Headstuck [Goodbye.]

[Qeztotz]

no
the entirety of this fucking awesome FA fucks up my PC!

[Dreamscythes231]

Just........
EVERYONE: Wait....patiently.....

[Qeztotz]

we are and have been for over a month now
(it is over a month right?)

[Anti-Riku]

we are and have been for over a month now
(it is over a month right?)

a month and a day, the last update was posteed May 1st

[vengeanceCreed]

a month and a day, the last update was posteed May 1st

Hearrghrljsd;fsdflsdkfsdf. That makes me so sad. ;_; I'm sorry guys, I really bit off a lot more than I could chew with this animation and my heart's just not been in it. :x As it stands the animation is only 40% done right now; I may end up excising some of the 208 planned frames of animation (it's a hell of a lot of hand drawing; by contrast Jaden's dance had about 80-some frames) and shortening the background song. What happened was, I got the idea to do like... An entire actual dance animation, as opposed to looping a few clips over and over like I did with Jaden's. It looks awesome so far, IMO, but man. o_o It is one HELL of a lot of work. It's not that it's TOO much work, just that I can't seem to make myself sit down and work on it for more than an hour or two a day, which produces about 10-20 frames.

It shouldn't have taken nearly this long, and so as to avoid any such super-long interruptions I will not be attempting something quite this ambitious in the future. Once this animation is done with I'm going to resume normal-esque updating, including another Flash sequence in the very near future. :O

In fact, I have actually been giving thought to doing a quick 'Let's see how the hell Jason got to where he is now' thing in the meantime, just so this thread isn't deadski until the dance is complete. :x It kind of goes against the rule I made against 'NO TIME SHENANIGANS IN HEADSTUCK' but... It isn't REALLY. >_>;

[Qeztotz]

Im just happy to know youre still in the realm of the living, vengence

[Naristar]

Jason, this is still awsome even if we have to wait for it!

[Chaos Waltz]

Jason.
If there's one thing every fan of Homestuck knows.
It's patience.
Because even though Hussie can just shit frames like a cat that just got into the booze,
We still have to wait for months at a time every time something important happens.
Take all the time you need.
We'll still be here.

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The moment you realize you've spent waaaaay to much time on 4chan. . .

[vengeanceCreed]

Here, have this. >_>;

>runs away to do more animation< XD

EDIT: Quick progress report! I revisited the planned frames for the animation and did some trimming here and there.

CLIPS ANIMATED: 4/7
FRAMES DRAWN: 109/170

61 frames remaining! Then I gotta throw the whole thing in Flash and make a video out of it... Hoping it turns out well!

[Qeztotz]

WHAT IS THIS
AAARGH!
MY BRAIN! IT HURTS! CLOTHES SWAPPING!
JASON IN BAGGY SHORTS
COOKIE IN A TRENCHCOAT
please excuse me whilst I have a lie down in a dark room

[vengeanceCreed]

GENTLEMEN, BEHOLD!!! AMAZING Headstuck fanart by hybridHelix!

[hybridHelix]

"Because even though Hussie can just shit frames like a cat that just got into the booze..."

it's going to take me days to get this image out of my head.

[Qeztotz]

Same

[Chaos Waltz]

I do my best :3

[Dreamscythes231]

GAHHHH WHY AM I SEEING THIS NOW!!!
JADEN WEARING COOKIES CLOTHES!!!!! AGHGAHGAHGAHJGAJAGJ

Anyway, goo luck with the flash.

[vengeanceCreed]

MOAR ART! This time a stylishly stylized rendition of Molly by Dragoncookie, Cookie's player person!!!

Keep an eye out for some things and stuff tomorrow... :3

[Seanorib]

[nvm]

Awesome art, Dragoncookie.

[Qeztotz]

Awesome!
Can we please get a progress report venge?

[hybridHelix]

ha! molly's so cute!!

[Legendary]

Awesome!
Can we please get a progress report venge?

He says "Today".

[vengeanceCreed]

Awesome!
Can we please get a progress report venge?

After assembling the basic structure of the final video in Premiere versus the number of remaining frames I'd planned to draw, expect to see things a'splode either late tonight or tomorrow during the day. :3

[vengeanceCreed]

God DAMN, you are GOOD. You amaze yourself, seriously. It's hard to imagine how you don't let this all go to your head, but a good leader knows better than to flaunt.

==> Molly: Assess situation at hand.

