean it. She writes beautifully and her poems are full of emotion. I could see a teacher teaching her poems in the classroom someday and actually finding RELEVENT themes in them that aren't all 100% bullshit.

Somehow she inspires me to write poetry for her. This may only be the second poem I have written for her, but that in itself is amazing for me.

So here it is.

What I See Now

I used to look at you differently hon
No lie, I really did
I used to see your beauty,
Your dark skin somehow shining in the world,
Your dark beautiful eyes,
From which shined a bright radiance
Which brightened my days,
I saw your personality,
Your shining personality,
Full of humor, passion, care,
And even stupidity,
But it was fine, because I was stupid too
Still am.
I saw the ability to talk to you,
About anything,
Whether it be a casual conversation,
About things that wouldn't matter in a sun rise
Or the serious matters of life.
I saw I could talk to you,
And I took advantage of it.
I saw the negatives,
I saw your demons, your fears, your flaws,
I saw I had to weather them,
I saw I had to be there,
To comfort you,
To listen to you,
To counter them.
But those negatives never distorted what I saw
Which was how great you were
How lovable you were
How 1337 you were.
But as time goes on,
I don't see that anymore
Those things I saw are fading into the background
Of what I see in everyday life
But I do not fear this
I embrace it
Because in it's place I see something else in you
Something far greater than anything I could have seen before
I see the future
Yours and mine
I see us together,
for years to come
I see the gifts and flaws that are you
With me
I see another half of me
Something that can complete me
And I see it in you
What Im saying
Is that I see love
Infinite love
That will be seen by all,
Until the end of time
I love you,
Now and always
That is what I see when I look at you these days
And I embrace it
Just as I embrace you
And your love

School has started. Instead of limiting my free time to work on flash work I find that my new organizational skills have helped me plan time for flash.

The concept art for my new movie is for the most part done and storyboarding has been going well. It's giving me a better feel for what my movies will look like on the screen when I start animating them rather than figuring what I want as I go along. Storyboarding was a great idea and one Im going to keep doing in the future.
No work yet on LFD2 since whenever my last update was about it, but I might try to get an hour or two in once in a while. Maybe having a scheduale will help me get more work done.

This is a short update, but just informing everyone that progress is being made on stuff. I'll have a pic of something in my next post, hopefully of LFD2 and not concept art from new movie.

My workload is dramatically increasing as summer draws to a close.

School starts in roughly two weeks and I have a lot of summer AP English work to finish before then. I prcrastinated AGAIN this summer in working on it so now it's major crunch time. Hurray... -__-

But good news is my flash workload is getting bigger. I just finished writting the script for a new movie and am now beginning to storyboard it. I have a few voice actorls lined up as well for the various parts in it. It will be good practice at drawing different types of creatures too.

Yungjazz literally just sent me his lines for LFDII, so I can finally complete the missing scene from it before finishing the rest of the movie. Don't expect that too soon unfortunately...with school starting I will lost a lot of time on it.

Just a quick update for any and all fans out there.

In about eleven hours I will be heading off to Band Camp to get ready for my last season with my high school marching band. What awaits me is a week full of marching in the hot sun, teaching new members how to play and march and look good, teaching them that "trumpets do not accept mediocroty", pulling pranks on everyone, and just having some good fun.
I'll also be using this time to think deeply about some things going on in my personal life. Some real soul searching. I hope that goes well in whatever direction it takes me.

When I get back I'll be ready to continue work on LFD2. I was able to get my mojo back and get some work done on the movie, but still nowhere near as much as I need to get done if I want to make any real progress on it before school starts up again.

One good thing that did come out of this motivation lack was I learned how to beat it. Side projects. The Disturbed "Prayer" Collab distraction helped me get my motivation back since I was never bored working in between two projects. Though now that my piece is done and emailed off I have nothing left to do BUT LFD2. Well that won't do will it?

