Is animation supposed to be art or entertainment?

I have been animating nonstop for almost six months now for NATA. I thought I would take this opportunity to address some issues I've been having with the idea of animation.

Without a doubt, the ultimate purpose of animation in this context is to entertain. That is the point. That is why other animators on this site and I animate. There is not a fixed structure required to make an entertaining animation, yet somehow, I find that I always end up looking for one.

Over the past few months, I have reached a point where I only really enjoy an animation if it has a clear, easy to understand plot and evokes some sort of feeling (humorous, sad, etc). Anything that deviates even slightly, I label as "unprofessional", "pretentious", or even just "bad". I do this when I look at my own videos and I do this when I look at other people's. I find that I can't even enjoy going to art galleries any more because I can't help but feel that everything there is just missing something. Maybe that's the correct way to think, and maybe it's not, but either way, it means less enjoyment for me, so as a content consumer as well as creator, I feel like that is a bad thing.

To be fair, I am not sure that animation is the right medium for those "unconventional" forms of entertainment. I think it is unprofessional if you make a movie with the disclaimer that you, the artist, have no idea what it means. I think it is bad if there was supposed to be a plot, but it wasn't thought out well enough for it to make sense. I'm even guilty of making movies like that, especially recently, and I'm trying to get past that and make better movies. But still, I am just not sure that it is a good thing to jump to conclusions immediately like we so often do. Is there anything wrong with having a movie where the plot is abstract and not literal and forces you to consider the other elements of the movie to fully realize the meaning? Is there anything wrong with making movies for oneself, rather than for the audience? Isn't that the point of art? Then again, this is all awfully hypocritical, because I myself jump to the same conclusions I'm ranting about.

I'm curious to know what you all think about this. I don't really know what side is the correct side, but I do know that, for better or for worse, I now look for that specific formula.

Other news

I feel bad for doing this, but I ended up just using some of my friends in real life for the voices in my final NATA entry. It's not that the voices submitted to me were bad or anything. In fact, I was really impressed by all of them, and I now know that Newgrounds is a great resource for voice actors for future projects. However, due to life getting in the way, I just had to go with the most convenient option, for my own sake. Sorry about that, guys, but my priority right now is keeping my head above the water. Next project that needs voices, though, I promise I'll follow through!

I'm not really going to get into why life was getting in the way, but I'm just going to say that everything's been rather overwhelming recently. To (somewhat sarcastically) quote The Catcher in the Rye, "it's so goddamn depressing. It really is." In addition to the more private issues, although NATA has been fun, it does get stressful after six months, which is a contributing factor in the decline of quality in my recent videos. I like the way my current video is going, though, so we'll see what happens with this one. It's funny to think that in a few weeks, this will all be over. It's been great to be a part of, and I hope it has also been great following along.

-Dave

Ok so it's the NATA final round, and I am in need of a voice actor!

The general plot of the story is that a guy dies and meets death, and has to choose between remaining a ghost or moving on. However, he's a bit in denial, so he and Death test that he's dead, argue about it, etc, until eventually the conversation ends up about Death himself, and it turns out that he has problems with sadness and depression, too. I won't spoil the ending because that would be bad.

But, that said, I'm in need of someone who wants to voice Death for me. You'd have to be dramatic at first, but be able to break down a bit near the end while still sounding like Death might. If you're interested and have a demo reel or something you want me to listen to (or have a video you're in or something like that), let me know!

Thanks!

Dave

NEW THINGS ARE HAPPENING.

Ok so my website is back up after a fair amount of debating with the service provider. That's all nice. So now my new dilemma is this: It's coming time to renew my domain name, which is currently pahgawks.com, but I feel like maybe I should rename it now that I have the opportunity. My website has been under this name since I was in the third grade, and for the longest time, I only made videos about "pahgawks" (look at my older videos. Actually, don't; they're bad), so that wasn't a problem. But now I haven't done anything with the characters for a few years, so I think it's time for a change. Unless, of course, my username everywhere is well-known enough that it still works. Basically, it comes down to a question of who the main audience of my website will be: people who already know me online, and people who don't.

