Tom Arnold

Howdy, its shaggy.

Lately Tom Arnold has been coming into the office to offer his talents for an animation we are working on. Its called "Tom Arnold Saves the World!" Don't worry America, Tom will pull us out of this rut!

Here's a sketch and the final version :)




The sketch of his head turned out kinda crappy but I think I saved it a bit by tweaking the chin and mouths in the final illustration ;) Labamba created his body and pudgy fingers.

Big Foot goes to the Olympics!

Hola Amigos! Have you guys seen the video of that Poor Beijing Olympic weightlifter who broke his arm? Well this week Big Foot is gonna show em how its done! Here's a sneak peek of Mr. Big Foot, Background and Beijing Olympic Chinese man.

I used Illustrator to create Mr. Big Foot. He's a simple character with simple shapes so sketching was unnecessary.

Here's Shaggy's Lil' Beijing Olympic Employee doing his job. Shaggy also used Illustrator to create him.

Here's Shaggy's beautiful Olympic BG. He mainly used Illustrator, but a touch of Photoshop and Corel Painter.

Characters for clients

Here are some character concepts made this week for someone somewhere that might do something sometime. The dude wearing the ACDC shirt kinda reminds me of Jamie Hewlett's work (just not as awesome). It was an accident, but maybe happened because a week or so ago i was reading an interview with him about his animation he did for the olympics. His work is awesome, and might have been floating around in my empty cranium while i was doodling and found an exit through my nose and ended up on the paper :)

This week...

Hey, it's Shaggy!

This week we were going to start working on an animation with Prez Bush, Dick Cheney, and of course Obama and McCain. It was going to be titled Presidential Olympics and feature the Presidential Olympic event of baby kissing. Baby kissing is a crucial event for the presidential candidates to express their tender side to the American People. With the right technique one can raise their public image, and still secretly taste some delicious babies.

Anyway, Later on Tuesday we changed directions and are putting up a silly Olympic montage this week. Also, Monkey came up with a good way to show the progression of McCain's 4 years in office if he wins. I wont give it away but it should be silly ;) Look for that in a week or so.

Also, if you happen to be a beautiful young lady, live in the Los Angeles area, and are willing to come into our office...We need you to star in a game we are going to create :)

If you're interested, send me a pic of yourself, and i'll get back to you with more info.
email... lgshaggy at gmail dot com

Here are some drawings that were done for the Presidential Olympics animation before it was canned :(




have a great weekend!
-shaggy

Story Boards and Artwork...finaly another post

Howdy, It's Shaggy.

Recently we had someone leave a comment about our lack of posting. I'm here to apologize and let you know that its all LaBamba's fault. Its a long story but basically it boils down to him just being WAY TOO SPICY! Oh wait thats not it. We're just overworked so much that by the time we are done drawing and animating our arms are nothing more than worn down bloody stumps...which makes it hard to blog. Either that or we are just kinda lazy...which also make it hard to blog, or do just about anything. So thank you anonymous person (who very well could be LG's very own Joe'zee) for inspiring us to blog once again!

I Put together a few pieces from our last two animations... "Hulk Smash Energy Drink" and "The 5 Most Awkward Koolaid Ads" (check out the final pieces by clicking the links)

Here are the rough animatics I put together in around 2 days each.





While I was creating the rough animatics, Everyone else began the artwork. Here are some ink concepts and final artwork for the Hulk piece created by Joe'zee.



We created Hulk Smash from start to finish in one crazy week. Koolaid was spread out a bit due to other bidness stuff getting in the way. So what happened was all the artwork was created a week before hand and then last week Cabana Boy and I animated it all and put it together in 3 wonderful days.

Hope you all had a wonderful 4th!
-Shaggy

David Archuleta

Shaggy here,

So midday Tuesday of this week we thought up an animation of American Idol's, David Archuleta. We're going to be rushing to get it done by Friday, but all should go well. The best part about this animation is I'm out of town Friday so I dont have to deal with putting it together!

Basically, it was inspired off of the vulture in Bugs Bunny. Seacrest is going to ask David some fairly basic questions and David is going to get all bashful. What an adorable kid he is :)

LaBamba, once again did some great bodies for the characters. The way we are setting them up is creating most of the art in Adobe Illustrator and importing it into flash. Thats the typical way we do things here. All Davids blinks, mouths, arms, and poses are drawn out first and illustrated. Then they are set up in flash for animation.

