PRETEND

Real life conversation with my soon-to-be 3-year-old daughter.

I am a wimp when it comes to pretending.

Giving My All

It was my proudest moment.

How To:

Try a new method today!

Hourly Comics Day

Instead of Sleeping

I stayed up to make this terrible joke.

You're welcome.

Movember Rain

My Movember mustache has been frightening my children. Luckily the month is over, and we are all a little more aware of men's health issues.

Magic Tofu

My family stayed on vacation in Washington without me.  I miss them.  Especially at dinner time.  The most interesting things happen at our dinner table.

Lunch Comic

In Your Eyes

Abiline is talking more and more these days.  Judging by her smart mouth, she's taking cues from her brother.

Bonus points if you can guess my real eye color.

Christmas Cheer

It feels like it's been far too long since I've posted comics.  My kids continue to say really funny things, so I thank them for writing my material.  Actually, it's mostly my son Sawyer.  Lately the only thing I hear my daughter say is "boppoli!" (Her favorite food is broccoli.  This is what happens when you raise vegan babies.)

(click comics to bigify)

I generally don't approve of the F-word, but it's pretty cute when you hear a 3 year old say it.  And with such sincerity.

In 30 years you will, Sawyer.  Then who will be laughing?

Hope this Season is bright for all!

Moving Comics

...

or, at least, comics that move are a subject that has fascinated me recently.

The last one I did got a pretty good response, with some questions about how I did it. Well, you should know that I'm almost always making things up, so I can't be considered and authority on this (or any) subject. Anyway, I'm sure there are a bunch of ways to get to the result that I did, but I will divulge my secrets (which are so simple that, upon their divulging, you will wonder why you even asked).


First, a new comic:



and in an alternate form:

Some Dads Give Their Kids Blocks from Anthony Holden on Vimeo.

Ideally, I think it would be cool to build in a Flash functionality that allowed readers to click on a panel when they are ready to watch the animation. That way, you could get the benefit of animating moments while maintaining a more traditional feel to the comic (one that doesn't distract from the other panels because of the constant movement). I might do a little more studying to look into that option. It may involve learning some code, so buckle up.


Some Philosophy:

There are advantages and disadvantages inherent to both animation and comics. Comics, similar to novels, have the ability to delve into a world rich with sensory experience via the words and images on a page. In film, ideas can only be conveyed visually or aurally. That said, film has the advantage of time-manipulation; a director can control exactly how long you see and hear things. You can't do that with comics.

Sure, comics employ some parlor tricks: filling pages with dialogue or stacking multiple drawings that depict an action in order to slow down the reading experience. But at the end of the day, a reader gets through a comic as fast as he or she wants. The author does not control time.

By animating comics, the author can cheat a little. I can manipulate small moments of time within a panel. I think this has tremendous potential. I apologize that all I've used it for so far is to make jokes about butts and handing bricks of hash to minors.

The point is that someone with more noble tastes than me could do something really great with this. Please, noble people of the interweb, I adjure you: make great things with moving comics!


The Tricks:

I use Flash (CS3) to make the comic. I'm most familiar with this program when it comes to animating digitally, so the drawing process is pretty intuitive. When planning out individual panels, I try to make sure that things loop in increments of 24 frames, so that if I end up with panels of different loop lengths, they don't hiccup (so to speak) when the loop comes full circle.

I've tried a number of methods for actual GIF file-creation. Flash's compression engine is sort of crummy, so I tried a handful of export options in After Effects (also CS3). After Effects GIFs had similar compression issues in my experience.

Then, my good friend, Eric Armstrong, showed me the light. Here's the deal:

1. Export Quicktime (.mov) from After Effects at full quality.
2. In Photoshop, File>Import>Video to Layers. Your animation will show up in a stack of layers.
3.Cmd+Option+Shift+S ...it's a heck of a hotkey, please stretch before attempting.
4. Preview your .GIF, mess with the options, get it to where you like it.
5. Export!


Blogger has weird issues hosting gifs sometimes, so I have been using Photobucket to host the files, and then embedding image links in blog posts. I have noticed other gifs elsewhere on blogger that seem to work just fine--what are you folks doing to get yours to work?

Like I said, there are probably less convoluted ways of making GIFs, but this is what's been working for me. Let me know if you have any luck with this process, or if you have a method of your own that you use to make GIFs. I understand there are ways to make GIFs exclusively within Photoshop as well. Anyone with experience doing so, please chime in!

My thanks to you if you read this far. With any luck, I'll keep experimenting with these in the future. See you soon!

Father's Day

You don't have to follow this blog for very long to know that being a dad is the best part of my life. I had a great day yesterday, thanks to my wonderful family--and most of all thanks to my beautiful wife, Allison, without whom I could never have known the joy of being a daddy.

Here are a few excerpts from recent weeks. Being a dad is the greatest adventure I've been on yet!



PS, there are more Doodle Book drawings coming up soon, so if you haven't yet, leave a comment on the post below to enter yourself in the doodle-giveaway raffle (no boxtops required)! We'll be picking the winner tomorrow!

Chit for Chat

My son writes the best dialogue.

Male Bonding: Part Two

Part one, here.

Male Bonding

I'm ready for your lightsaber jokes.

Just in One of Those Moods

A little update from the Holden house.

I used to hate it when people wouldn't post for weeks at a time...and now I am that person.
Sorry!!

Things at work have been super busy. I haven't checked my google reader in several weeks either (which explains why I haven't been commenting on your blogs, dear readers). Hopefully I'll get back into the swing of things soon!

More True Stories from the Holden Home

And I still don't know where he picked that word up.

Surprise!

Children are wonderful.
More and other work to come soon.

(click image to enlarge. please.)

Ahh, Sweet Nostalgia

This isn't entirely true. If historically accurate, my older brother James would have been down the stairs first.

Merry Christmas, everybody!

The Tale of Sawyer-saurus: a comic in photographs