Anyway, what do you think? Any domain name recommendations?

Next order of business: I was contacted by a musician to ask if I could make them a music video. So, that'll probably be happening once NATA is over. But since this is something I'd be paid for, I'm going to take more than a month on it to make sure it's as polished as I can make it.

And lastly, about NATA. I'm changing things up this round. I've been getting lower marks in the art and animation categories, and with my current art/animation style, I don't think I can possibly get more points without putting in a ridiculous amount of effort. So instead, I'm changing styles. I've told a lot of people that I'm going to be changing styles anyway to keep things interesting for me while I'm making it, so this was bound to happen anyway. Below is a small example of the sort of atmosphere I'm hoping to create, although I should point out that I still don't have access to my tablet, so the whole thing was drawn with a laptop trackpad using the polygonal lasso tool in Photoshop.

So some interesting things happened.

WHY I'M STRESSED
A Brief Summary of the Past Month, in Three Acts

ACT 1: WEBSITE ISSUES
On July 7th, I got a funny email from the legal department of some porn site claiming that I had hacked their servers and that I should cease and desist immediately or they would threaten legal action or something like that. Since they claimed to be from "boobysearch.com" or something ridiculous like that, I deleted the email and thought of it as spam.

Fast forward twenty minutes: Turns out there was a rather large load of traffic to a php script on my website that I couldn't remember making. Upon further examination, it appeared that the script was logging IP addresses to a text file. That was odd and unnerving. I promptly got rid of that, did a bit of research as to how it might have got there, fixed the security hole, and changed my passwords just to be safe. So far so good. However, after a few minutes, I noticed that the site was becoming increasingly laggy. This was because the hits had jumped up to 10,000 since I had last checked. Normally, my website only gets maybe one and a half hundred a day. Then, emails started piling in from other people claiming that I had hacked their sites. What had happened was that the same person or group that got my website presumably also infected a bunch of others and made them redirect to mine. I tried replying to all the emails individually, but they started coming in faster than I could reply. I decided instead to put a message up on my website where the now-deleted php script was so that people would be redirected to that rather than a 404 error. I put up what I was putting in my emails: No, I didn't hack your site. Yes, I'm on your side. I was hacked, too, and I'm in almost the same boat. Here is how your site was probably infected and here's how to get rid of the problem.Except then the server started faltering. I had previously set it to log any redirects into the database because I was testing something out a while ago and forgot to turn it off, so that was causing a lot of the problem. I disabled that, and that helped for a bit. But things still were slowing down rapidly, so I ran a script that would cache the main pages and serve them up as static html files rather than php files to minimize as much server load as possible, and that worked. I also made it start blocking certain redirects from infected sites that were sending me a particularly large load of traffic. Anyway, the server was handling the load reasonably well, and I was a bit proud of myself for dealing with it smoothly. At 2:00 in the morning on the 8th, there had been some 50,000 hits since 10:00 the night before, and then the hits started decreasing. The problem was dealt with, or so I thought.

A few days later, when the hit counts were beginning to return to normal levels, my site was taken down by the service provider, claiming that it had gone over my CPU limit and that I should upgrade my hosting plan. Unfortunately, even after trying to reason with them that this was not the normal traffic level and that it would get back to normal very soon, my site was still inaccessible and I still wasn't going to upgrade my plan. I've been too tired to negotiate further, so my site has remained offline since then. But because the site has been down and my message is now gone, the nasty emails began rolling in again with people who are really mad at me and who are threatening me and claiming that "I don't fucking know who I'm dealing with" and such. I did, however, also get some funny emails, like one from a guy whose website wasn't hacked, but who tried to visit a beer and wine blog which was, and found himself on mine. He then asked if there were any other beer and wine blogs he could get his beer and wine news from while the other one was being fixed.