Obama and Hillary

Hey, its Shaggy :)

This week we are working on a ridiculous piece called "Things You'll Never See" staring Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. To spoil it for you, they end up making out. Anyway, this is the new style we are going to try for the majority of our pieces. Its a bit simpler looking so adding new parts on the fly in flash shouldn't be so daunting and time consuming. Hopefully, this will add to the fluidity of our animations. Labamba and I had a week to create this piece, from the idea stage to the final product.

Here are the finals.

Labamba created the bodies and colored Hillary's head. I colored Obama's head

Here are the sketches I did of their faces

check it out here!

Flash Animation Extensions

Howdy friends, Its Shaggy.

So last post I mentioned fixing some problems in our work flow. One thing we are going to make use of is Flash's wonderful Extensions Manager. Basically this is a feature where independent actionscript programmers can write bits of code to help Flash users automate certain tasks and perform features flash doesn't have. Sounds like it's just a way for Adobe to not have to program certain things themselves, because some of these extensions fix some pretty obvious and annoying problems ;)

Here are the ones we are going to be using on a regular basis and links to where you can find them. Most are free but some cost a few bucks.

Enter Graphic at Current Frame - Author: Dave Logan - If you're on frame 300 in your root layer and double click into a animated graphic of a character, it normally brings you back to frame 1 of that graphic. this is incredibly annoying and a huge waste of time. By using the "Enter Graphic at Current Frame" extension, it will keep you at the same frame you were on before you entered the graphic. We assigned a Shortcut for this extension to the
" ` " key, which is the key above the "tab" key.

Anim Slider - Author: Warren Fuller - This extension is useful for scrolling thru a graphics internal timeline. It's really helpful for mouth animation and changing out hands. Instead of creating a bunch of different hand graphics that swap out in place, you can put them all in one graphic on different frames. Then all you have to do is select the characters hand and scrub thru the "Anim Slider's" timeline until you find the one you like. It basically does the same thing as typing a frame # into the properties panel. Very useful.

Keyframe Jumper - Author: Dave Logan - This feature jumps forward and backwards to the next keyframe. We assigned it to the ";" and " ' " keys because they are just above the keys that move you forward one frame on the timeline. This is useful for quickly checking your blocked animation poses.

Multi Swap - Author: Dave Wolf - This gives you the option of selecting as many symbols as you want and swapping them all out for a different graphic. One use is for changing out a hand to a different one after the animation has been completed.

Search and Replace - Author: Dave Wolf - This changes searched words in you library to something new. Just a good renaming extension :)

There are a few others as well but those are the ones we will be using most often. Make sure to check out all the other extensions these fine fellas created because there are a lot of other good ones. Another good spot to find some extensions is at the Adobe Exchange site.

-shaggy

An LG animation on TV?

Holy smokes! Its been a while since our last post. I'm afraid our blog traffic has dropped from 5 to 2 visitors! Crap! Ok shaggy, if ever there was a time to bring out the most amazing, sure fire content piece, now is the time! (when I'm in a high pressure situation i usually talk to myself in the third person) Alright, you need something drastic to post and boobies just wont cut it. I mean check out this comment on one of our last pieces featuring boobs!

"Seriously! Enough with the fucking boob shit. You guys don't talk about anything but tits anymore. The humor is juvenile, the voices are pathetic and this obsession with tits is just getting awkward. It's like listening to a virgin go on and on about all the sex he's had, to cover up the fact he's gay. Fire your comic writers and hire some new ones. This was cool in 98, but it's 2007, GET WITH THE TIMES!"

Obviously boobs are so 1998. Seems like Shaggy's screwed. I guess he will just have to tell you about his week at LG...

So, we have been working some nutty hours lately for an animation we are trying to get on TV! We've just begun the actual production of it and are in the process of creating all the artwork. Just recently we've finished up the storyboards and added the voice over audio to it. We brought in some amazing voice tallent! Tom Kenny and Tara Strong are the two most familiar ones! Nothing but the best in the biz for us! They all did an amazing job.

