Paul Gadzikowski

Well, whatever the barrier is that keeps me from tackling more Flash animations, I've failed to get over, under, around or through it since I announced in May that I was going ahead with the Doctor Who/Ringworld project. What I appear to have stumbled on as a summer project instead came up this weekend at AKOTAS. Saturday for Sunday's cartoon I didn't feel like dealing with my home scanner, nor like resorting to triangles. So, instead of drawing in pencil and scanning it into MSPaint, I drew with the mouse right into the MSPaint file. It isn't the first time I've done that at AKOTAS, but it's the first time in awhile. Something about the idea of divorcing my online art from the analog world entirely appealed to me during previous periods of mousedrawn AKOTAS, and I seem to be ready to try it again. This time the attempt may even be prompting me to expand my technical skills, and I don't mean with software or hardware. Today's AKOTAS has varied line weights. I've never grokked use of varied line weight before, and here I am using it to purposeful effect.

Since last summer when I made four Flash movies to found an animated journal webcomic and then school started again, I've completed one more, and rejected two or three more scripts as too ambitious or too lame or just-haven't-gotten-to. This is disappointing not just because I enjoyed making movies on my home computer when I did it in the late 80s and early 90s, but because my Daily journal comics of the 20th century featured not just appearances by people I liked to know I think of them, but appearances by some invented characters I think are clever and would entertain people on the www; hence the movies' umbrella title Infinity Labs. I'm thinking of putting off wowwing the world with my 1337 4n!m47!0n ski11z till retirement, and scanning original pencil Dailes for the Infinity Labs site.

The last time when I revived what's called at the original fanfiction website "original Dailies", and at AKOTAS "blue binder cartoons", was on the original fanfiction website. That was the 2003-2004 triangle Dailies season, when I didn't foresee that I'd ever move on from drawing daily at the fanfiction site. Original Dailies appeared three times a week, alternating with fanfiction triangle Dailies and King Arthur in Time and Space triangle Dailies, for only a year till I started Arthur, King of Time and Space, rendering just enough of my invented scenarios' history to tantalize at least one reader I could name.

The time before that when I revived the blue binder cartoons was in the early 90s. We'd just moved to Louisville from Chicago, and I'd come to know our new circle of friends well enough to feel I could write them. Differently from the 70s and 80s, I decided to segregate all copyright infringements out of the blue binder¹, and replace them with thinly-veiled parodies of themselves. This also affected the Labs overtly: in Chicago they'd been named after Moebius Theatre, the comedy troupe which performs at conventions of which I was a member in the 80s and which, in the Dailies, was also a front for our secret space program. A lot of Moebius Theatre material had been adapted into Moebius Labs backstory in 80s Dailies, and all that was the original writers' copyrights and had to go, along with the Star Trek and Doctor Who and the Lab's original name.

In Louisville in the 90s I continued developing my invented scenarios, including an origin for Akili Tembo the humaniform elephant who'd been a classmate of mine in high school and a dormmate in college, which is worth mentioning in the present context because it's the aspect of the web original Dailies which intrigued the reader I mentioned above. In order to familiarize my Louisville pals with the invented scenarios' backstories, for a while in addition to regular Dailies I drew Flashback Dailies², revising events chronicled in 70s and 80s Dailies to excise the copyright infringements.

If I decide to revamp the Infinity Labs site for the old classic Dailies, I'll start by scanning and posting these Flashback Dailies. When I've got through them, I'll scan and post selected actual 90s Dailies featuring important developments in invented scenarios, or just good jokes³. Then I may start actually drawing pencil Dailies again, adapting important developments drawn for the 2003-2004 web "original" Dailies to the format of the Infinity Labs site cartoons. (Redrawing them would be required for continuity as well as format, because in the web "original" Dailies I forsook the binder Dailes' copyright infringements' thinly-veiled parodies for their King Arthur in Time and Space analogs, and the KAITAS analogs would need to be re-replaced with the thinly-veiled parodies.) That depends on whether I think I can maintain a second webcomic with AKOTAS, which I plan to keep my primary project until May 21, 2029, which means even the scanning of old Dailies will probably only post Monday-Wednesday-Friday instead of every day. The Infinity Labs cartoon website's format would continue even at this point to be scanned pencil strips with no post-production, so it would be easier to maintain alongside AKOTAS than a second full-color, computer-lettered and -layout, daily comic.

Then I might just continue drawing pencil Dailies, continuing the Labs' story on the Infinity Labs site, as I meant to do with last year's movies⁴.

Who knows, it might take me till May 21, 2029 to get that far.

¹ And into a light blue binder of their own, where they were called "Hero Dailies", the precursor of the fanfiction Dailies of the original fanfiction website. I drew Hero Dailies only three or four days a week.
² Flashback Dailies also were kept in their own, dark blue binder and were not drawn every day of the week. Plus I eventually naturally reached the end of them.
³ That is, such jokes if any which can't be instead adapted to AKOTAS.
⁴ I also toy with the idea of soliciting triangle Infinity Labs movie scripts from my friends.

• scarfstepgrandson's lead levels were fine. But we had to ask to find out.
• I'm continually underestimating my homework load this semester. The current Infinity Labs production will not be done by the end of the month after all.