So yeah, that was fun.

ACT 2: WORK AT A SUMMER CAMP
It's been a really long time since I've gone to a summer camp, but now I work at one. It's been pretty interesting. It's a science, tech, and computer science camp. My coworkers are pretty awesome, and they're all as geeky as I am, and even though I'm the youngest one working there by far, we're all friends. We all went to see the new Batman movie after work one day, which was nice.

As far as the actual work went, though, it's been quite the experience. I'll start off with the most interesting story. When I was working with a group of grade 1 and 2 kids (around ages 6-8, for those in other countries), and we were doing some really basic flash animation, a kid went and did his business on the floor. I'd like to think he was just so intrigued by the Flash lesson that he just couldn't get himself away from the computer to use the washroom. But no matter how it happened, we ended up with a shit on the floor. Another kid stepped in it somehow, and then started screaming and running all over the place, not thinking that he would be spreading it around by doing so. We had to interrupt the lesson and take everyone outside because the kids were starting to panic. Then we had to clean up the mess. It was definitely not the work I had signed up for, but it must have been even worse for some of the volunteers, who had to clean up shit and weren't even paid for it. Let's have a moment of silence for the bravery of those poor, poor volunteers.

tl;dr shit happens

Other than that, things went pretty well. I enjoy working where I do, and teaching programming and stuff is pretty fun, especially for the older age groups, who actually take it in and want to learn. I thought it would be a problem that I'd be maybe only one year older than some of them, but that didn't end up being a problem. It just made communication easier, if anything. Also it meant that we didn't have to waste time telling them how to spell stuff. We also had these awesome LAN Armagetron tournaments, which were cool. The only trouble with everything was that the hours were pretty long. I'd go in for 7:30 and leave at 5:30. That doesn't leave a whole lot of time for animation and stuff, considering I have to actually get to bed on time now. That brings me to the next act:

ACT 3: NATA

First and foremost, I believe that because of a lack of time, resources, and creativity, I didn't make as good of a movie as I would have liked this time around. I mean, it's at the point now where I feel like it's a chore to open up Flash and start working. It just isn't fun, and I think that it needs to feel fun in order to actually put everything you can into a project. Do you know that feeling when you're in the middle of a project and then just get a sinking feeling that maybe what you're doing wasn't actually such a great idea, but you're too far in to turn back? That's pretty much what I felt. I don't know, I think I could just use a break. I won't be upset if I get eliminated this round because I'm against a great animator, and if I have to get out, now's not a bad time. It wouldn't be an unwelcome change to be able to take a bit of time to relax and wait for inspiration to hit so that I could make a movie that I can take as much time as I need on. I'm just going to try to regain a positive attitude, I guess.

And on that note, I think I should talk about what I can learn from this entry. Firstly, something that I thought went well. I let some of my friends help play some of the music, which was nice because it meant that I didn't have to worry about practising music to the point where I feel it is good enough, and that I could focus more on the animation. Unfortunately we had some technical difficulties with the microphone and ended up with some clipped sound, which I guess is something that happens when I don't have full control, but I think I dealt with it enough that the soundtrack still sounds nice. Also, I used some of Bing's music again near the end, which is always nice, because it's awesome music and it tends to fit well with the stuff I make.

Unfortunately, not everything else went well. I tried doing some animation on paper with a light table, but it turns out those things heat up an awful lot, which is a killer on a hot day, and also when I scanned them in and found a slight fault I had made (I accidentally put the wrong leg in front on one frame and then carried it on throughout the following frames), I had to end up redrawing almost all of it anyway. Being able to preview as you go is a really good feature of working digitally. Oh well. Lesson learned, I guess.

Also you'll notice a lot more 3D stuff. That's there mainly as a time saving thing. Once I have one 3D model, I don't have to redraw it. It's a bit faster, and it sometimes looks nice. I sort of like how the shatter thing ended up near the beginning of the movie. The rest admittedly doesn't fit as well, but it saved me time, so it had its purpose. If I ever get some free time, I'd like to try out 3D animation in a context that fits the medium more, such as in a full-3D animation, or in combination with video, which is something I've always wanted to learn more about. I just need to wait for the time and inspiration first, though.

