Race to the Finish! Also Capitalism!

Inking is now under way on "Advent of Sock," penciling having been completed a few days ago! It's a big one, and I want this done before 2009 so I am going to be going nuts trying to wrap this one up by year's end.

This one is, as I thought, more of a bridge between the first and third parts. However due to massive cliffhanger action at the end, I have also put together a short trailer for the third and concluding installment which will be released with the short.

News of Sock

Last short of the year and boy am I ever dragging my feet (mostly unintentionally). There's been a long series of delays on production but it's well under way now (penciling is maybe possibly somewhere around 50%).

I don't know if I've actually talked about what the deal is with the Sock series yet. Basically, it's always been set to be a trilogy with an ongoing story arc, "Advent of Sock" being the second installment. Herein lies my anxiety for this project, because whereas "Dawn of Sock" and the final chapter are/will be mostly self contained stories, Advent is more of a bridge between the two. It has it's own story but seems to be mostly concerned with setting up for the finale. More Sock has been the most consistent request I've received since I started animating and I feel expectations are a bit high (something I haven't really had to deal with with other series). Hopefully it will meet all of these and surpass them. Here's hoping (and working really freaking hard to do so). 

Less complaining! What I can concretely say about this: Whereas "Dawn" was more centered around Sock's owner, this chapter focuses a lot more on Sock and the underworld. Additionally, Sulek is returning to do the score for this one with a brand new song entitled "Nothing At All."

I'm really pushing to have this out sometime in December, as I need as much time as I can to get started on the next Valentine's Day video which I rather need to have done by that day. 

Wooo business! Let's have a party! What's that smell? Oh, the stress cake is on fire!

PARADE TIME

14 straight hours of editing and explosive food poisoning later:

IT'S DONE.

7 minutes and 50 seconds. Lots of frames. 20 layers of audio.

Multiple epic explosion filled battles. 3 rampages.

Late Night Editing Dinner - Cocoa Puffs WITH MARSHMALLOWS 

WHAT

The pre-release for this site and YouTube is online, but it'll be a week or so until the site is back at 100% and the NewGrounds release is compiled. Then it's time to work on the game a little more, and finally to start Advent of Sock at last. 

The homestretch! That sounds kinda creepy!

SuperVillain IV has finally finished the animation stage. I am not half delusional from the last week's inconstant trickle of sleep. My computer is coated in lead and other coloring implement residue. Anyways.

Filming starts soon (Friday?) if my camera decides it has enough fight left in it for getting through these odd couple thousand of frames or so. I attempted to start filming today, but it insisted on zooming inwards constantly. I told it not to and it threw a fit. If it insists on being generally senile throughout tomorrow, I'm probably going to have to shell out for a new one which could delay the release again. I wish there was, along with bold and italics, an agonized, blood dripping, horrifying angstmuffin emphasis that I could have put 'again' into. Graghhhhh. The only plus to the delay is that I can start working on the new Sock short in the meantime.

Speaking of delays, I worked myself to death this week and I have no comics for next week. I won't put up a hiatus thing quite yet, they may still show up at my door. With a warm pizza. And a hug.

Still chugging along!

Right, I feel bad for unintentionally becoming one of those people who always saying they're working but never have anything to show. Rest assured, I'm pumping all my free time into these upcoming projects, however they are numerous and are all clogging up at the exit of the creationering machine... is that my brain? Maybe the lack of updates is because it sounds like I should be having a stroke. Huh.

'SuperVillain IV' is beyond massive. It's a solid 30% bigger than the previous larger projects and after I finished 'Perform' I've been working harder on coloring and making things look shiny, hence another delay as I'm no longer chicken scrawling with some Crayolas. I am a sixth of the way through coloring, but I haven't gotten to work for awhile on that because of the other projects.

Komix Games and I are teaming up to do a SpermRider game as previously rumored. I can't honestly give a release date for this, especially because I'm not the one doing all the programming so I have little idea of how far we've got to go. But I can say that Komix is a fantastic programmer and this is shaping up to be a very addictive little game. 

Currently working on background art and explosion particles.