Just now I finally recorded the soundtrack for the next Infinity Labs cartoon, and I imagine it'll go up around the end of the month. The breakthrough in the script seems to have been writing myself out. That's right, writing myself out of my own animated journal comic.

Remember when I complained about shape tweens that don't track? Well, today I was working on a segment of my secret Flash project. I drew several figures in shapes made up of strokes and fills. I created a string of frames in the timeline for all the objects and inserted a keyframe in the first panel and in the middle of the timeline. In the first panel I moved all the figures offscreen to the left, since the scene is to start with the characters coming into shot. I created shape tweens between the two keyframes, and ran the scene.

Two of the objects' fills did the rotating corners thing like the scarftail in the problem demo linked in the previous entry.

Not the stokes. Just the fills.

All I'd done was select all objects in the frame and move them to the left. Two - and only two - did this to me.

I decided on the spot I'll work in motion tweens only from now on. The bad news is this means working exclusively in symbols*. The good news is, the decision seems to have removed a major contribution to whatever psychological obstacles there are to my getting down to work on my Flash project: I got so involved this evening that I updated AKOTAS ninety minutes late.

* For the non-Flash literate (if any have made it this far), that essentially means working in virtual cut-out animation.

I've always said I write, or draw, to be read; I had burnout haituses during my pre-internet Dailies days (so far not during AKOTAS, knock wood), but most of them¹ coincided with periods when I didn't have a large circle of friends to read them. I also say that when I write or draw is when I touch God, because that's honestly what I think that rush is. But when Matt said he'd had to choose between his cartoons and his social life it made me realize that to me there's no such conflict, because those two things are the same thing. I'll keep drawing AKOTAS while its unique visitor count continues to rise steadily - hell, I'll keep drawing while its unique visitor count isn't zero². But part of the reason I do it - part of the reason I started AKOTAS instead of just drawing fanfiction Dailies the rest of my life, I see now - is to be involved in the back-and-forth of all webcomics culture, especially while qtrhorserider and I can't find any sf fandom in this town. My daily cartoons are my social life, and in one fashion or another they always have been.

Which is why [spoiler for Flash movie project deleted].

¹ Not all, but most.

² There's the possibility of burnout hiatuses, but so far the evil days come not.

In the 80s someone I knew read that people lose imagination and the capacity to play (in the most childlike sense of the word, like with toys) as they mature, because part of the physical maturation process of the brain is actual closing off of some of the synaptic or neural pathways.

I remember the last time I played. I was about fourteen, so about 1974. I had a dozen or more of a collection of hard plastic posable cartoon character dolls (I suppose today they'd be called "action figures") that an outfit called R. Dakin put out; a superficial websearch shows they were acquired by Applause in 1995. These dolls were seven to ten inches tall. I had mostly Looney Tunes and Hanna-Barbera characters - I think I only ever saw Disney Dakins at Disneyland, and I never had many - but I also had Kool Kat and the Pink Panther and a mouse in a yellow turtleneck sweater whose cartoons I've never seen and whose name I don't recall. This day I cast them as myself and my friends from junior high school. Smaller, cuter characters like Tweety Bird were cast as girls regardless of intrinsic gender (though there were some intrinsic females in my collection, e.g. Wilma and Pebbles Flintstone). I was the Pink Panther. Barry was the turtlenecked mouse, Chuck was Kool Kat, Bruce was Huckleberry Hound, Dan was Yogi Bear, Lisa was Tweety, either Barb or Holly was Sylvester and the other may have been Bugs Bunny... We all lived together split up among houses in a Hundred Acre Wood style place staged in my bedroom (I'd had the master bedroom since scarfmom and scarfdad had split up). We all fell victim to some sort of mind control plot, but whenever a really good song would come on the radio one of us would break free. For Bruce/Huckleberry it was Smokin' in the Boys' Room (just because I liked the song, not because of anything I knew or suspected about Bruce). It must have gone on for an hour to a whole afternoon but this's all I remember now. After that Jackie Paper came no more. The toys themselves will have been destroyed in a storage locker fire in the 80s if scarfmom even still had them as late as that.

I've got animation capability back after ten years and I can't think what I'd like to do with it.

I put AKOTAS characters in today's movie instead of the fanfiction characters who were in the original version because the AKOTAS site is the one where I'm not running out of room. Also - I admit - much as I love fanfiction, part of the reason I started AKOTAS in the first place was to create a body of work without the baggage others lay onto fanfiction; and in case this stuff takes off I want the same for it.

(Tonight I looked at the VHS that was my "animator's sketchbook" till the Amiga's monitor died. There's almost an hour of material there. Its last entries are dated May 1996 - almost exactly ten years ago.)

This morning I meant to finish the remake before work. I got done everything I wanted to, and then discovered I'd merely made it to the Fine Tuning Phase. It's all coming back to me now.

So here's my first Flash movie. It's a triangle beaming up to the Enterprise. I haven't found directions yet for imbedding a movie into a webpage, so here's a link. It's Flash 5, which is at least four years old, so I assume your browser will play it.

Edit1 I found embedding code on the web which worked locally, so let's try it here.

Edit2 Nope. Bother.

Edit3 It must be an LJ thing. Any other place I try it, it works.