Lastly, I've been out of town a bit, which has been a major hindrance to the completion of the movie. It meant that any recordings for the music became final because the only internet I could get reliably from my cell phone, which is slow and I also do not technicaly have a plan for, making it costly. Also, being stuck with a laptop trackpad is arguably worse than a mouse for drawing and especially for 3D animation (try using blender without the scroll wheel/middle click. I dare you.) Luckily, most of that was already done, and I was able to make the credits using only the text tool and the geometry tools (line, circle, etc.) However, uploading the video was a problem, and I spent the majority of the day visiting a bunch of towns near the cottage I'm at trying to find a restaurant or something that would let me sit around for an hour or two uploading my movie. I guess I probably shouldn't have made it 720p. Oops. Should have thought that one over more.

So anyway that was my past month. It's a little weird knowing that from now on, all of my summers will be this busy until I retire. That's pretty scary. I guess I'll get used to it eventually.

/end transmission

Well, to start off, I finished my entry for this round of NATA, and you can see it here. It's definitely not the best video I've ever made, and it admittedly doesn't have the same appeal that another big metaphor movie would, but I sort of like it. It was nice to make a movie that doesn't actually mean anything. If for some reason the Newgrounds video player still takes too long to load for you (although I personally see no problem with it now), you can also watch it on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLi0kbN1noc

Ok now that I've got the obligatory self-advertisement out of the way, on to the other stuff.

I've been so focused on animating on schedule to meet deadlines that I've barely done anything else. So far, NATA has been a great experience. It's provided an unbelievable amount of practice which leads to improvement, I've met some awesome people, and it's fun. However, I've noticed that I haven't actually done much else recently.

I should start out by saying that I start my new job tomorrow. I'll be teaching kids at a science, engineering and computer science summer camp. This will involve teaching grade 2-6 kids a bit about about Flash, Photoshop, and HTML, among other things. I'm not entirely sure how it will go, but it will be interesting, anyway. I have a feeling that no matter how much I plan this out, there's going to need to be a lot of flexibility, due to the nature of the smaller children. Funny story: Part of the training involved being given offensive things little kids might say, and we would have to say how we would respond to them. One example: "Little Jimmy sees an attractive girl walking by and says, 'Boy, would I like to bang that shit.' What do you say to Little Jimmy?" It was very hard to keep a straight face. Anyway, I think it'll be a fun job.

I would also like to start painting again. I think it's been half a year since I have even picked up a paintbrush. I took art class in the first semester of grade 10, and since then, I haven't done much art just for the sake of art and not specifically as an asset for an animation. I have a set of brushed and canvases and paints that I got at the end of the first semester, hoping that I would then use them, but I haven't touched them. In fact, they sat on my desk for so long that one day my sister just waltzed into my room while I was gone and took all my art supplies and used them. I didn't even notice for a few weeks until I needed to get a pencil, but noticed that the area where I keep them seemed unusually empty. I think I didn't use them because, to put it simply, I just didn't want to paint. I find that if I don't want to make something, if I'm not inspired enough, or if I find it boring, the end result will be boring and bland and bad. That was one issue I had with art class. I don't feel inspired every single day, yet I'd have to work anyway. Now, though, I actually want to, so it's a different story. Maybe I'll start to use the art portal. We'll see how it goes.

