Zombie Apocalypse.

School's out and my immediate instinct is to leap back into artwork and animation like a fat guy leaping into a buffet.

Unfortunately, graduate school has turned my brain into mincemeat. Frankly I need a replacement brain. So I thought, "Why not marry these two completely unrelated facts and create an illustration that reflects the state of my mental functioning now? Just sit down and run with it. Do whatever comes to mind."

That's exactly what I did. Only I didn't stop there.

I also thought, "Wouldn't it be great if I could not only publish the finished piece, but actually show the four or five people in the universe who might actually care what the illustration process actually looks like from my end? You know, sort of make an experiment of it."

That's also exactly what I did.

I sat down, Wacom tablet at the ready, Flash CS3 open and awaiting my orders, and I went on the hunt for a program that would let me display to folks the digital canvas exactly as I saw it. Enter "InstantShot!" This lovely little program would allow me to do something pretty cool - it sat quietly in the background and snapped screenshots of my Mac at 5 second intervals, not unlike a social worker supervising divorced-parent visitations. And so I began, vowing not to stop until something presentable resulted. After 90 minutes of drawing I had a cuddly, rotting, diseased zombie staring me in the face and over 600 sequential screenshots documenting the process.

Now, how do we put these 600+ images into a sequential video format? That's the question I asked myself. Thankfully, I discovered a cool little parlor trick in Photoshop that allows you to do exactly what I needed. (Score one for Photoshop by the way. Even Flash couldn't do this as efficiently as Photoshop could. Who know Photoshop could do animation too? High fives.)

After a little bit of video editing and some sweet beats from Flying Lotus (the track is called "GNG BNG" in case you're interested), I give you the process and the finished product. Check them out in the new 90-minute piece entitled "We Are All Zombies."

Braaaiiiiinnnnnssss... Om nom nom nom.

The Piece: We Are All Zombies.
(click the thumbnail to view the large version)


The Video: How to Create a Zombie.