Here are some final backgrounds for the piece that Labamba and I created. They were all sketched in Photoshop with a Wacom Tablet and colored in Adobe Illustrator. Our last couple blog posts about background concepts were an attempt to come up with a look for this pilot animation. ( 1, 2)

Next week we will post the characters that JoeZee designed and Cabana Boy and Natty Red helped Illustrate. They are friggin' sweet!

establishing shot of the island off the coast of Maine (sketch: shaggy illustration: labamba)

A dock where the first shot takes place (sketch: shaggy illustration: labamba character: joezee)

Dining room. (sketch: shaggy illustration: labamba characters: joezee)

Zack's rundown new school. (sketch: shaggy illustration: shaggy character: joezee)

Restaurant (sketch: shaggy illustration: shaggy)

Another Background Concept

We've been working on creating a background style for an animaiton we are going to begin but havn't been having much luck. Most the artists have been taking a crack at it so far, but we havnt found a style that fits. The problem has been that we've been adding too much detail and trying to come up with something interesting and unique. Normally that would be awesome, but we have some stylized characters, and we dont want to distract the viewer with some busy backgrounds.



This background uses the same line quality and keeps the detail fairly low. We experimented with different colors but, the Boss wants a "Simpsons" look, so we are going with the bright pastel colors.



Later Ill post some of the finished background concepts.

This is another video of me illustrating it! Snapz Pro is a sweet program :) I'm sure Ill continue to bore you with vids like this! Maybe one day I'll add the video thats not sped up. Exciting! A full three and a half hours of slow paced illustrating fun!

Background Concept

Here is a background concept style for a pilot we're going to be pumping out in the next month or so. It still has a little ways to go as far as looks though. I just don't think its there yet. Anyway, I recorded myself illustrating it! Sweet. It's recorded at real time. I'm actually half cyborg and can work that fast! Sweet. Plus all I need is this goo that tastes like baby food to keep me functioning.


The thing that sucks about this video is that I didn't start it until I already illustrated the bluff on the left, AND, the video of me completing it...got corrupted and didn't save :( So its just the middle of the drawing. However, you'll still get an idea of the process, maybe. It's all done in illustrator.

Celebrity Telenovela!

This week we are hoping to finally finish our fun new animation "Celebrity Telenovelas". Here's a screen shot of one of the many scenes. Shaggy created Sean Connery and his hoes, and Natty Red created the background. This should be fun so stay tuned!

Pee Wee and the Leprechaun!

Sorry its been so long since our last post. Busy we have been with a bunch of pitches the last two weeks. However, this week we're stepping aside to bring you a horrible tale of the worst accident ever seen! There was a sound like a garbage truck...DROPPED OFF THE EMPIRE STATE BUILDING! The Angry Lep tells Pee Wee of this twisted tale!

Here is some art work we just completed.

Monique Version 2

Howdy, So over the past few weeks, we here at the office have been honing our halo skills in preparation for the launch of Halo 3. Nearly every day at lunch we hook up the projector and get our asses whooped by Labamba. You see Labamba doesn't spend his free time going on walks, taking time to smell the flowers, or sitting back and just being...he spends his time walking through the halo maps, finding the best vantage point to surprise attack you and then t-bag your body all while yelling "Ownage, OWNAGE!" Most of us here have learned to deal with it...all except our video editor. I'm kinda worried one day Labamba's not going to come into work and our video guy will arrive with a big crazy grin and some blood splattered across his cheek that, when asked about it, he will disregard it as some careless ketchup splatter from his morning hash browns.

Anyway, on to the posting. A while back we posted a drawing JoeZee did of Monique. Well, things were postponed for a while, but we finally came back to her and changed some things around. She came out a bit cuter and instead of being at school we put her on a train. JoeZee did the sketch of Monique, and I colored her and created the BG. These are two different BG styles she is set in. Were leaning toward the first one.

Britney Spears

So Britney did what seemed to be a half sedated performance at the VMAs a couple days ago. Of course that means we here at Liquid Generation have to cover it ASAP! For some reason Britney has always given us a hard time to draw and this week was no exception :( Anyway, here are some attempts I did...

