No, this is not a music game journal. It's more of an idea or two i have in mind. Most of these happen to me while I'm sleeping. Whilst it's inconvenient i wake up at times like these to storyboard them before these ideas make their way quietly to the nearest crapper and accidentally pull the flush chain.

This idea is just like many other ideas that float into my head: Sonic and Tails running through zones to some musical piece I've recently become obsessed with. Last time this happened it was thanks to a song called Onihime...

This time however, the Guitar Freaks and Drummania slot machines of fate have decided that i would fall madly in love with Concertino in Blue.

Why, you may ask? Because it's random. The notes are ridiculously fast and the drums are outright chaotic. It's the level of precise execution needed for the author musician to put that piece together that made me appreciate the song so much. That and i just like tunes with a mix of instruments that play really slick tunes of that kind. Anyway, after an endless night of me practicing to survive the song on the highest possible difficulty without dying somewhere in the middle the brain tends to play it over and over again even after the sound drops down to zero volume. Mine does that, blocks all incoming friend conversations irl out and induces me into some sort of dancing sugar plums coma where instead of plums doing the cha-cha with each other i see a blue hedgehog grasshopping across cliffs followed by an orange fox with two tails desperately trying to keep up with him. And so, Concertino in Blue gave me ideas for my next cartoon.

The techincal side of things can seem daunting at times, but for me it's generally like this. I pretty much draw all of my animation cels on A4 paper (yeah, no tablets and no mouse sketching. sue me.), artline them, rub the penciling out, scan them in B&W mode at a 300 dpi resolution and vectorise them directly into Flash. At this point most people who create their art in Illustrator are probably frothing at their mouth thinking i'm a moron. Then again, i did forget to cap hit rating on my mage in World of Warcraft and ended up having a frog resist my fireball. On that note, hear me out.

The reason i trace the bitmap in Flash instead of re-penning everything in illustrator is because i animate entirely frame by frame at a 25 fps rate. On top of that, shading can be a pain in the ass when you have pen lines crossing over each other. They're kinda the only tool i have for shading without headaches. If i go to Illustrator and sit there shading each individual frame then i might as well sit back and watch my facial hair grow one millimeter at the time in slow motion and hope for faster results. I have no idea how Anime artists have the patience to get their shading done in Illustrator, but until i become a LOT more adept at using it for FBF animation, tracing bitmaps into brush shapes and pencil tool shading will work just fine for me, thank you.

Maybe taking a week off drawing up cels for this to hit up Illustrator tutorials might be a good idea.

In the meantime, storyboarding for Concertino in Blue is now complete, at least up to a point where i haven't completely binned my idea. I'll remember it tomorrow and i'll be able to go from there.

Oh yeah, since i can't be bothered producing anything right now here's a pony. Uncolored lazy hedgehog drawing signing out.

Massimo--