crash into meeeeeee

goddamn dave matthews band song is stuck in my head...

I curse the day I decided to do a car chase movie.

ABOVE: DeSeve's Ferrari.
I've forgotten how time consuming animating cars is. My next movie will be two people in a room, talking.

Writing Road Rage

Well, today I'm recovering from a sore throat and a throbbing headache so my drawing skills are useless.

The idea for Road Rage was hatched a year ago this week. I was having trouble developing a story for another film. I always thought a sequel to Road Test was sort of a lark; I didn't want to make sequels that were rehashing the same jokes over and over again. I'm slower at animating these films than a lot of my contemporaries, so if I'm going to put something out there, it better be worthwhile. It just so happened that Road Rage's story was evolving more organically, and faster than the other (which I still hope to make).

I thought that having the innocent kid, Gabe, from Road Test, ten years down the line as a frustrated, overweight and bullied School Bus driver was a great way in. It would definitely allow the story to stand on its own, and one of the main criteria was that I did not want someone to have seen Road Test to understand Road Rage. Bringing back Mr. Dot (the road Test instructor) as a road cop also felt natural, because most road teachers are ex-cops. However, I didn't want to overuse him; he's really in a few choice scenes.

Road rage isn't necessarily a hilarious topic for a comedy, and the more research I did on it the more unattractive it was, that truth was crazier than fiction. To undermine that dark current, I decided that the tone was going to be heightened action-comedy (like that great Schwarzenegger movie "True Lies"), where the action sequences and events are just this side of ridiculous.

Unlike Road Test, Road Rage has a villain: DeSeve. DeSeve is a guy who goes after Gabe when his school bus accidently dents the rear of his Ferrari. Most sequels have a great bad guy that really puts the hero through hell (the T-1000; Khan; The Toy Collector; the Alien Queen) and DeSeve hopefully is no different. It's no big stretch that if someone will take the time and energy to get out of their car after someone cuts them off; this is a guy that does A LOT of crazy, violent things in the story to rectify the little dent.

Another new character is Ashley (or Rosie, I'm still deciding ;). She is probably the angriest character in the whole story. She's a third grader full of energy and chaos. If Gabe doesn't express his emotions, Ashley, the girl he is transporting home, does, in spades. She is essentially the catalyst for the events that occur.

The original climax had the School Bus and cars sliding off of a drawbridge, with Ashley kidnapped and Dot coming to the rescue. Ironically the image of cars crashing destruction derby style down a drawbridge was what pulled me into this project to begin with. The problem was that the story wasn't Gabe's anymore, in fact, Gabe was more of a passive protagonist, as passive as Tom Hanks is in the Robert Langdon movies. It was essentially Cop vs. Thug.

I ran into a similar problem with Road Test. The whole structure of Road Test was an instructor who insisted on his charge finishing the test regardless of the crazy events happening around them. Halfway through they get into an accident. it just killed the pace.

So no less than 8 weeks ago, on Memorial Day, I rewrote the ending of Road Rage. I always thought that road rage is a very childish act of violence, so what better environment to set the final battle in than a children's playground? It brought all of the themes of anger, bullying and man-ing up into one neat package. There are a few surprising story turns in there as well which I hope the audience enjoys.

Will there be a third "Road" movie? Jokingly, the title would be "Road Closed." But probably not. After you see the events of the story in this one, you will wonder where else I can take these characters. They will all be emotionally damaged (or in intense therapy) for years.

Watch your back

Like Stealing a Social Studies book from a baby...

Who would stoop to stealing a Social Studies textbook from a kid? This guy....

Happy 4th of July.

Have a safe 4th of July. Or the night might end like this:

Gun!

Slides aren't as fun when you have a psycho trying to kill you

Stare Down

Choked up

Cones.

Yeah, I could've drawn em. But I modeled them in Maya anyway. Yes, they'll be used as weapons in the story :)

beeeeeeeeep

you want a fresh one?

ouch

Are You Insured, Part IV

moment of truth

don't miss the bus

Pretty much everything in this bus is rigged to be destroyed.

You still won't like him when he's angry

You won't like him when he's angry

make my day

come with me if you want to live.

...happy trails

Footsies

BLAM.

Is Officer Dot giving Gabe a wedgie?

You be the judge.

Still here...

Outside, drinking a beer and doing a major rewrite to the final action scene...unfortunately I don't think the drawbridge sequence is on the cards anymore. I'll let Officer Dot process a sentiment:

This post has nothing to do with Mother's Day.

I AM THE LAW.

The re-introduction of Mr. Dot, now Officer Dot.

Are you Insured? Pt.III

Stand-off

DeSeve assesses the damage on his stolen car and goes from 'confused' to 'pissed off.'

Safety first

After Gabe gets into a car accident, he checks to see if Ash is okay...

Get off the phone

Crawl before you run

In this scene, Officer Dot is about to arrest DeSeve but Gabe gets freaked out and drives away. And yes, the animation is very very rough =)

...look the other way

here you go way too fast/dont slow down/gonna craaaash

In this scene, Gabe takes his eyes off the road for a second and, well, it doesn't look like he's getting Little Ashley home on time...