And, lastly, I have to also remember to continue practising music. As you may or may not know, I play the flute, and you can hear a little bit of that in the soundtrack for Masquerade. I typically forget to take out my flute at all over the summer since music class is over, but that's not a good thing because I'm not very good to start with and it never ends well when I don't practice. This year, though, I took the initiative to get a bunch of photocopies of my friend's RCM studies and pieces (around grade 6/7), so I'll have that to look at. Also, it sounds sort of silly, but I've been looking into some jazz flute stuff, like Moe Koffman. (He made the song used for the theme of As It Happens on CBC, so you might know his music if you're Canadian even if you haven't heard of him.) I'm hoping to maybe make some more songs using real actual instruments since pretty much all of my friends at school play something, and they are, for the most part, really good. It'll just take a lot of extra planning and forethought, not to mention time to transpose everything for different instruments.

So that's what I have been and will be up to, Newgrounds.

Dave out.

So, first off: My entry to the NATA novice round is complete, and you can watch it here. I'm proud of how it turned out, but long story short, there's a lot of stuff I tried that I probably won't continue with any more.

1: 3D. I found that, although working with 3d is fun, it doesn't mix that well with my style of 2d. Specifically, things animated in 3D that are part of the foreground just look out of place. So, I won't be doing much of that again. However, I found that 3D in the background worked somewhat well. If I make a full 3D model of a set I'm going to use, I can render out various angles of it using a toon shader and it looks surprisingly like the way I do backgrounds normally. Of course, this only works for geometric things like offices and trains (what I used 3D backgrounds for in my entry.) Trees and clouds and stuff I'll add in drawings for.

2: Limited colour schemes. I used them for a video or two, and that was fun, but now they seem boring to work with. For the sake of keeping me interested in what I do, I'm moving on from them.

3: Vignettes. I thought I'd try to put a subtle vignette over (almost) every scene. It did add a bit of visual interest, but I can't help but notice how static it looks. I originally tried having a different sort of texture of vignette for each scene, but it just looked weird. Next time I think I'm just going to let the visuals in the animation do the talking on their own.

Anyway, in terms of other stuff I've been up to, school is drawing to a close and I just finished my computer science final, which is a game written in C++ with the Allegro library. It's sort of crappy, but you can download it here if you want to try it out. It's sort of inspired by games like the Jumper series, which frustrate you an awful lot, but not quite enough so that you don't lose interest. I hope to accomplish something similar.

Some things to note about it:
1. It's a beta version made for this class and the deadline the project has. I will most likely continue to work on this, so feedback is welcome.
2. Some features exist pretty much only so it fits with the rubric that it's being graded with. For instance, high scores and save files are saved to an unencrypted text file, which is incredibly easily editable. In the final version, either the local copies will be harder to edit, or the high scores will be stored on a server.
3. The music is definitely not final. It's just that the game needed sound to get full marks, so I quickly threw on a soundtrack I had lying around. It doesn't exactly fit.
4. The boss is really only there because we needed to have nested structs/classes for something and a boss made up of a bunch of particles is the only thing I could come up with in time. He may or may not stay for the final version, but if he does, his levels won't be the last ones (there's more to come.)

And then I made another quick little flash game for a friend's birthday. You can play it here. Since my friend hates wall jumping, I made a game where the objective appears to be all about wall jumping. In reality, it's about NOT wall jumping in creative ways. Sort of.

I won't be doing a whole lot else from now on (except for possibly the next round of NATA if I happen to make it through. It will be close.) I somehow managed to get a summer job, so I'm both excited about that and freaked out. It's great because I'll be teaching at a computer science summer camp, which is fun and awesome, and it's scary because OH MY GOODNESS IT'S LIKE I'M SORT OF AN ADULT NOW AND OH MY GOD I CAN LEGALLY GET A DRIVER'S LICENCE AHHHH EXISTENTIAL CRISIS

so tl;dr I've been busy recently and I will continue to be for a while.

Bye!
-Dave

Earlier this week, I participated in the provincial 2D Character Animation competition for Skills Ontario in Waterloo. We were given the prompt "it happened all at once" and we made this video:

My partner and I ended up getting seventh, and we will not be advancing to the next round.