And finally, the week hiatus on the comic gave me time to whip up a short 6 page graphic novel type story called 'Glucosian Shank' which will go up on Friday in time for the 300th Tales of BarfQuestion webcomic. Wooooo.

In summation, there will be lots of stuff, round about soonish. Not updating sucks, but the suckage should soon be evaporating into a sunrise of happy awesome new content.

PHWWWOOAAARRRR

Holy Bejezus this movie is long. See you in 18 years.

Comicky Business

Tales of BarfQuestion now has an official comic book out! This is 200 pages of web content as well as completely unseen exclusive features for $19.99!

THE COMIC

In the last few weeks my imagination threw a tantrum and I decided to stop the webcomic and stick up an alternate project I was working on. However it takes 10x the work to update that comic twice a week than it does to do Tales of BarfQuestion 5x a week. Right now the monster that is SuperVillain 4 is taking up all my time, but I intend to start doing the regular comic again as soon as possible, most probably on the 14th. So stay tuned dammit!

SUPERVILLAIN IV

Is bloody ginormous. The first of two fight scenes has a higher frame count than the whole of SuperVillain 3. On top of this, there is an actual multi-dimensionalish story with character development (!) that has to be conveyed which adds to it. This will probably be surpassing all other projects in terms of frames and work involved, so I will be insanely busy as I still want to get Advent of Sock and the winter holidays special out this year as well as two top secret projects (which are secret because I have no guarantee that they'll pan out). 

I'll be posting tons of making of materials and stuff in the blog once it's released, and you can also expect two new SV shirt designs (actual detailed ones this time), a free downloadable SuperVillain stencil for making your own box/graffiti, and Sulek's SuperVillain EP which contains previously unreleased music from the SuperVillain shorts as well as new music made for the currently under production film.

TL;DR- I'm busy, there's SuperVillain stuff coming, and the comic's coming back Monday probably.

Back to BarfQuestion

Perform

And after a couple months of hard labor, the new, and final commission piece for a long, long time is here! I'm very pleased with it; visually this was a series of experiments and ventures into new territory and it has all paid off quite well, in my opinion. Monarch, the band behind the music, was also extremely awesome to work with and you should check them out (click).

It's hit me now that it's over halfway into 2008 now and I've only done one piece of completely original work. Commission work is good for making new connections and broadening your horizons, but both of these new pieces (You Don't Wanna Leave, Perform) are kind of hybrids and I miss doing 100% my thing. This isn't bad, but I miss my little BarfQuestion universe.

Concept art for SuperVillain IV

The rest of the year is back to regular BarfQuestion programming, and am I ever excited. This next week or so is going towards getting the new BarfQuestion comics compilation book out to the printers. From there the rest of the year will see, for sure, SuperVillain IV and Advent of Sock. The frame count on all of these new ones is rising so fast that the number of shorts I can put out has been decreased dramatically. However I also want a small project to accompany each of these, which I will utilize by getting some adventure games together to go on the games page I keep talking about but never doing.

More on that later, better get back to the book.

Next Up

The 2008 Wisconsin Film Festival was awesome. Kind of surreal seeing something I had only previously seen on the internet exploded one million percent and projected on the big screen. 

In other bragging related news, the new Mike Mangione video is doing very well; it's been on the front page of NewGrounds.com for about a week now and took the daily first and weekly third place awards. 

Anyways!

Pre-production is almost finished for the next piece, which is another commissioned music video. This time it's for the very awesome Monarch, and I'll be doing a video for their song "Perform." It's a darker noir piece like "Monarch" and "the Closing Hour," but it's shaping up to be more uplifting and positive because for once it's not about some hopeless guy slowly dying because of a heartless corporation. Yay!

Below are a couple conceptual sketches.

2008 Relaunch!

Barfquestion.com is now officially in flash with a bunch of snazzy features and content! Plus check out the store for a ton of new merch, including a line of Adventure Toast products just in time for the new Mike Mangione music video!

I upped the number of frames I drew for each sequence for this one, which is something I plan to continue to do because, you know, quality and all that. However updates will be a little more sparse just because I'm taking my time more. Anyways, the new video was fun but I'm looking forward to having more creative control. This one just seems a little bland in certain aspects, but hopefully that's just me. The next project is another music video, but I am super excited and have some really exciting plans for it. I'll be posting sketches and previews as I go.

