Speaking of Happiness
(November, 2005)
This movie, my first animation, might seem a little meaningless unless you know why I made it. Well, that probably wouldn't help anyway.
See I had started visiting a website called Newgrounds which hosted flash animations. They got hundreds of submissions a day, about half of which never made it through "the portal". That being a place where the first few hundred user's ratings of the submitted movie were used to decide whether or not it would be added to the archive. For good reasons many of the rejected shorts were just quick and messy animations. A cute cuddly bear getting shot. Video clips of someone dancing badly to annoying music. And of course, stick fights. A few decently choreographed fights got through, but sometimes it seemed as if there were an underground cult that specialized in doing nothing but submitting simple stick figures beating the crap out of each other.
That's where this short's idea came from. I don't necessarily hate stick fighting, it can be strangely entertaining in it's more competent incarnations, I just thought I'd poke a little fun at them via a more dimensional character (drawn to be no one in particular). Also, along with my Blackaby guest strip, this was a little bit of throw away practice after getting a drawing tablet for the first time.
So yes, this was done in flash, drawn frame by frame, or fbf as they say. It took a few days (fine, weeks), but it's ok considering I've never drawn anything for animation before.
( minutes, seconds).
(Macromedia flash required of course)