(this is the one we decided on)



Thats all I'm willing to post because they get worse and worse from here on :)

Party Foul Game Layout

So this week we have all been either creating new games or making new version of old ones. I've been working on this Party Foul game. Basically the way it works is you hear an audio clip, then you have to guess which movie it came from. After you guess you get to see the movie clip that goes along with the audio (similar to who farted)

Here are some scribbles i made while coming up with the idea...



And here is a rough idea of what its kinda gonna look like when its done...
The shatter was done in Maya using its cool physics feature. It takes a lot of tweaking to do pretty much anything in Maya (especially since my knowledge is limited) but its fun and looks cool :) The pic of my bearded dragon Maldune is where the Video will go.

If you're importing an image sequence into Flash, there is no way to lay the images out on the time line on a single layer easily. Flash allows you to distribute the images to layers, but after that you have to pull each one onto a single layer separately. Anyway, I found an awesome flash extension on Adobe's exchange page to fix this :) click here to check it out!

Bikini Wax Sabotage

So here is an animation I'm working on for an upcoming Liquid Generation Sabotage. It's pretty fun because it involves a little more traditional animation than we usually do here because of time constraints. In case you didn't notice, the physics on this beach in most cases is fairly normal, except when applied to women's breasts, then it's more like she's walking on the moon ;)

If anyone knows of a free and simple program to convert flash files into a screen saver, let me know in the comments and Ill post a screen saver of this animation.

Pop Culture Quiz Layout

Sorry it has been a while since the last post. Last week we were working some late hours to animate How to get into a Celebrity Nightclub. This week, however, we're not doing CRAP! Keeeeeding, I'm Keeeeeeding! Everyone is pretty much doing something different. Natty Red is working on her wizardry, Cabana Boy is practicing his sniping with the help of LaBamba's expertise, Bear Toes is off clawing the LA river is search for salmon, JoeZee tried to push him off some logs into the river but was attacked by some spartans, check the footage here...and I like blue cheese.

Anyway, here is a screen shot of LG's Ultimate Pop Culture Quiz I'm working on. One is the black and white scan, the other is after it has been brought into Adobe Illustrator using the live trace option, and some color has been added. Can you guess who the inspiration came from? I'll give you a hint...James Jarvis.

JoeZee has been doing some sketches for another news related piece. Ill post those later. Labamba, Cabana Boy, and Natty Red are making some more sexy girl games like Sex Scene or Murder Scene, Fake or Slutty, Boob Match, etc. for your oogling pleasure, and Bear Toes is working on a Fill in the Blank for The Office.

So thats whats going on here. Have a splendid day.

How to Get Into a Celebrity Club Animatic Storyboards

Here is an animatic Labamba and I did for our animation that's going up next week. It has the same character from our previous piece, Prank, Tuna in the Light switch!

Free Wallpapers! Woo Whooo!

I think we're going to start posting some wallpapers up here for your downloading pleasure :) To kick it off, I thought we'd start with a sexy one. This one is from our beer tapper game! check it out here if you havn't played it yet...

Beer Tapper Gone Wild

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1020x768

1280x1024

Boob Match Layout

Here is a game Im working on doing the design for. Its basically a matching game, but instead of boring random images, you're matching pairs of wonderful breasts!

So anyway, I started with a basic layout and chose some colors after I figured out what will be needed in the game and how the animations will work...



After that, I just mess around untill I get the look I want :) It should be a fun game when its done!

Decepticon'd Board 5

Here is the last board :)

Decepticon'd Board 4

And board 4 follows 3 in most circumstances

Decepticon'd Board 3

Here is Board numero tres

Decepticon'd Board 2

Here is board #2

Decepticon'd Board 1

Here is the first board for Decepticon'd. They aint pretty, but they get the job done :) LaBamba and I pump em out so the art/animation team has some reference. Tomorrow, if we run into some free time and the audio gets done, we'll throw together an animatic. An Animatic is the storyboards timed out with the audio to get a sense of timing for the piece.

Potty Mouth Ninja BG

Here is a test of the background art from Potty Mouth Ninja. The water, bridges, rocks and bushes have been made to tile. Lets just hope our programmers have the time to put it all in :)

The art was all done is Corel Painter with some Photoshop tweaks.

It should be a pretty sweet game. Look for it at your friendly liquidgeneration web center.