@adamSongbird - @Aalasteir (Q) - Index
Q: What was your pipeline for creating Aye!! Pizoozo!
I did some quick boards in Clip Studio Paint, but I did most of the animation work in Procreate Dreams on the iPad. It's a severely flawed piece of software, but it worked well for this looser kind of style I decided to try out. Although one of Dreams's "quirks" -- the variable line resolution based on how zoomed in or out you are while drawing, which I was unaware of at first -- unfortunately resulted in me having to go back and redraw a bunch of frames. I made the music using Furnace, a chiptune tracker with SNES-style soundfonts.
Q: What was your process for further realizing what about making art brings you joy?
I think around 2020 or so -- whatever went on then -- I had time to really delve into my old work I made as a kid and as a teenager and I think really zero in what I loved about those old pieces, as technically scruffy as they may have been, and also I think just better get in touch with myself and how to express these parts of me I liked better in a piece of art. Just things like the memory of how much I enjoyed sitting at a table as a kid with a blank piece of paper in front of me and boldly colored markers or colored pencils... things like that.
Q: What is the story behind Love is Lunch?
I think around 2020 or so -- whatever went on then -- I had time to really delve into my old work I made as a kid and as a teenager and I think really zero in what I loved about those old pieces, as technically scruffy as they may have been, and also I think just better get in touch with myself and how to express these parts of me I liked better in a piece of art. Just things like the memory of how much I enjoyed sitting at a table as a kid with a blank piece of paper in front of me and boldly colored markers or colored pencils... things like that.
Q: What was the inspiration for Those Pesky Beetles!
So both Love is Lunch and Those Pesky Beetles! were created specifically for a little animation festival called Loopdeloop. There was another piece of animation I made before either of those called 'Toy Robot', too, which isn't on NG. It was -- at the time -- a Los Angeles thing where animators submitted little or sometimes not-so-little looping animations based on a theme, within a month or so.
For 'Love is Lunch' the theme was 'Love is Love' -- I didn't want to make a super short loop, so I envisioned a piece where two alien monster ladies expressed their love for each other odd ways, namely feeding each other strange objects. I figured most couples in private probably have these goofy idiosyncratic expressions of love language for one another, the kind that probably wouldn't make sense to anyone outside of the relationship, but doesn't have to, the short was kind of an homage to that I guess. I originally wanted it to keep building in weirdness over the course of the movie, but it got simplified and streamlined down to what it is for the sake of time, it was a little too ambitious to get done in a month or however long I had to create it.
For 'Beetles' the theme was 'insects' if I remember correctly. This one I didn't actually complete in time for the festival. I had been toying with the idea of little dung beetle characters for a while before coming up with this one, so I was happy that I found a way to use them, even if it wasn't part of their originally intended context.
Q: What did you learn from animating for Ollie & Scoops Episode 8: Warm Cream
I actually worked on five episodes of Ollie & Scoops: episodes 3, 5, 6, 7 and 8 altogether. The team were sharing social media handles with each other sometime before episode 8 dropped I think, I shared my NG handle and whomever was in charge of uploading the cartoon was kind enough to add me in to the little personnel section. It was a fun series to animate for because the cartoony style gelled well with my own, and we were allowed to exercise a decent level of creativity and personal pizzazz to how we animated our shots (within reason). It was a good means of trying new things and challenging myself as an animator, although sometimes we just had to finish a shot quickly and efficiently as well.
Q: Tutorials and art resources you would recommend?
There's a lot out there, I'd say just find someone who does the kind of thing you'd like to do, or at least someone who explains it in a way that makes sense to you. If I'm being honest I don't spend a whole lot of time studying art resources or references these days unless I need to figure something out for a specific, present use. I do have a video of Bob Clampett's 'Kitty Kornered' on hand that I'd occasionally go through and freeze frame when trying to figure out how they did certain "cartoony" feeling effects. Doing stuff like that can be helpful.
Q: What are your favourite Nintendo games, and why?
Most of my favorites were from the SNES era. Super Mario World is very nostalgic -- probably the first game I ever pined for seeing it on display at department stores, and the most enchanting -- and Earthbound is very special to me for maybe more complicated reasons. In addition to just loving the feel and aesthetic of Earthbound, it also came into my life at a time when I felt like I was transitioning out of childhood into adolescence, and the game felt like it represented that in a lot of ways, but in a way that was weird and beautiful and warm.
Q: What makes a video game, retro? And why do you think retro gaming appeals to you?
I mean it was literally the era I grew up in, so personal nostalgia plays a pretty big role. I often perceive my childhood, not just now but even as it was happening, as revolving around video games, which game I was playing at the time, or which game I was waiting to get for Christmas for what seemed like forever. By the time I was a teenager I was already missing certain things, and I started going back and looking for older games I'd missed out on, or rented but never bought. Collecting old games was a lot cheaper at the time, thankfully.
Q: How did you get interested in One Piece?
There was some sort of pipeline that led me from playing through Dragon Quest 11 to rewatching all of Dragonball to One Piece. I think the former things eased me back into realizing I could still appreciate long-form media as an adult, which made it easier to finally jump into One Piece, but it'd caught me eye repeatedly over the years beforehand. Now I'm obsessed, it's the best. Up there with Nintendo for me.
Q: What do you think about anime?
I loved it as a kid; I watched Sailor Moon and Dragonball Z and my older sister would bring home VHS tapes of all sorts of strange and wondrous cartoons from Japan. I think it started to feel stigmatized during my teenage years, and I guess maybe I convinced myself that it wasn't as good as I'd remembered it. But I think as an adult you start worrying less about being seen as some socially mal-adapted "God and anime" kid and I went back and watched the stuff I enjoyed and it held up just fine! The animation scene in Japan is just way more vibrant and complex than it ever really had a chance to be in the US, for a number of reasons.
Q: In what ways has David Lynch influenced your creative process?
I don't know about process, but I just love the weird, mesmerizingly dreamy feel of Lynch's films. Mulholland Drive really got into my head, and really reshaped how I saw the medium. I'd like to capture some small semblance of that essence, ideally, but I make very different things I think.
Q: What do you do when times are tough?
Something. Always something. Sometimes it's good to withdraw, but never to the point of passivity, especially when others might be relying on you. That also means making time to make the art I want to make, even when I'm exhausted from everything else, because I know that if I don't do that now I might not ever.