This was pretty disappointing for me for a few reasons. Firstly, we came third at the national level the year before, and everyone expected us to come back even stronger this year. There was an enormous amount of pressure to succeed, and a corresponding amount of feelings of failure when we didn't. Secondly, animation is pretty much the only thing I'm any good at, and I'll admit that it really hurt when we didn't even place. I mean, it's not like we came second and narrowly missed advancing to the next round. We came in seventh, which was unexpected.

When I try to analyze it, I think that maybe it had something to do with the cartoon violence in our movie, which may not have been acceptable at this particular venue. It could have had to do with our dull colour scheme and our lazy backgrounds. I'll admit the limited palette worked much better with the vibrant reds we used in our last video at the Skills Ontario regional level than it did with the boring blues and purples in this one. It might have had to do with the fact that the frame-by-frame was a bit sloppy, but that was still better than the frame by frame in last year's, which fared significantly better. It also could have had to do with the bad sound editing, but we had little time and we only had a microphone and Audacity (plus we were in the middle of a very large and noisy room with hundreds of people.) Okay, so I got defensive and tried to explain why those last two points might not be valid, but I still know in the back of my mind that excused won't help. Frankly, I'm still a bit confused as to why it didn't do so well, but the past's the past, and I guess I have no choice but to simply move on to the next thing and make the most of this. If you want, you can offer constructive criticism of the movie so that I can make a better one next year, because then I can get something positive out of the situation.

So now my time is pretty much free since I won't be on any more trips for anything. I'm glad I finished my entry to the NATA open round (which can be seen here) early, though, because when I got back my motivation level was zero. This whole experience was sort of a turnoff from animation for a day or two. Now, however, I think I'm past that stage. I think I'm at the point where, instead of feeling like a victim of some sort, I feel like I want to pull back into the game and prove myself. I expect that when the next round of NATA starts, if I make it through to round 2, I'm going to put even more effort into it than before. That's one good result of this for sure. I just think that I probably won't be able to make something that's very funny for it because I guess I am no longer in a very funny mood, so expect something with a bit more meaning behind it next (like my video Masquerade did) if I do make it through and if the theme permits it.

So that's all I have to say for now. I guess you can't win at everything. Life will carry on as normal. Hopefully I'll learn from this experience.

Thanks for being here when I need you, Newgrounds!
-Dave

Yesterday I went to Kingston, Ontario for the regional level of the Skills Canada 2D Character Animation competition. In case you don't know, Skills Canada is a nationwide Canadian competition for skilled trades. Animation is one of its categories, in which teams of two are given topics and a day (or two, if it is at the national level) to create an animation. Usually, sound is a component, but at the regional level it isn't.

Long story short, me and my partner won, and you can see the video we made here:

The topic this year was "it was never going to be an ordinary day", which is significantly better than the one they gave us at this level last year ("your friend is being bullied. What do you do?") At least this time there is a lot more room for interpretation. The way the contest was organized made sure we created storyboards first, because they were worth 25% of the final mark for the video and we weren't allowed to touch the computers until the first hour was up. Once that was done, we had four hours to do everything else. Because of the nature of the competition (limited time, no sound, etc), I'm not uploading this is a flash on Newgrounds, but as far as these sorts of contests go, I'm proud of it. I think it turned out really well given the time we had. I'll be moving on to the provincial level in Waterloo at the end of this month.

Anyway, on the topic of Flash animation, I discovered another issue with Flash's quicktime exporter. It occasionally messes up the frame rate/keyframes on YouTube and other video uploading sites, causing stutter and the wrong frames being held. I eventually discovered I could make a much better export by writing a little script that makes a PNG sequence out of an SWF (including actionscripted sections such as the particles when the kid is vaporized in the above movie.) Then, using ffmpeg (a free command line video conversion tool), I could string together all the frames, plus an exported WAV from Flash if I wanted to use sound. Great quality, too. I think I'll eventually publicly release the image sequence editor I made along with a batch file with the ffmpeg commands used if there's enough interest.