In fear of losing my motivation (as well as my time) again after band camp Im looking for new side projects to take up. Im almost done writing a script for a small short I might make in the near future. It was inspired by the fact that I now have a colony of wasps living in my mailbox, making the simple task of getting the mail a little hard. I'll finish writing that once I get back and will hopefully start animating it too.

Other than that I might take up another part in the Disturbed "Prayer" Collab because I really enjoyed animating something which I could be creative about in a very short amount of time. I might do it again if the collab is in need of a boost. Please join the collab newgrounders. Even if you don't like Disturbed you can be really creative with some of the parts if you base it on the lyrics.

With those ideas in mind Im going to make it a new goal of mine to always have some sort of side project next to my main project just in case I get bored of one and just to simply always have something to do with flash. That way I'll get more practice and more movies in the portal (hopefully). I don't care if it's another animation, working on a story, scripts, artwork, storyboards, coding, whatever. Im going to do something other than sit around playing solitare on my computer because I have no motivation.

In other news I found the number to the AP testing people and my dad called them and found out my score for the AP US History test I took in May. We were all getting impatient since everyone and their mom recieved their scores but me. The conversation went a little something like this.

DAD: "They said something about you getting a 5. What's that mean?"
ME: "That's the best fucking score I could get"
MOM: *jumps up screaming and hugs the crap out of me* ^__^
DAD: "Sweet"

YAY ME!!! =D

Work on Little Frog Duel II has pretty much slowed to a halt. When I find the time to animate, which comes rarely nowadays, I have no motivation to work on it. It's weird since I keep thinking about it during the day, how awsome the final product will be, how great the music I found for the fight scene is, how I actually have a storyboard this time that will probably work, and just how better I have become at animating. I want to show it in this movie, but for some reason I have no motivation at all.

I've looked around for ideas to get over this slump. One that seems promising is to work on smaller projects at the same time so I have something to switch to if I get bored of working on one thing. I've been looking for some collabs on the forums and I think I've found a good one to take a stab at.
The "Prayer" by Disturbed Collab organized by ShortMonkey is now my new project, joining of course with LFD2. Now I have something fresh to work on if I get bored of LFD2 and vice versa. Hopefully this will work. And if not, at least it's more practice for LFD2.

Oh yeah, plenty of spots open in the collab. Check it out if your a fan of Disturbed or just want to animate something.

In other news, McDonalds McSkillet Burritos are'nt too shabby. YUM!!!

First things first, my girlfriend loved the vid I made her. She's watched it at least three times everyday and cried at least one of the times. She loved it. And so do I. I put 17 hours of my time into that movie, as well as my heart. Im glad she loved it, and Im glad it will give her something to watch while she's off at U of M.

Now onto the sex. I have a new toy. Look down. Nuff said.

Before I talk about what Im 70% done with, I'll give you all an update on Little Frog Duel II.

For one...I can't decide whether to us "II" or "2". I like the Roman Numerals personally...but I find I switch back and forth all the time. For now I'll stick with the numerals for the long title and go with a "2" for when I say LFD2. Any thoughts????

Now on to actual movie news. I have been slowly working on it since school got out last week. I've put in two hours work on it over two days of actual work. This past Monday(June 9) I found there are some sound issues in terms of when they play. I believe the reason for this is because I animated a lot of things within movie clips, sometimes placing a movie clip within another movie clip within the main timeline.

In the next scene I decided to scrap this approach and animate mostly on the main timeline. There is a sound effect on the main timeline in that scene. When I tested the movie the sound that is supposed to play during Scene 3 plays midway through Scene 2, the scene with all the movie clips within each other. I know how to fix this, and spent a while doing it, but it's not completely fixed yet. Im not looking forward to fixing it, but I have no choice. Soon it will be fixed, but not for a while.

Now what could I be 70% done with if it's not LFD2???

This Saturday (June 14th) is my girlfriend of almost 17 months Open House. She just graduated High School and the only thing she asked of me is to give her something she'll remember me by when she's off to college in between my visits. I had a hard time thinking of something until Tuesday morning while I was still in disbelief over what I had to do to fix LFD2. Why not make a movie based on some of our funniest and best memories in the relationship??? I set out to do this.

