The Blams of Time

I decided to work on some art to help move the cog wheels of Clock Day.

Clock Day is celebrated every 15th of August (since 2001) on Newgrounds. It started when a user named StrawberryClock turned in his flash submission which contained merely the letter “B.” This submission, as much as it was blammed, withstood the blams of time and has churned out an Internet subculture. From these bytes of silliness grew the phenomenon of the creative Clock Crew.

According to history books, before StrawberryClock submitted “B,” he turned in “A” which was blammed to the brink of oblivion. Thus, my project is based on that submission by StrawberyClock.

It’s a short animation that personifies the letter “A” and A’s bleak, short-lived future it faced by the forces that bind Newgrounds.

Below are some of the pre-production works that went into this project. Enjoy!

First, I started off by penciling some basic shapes to get a good feel for the character and simplify his figure.

Upon nailing down the final design, I decided to go straight ahead and not do the turnarounds, something I essentially do on all projects.

After thumbnailing the concept storyboard, I dove right into a tight animatic with Jedadiah’s Pardon? (Theme) from the Audio Portal. Songs that didn’t make it into the list or were dropped last minute are the following; a salute to these talented audio slaves:

CJ’s: Ghosts of the Past
DanPaladin’s: PEAR
Zeke30695′s: Lilium (Music Box)
Jedadiah’s: Reprise and Finale

The Clock Crew in the mean time have finalized on this year’s preloader, which I’ve modified to fit my animation.

Getting to the end of this post, I had fun working on this project. The total time it took me from script to screen was approximately 12 hours, broken over a few nights. Getting technical, this animation was made in Flash CS3 (bloody thing crashed a lot of times), the background texture is from CGTextures.com which is a collective maintained by Marcel Vijfwinkel, also used Photoshop for editing and optimizing the final image. Audacity was the weapon of choice for sound editing.

I’m submitting the finished animation this Saturday to Newgrounds and by next week, it will go up on thedevilsgarage.com too. So for now, I shall leave you with two stills from the animation.

Shout-out to Sean “Chains” Mckenzie who helped me out with that strange language called ActionScript.

Update: Death of “A” has been featured on the Newgrounds homepage! It got 15,000 hits in the first 24 hours; most excellent!