Raven Effects » evil onion

Object(root).evil = true;

snazzyFez — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 17:23:25 +0000

I’ve taken a week off from updating this as I’m trying to catch up with everything that always seems to be barreling down my way.

I’m still working on the new onion story, trying to come up with some new interesting backgrounds – right now, I’m playing with poster ideas, using various sketch software on the iPad to try and come up with something. Hell, I even played with 123D Sculpt to try and make a 3D onion…. that’s not coming out as well as I had hoped. If only I could just sculpt him in real clay, then scan him in. Because, you know, I have access to all that kind of equipment … or even clay. For now, here he is, squashing a flower.

One thing that keeps coming up (thanks in part to Theresa bringing it up on occasion) is, what other kinds of rude things will the evil onion do. She wants him giving the finger. What finger? Do I have to give him arms first?! Will he need legs too? Will he end up looking like Chairface Chippendale, except an onion and not a chair? This is a slippery slope, innit?

Still, today is the first night of class, and I’m going to see where this new batch takes me. Teaching is always an odd thing to me, since I’m working off topics that are very familiar to me, I don’t really feel like I’m teaching as much as I’m just explaining the obvious (yes, I know, obvious to me), but I generally feel that this stuff should be fairly easy to pick up once they give it a chance, and I should be there to just elaborate on the simplicity (or complexity) of the general ideas.

This is my second quarter teaching Flash, and I think it’s going to help me get to the ball rolling faster on the onion. I think I’ll be taking the iPad and sketching during lab time a lot this quarter.

The Evil Onion, revisited

snazzyFez — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 16:00:25 +0000

So I’ve been struggling with what to do with the onion – where do we find the onion, 12 years down the line? Is he still in the suburbs (the most foul and evil place on earth)? Has he turned a new leaf? Given up on his evil ways? Did he turn that leaf back over and go back to being evil? Is there a Mrs. Onion? Does he work in IT? Twelve years later, have his hopes and aspirations been fulfilled?

Fade in, our onion, now an elder statesman in his oniony community, his comfortable life ensured by his misdeeds throughout the years. No. That won’t work. Maybe he’s like other cartoon characters, never aging?

Fade in, the onion sits at a desk. There are posters on the wall behind him, calling for donations, onions smile down from these posters. He’s working for some kind of charity… but what kind?

More later. I think I have the beginnings of a new cartoon finally…

reconstructing the onion

snazzyFez — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 00:21:55 +0000

I’ve come to realize something about this onion. It is, as one of my more blunt students put it, “flat.” Hey, this was 12 years ago! These were simple projects in a simpler time – my god, we were still in awe over Shrek, and the incredible wooden faces the humans in that movie had. So for me to actually fake out some 3D with some simple skewing was pretty cool (for me anyway). With time and wisdom, even I wonder why I didn’t even bother with some gradients to give the illusion of depth.

Still, I was still learning to use Flash, and people were still learning to use “Google” as a verb, so it wasn’t like I had all the resources of the world at my grasp. Not yet anyway. Today, things are a little bit better. The vast resources of the web are easier to find, and most is on YouTube, narrated by 13 year olds. This coincidentally, is how I modified my Nerf Maverick, which I’m apparently no longer allowed to use in night class to shoot college students…

Where was I? Oh, the onion. I’m going to rebuild him. Ground up, which I suppose is how onions go normally. Flash apparently can rotate in 3D, but really, it’s rotating a 2D object in all it’s flattened glory in a 3D space. Apparently I’m going to have to find a new way, and that way may be Photoshop, but who knows. I’ll play with that, and maybe post an image of whatever bit of the onion I’m currently constructing.

Evil Onion ressurection… step 1 – find the offending root

snazzyFez — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 07:25:27 +0000

I’ve been looking through old cds of stuff I backed up ages ago, thanks mostly to Theresa Crout’s insistence. At some point I mentioned making Flash cartoons of the most vile wicked thing that plagues me most every lunchtime – onions.

So, here are two cartoons I made somewhere way back in the foggy days of 2001: On the Road and At Home.

By the way, I have no idea why I gave him fangs. I am however still certain that onions make lousy neighbors.