#i posted a turnaround of a model i did for a friend in a discord server and someone called it “the boykisser” just bc it was a cat?

[breakbeatbun]

y'all have gotta learn to act normal about other people's characters

just bc you think they're hot doesn't mean the person who made them wants to know if, or how, you'd fuck them. i feel like that's common sense. it doesn't make it OK now just because it's not a real person you're sexualizing. you don't know what they mean to the person who made them, and if you do, well what the fuck, then.

[loreweaver-universe]

DRAGON BALL SUPER: BROLY SPOILERS AHEAD

So I just got to watch the new DBS movie, and I fucking loved it.

I’m gonna gush about it through most of this post, so don’t be fooled by me starting off on a negative note--namely, turning Bardock into Jor-El almost negates the entirety of his nuanced characterization.  Watching Bardock be a concerned father instead of being ashamed of how weak Kakarot and Raditz were sucked.  Watching him smile warmly was jarring and out of character.  You see, the point of Bardock is that he’s a shitty person.  He’s an awful mass-murdering mercenary, an evil, evil man who doesn’t care about his kids or the people he kills.  What’s interesting about Bardock’s character in the Z movie is how conflicted he becomes as he finds a reason to try to protect his people, motivation to change things and avenge the deaths of the only people he did care about--that red bandana he wears is a white cloth stained with the blood of his best friend.  That struggle makes him just about my favorite character in the entirety of Dragon Ball canon.

This version of Bardock is based on the terrible Dragon Ball Minus comic that itself completely missed the point of Bardock’s character, but he’s in better shape here--it’s still made clear he’s a remorseless mass-murderer, he’s just...also a dad, I guess?  I didn’t like it.  At least they added his last stand back in, in a beautifully animated few seconds that left me craving more.

Fortunately, it was the low point of a fantastic flick, and it only gets better and better from here.

For every crime perpetrated against Bardock’s characterization, Broly’s gets improved and expanded upon.  This version of the berserker is engaging, likable, and sympathetic--not so much a creep held in check (in an indisputably justified fashion) by his father as an innocent, abused victim who poses a real danger to everyone around him, whose abusive dad only manages to make things worse with the justified-adjacent (and much MUCH crueler) measures he takes to prevent Broly from going nuts and destroying everything and everyone in sight.  His interactions with Cheelai and Lemo say more about the character than the entirety of the original Broly movie.  I love love love the new Broly, and was actively rooting for the heroes to keep him (and his two new friends) through the entire movie.

A small bit--Bulma and Freeza’s wishes being so hilariously petty was hilarious and I loved it.

Most of the movie is dominated by one long extended fight between Broly on one side and Goku and Vegeta on the other, and holy shit.  This is the best fight in the entire franchise that I’ve seen.  I haven’t gotten to watch Super yet, but everything I’ve seen about that says to me that nothing in it holds a candle to this fight--and nothing in Z or GT did, either.  It’s beautifully animated (with the exception of the animators breaking out the choppy 3D models a couple times, though thankfully they’re smoother this time around).  It’s beautifully choreographed, those excessively so at a couple points.  It’s emotionally resonant, as you spend most of the fight sympathizing with Broly, something completely unthinkable in his original incarnation.  The transformation into the Legendary Super Saiyan being motivated by his father’s death was heartbreaking, and the fact that Freeza got the idea from remembering what pushed Goku over the edge was a brilliant touch.  The movie’s a cavalcade of canon in general, with references to and tidbits taken from events throughout the series and canonizing elements of the Broly and Janemba movies in fantastic ways.  Rehashing the failed fusions was a little boring, but forgivable.

Cheelai in particular has become a favorite character of mine, and not just in the context of this movie; I love the way she’s characterized and she’s up there with my favorites in the whole franchise.  I was also heartbroken when I thought Broly was going to die, but the turnaround right after into Cheelai and Lemu wishing him to safety made me incredibly happy.  Can you believe it!  Broly got a happy ending, one that was deserved while still recognizably being Broly!  He’s also teased as possibly appearing in future content, which has me incredibly excited.

I’m completely in love with this movie, to be honest.  Not even the stuff it did to Bardock can meaningfully dampen my love for it, and it’s got me even more enthused for Dragon Ball than I’ve been in a long time.  I’m gonna spend next month watching Super in my spare time, I think--yeah, sorry, it won’t be a liveblog beyond me posting commentary in the community Discord server’s anime chat.  Some things have to be For Me, and I haven’t maintained a healthy balance of that lately.  Besides, I already know the broad outline of events.

tl;dr I cannot recommend Dragon Ball Super: Broly highly enough.  Also, the end credits song is a fuckin’ bop.

[qaftb]

Jewel Racasa - Week 5

Indiegogo

We launched our Indiegogo page! I did a lot of edits to the content section to make it more visually appealing. I had to put together all the text and images in photoshop since Indiegogo's customization is not the best. I tried to keep a color scheme of orange, warm brown, and purple to represent the characters. I also made the campaign video! I scripted, recorded, and edited it all last Friday (Feb 11). I wish I recorded it a lot better but I think what I made was good for the time I had to make it. It was a smart choice to use the PNG voice-activated software since we wouldn't have enough time to animate it. Overall, I think our Indiegogo page looked really nice!

Promotional Video

I posted it everywhere I could online! I posted it and sent it out to the Katipunan Club (UHM Filipino Club), every class discord I'm in for this semester, my friends' discord servers, all of my social media accounts, etc. I was quite nervous when we launched it but it's really relieving to see all the people who donated so far and just how quickly we raised 50% of our goal. I also donated to Salt the Earth and I plan on donating to Low Battery as well when they launch theirs soon!

Indiegogo Page

Crew Assignments & Review

This week I've mostly been giving out assignments to our storyboard artists and our background artists, as well as providing feedback and critiques

Storyboards

I split the screenplay amongst the four of us. Luckily, one of the story artists, Hannah, had already finished boarding the first half of the fight sequence. We agreed on 2 weeks to work on it with a progress check halfway through, so I will be checking on their progress this Saturday (Feb. 19).

I started working on my part of the storyboards but haven't been able to work on the timing and draw the rest of this sequence since I've been quite exhausted and my eyes have felt really strained lately. Here is my progress on the second half of act 1 where she sees the cloak for the first time:

Backgrounds & Environments

Since I haven't been able to work on the environment design more, I decided to hand it off to one of our crew members, Rachel. She took a lot of the concept sketches I made a couple weeks ago and refined them to all fit together like an actual village. I also asked for designs that reference my cousin's coffee shop, Coffee Terminal, in the Philippines.

She was struggling to make her design for the coffee shop fit in with the layout of the other buildings. I suggested designing it to be a food truck with an outdoor dining area instead of designing an exact replica since the bus is the main focus of the coffee shop. I sent her some real-life examples as well as a rough concept sketch to help. We agreed that the food truck interpretation of it would fit a lot better into the layout she has already created.

Our 3D modeler, Tyler, had also been working on modeling some of the buildings. He has sent some turnarounds and screenshots of the models he's made so far! Tumblr only allows 1 video per post so here's a folder to the 3D model turnarounds he's sent so far: 3D Folder.