"Happy 6th Birthday Ninja Spirit!!" Sunday March 15th, 2008

Alright so here is the big Birthday Filler for Ninja Spirit's 6th birthday on the web. I hope you enjoyed it and thought it was pretty neat. I'll break down just how this entire project came into being for you as an additional treat.

First off, my original plan for the birthday filler was to have a lineup of each character and how their looks changed from Chapter One all the way through to Chapter 5. I wanted a long panel of Yuki, Joe, Dave, Tom, and Key. So at this point I started doing the drawings completely from scratch in Photoshop. Right around Thursday I decided that there was simply no time to color all those images which sat around 26 or so. So then I decided to keep everything in black and white, but to use that as an advantage as I could then make animated gifs that would be of a reasonable size. So the plan is now to create smaller panels of each character that animate through their change in looks.

The problem is now that I have an uneven amount of characters to fit in an even number of panels. So basically I then added Julienne to the line up and had to draw her out. I basically finished all the drawing by the end of Thursday and there ended up being 35 images (The final ending used 33). It was definitely weird to go back and redraw some of the old looks of the characters in my current NS style. Joe just looks really weird in the earlier chapters. I did enjoy going back and seeing what the variety of looks I gave Jules. She actually had another look in Chapter 2 when she kept her hair in pigtails for the homecoming game when she first meets Dave. I ended up swapping that out for the hair style she wore when she and Tom invaded the Kawasaki Homecoming Dance. I also had one of Joe from the early panels of Chapter 4 when his hair was a lot more mullet-y then it ended up being later on when I lengthened the front bangs. All in all it was really fun to go back and try and redraw my characters!

So as I was about to pop open ImageReady to create all the animated gifs, I was like ' hey wait a SECOND!! I could use this as the ending animation for the comic!!'. So instead of opening up ImageReady, I booted up Flash and got to work... Mind you this is now midnight of last Friday.

The first hour or so was basically planning out the timing of all the animation. All the images had to show an equal amount of time and so did the fade in and fade outs. I already knew the song I was going to use since I had been planning on an ending animation for a long time now. (I'll go more into the music later.) So once I did all the math by hand on a opened envelop, I started putting everything into Flash and setting up my timelines. You think I got this right on my first try? Pshaw!!

Problem One - The backgrounds are separate from the character images that fade in and out. However when I created the character images I made them on full backgrounds. I saw this problem when I tried animating the first character and I stabbed myself in the eye once I realize what I did. I then spent another hour or so changing all the character images (33 in all) so that everything but the line art would be transparent. I then deleted all the old images in Flash and imported the new ones in. It worked like a charm, but it's now about 3 in the morning on Friday.

Problem Two - Since I did all the math by hand, it would make sense that I totally and completely screwed it up. This is exactly what came to pass. The song was 2 minutes and 20 seconds long. Each second is 30 frames in my Flash animation. My problem was that I counted two minutes as 200 seconds instead of 120. So then about midway through I was like why does it look like I'm running out of time and music to run these animations over? DUH! So then I changed everything, but then I made a simple math error and everything was off by a few seconds. By 5 in the morning I said F myself and did all the calculations in Excel. I would never have a problem with the math again. The lesson as always... I suck.

Problem Three - Time itself. I knew at this point getting the ending done was an impossibility so I stopped work on it and used Rob's Scott Baio fanart as a filler for the weekly update. For those of you who didn't remember, I used Scott Baio as a character in the comic for a gag way back in Chapter One. I never intended on using him again, but Rob always joked that Scott Baio should come back as the main villain of the comic. Had this been a comedy instead of an action comic, I might have done that. Either way I finished the update and went right to bed.

Problem Four - For some unknown reason when I ended up finishing the movie and throwing it up on the web for a test run, the movie was completely out of sync with the music. It played fine on my hard drive, but no dice when viewing it over the web. I changed the music settings in flash and got it to sync better, but I ended up having to adjust the timeline to get it to look right on the web. All in all this was minor, but it was a bitch because there was no rhyme or reason as to why I was having this problem.

Anyway I finished the movie Saturday afternoon and then I figured I would go the whole nine and create that starting page with the Start Button for the movie. I had never done anything like that before and I am happy to say that I was able to figure it out pretty quickly and get it to work right away. As it stands I hope you liked it and it upped your enjoyment of Ninja Spirit. This should also provide a hint for my future project for NS. That's right... an Opening Movie for the comic. It's about half way done and what I have so far is pretty cool. It's a lot more intensive than the ending and when you see it, you'll eventually see why it's taking me forever to finish.

Also a side note on the song. Once I heard the ELLEGARDEN album Koukasen was on, I KNEW this was going to be the ending theme for the comic. Just for the record, this is only the ending theme for the comic for Chapter 5 and beyond. The Opening Theme for the comic is currently "Jitterbug" by ELLEGARDEN. The original Opening and Ending Theme for the comic was "Stay Away" by L'arc~en~Ciel and "Koi ni Ochitara" by Crystal Kay. While the original opening and ending animations will most likely never get made, I did have the image of what they entailed in my mind. The original opening is a bit too busy to describe what is going on, but it focused on showing Yuki, Joe, Tenko and Kelly and later on Dave, Julienne, Tom, and Key. It also featured each of the "bad guys" of each of those chapters in the chorus of the song. The original ending animation was going to be done from Key's perspective and pretty much included scenes of her in school, hanging out with Kelly, and pining for Yuki. It was pretty much going to be static images fading in and out like this ending.

Finally I would like to dedicate this ending movie to my grandmother who passed away last Wednesday. I had planned on mentioning this on Friday's post, but it felt right waiting till this update to do it. I wasn't really close to my grandmother since she lives in a completely different country, but she was also the only grandparent I really have any memories of. She lived to be 96 years old and what I do know is that I am glad to have had her in my life for the tiniest of moments she was a part of it. I don't know if I ever shared this story with you all, but probably till I was about in 5th or 6th grade I assumed EVERYONE'S grandparents lived in Japan. So when classmates would be like 'I visited my grandparents this weekend', in my mind I was like 'holy crap how lucky are they being able to go to Japan for a weekend?' I eventually learned the truth though. Anyway I hope that even though she and I were not really close, she was proud of the way my brother and I turned out. I know that she lives on in my dad and thus through us.

Just one final note, this will be this week's update so do not expect an update this Friday. The comic will return to it's usual slot next Friday. I am using the extra time to get a bunch of side stuff done that I had mentioned in the last Chapter 5 Comic post. I hope you all have a great week and I will see you again soon!

River's Top 5 Favorite Treats from Gift Baskets my Grandmother Always received and gave to us when we visited
1. Daifuku
2. Tropical Fruit (Lychee and Papaya)
3. Calpico Variety Packs
4. Fruit Juices
5. Osenbe