First I made a list of everything I could think of that was funny during our wonderful 17 months. After realizing my memory sucks, I came up with a list of 17 memories that were fun and crazy enough to animate. I want this movie to not only be a reflection of our relationship, but also something that will make her laugh. I immediately began animating them. Now three days and about 11 hours of work put into this movie later, Im 70% done. I only have five more clips to animate, which I plan to do most of the work tonight. I'll be dead tired tomorrow, but I don't want any of the clips to be last minute.

Im also proud to say I've cut none of the clips due to my skill, something I had to do earlier with every one of my movies. Though I might cut one just because I can't think of a way to make it funny...or interesting...but meh...I might replace it with something else. It is yet to be determined.

So Im off to work well into the hours of the morning. Wish me luck.

Remember that animation I said I was going to make??? Turned out I didn't do it. Not nearly enough time even if I tried to do it, which kind of sucks because I had the script partially written out.

My finals have begun, and with that the final days of school. My chem final was pretty easy, my English should be alright, my Hon. Trig final will kill me, and my APUSH final should be passable. Once this shit is done I can FINALLY focus back on Little Frog Duel II. It's been too long and I need to get back to working on that thing.

Today while we were in band doing absolutely nothing since we had no final, my friends and I came up with a stupid yet possibly funny concept for a movie. We were joking about senior band camp pranks and one idea, which was completely stupid, was to bring gerbils with us in our bags and launch them with water balloon slingshots at the freshmen. Just imagine a gerbil flying from the sky, landing on your face, and then tearing it up.
Stupid right? We know, but it made us laugh.

So today we kept talking about it because we couldn't get that funny yet horrible image out of our heads. We pondered what would happen if the gerbals were zombie mutant things. Finally we laughed at the concept of the gerbils with greyish-black fur, red eyes, huge claws and teeth, and a lizard-like frill that squirts acid at you.

They told me to make the movie sometime this summer, and you know what? I just might do that.
....after LFDII of course.

The end of the year is upon me. I now have six days left of school. Less than one week. Three of those days are full days, the rest are finals. Finals will not be a challenge this year as they were last year except for a few honorable mentions...Honors Trig. Once again the final will determine whether or not I have an A in the class or a B. Knowing how I do on math tests in general, Im looking at a B+ for the end of the year grade. Not bad, but I wanted an A, hell even an A-.

But I won't give up. I will study my arse off and try to get that A. But that's not why Im insane? Im insane because once again I am trying to undertake an animation project in a short amount of time, only this time for a class. My AP US History class final is a project. The project guidlines are simple. Use the knowledge and skills you learned in this class to make something creative. It could be a movie, a presentation, a family scrapbook relating to historical events, yadda yadda yadda. My project is on how World War II still effects us today. Examples Im using are nukes, UN, Israel. I have more than enough information for this project, but for the longest time I couldn't figure out how to do it. Until now.

Im going to try my best to make an animation. Simple, nothing spectacular. Simple stick figures or something less complicated than full characters explaining my topic with some witty historical humor thrown in that no one will understand except amateaur historians( aka, APUSH students).
I have five days to do this. Tonight, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, possible Monday. But five good days. To make this worse, I have to work a concert, graduation, go to a graduation, and study my ass off for my Trig final. I am insanse to do this, but otherwise my project will NOT be creative and I'll be sad/burned out to care.

My backup plan is good though. Animate at home, make boring powerpoint at school. That way if I can't get the animation done, I have a powerpoint. Won't be as good as an animation, but I don't have a choice.

Wish me luck once again Newgrounds. I promise after this I will get Little Frog Duel II done. That is SOOOOOO much more fun than making small movies of lesser quality.

PS...anyone know of any program that will turn an .swf into a playable movie format for macs? Like MPEG4's or whatever format an I-movie is in. I have serious doubts my school will have flash player on a normal computer. The web design computer have Flash 8, but normal comps don't.

Thanks in advance.