(( AUTHOR'S NOTE: *falls over* I am now dead. I can't believe it's finally done. I CAN'T BELIEVE WE CAN FINALLY GET ON WITH THIS FREAKING ADVENTURE! XD I have written up a Postmortem explaining why this took so long and how much I suck, if anyone's in the mood to hear a bunch of senseless ranting from someone who's had waaaay too much coffee. ))

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[S] MOLLY: DANCE POSTMORTEM

First of all, I would just like to say that this project was UTTER INSANITY. This was a fairly massive undertaking, not the biggest thing I've ever attempted but certainly the greatest test of my skill and patience with multimedia malarkey. In the end this wasn't much more than 30 or 35 man-hours of work; I managed to stretch it out as long as I did through a combination of A) Laziness, B) Being horribly distracted by an unusually large number of video games for such a short period of time (Mass Effect 3, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat with M.I.S.E.R.Y. Mod, The Exiled Realms of Arboria [TERA; an MMO], and Terraria), and C) More laziness. I neglected this project for a really long time because I had this huge ambitious idea and cowered when I realized what an insane degree of work and dedication it was going to take to bring to completion. In the end, I like how it looks, but it's nowhere near what I was hoping for. Alas. Thankfully, hybridHelix volunteered to take on a few frames, which helped ease things up a bit.

There are two main factors that made this project several times more tedious and complicated than [S] Jaden: Dance.

1. I should've selected a better video to trace. After consulting with Naristar on what kind of dance Molly should do, I just went to YouTube, selected one almost at random, and got to work cutting it up into clips. The video I selected was of several different people (of varying height, weight, and build), shot on a handheld camera (which bounces up and down, shoots at odd perspectives, and moves around constantly in the clips), and uploaded at a low frame rate (which made some frames blur together, leading to 'which one of these 3 legs do I draw?' and 'Oh, hm, the leg is completely blurred out). In addition to the latter, the people I was tracing were wearing large/flouncy outfits so nearly every frame became an anatomy and figure drawing test: "Hm. Well, I guess the waist ends about there, and judging by where the knee is the leg should be starting here." What was a totally painless breeze in the creation of [S] Jaden: Dance became a nightmarish process of constant corrections, going back over frames and realizing, 'Oh crap, her arm should be HERE, not there. Time to redraw.'

2. I should've stuck to the [S] Jaden: Dance formula of 'grab 4 or so clips from the video, loop them over and over again.' My intention was to create one continuous, unbroken dance with no repeats (I failed this objective miserably) which would've necessitated around 900 frames of animation. To give you an idea, the final count as of the completion of the project was 166 frames.

Just to give you an idea of the process that went into creating this, I made a rough breakdown of the steps of the last frame of the animation and the final compilation:

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STEP ONE: The original image, taken from the original video. I decompiled the entire video into individual frames and deleted every two frames (i.e., 1 x x 4 x x, etc.).

STEP TWO: With a lot of approximation on where the body fit under the big, flouncy clothing, I drew a basic outline of Molly's body.

STEP THREE: Filled in the figure outline and made adjustments to try and resolve any wonkiness.

STEP FOUR: Drew in Molly's clothing accents, shoes, and hair.

STEP FIVE: In this particular case, drew in the arm holding the Robin Hood bottle, hid the traced image, and saved.

STEP SIX: Imported the whole stack of images (17-40 images each clip) into Flash, created new Movie Clips, and added each frame individually.

STEP SEVEN: Dropped the Movie Clip on a black matte and published it as an animated GIF.

STEP EIGHT: Assembled all of the assets in Premiere. This step involved a whole lot of complicated whatsit but screw it, I'm not going to go into details here. XD

Steps 1-5 had to be repeated a whopping 159 times (hybridHelix took care of 7 frames for me), with frequent revisions after cycling through the images and realizing something was wrong, Steps 6 and 7 had to be repeated 7 times for each dance clip, and Step 8 was... Well actually, I got all of that done today.

Long story short... I am so, so, so incredibly glad that's over. :P I am going to go collapse into a heap of doom and death, and get this story back on track!

Thank you everyone for hanging in there and being such amazingly awesome readers, and a BIG SPECIAL AWESOME THANKS AGAIN to hybridHelix and Dragoncookie for their amazing fanart (which is a few posts above this one), and EVEN MORE GRATUITOUS HEAPING THANKS-GOO to hybridHelix for taking a few frames off my hands and making me feel a little less crazy.

[Rikushadow5]

>Creed: Revive

[ashdenej]

>Sprite: Transform yeah that's going to happen anyway

>Sprite: Transform unexpectedly???

[Qeztotz]

.............................................
.............................................
.............................................
.............uh............................
shell..............shock................
.........epicness.......................


>Qeztotz: cease being shellshocked
>Molly: complete rest of shenanigans and go to meet jaden