Also, NATA (formerly TOFA) starts tomorrow. I'm going to be participating in that, as well as the guy who made the animation for Skills Canada with me. It's my first year participating, and it seems quite fun, especially given all the time we have for each round. Good luck to everyone else joining in!

-Dave

Last month, I went on an insane programming spree. I tend to do this every year in the month of December. Somehow, I have made it my tradition to make little games for my friends as gifts, which I suppose started because if I focus on nothing but programming, I can get stuff done relatively quickly and effectively, and it would probably be more meaningful than if I made a silly card or something. Anyway, I worked at about a game a week, and I finished on time. None of the games are terribly exciting, original, or long, so I didn't put them on Newgrounds, but the whole experience tends to improve my skill as a whole. Just in case you're interested, you can see the ones I am most proud of here:

http://fav.me/d4k37si "Corporate Rampage." Basically you run around an office destroying as much as possible without getting caught. I learned a lot about optimizing code to make it run efficiently, as I was dealing with more objects onscreen than I am used to.

http://fav.me/d4k3949 "Just a Head." Now, this was really fun to make, because it is motion-controlled! Plug in a webcam, adjust the calibration, and start playing. Walk around and, as objects change position based on parallax, try to make certain things connect on the screen.

...anyway, I might upload some of these to Newgrounds at some point if I decide to turn them into full-fledged games. However, I think I will focus more on making new animations. If you haven't seen it already, I made a new one recently:
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/
587288
To be honest, I've sort of squeezed a lot of my creativity into this, so I probably won't have anything new too soon. I'm spending my time nowadays teaching some people at my school how to animate in both Flash and, soon, Blender, so I might have some collaborations with some of them up at some point, but it won't be my usual sort of flash. It won't have any deeper meaning, and it will most likely just be a practice for the animation skills of the people I'm working with. On the other hand, it's almost exam period, which I really like. I'm not good at exams or anything, but I find that whenever I need to study, I start having all these great new animation ideas. The problem is that I usually start working on them rather than working on schoolwork, but hey, at least I'm getting SOMETHING out of it, right? ;)

Anyway, that's all for now, folks.
Have a nice day!

Hey folks!

So, I've been doing some work creating things with Actionscript 3 recently. I'll start doing something because I'm bored, but then it might turn out to be useful, so I will continue developing it until I can actually put it to practical use. One of these things is a particle system that creates a bunch of "bugs" that follow and swarm around a given point. You can see a demo of it and get the source code for your own use on my website. I haven't actually used it in an animation yet, but it will most likely be in my next one (or the one after that, depending on how fast I finish it.)

Another thing I have been trying to accomplish is an automatic music generator. So far, it has a structured but random drum kit that picks either 3/4 or 4/4 time depending on the selected genre (e.g. rock, jazz, blues). That works relatively well, and it will even put in fills and drum solos. What I'm having slight difficulty with is the melody. My main problem is a technical one: How do I play the sounds? It would seem like too much work to go and make a sample of a whole bunch of notes for a whole bunch of instruments. Does anyone know of a sound library that is relatively easy to work with that is capable of generating good sounds? I tried programming my own, but all it could do was a sine wave, and it sounded really crappy. Any suggestions would be welcomed! :) As for the actual melody-building, it is coming along surprisingly well. It can make chords, play a blues scale, solo, and structure itself into choruses and bridges. It just sounds crappy. But hopefully if I can easily generate the sound with a library, this will be fixed.

Also, you may have seen that I have a new video. Let's Go Fly a Kite was the first of what I think will be two "practice" submissions of mine that I am using to develop my frame-by-frame skills. There are some things that I tried that I probably won't do again, such as the textures on the shirts, pants, and hair. But I do like the "watercoloresque" backgrounds I put in, so I think I will do something of the sort again.

Oh, and one more thing. I came third in the SkillsCanada national competition! It was pretty fun. The people there are cool. Check out Conkertheking22, who came in second, and also happens to be on Newgrounds.