Rail!
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The Making of "I Like My Women
Inbred - Special Edition"
Page 3: Updating The Art
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THE
VECTOR ART: I had to take each graphic object from the
original cartoon and repair it. Very tedious. Some graphics had to
almost be completely redone. For example, here are a few before and
after shots:
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BEFORE: The first graphic to be updated was
Bubba's pickup truck. In the original version above, it was
traced from a photograph of a 1956 (IIRC) Chevy pickup. The
lines were hand-traced by a trained monkey named Pete, whom
I duct-taped to my mouse. Needless to say, the results were
below my expectations. Pete the monkey was given up for
adoption weeks later. |
AFTER: I discover vector graphics. I finally
figured out that the mouse is NOT a pencil. This magical
thing called a "computer" can draw straight lines,
which I, as an imperfect human, cannot. So here we have a
clipart-quality pickup truck fit for a cartoon redneck. All
thanks to straight lines and smooth curves. |
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BEFORE: Next, it was time to update the main
character, Bubba. He's drawn a little sloppy, that's all.
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AFTER: I smoothed his outlines and redrew his
arm hairs. I gave him a brand new red shirt to replace the
gray one with the holes. I think he won it through a cigarette
promotion. I added his shadow to the wall behind him to give
him more depth.
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BEFORE: Hm, what's missing from this picture?
Oh, I know! A nose! This hot blonde girl (known as
gra_Chick1) is missing a nose and proper lighting. My
"shading" technique consisted of drunkenly drawing
a line down the left side of a graphic and applying 50%
alpha effect to it. |
AFTER: Now she's got a nose, and she dances
(actually, her head wobbles around randomly). I smoothed her
outlines and gave her a left eyebrow. Left eyebrows add so
much extra expression. |
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BEFORE: The cop looks okay, he just needed to
be smoothed out a bit. His thumb and hand are also quite
misshapen. |
AFTER: That's better. He's still got that
winning, approving smile. Now his shoulders are perfect
curves with no true definition, which is the fashion in
vector art these days. His hand is a little more stylized
here. |
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BEFORE: I would not buy these pork rinds. I
don't care if they have my website's name on the bag. First
of all, what is up with the puke-green color of the bag? The
pork rinds are a Google Image Search for "Pork
Rinds" with Flash's "Trace Bitmap" tool. The
pork rinds resemble small intestines, or possibly large
intestines connected to a colon of some type. Once again, I
must recommend against consuming these. Return them to the
manufacturer for a full refund. |
AFTER: Ah, that's an improvement. I actually
had to trace the Rail! logo in Flash, which took like a
couple of hours. The inside of the bag are actual pork rinds
that I photographed from a bag I found at the gas station.
The basic shape and design of the bag was traced as well.
The starburst design in the background was borrowed from
thousands of advertisements. A lot of people can't see this
part in the cartoon, since it moves too fast: The bag says,
"No carbs, you animals!". That's your trivia
question for today. |
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BEFORE: "Baby, you've got the darkest,
deepest EYEBROWS I've ever seen." Her pupils are asymmetrical
for that good old fashioned cavewoman look. Her knife is a
little big, and contains a radial gradient. Her hands are
quite malformed. Her shirt says "ELVIS" for some
reason or other. |
AFTER: Her eyebrows are shrunken down to a manageable
size and her knife was shrunken down as well. Her lines are
smoothed and/or redrawn. She has a normal five-fingered
human hand to threaten you with now. |
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BEFORE: The yankee was originally kicked by
Cletus, and Cletus alone (now Bubba joins in the fun). The
yankee's head is not misshapen due to Cletus's constant
stomping - it's just drawn that way. His body is also shaped
more like a dog's, although that really wasn't what I was
going for (I was trying to draw a human). |
AFTER: His head is now fairly symmetrical.
His upper torso is actually based on my own body - so in a
way, he's me. You may have noticed that his feet are white.
It is because his shoes have been knocked off during the
beating, and they are lying to the right of your screen
(actually, I was too lazy to draw his shoes). I should also
not that Cletus's left boot is based on an actual combat
boot, and Bubba's left boot is based on hiking boots in my
closet. Cletus's right boot is based on a "loop". |
HANDS: Almost every instance where you see hands
was traced, I hate to say. There was no other way to get them
to look the way I wanted them to look. ARM
HAIR: One of the last
things I did for the cartoon was to add Bubba's hair back to his
arms. I didn't want to go with the sloppy, random hairs I'd used
previously, so I settled for the Popeye-style "Lines on the
forearms-style" hair, which is far superior. I had to add this hair to
each Bubba
graphic where arms are visible. Once again, tediousness prevails. THE
ANIMATION: Here's where it all comes
together... sort of. The animation was not much different from
the original cartoon. There's still a lot of motion tweening,
panning, and zooming. I used motion paths for a few scenes to guide
the graphics around the screen. The characters blink a lot, since
making a cartoon character blink is the easiest form of animation.
There's a quick moment of lip-synching where Bubba says "YEEEE-HOOOOO"
- but his mouth is actually shaping "YEE-HOE". This is a
horrible mistake. You'll notice that a lot
of these "After" pictures use photographs for the
backgrounds. For some reason, I decided to dedicate an entire page
to describing them: Page
3: Taking the photos!
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