Rombies is coming.

Info on the upcoming Gestalt Publishing Rombies series on writer Tom Taylor's site and a new site for Rombies here. Things are moving forward. please be patient, I assure you it will be worth the wait (although I can't wait for it either!). UPDATE; yup, thats the same pic on the screen on the Cintiq in the post below.

Tokyo Anime Fair 2010 (Megapost)

The 2010 Tokyo Anime Fair is over now but Gestalt Publishing was represented on the floor by myself and a small entourage of Gestalt for-a-day people (no one needed to know). Now that the carnage is over I can report on what we saw there.

Buyers were rife on the floor, people representing foreign companies that redistribute films in English. But I wasn't there for that. I was invited by the super nice people from usagio and got to meet a heap of talented people in Animation, Motion Graphics, Design, Illustration etc. etc...

On top of Usagio and their whimsical and cute style, I would like to introduce a few of the people that I met which I am sure are bound to impress and inspire;

Takahashi Koya's works in particular impressed me a great deal. The animation in his showreel is made completely in After Effects. Outta the box with no plugins. Really, you have to watch it.

Ohrys bird/ Anime Tronica Co. Ltd. are fantastic. Musicians who made their own music videos, found they were so good at it that they started making more for other bands. And then animation for Ad agencies and so on and so forth. Their story is one I love.

Ishikawa holdings have been making some great animations some of which I had seen a year or so ago on niko niko douga (Japanese YouTube with more wtf) while not the funniest, this 'advertisement' for The Grand Guardian Tokyo mansion (apartments) I can't forget.

There are many more people I met and hope to keep in touch with, but for now lets move on to other aspects of the Anime Fair. Amongst all of the booths on the floor one in particular stood out shining and bright from the skimpy cosplayers, Animated figures and such. And that booth was the Behemoth booth; the company who brought us Alien Hominid and Castle Crashers

available on Xbox live and coming QUITE soon to Playstation network. Seriously, All gamers  need to get this. Tis' porn. Pure Porn.

I was lucky enough to meet with Dan Paladin - the artist behind Castle Crashers and other great games (pictured above, with dodgy looking me). I told him that his working videos helped inspire me when I was working on SquareEnix stuff. He helped me quite a bit and I think he appreciated me telling him this. These guys are awesome. Seriously awesome, nice hardworking dudes and I wish them the best of luck in the future (not that they need it). 

So he drew me the above picture and I offloaded the Gestalt comics library onto him and then left for more booths. Or to be more correct, collecting loot. And my oh my, there was loot to be had. I ended up with more than I could alone carry. 10 or more DVDs and my personal favorites being some gorgeous oversized Studio 4˚C (who worked on the Animatrix for those un-familar with Anime - and their AWESOME work) Genius Party books.

The experience of the Tokyo Anime Fair was great and the contacts made were... well, how can you measure something like this? I will definitely be attending next year and feel as though I have enough inspiration (and freebies) to last till then. TAF2011? I recommend it.

Rombies concept art

A little something I found on my HD this morning. Rombies issue 0 has been out for a couple of weeks now and I thought why not show this concept art?Tom Taylor named this guy after Gestalt's editor Wolfgang Bylsma and although never written in the book, it definitely kept things amusing for me as I poured over Tom's script. Possibly it was named thusly to remind him to give a real name at a later date. Possibly.

Yongen - Give me your Sun, Give me your Moon promotional video

Here we have it, The final product. the sum of the last 2 months worth of sleepless nights. The promotional video for Yongen's new album (itunes link) - Give me your Sun, Give me your Moon.

Yongen have made such great music on this album and we really felt that the world of Vowels fit it nicely. But now you can decide for yourselves. Please watch and let me know what you think. I have written scenarios for the the entire album (!) and if possible,would like to animate the whole thing. Make a movie of sorts out of it.

A big special thanks and sloppy wet kiss must go to Aim at Entertainment for assisting with 3D, helping me polish my animation and for their great technical knowledge. The clip wouldn't be half as good if they weren't there to help me.

You can listen to more of Yongen's music here. I was also art director on the site and yes, that is again, the world of Vowels making an appearance there. I am very happy that the two worlds have met and mesh so well (I personally want to see what happens in the next video, even if I know whats going to happen). ok... next project...

Here's a little clip that I put together for the new Gestalt book Flinch (many thanks again to the seriously awesome Detektivbyrån for their fantastic music);



I seriously cant wait to hold this book, its going to be one of the best that Gestalt has produced to date. I love seeing the quality of the books (content and print) get better and better.

Moving away from books and looking back to the digital, here's a screen of the music video I am producing and I should say finishing at the moment;
This was a great project and I hope that there will be more like it to come. I started with a comic book. Not storyboards - very unconventional, I know - but I wanted to keep it in the same vein as the Vowels book. My intention was to make storyboards after that, but the book ended up being used AS the storyboard document.

Next, I scanned the whole book and created a dummy video (I forget the technical term for this, I'm not normally an animation producer) and matched it as nicely as I could to the soundtrack.

We looked over the comic and divided it up into sections or cuts (35 in all) and decided how to tackle each cut. By this stage it was obvious that I needed help and so I was assisted by 3D artists, Animators and designers throughout the project.

Then I had coffee, a lot. 'Cause for two months I didn't sleep, working until about 3-4 in the morning each night. First all BG's were created, then keyframes for animations and then all the tween work (lots and lots of pictures).

Art was all done in Photoshop, animated in After Effects (with the much needed advice of my workmates here at Aim at Entertainment) and composited in imovie (It should be noted that I had access to Final Cut Pro and various other editing tools for this but opted to keep it simple lest I die from stress).

If I do this kind of project again, I will definitely blog about the process I use and progress the project makes. This was finished a month ago but we have been slowly polishing the thing up again and again and again for the bulk of this month and now we have a professional looking Vowels themed Yongen promotional music clip to show you all on the 20th of this month.

Phew~

Halbon, our new game for iPhone & iTouch has just been added to the App store (And the process wasn't even half as painful as I had been hearing about). This is an addictive little game which, again I am pleased with now that it is finished and out in the wild. For people who have the device and are interested, click this link to go right to the App store Halbon page (its on special for its launch) or here for the (English language) website.


Whats cool about this is that is that we already have an update with an added play mode and lite version in development. Even cooler still, is the free web comic that Gestalt comics site will be hosting. It's a lot of giggles and just good fun. More on that as it comes (I have co-written it with Nakatsu-san from Aim at Entertainment who will be illustrating).

Please let me know what you think!

Games - UPDATED

No post for a long time unfortunately. I have been hard at work on a puzzle game at work for the X-box... I do however have a little treat for you all. A previous version of the game exists on the Nintendo DS. You can play the game online (in Japanese) here
the objective is to delete squares of 'yosumin' before the timer runs down. Its a simple game but very addictive.
I am also working on a short comic for Justin Randal and continuing work on my own new book. So there is bound to be some new work appearing here soon. Sorry for the wait. Please enjoy Yosumin until then!

I will try and post more online games here (as - I guess - most of the DS, Wii and other console stuff is only sold in Japan at the moment). So , now I promise games AND artwork...