#more like SPOOKULELE

[spookulele]

Foolin' around with expressions. I've been thinking an awful lot about where i pull my facial expression inspo from, especially for this project. I try to give all of my pitches and projects their own unique individual styles, especially in really small details like how i draw the mouths or hands. I think the expressions in Spookulele! some from a whole host of different stuff like Gravity Falls, Rankin and Bass, Loony Tunes and Tex Avery, Lupin the Third, and the Great Mouse Detective (and like, 60's to 80's era Disney in general). I mean, there's more than just that, but i think those are the ones that I've noticing most lately. I'm always noticing new things in my art. That thing they say about steal like an artist or whatever. I just like to keep close track of where I'm stealing from I guess. I'm thinking of putting together a huge document of all the shit that's influenced the project, I think it would be fun

[undertakers-convention]

Spookulele! pilot animatic WIP/unfinished thesis

Ok so I'm mostly posting this to show off the voice over talent of Janet Klein, and the background art (done by @frodho-slaggins ). I didn't post this at the time I actually "finished" it out of shame, because what artist doesn't hate their own work, I suppose. Basically I wanted to wait to post anything big like this until I had the full 20 minute pilot finished, but that's a big undertaking for one person. So I'm posting it now for posterity or something, I dunno

This is not the intended look for the final film, this was a rush job I did in order to graduate on time, as this was my senior thesis. This is basically a very rough colored animatic cut of the first half of my pilot. More is to come. The ending is a fake out that I added in order to shorten the film into a thesis. Looking back, it may have been a dumb decision to try to do something so huge as my thesis, but I guess I graduated. All that said, I'm very proud of the potential it has, and even more proud of the voice over and the backgrounds. A lot of love went into this, and a lot of love is still being poured into what will become the final pilot animatic, so keep an eye out if you want to see a better version of this

[yepthatsacowalright]

Thank you, universe, for making the chords to ‘Come Little Children’ and ‘Rhiannon’ super duper easy on ukulele, so that I can incorporate my new uke hobby with the spoopy times this year.

[indiegamesofcolor]

[I.D.: A gifset containing four gifs of the upcoming game Dreamland Confectionary. 

Gif 1 shows panning shots of the game’s environment: a lush and colorful forest. An owl is sitting on a branch in one shot, while a ghostly forest inhabitant stands amongst bushes in another shot.

Gif 2 shows a close-up on a small, four legged creature with quills on its back. The creature hops up and down before the view shifts to a more human-like character with white hair, pale skin, and animal ears.

Gif 3 shows an oven shaped like an animal jumping as pictures of desserts with a pastel color palette pop on screen. Each desert is served on a leaf and each image overlaps the other.

Gif 4 shows the protagonist, Ami, running between areas close together to each other. When she interacts with a creature in each area, a white light bursts from her.

end I.D.]

Dreamland Confectionery is a a game about baking mystical desserts for magical spirits! Play as Ami, who has just unkowingly released an evil force. Explore a massive world to collect ingredients, befriend both animals and humans, and bring the magic back to the land!

For Mac and Windows. Free demo is out now. 

Developed by Spookulele Games, a studio who has worked on other games such as Alpaca Stacka. Made up of the 2-person team of Sheehan Ahmed and Weston Bell-Geddes, Spookulele Games wants to create accessible games in an industry where ableism is often overlooked.

[spookulele]

Anette's main solo song, which will be sung by Janet Klein in it's final form.

This is another of those preliminary demo tracks I recorded years ago, trying to figure out the soundscape, and mostly failing. In theory this one was more successful than my attempt at the Ukulele Song. I think it's sloppier, but the idea is there, and I can hear promise here. I like the idea of this track being supported by a nice plucking guitar pattern, and the whistling is a fun touch. Ultimately it'll also likely have violin. But I recorded this when I was still learning guitar, and I chose two opposing tempos for the ukulele and guitar, so they're EVER so slightly out of sync, and failing to keep pace. I think I'm a much stronger songwriter than I am a music producer. Luckily I'm not producing the final tracks alone. Aside from all that, this is actually the first song I wrote for Spookulele!, and the first song I ever got to write for Janet! I'm still quite fond of it.

[spookulele]

This track is like, super duper old. I recorded it almost three years ago, in an attempt to sort of figure out the soundscape of the songs in Spookulele!, but I wasn't super happy with it. I liked some of the banjo plucky bits (I was just starting to learn banjo and I'm still no expert) , but overall, the soundscape was a little too spare and limp. But I was goin' through my old files and thought it would be fun to start sharing some demos for the songs, since we're nearing the release date at a swift pace. I guess you could call this sort of the signature song, and eventually it will be a duet between myself and Janet! Stay tuned for more!

[spookulele]

I'm on the worst platform now, so if you're there follow me I guess. It's not just updates on Spookulele, but they will be there for sure

[undertakers-convention]

Before-bed cool-down of an OC, details under the break

This is Talia, a character from an original project I’ve been working on for a really long time, not super actively, but it’s always in the back of my mind. This is another one of my many ideas in which the characters are musicians, because I always like a good excuse to have songs in different genres, and I can never resist a good musical. And my favorite trope in musicals is when the characters get a song or two that’s a real live performance in the canon of the show. This particular idea would focus on a fictional rock girl band called the Vims, in which all the characters are famous popstars who live in the same apartment, but they’re also superheroes. Individual episodes would I think reveal different villains, and specifically I kind of like the idea of each girl having a villain who’s sort of a foil to them, or maybe they meet other musicians and heroes. Lots could happen. The art style is, in my imagining, sort of a mashup of My Life as a Teenage Robot, Powerpuff Girls, Samurai Jack, and Gorillaz. The pilot would likely be a mocumentary about their big tour, and I would definitely want to produce a real album of actual songs for them to perform because I’m extra like that, and also tbh I do that for all my projects. @spookulele, my current main project, currently has a list of I think over 15 songs I’ve written, but obviously not all of them can appear in just one episode of a cartoon. I just have too many ideas I suppose, and once you start working in a particular genre, it’s hard to stop writing in it for fun. I think the Vims would be really fun to write songs for because I want to make it a mashup of different musical genres to reflect the four members (I’m still working out the details, but one member might be more punk while one is more folky or one is more synth-driven or whatever. Still need to figure a lot of it out). I tbh would need to do so much research to figure out how they’d all write and play, and probably find a bunch of different people to form a band that could actually feasibly write and play everything. So it’s kind of ambitious and not fully formed, because this is a very silly, non-serious, back-burner-type-project. I’ve put too much thought into this idea, but also at the same time not enough. Ambitious yet also not really at all. I contain multitudes. Tbh I’m mostly writing this down so I can remember it later, because I’m retooling some of it. eh.

[spookulele]

concept art dump

Some amazing pieces of concept art done by one of our artists, Ed. The pieces they’ve done are so whimsical and have such an early 20th century spirit to them, I just love it. They also sort of remind me of like, 90s animation, like the Cats animated concept designs, weirdly, which I also am pretty obsessed with. The clothing design is one of the most important aspects of Spookulele, I want to capture mostly what people actually wore in the 20′s, but with a mixture of whimsical fantasy clothing for good measure. I think these capture that pretty well

Find more of Ed’s art here: https://www.instagram.com/boltzmannbutt/