PLEASE CRITIQUE, I BEG OF YOU!!! D: I will cry if no one critiques this.

Also, download for animation. >.>

One day as Saku and Gill were walking through a forest, and Gill is prodding Saku in just about as many irksome ways as possible ( he later said, and I quote because I have logs, "You're just fun to irritate, being a ticking time bomb and all." ) Saku ended up in this little monologue here. I don't remember EXACTLY what I was saying, and there's a lot of pauses for effect and enunciation so it's a LITTLE hard to tell but he's saying something along the lines of, "If I make just ONE little slip-up... this WHOLE PLACE could go poof!" Needless to say, Gill was VERY impressed... not.

ONTO THE TECHNICALITIES!!

I had this idea as Saku's motions were VERY clear in my head, and I was suddenly struck with an idea... I saw an animation awhile back here on DA, I don't remember anything about the name, description, anything... it featured a yellow cat in a box attacking its creator, and the DA name always reminded me of "nachos". BUT ANWAY- so THAT train of thought went to FFVII AC, the Matrix, Gulliver's Travels, and other such animated goodness and CGI that took an initial actor and then worked a character over the base.

The day prior, or maybe a few days, a friend of mine had asked to share a webcam conversation. I'd hesitated until I remembered my new computer had a built-in webcam, and thinking on this I thought, "Great! I'll record myself acting out the scene and TRACE MYSELF!!" Except... Saku looks very different than me, but that's beside the point.

So I spent several hours trying to find a program that would capture the video clip, or convert it to a .avi or other format. And then I remembered, this computer doesn't have Flash! AUGH. However! My ollld version of PaintShopPro ( 7, anniversary edition ) had a special animation program tacked on. Great! I was able to FINALLY record into a .avi format and drag that into Jasc Animation Shop. I went to start tracing over it... to realize that the tools here were PAINFULLY limited.

I pondered... and pondered... Ah! The GIMP! So eventually I had a three-layer layout. The webcam capture, for whatever reason, took two frames at a time so every other frame I improvised by taking the two frames I was transitioning between, setting one to 50% opacity and finding a nice midpoint between the two. The top layer was a blank, white layer at about 60-70% opacity So, I would copy a frame of the original video recoding I made of myself off of the animation shop, bring it into GIMP, configure it nicely, improvise and / or trace, copy / paste the completed sketch to the animation, repeat...

All in all this took about a day and a half to make. It runs 136 frames, for about 18 seconds if I did my math right. 10 frames per second, I think? 135 frames of animation, and a single frame held at the end for... 5 seconds, I think.

For the ending I wanted something other than "The End" or "Fin", and I found a font that looks REALLY similar to how I imagine Saku's handwriting... so I just threw something in there that sounded like something he would say.

NOTE: I am not coloring this. Not now, at least. It's simply too small - I'd either have to be anally perfectionist about it all to fit in all the details, or find some way to miraculously double the size of the entire animation without pixelating the line art.