Mid-2021 Catchup

Dear person reading this. How are you? Are you well? I certainly hope so. Remember: it is important to take care of your physical and mental health at present, do not neglect that.

Alright, onto more prosaic matters – what’s been happening? Well, a fair bit. I guess I can share some work:

Goldfish – Everything Is Virtual

https://www.instagram.com/p/COc4k7gpCFI/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

Goldfish and I launched this NFT on Momint. There were 3 editions, all 3 sold I think, and we didn’t make a fortune but it wasn’t too paltry either. *Momint apparently uses Daicoin which I believe is a lot friendlier to the environment than Ethereum and Bitcoin.

Did most of the drawing in Procreate on iPad, then comp’d it and added more frames of animation and fx in Toon Boom. I have a love/hate relationship with Toon Boom products, sometimes I really enjoy using Harmony and Storyboard Pro, sometimes it drives me up the wall. I really enjoy Procreate though, a friendly app. Toon Boom for me is *not* friendly. Another app I really like is Aseprite for 8bit pixel drawing and animation. That’s a ‘friendly’ app.

The Moths Ep01

The other day, I think it was a weekend day, I had the distinct feeling I had the energy to create something for fun, whether it be a song or a little animated short, but I would only spend an hour on it from start to finish. In the shower earlier in the day I had this idea for The Moths, as a result of thinking of if there was a Moth Mother, she’d probably just be called ‘Moth’. Anyways, this took about 1h15m from start to finish. Will I make more? My buddy and colleague Ryan Van Eyk has written a bunch more episode outlines almost as a joke but they’re great. Maybe I make a movie in 2 hours, I dunno, if the mood strikes maybe I DUNNO BRO.

Song About Angie

https://www.instagram.com/p/CLhayWSJW8G/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

Made this one weekend day.

Song about Mario Bros or something

https://www.instagram.com/p/CQRD5KjpbQA/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

I uh, was testing out some recording stuff and made this.

PicoCad

https://www.instagram.com/p/CP5JLRoJJW1/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

And I made this little Kiffness pixelart homage with a cool little app called ‘PicoCad‘. I drew the sprites in Pixaki on my iPad.

Twende took part in Annecy 2021! I was lucky enough to be invited to France and Annecy with free accommodation, but with the travel conditions, it seemed like a crazy time to travel from South Africa, I can’t get vaccinated yet and that’s one of the conditions, and I would have needed to quarantine for like a week or something on arrival in France, and possibly on the way out too, so one of our producers went luckily.

In other news, my friends Nic Smal and Lucy Heavens have got their show (previously called ‘Donk’) KIFF greenlit by Disney for a full season. This is *AMAZING*. I’ve seen the pilot animatic and it truly stands head and shoulders above anything I’ve seen come from South Africa, either 2D or 3D, in terms of the number of jokes, tightness of delivery, and readiness for an international market. And obviously, I’m super jazzed that they called it KIFF 😀 spreading the word, yo.

Also, most people reading this will already know my brother Dave aka ‘The Kiffness‘ is absolutely nailing it with pretty much everything he produces. I think he had something like 3k YouTube subscribers before lockdown and is now bearing down on 300k (!!!). Incredible. His video songs rack up millions of views online, he gets reposted by the likes of 9Gag and Ryan Gosling and ends up on news channels around the world, and seems to have the secret sauce of secret sauces 😀 Great job boet!! More links to his stuff on his Facebook and website.

Also, been working on some videogame stuff that I’m really jazzed about that’s under NDA.

Ok then, keep well, goodbye.