Sindickits... say what?

That's Sindickits (you know, like "syndicates," but all cool and stuff because it's spelled phonetically).

That's the title of the new comic that my buddy Ramon Rodriguez has been working his ass off trying to complete in the past few months. Issue number 1 is finally done and he's celebrating by unleashing this artistic mania on the web world.

Hit up the link below to check out the web version of Issue #1. Give it a read, send words of support and encouragement. Artists like he and I, we work tooth and nail to produce these labors of love, and it takes ALOT to produce even something as small as a completed illustration when you actually care about your craft. Show your appreciation for these and all independent artistic endeavors by checking out work like his.

Sindickits awaits. CLICK HERE TO READ ISSUE #1!

image used with permission of Ramon Rodriguez.


And I'm out!

- Fred

Sweat the Technique.

Greetings, Planet Pandora (shitty Avatar reference, for the win)

First things first...
The Heretik Times has changed hosting, as promised. You may have noticed that the new site address is blog.heretikstudios.com, which is not too shabby at all... an improvement, in fact, on the old, s/e/g/m/e/n/t/e/d URL, so I actually have no complaints. Plus since it's hosted by Google now, the search bar is integrated properly (now featured atop the page, as you may have noticed), which means that not only is my blog more likely to be found by the unsuspecting masses (I liken this to wandering across a landmine. Take that however you want it.), but I can now post to the blog with supreme ease and publish updates and fixes faster than Doc Emmett Brown can say "Flux Capacitor." Zoom Zoom, bitches.

The switchover wasn't too bad actually. It took all of about 20 minutes, including some backend tweaks and some additional cleanup site-wide. It seems that we're good to go now though. Ready to move onward to bigger and better things.

In other news, as I combed through some of my older materials, including the first half of the still-unreleased Gun episode 2, I stumbled across an irritating little snafu. One of the shots in a scene toward the middle of the episode happened to be edited in my old-school manner (read: before I acquired a Mac, Wacom tablet, & CS3), so it was entirely composed in Photoshop. The problem - this perfectly-sized slice of animated (read: fixed-resolution jpeg) goodness is not at all scalable... not without some quality compromise. So, when I review the older parts of episode 2 (which were produced on a lower-res monitor in Windows) using my hi-res Mac display, the differences are apparent. Ironically, it's one of my very first preview shots that is the victim in this episode of Law & Order. See the evidence below:

(click thumbs to see larger versions... not your thumbs, I mean the images.)
Before scaling:


After scaling:


As you can see, the increases in resolution (which result in making this image larger) have some unpleasant side effects, not unlike scarfing down a 30-pack of White Castle cheeseburgers (not that I speak from experience... ahem). After scaling, this shot looks like one of the Mooninites spooged all over it and never called it back. I am not pleased with such Sega Genesis aesthetics, so I'm attempting to correct it. However, not even the magic of bitmap tracing has helped. Waving that magic wand over the image has only resulted in a muddy, and equally non-scalable version of the picture. (If you don't know what I mean by "bitmap tracing," maybe I'll explain it in another blog, if it's relevant.) I won't even bother posting it here, because it's just more of the same, only with less color separation.

You might be thinking upon seeing these images that this change in quality isn't a big deal. However, if you've ever worked with vector animation or graphics, you already understand why this is a significant loss in image quality. Scaling generally isn't an issue in Flash, so to increase display resolution and begin seeing pixels in your work where they didn't exist before (visually, at least)... yeah, you could say that's a problem. If clarity and crispness are the keys to winning the vector game, then this image is playing like the New York Mets.

This is the sort of thing that makes me wish I was a filmmaker instead of an animator.

I'll probably just end up tracing the whole damn thing by hand and calling it a day. You may now be asking, "Fred, why can't you just use your original drawings and simply recompose the shot?" The answer: "Because Fred is an idiot who somehow lost the original drawings in the old FLA file, and now has only the finished Photoshopped version in his possession." A natural hazard of switching work systems however, I assure you.

Anyway I shouldn't really complain about this. Truthfully I can fix it with relative ease, but it just annoys me that I have to step backwards in the middle of production, considering how far behind schedule I am as it is. So I took a moment to soapbox about it.

OK, I'm done ranting about this minor setback. Back to my honey comb cereal. Later.

(So how many pop culture references did that total then?)

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Rollover.

Just a quick update...

In the coming weeks, expect things to possibly get weird around these parts. You see, Google is planning to take this funktastic blogging service of theirs and eliminate site hosting. The Heretik Times is a site hosted blog, so I'll be switching things over, and hopefully not encountering any problems of the variety that make me want to rip my hair out in frustration and throw things at the wall.

If all goes well, smooth, and crisp, I should be back to inundating the web with mindless chatter in no time. Now get back to whatever it is you were doing... trust me, it's more important than this update.

K thx bai.

- Fred