Fleebag Studios Presents "Skeeters"

[fleebag]

Hello fellow AM'ers,

I've been working on a short for a couple of years (calendar time) and it is now ready to show everyone.

 

Without further ado, I present:

 

Skeeters

 

Comments welcome, of course.

 

Enjoy.

 

(The web site is new, too. Feel free to look around.)

[martin]

My wife wanted to know what I was laughing at, so I showed her, and now she's laughing.

 

Great job, and good production value.

[Zaryin]

I liked the short episodic use. Very nicely done.

[starwarsguy]

Wow! That was great! lol

 

Great work!

 

I haven't made any shorts because I don't like to do funny shorts, so to develop my characters I take some time, so... Still working...

[fleebag]

Thanks Guys!

 

Glad people are enjoying it. It started as a single episode (now episode 2) and it took on a life of it's own. My voice actresses live on the other side of the state, so after I decided to add some more episodes, I went over there, setup a little recording studio in a motel and did all the voices in one go. I could only hope that the voices turned out and I didn't have to re-record anything. As it turns out, there were only a couple places where I had to do some creative sound editing to make something sound right.

[fleebag]

I have updated the Quicktime version of the movie to one that is 20 Megs. I hope that will mean that more people will be able to view it.

 

There hasn't been much commentary on it, so I assumed the file size was too big. Is that the case?

 

Here's the link to the download page:

Skeeters Page

[pixelmech]

I've been trying to download the files unsuccessfully (at work on a big honking pipe). If I right click and save, it times out (and says file might have moved, etc blah blah). Simply clicking on the QT link gives me the qt movie in a page but it never loads - or is loading soooo slow you can't tell (after waiting some time I get like 3 seconds of the beginning music, that is all).

[fleebag]

loading soooo slow

 

Short answer, try it again, it should be better now.

 

Long answer:

I've been trying a new distribution technology called "Coral" or the NYU Distribution Network Here is their web page.

 

In short they provide an internet caching service that a site can take advantage of to prevent the "Slashdot" effect where a site goes down because of sudden popularity. You add a string to the end of the domain in your links and it will get the file from the network instead of the source site. The issue I just learned about thanks to your post, is that someone has to completely download the file once so it is copied into the network's cache. From that point on you get the files at a good clip because they are on the Coral servers.

 

I just downloaded the whole movie here at work (slowly). Now that I did it once, it comes down quickly.

 

I'm still learning about this network service and hope it will help me not exceed my bandwidth at my site. Thanks for letting me know what was going on.

[pixelmech]

Nope - no dice. At first the QT dowloaded at about 30/kb sec (slow). I minimized it and suddenly got a msg that it was done. Started viewing it, and right during the intro I got a buzz sound and that was it - the whole movie is the intro card saying "by Bob Freeman" - never get's past that.

 

Unless you really expect a huge bump on this, I'd just put it on your own server, this doesn't appear to be working too well. Tried the WMV too with no luck.

 

HTH

 

Tom

[KenH]

Whaaa! Me wanna see!

[fleebag]

I'd just put it on your own server

 

OK, I removed the coral link modifiers and you can get them right from the site. Be sure to refresh your browser so the links are updated.

 

Sorry for the confusion. Classic "It work on my machine" scenario.

 

Here are the direct links:

Main site

 

Windows Media, 20 Megs

 

Quicktime, 20 Megs

 

Any success?

[.:shortdog:.]

I saw it just fine... it was great!

[pixelmech]

Worked perfectly

 

Nice job - very entertaining! Curious how you made the wings beat - did you just move them at a really fast rate? (like every frame or something?)

[fleebag]

YAAAAY!!! Hope the bandwidth holds...

 

Curious how you made the wings beat - did you just move them at a really fast rate?

 

It was just that. I made an action that moved them up and down at about 30 frames per second. (which gives 15 flaps per second) Then I would drop that into the choreography and kick up the repeat so they would do that for the whole scene.

 

To add some variation I would take the whole repeated action and stretch or shrink it some. Each mosquito would have it at a slightly different length so they wouldn't flap like a drill team. I also varied the start a little, too.

 

Finally, at render time, I used multipass rendering (9 passes) and turned on 20% motion blur. Voila!

[Gene]

Hey Fleebag,

 

Great stuff. I really enjoyed watching that and thought it was really cute.

 

Keep up the good work.

 

Eugene

[nyahkitty]

Yay Skeeters!

 

Like, huzzah and stuff.

 

Hopefully this marks a trend of renewed productivity in animated content. I'm looking forward to seeing more.

[Dagooos]

Hi Bob,

 

Just watched your short nice work. Great characters and animation fun to watch!

[robcat2075]

Hey, that's a cute one, glad I caught it!

 

I'm curious about the voice cast's reaction when they finally saw their characters on screen.

[pdaley]

Did those girls even know where 'Attack pattern delta' comes from?

 

Congratulations on many levels to you and your crew.

1. You had an idea that was your own.

2. You figured out how to make it do-able.

3. You DID it.

 

The chemistry between the girls (sisters?) made for overall much better than average voice acting. A couple spots were iffy, (if you're going to say woohoo, say it like Homer and mean it) but there were many more occasions (like attack pattern delta) where the flow and interplay between them made the characters believable. I also like the technical jargon of breaking up the park into sectors and quadrants. Made it seem like this is very competitive business being a skeeter and it requires some amount of organization if you're going to make it. The sound recording quality was good and warm. You might want to think about laying down a general 'outside at the park' layer in the background, but then again compressing it for the web might just turn it to junky noise. The music (ukelele?) was also a nice fit .

 

Thanks for letting us see your work and good luck!

[gschumsky]

I've been trying to view it here at work (on this Dell...) but nothing yet. It's taken 10 minutes so far with the window still saying "connecting...".

[gschumsky]

Well, decided to try the QT version on my Mac laptop. I love the last episode "You hit an artery!!".

 

Too funny.

 

Nice work Bob!

[Rodney]

Bob,

Glad to see you finished these up!

 

I thought the first two episodes were winners when I saw them and your new additions certainly held up the standard.

 

Cute characters, interesting dialogue and great animation.

 

Bravo!

[Chopkins]

absolutely wonder full work! Fun, and imaginative I really love the backgrounds, excellent production values. All episodes are a real inspiration.

cheers.

 

charlie

[Dearmad]

D/ling now- 10 minutes to go.

 

Interesting you recorded dialogue with your actors together. Since I, like you, have only one room to record in and can't sound proof the actors from each other , though I could record them into seperate channels to isolate that- I had my actors deliver lines seperately. One victim would be recorded first, then I could take tracks that sorta worked, splice em together and play that into the next actors ears while they recorded their dialogue in response.

 

I can't wait to hear how yours turned out.

 

Congrats on finishing your project- that alone is a feat. Will edit when I have comments on the film. (7 minutes to go).

 

Ok, saw it: The voices are done really well. Good amount of character to them. I liked the last episode best. Pretty funny.

 

Amusing how you bothered to probiscus-synch. That in itself is funny.

[msfolly]

Fun! The artery scene was my favorite.