More computer woes + Ninjas

I ordered a new computer from Dell.

My current one keeps giving me problems and I just don’t have the patience for it anymore. I ordered a new computer with a good processor and I’m just going to gut my current one and put the RAM, video card, hard drive and whatever else I can in the new one. It’ll have Vista but I’ll get a free upgrade to Windows 7 when that arrives so I’m good to go.

In any case, I did the following piece of animation back in college:

I was looking at it earlier for some reason and I’ve decided that, once I get that new computer, I’m going to finally finish it.

Pencil test and more after the break.

The pitch is nearly done. All five pages are pencilled and inked (I’ll post previews of those once I’ve scanned them in) and the script for the first issue is completed as well. All that’s left is for me to work on the cover and some art for a website that we’re setting up and that’ll be that. My computer will arrive about a week or two from now and I expect to be completely done with my share of the work at that point. I’ll have free time. I’m going to get it finished.

“Macbeth with Ninjas,” as I titled the above animation, is the only short I did in college that I actually completed all the animation for, beginning to end. It’s quite possibly the best work I did during those years and I always wanted to see it finished. When I first presented it in college it was just a pencil test with audio (video embedded below) but I came back to it once or twice in the years after that in an attempt to finish it (resulting in the partially colored version above).

There’s quite a bit of work up ahead if I’m to finish it. The most time consuming thing will probably be the backgrounds. Most of the animation is already colored though and I will also need to add titles, credits and whatever else I can think of (background music maybe?). There are some effects that I still have to animate (the breaking window, the bullets, sparks from swords clashing, etc) and I’m thinking of either animating those in Flash or just keeping them really simple (2-3 frames tops) and doing them in Photoshop.

Below is the pencil test as I presented it back in college: