Get Ready! PlotQuest Episode 1 premieres this Thursday at 7 pm CST on YouTube! Here's a link to the premiere page where you can set a reminder https://youtu.be/vcWMhUVhuvI The animators, voice cast, and I will be on before and during the premiere to chat and answer questions starting at about 6:45. Hope to see you there!

That's right, the long wait is almost over! I'm pleased to announce that on Thursday, May 14th at 7 pm CST Episode 1 of PlotQuest will be released! PlotQuest is an animated series I've been working on with a few of my former students and friends. It's been a long road and I'm excited that people will finally get to see the finished version.

Even if you were at the pre-release screening at Archon, there'll be plenty new to see. The final episode features an additional minute of animation and a brand new ending. You're invited to chat with the animators and voice actors at the live premier on YouTube. I'll be sending out a link in the next few days but I wanted to get the news out asap. Hope to see you at the premiere!

Today I'm showing my process for creating an old-school RPG battle screen in Photoshop. As you can see, it's heavily  inspired by games like Final Fantasy IV and Lufia and the Fortress of Doom which were two of my favorites growing up. Apologies for the lack of narration this time. Life has had me really busy the past couple weeks so I didn't have time to record and edit audio. I think it's still helpful even without narration though.

Contents:
(0:00) - Laying out the screen
(2:55) - Outlining the background
(5:22) - Shading the background
(12:02) - Cleaning up the sprites
(20:38) - Adding the menus

Want to know more about this project? Check out popcornsundae.com

Had a great time at the Global Game Jam this past weekend. We made a video game in less than 48 hours! This is just a quick gameplay mock-up. You can download and play the full game here https://globalgamejam.org/2019/games/hannahs-home.

A big shout out to my amazing team, I was super impressed with everyone's talent, drive, and collaborative spirit!

Credits:
Team IDK:)

Programmers: Michael Boal, Emmaline Kelly, Kevin Annen

Artists: Randy Field, Madeline Urback , Gerry Tucker, Brianne Almalvez

Animation: Neko Pilarcik-Tellez

Designers: Matthew Lopez, Maxwell Brady

Sound Design: Maxwell Brady, Gerry Tucker

Sound designs taken from freesounds.org, edited from original content from the following users: qubodup, mattj99, movingplaid, cydon, leszek-szary, motion-s, mmaruska, madamvicious, shadydave, honorhunter, inspectorj, sirkoto51, kfatehi, deathscyp, greenvwbeetle, hullum, vsokorelos, and breviceps

I had the day off yesterday so I decided to carve out a little time to do something different. Between the pixel art and 2d character animation I've been doing a lot of cartoony stuff lately so it was time to dive back into the pseudo-3d world of After Effects particles. I whipped up this little GIF to send to friends and family for the New Year, it was a lot of fun. Happy 2019 everyone!

​This is the first in a series of tutorials I'm doing on my work for the web series, PlotQuest. This one goes over some tricks for creating a quick pixel art look in Photoshop or Clip Studio Paint. So if you've ever wondered how to take a piece of art you've already made and make it look like pixel art without having to actually redraw it as pixel art then you may wanna check it out. 

If you have any questions, comments, or just wanna show off what you've made using this trick please leave a comment. 

More about PlotQuest at http://www.PopcornSundae.com and on the Popcorn Sundae channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5k7XLDT8KRQ-J12TVkRVug

The Popcorn Sundae team and I have been really busy working on the show. Lots of concept art up on our site now. http://www.popcornsundae.com/production-blog

Just a quick holiday sketch inspired by my Thanksgiving.

For the past few months a couple of my former students and I have been working on creating a pilot for an animated series. I can't say too much about it at this point but what I can do is show you a couple shots from the pilot.

We completed the animatic back in January and it debuted at the ARTrepreneures Showcase hosted by the Regional Arts Commission of St. Louis and the Cortex Innovation Community. The animatic was very well received so we decided to move forward with finishing the show. Because this is a passion project right now, we've mainly been doing this in our spare time, however, I'm happy to report that the pilot episode is in final editing at this point and we'll be scheduling a screening soon. More on that as things develop.

Credits:
Me: Animation, Camera, Clean-up & Color, Sound Design, Backgrounds
Pltnm06Ghost: Character Designs, Storyboards, Backgrounds
Tommy Benoist: Storyboards, Clean-up & Color, Backgrounds
Taylor Gooden: Character Designs, Backgrounds
Music: "Nontinde Vendor Theme" by RoccoW