Anyways, it's off to Madison for the Wisconsin Film Festival! If you're in town, swing by on Saturday and catch "the Closing Hour" on the big screen!

Midupdate Update

Well, I kind of forgot to do that update thing in February. My computer died, and things have been generally hectic and stressful due to me undergoing the plot of VoyageWaffle in real life. If you missed the new Valentine's Day toon, it's been up for... awhile. It was actually completed during January, because all of February and March have so far gone into creating the huge monster of a music video that is "You Don't Wanna Leave." 

The video, due to reasons of girth, has been split into six production blocks, each with about as many frames as SuperVillain II. Blocks one through five are finally complete, as of just a few minutes ago, leaving only the last one to be penciled, inked, and colored. I hope to have this done within two weeks, and the video plus the site relaunch before April hits. Hmm. I smell unfeasibility, but I never much cared about that anyways.

A sneak peek at just a fragment of the new main page! Anyways, in other oldish news, the Closing Hour is not only showing at the 2008 Wisconsin Film Festival, but it also took home one of the eight jury awards for this year! Click here for screening info. 

Also, SuperVillain IV has been pushed back once more as I've been commissioned to do a music video for Monarch. Right after that's done, it'll be time for SuperVillain once again though, with another Sock installment following close behind. I need to be done with this entry now, Blogger is being a dick.

2008 Begins!

I've finally gotten around to starting production on the 2008 range of stuff! I can't guarantee when the first toon will be out, but there will be one on February 14th for sure.
Now, since I'm wasting a lot of time today, here's an in depth look at the upcoming projects! Hopefully redundancy will not be coming to town!

"You Don't Wanna Leave"

Runtime ~ 5 min 30 seconds
This is the second music video I'm doing in conjunction with Mike Mangione's fine group of musicians. The tone's gonna be a little more somber than the previous one, but there will be lots of crazy detailed environments, magic, wonder, monsters, and more. The penciling is just starting on this one, and I'm currently starting off with a scene in which the main character wanders into a village of strange mutated werewolf folk. Anyways, I can guarantee it to be a rich fairy tale of fantasy and self discovery, smack in the middle of suburbia.

"Valentine's Day 2008"

Runtime ~ 2 minutes 15 seconds

I really can't give too much away about this one, especially because it is a gift for someone very special and she is probably reading this right now. I can say, however, that animation on this one has finished and I will be filming and editing it somewhat soon.

"SuperVillain IV"

Runtime ~ No idea, probably in excess of 5 min.
Boy, am I excited to do this one. I have been itching to do this one ever since I finished part three, which although almost entirely intentional, left the character in a very dark light. As previously mentioned, this will continue and conclude the rough story arc of SuperVillain's corruption as a result of exposure to unchecked power. This promises to be an epic exploration of power, the ferocity of religion, and the bouancy of outhouses. Giant religious robot battles ahoy!

"Advent of Sock"

Runtime ~ A kajillion bajillion hours.
Another one I'm dying to get started on. Sock proved to be far more popular than I was expecting, and I'm going all out on this one. All I'm really going to say is that Sock's setting its sights higher as the restless souls of the damned pine to take over the land of the living. You can expect to see a massive coup from the depths of hell, a gigantic demon army onslaught, and Sock engaging a war with the gods themselves. This is uh... going to take forever.

"Sezja"

Runtime~ Six episodes, roughly 5 to 10 minutes in length each.
"Sezja" and I go way back. This was an abandoned comic project from the early 2000's that I ditched because, well, it made no sense and had no plot whatsoever beyond the first few pages. With some heavy storyline retooling, I think I'm ready to try to tell this epic adventure once more. And yes, it's going to be in color, but all I've got right now is a bunch of black and white sketches and images from the original comic series. It'll be a rockin' 18th century British adventure full of necromancy, wanton cricket rampages, and llamas.

Well there you all go, massive post to start off the year. Hopefully that was interesting and not too redundant, but now you know exactly what's coming at chooo. Form of- Lava soup!