It's Flash from this point on.

Yup. I'm animating the rest of Road Rage with good ol Flash. Since November I have been animating the film through ToonBoom Digital. The main reason why I got the program was because of the awesome vector engine that has a brush tool that is akin to say, Alias Sketchbook. But all good things must come to an end. I'm probably using the program wrong, but I recently animated a sequence in TB and for reasons too varied to get into here, realized that the entire sequence was being animated on a layer that was for lack of a better word, 'invisible' in the program. In shorter terms: It never existed. Which set me off, considering that I'm on a schedule to get this film out by summer. Luckily, all the scenes I have done are exportable as .swf's so those scenes will not be trashed; they will be imported into Flash and worked on. Yeah, Flash's brush tool really, really sucks but I'll deal with it for the next few months...

Ready to do some damage

Early design for Officer Dot's Interceptor (a.k.a. those "Cop in a Box" cars you see strolling around your neighborhood). This thing will drive straight through a city transportation bus!

twinkle toes

So here's the first half of the kid's dance moves (as to why she's dancing, read the post below). With time I'll finish up the second half this weekend...gotta watch more hip hop videos

There's a time and a place to bust a move---this ain't one of them

In the picture ABOVE, the supporting character, ASHLEY (a child who "Gabe" must deliver home, safe) has been kidnapped by "DeSeve" in an act of rage. However, he kidnapped the wrong kid, because ASHLEY is a seriously disturbed 3rd grader. She thinks this entire life or death situation is, like, the coolest, like, rollercoaster ride, EVERRRRR (See the rough dance below). She's truly enjoying the ride, busting a move or two, gets on DeSeve's nerves, and DeSeve proceeds to throw her out of the car (not shown, yet).

RAM.

Keep your belongings in sight at all times

The Last Laugh He'll Ever Have

Scene 12

Things are about to get....ODD

Non Road-Rage related, my friends Mike Carlo and Al Pardo have joined forces to create a new web series: ODD JOB HITLER. The first episode, Pool Boy Blues is up and it gets funnier with each viewing. More episodes are coming ( I'm privy to the other odd jobs that they have in store for the fellow furor and it's going to get more and more degrading for him). So, without further ado, click the image to check it out:

Happy New Year! Now... ...Why Officer Dot won't be riding a Segway in "Road Rage":

Seriously, I got a little miffed when I saw the trailer for this movie. One of the main conceits of the action sequence in "Road Rage" was to do a car chase with things that you haven't seen in a car chase before: A School Bus and mainly, a cop on a Segway. But oh well. It had to happen sooner or later.

Staring contest

Here's the baddie of the story: DeSeve. Staring.

Now here's the big change for those of you that have been following the progress of Road Rage: I've decided that DeSeve will *not* be a contortionist. As originally planned, I thought it would be a visually fun element to the story but the more I think about it, the less it's needed, it's extraneous. It's shoe leather. So now, he's just a crazed prison escapee in sheep's clothing (or, Armani). The handcuffs will still be on him (not pictured in the video). The prison escapee subplot was always a background "off-screen" story that the audience would have to kind of assume or put together on their own anyway, and the contortion ability , while it would have been kickass to animate, would have, uh, twisted things to the point of confusion. As I currently rewrite the story over and over in Starbucks on Astor (a ritual I have every early early Saturday morning), it felt like I was writing a sequel within a sequel as I tried to incorporate that element into the story. You could have a lot of things going on in a 4 minute film, but a prison escapee who also happens to be a circus freak ain;t one of em.

Scare tactics

More rough animation from shot 005. Enjoy.

'Til The Sweat/'Til The Sweat Drip From My...

A Hot Day from matthew on Vimeo.

Rough Keys

DeSeve

The villain of the story. He's an escaped convict who just carjacked a Ferrari when he's introduced. Originally he was going to have a nice, sleek Brooks Brothers/Armani/super-rich suit on and then slowly it's revealed that he's an escaped criminal (via his orange jumpsuit underneath the clothing). But that was another one of my bad ideas (i.e., I think I'm being smart but I'm really not). So right up front, it's very clear that he's an escapee: the oversized cuffs on his wrists. A bit of trivia is that this character was originally going to be used for a short film I was trying to write back in 2006, titled "Jail Bait," about a prisoner-cop chase on a prison bus, set in the 1920s (go back and look at my early 2007 posts). But it couldn't work out because it was (a) another confined-area story--i'd just worked on Road Test, where everything takes place in a car (b) ironically, the more I scaled back the story, the more difficult it got (c) the logistics were a nightmare---Ok, so does the windows of the prisoner transportation bus have iron bars on them? Why can't he escape out the driver's window of the car? How many prisoners are on the bus? What's stopping them from killing the warden that's driving the bus? and so on.

Mr. Dot v2.0

Check out the NEW Mr. Dot (the road test instructor from the first short film). The pencil drawing and character design is by Matt Jenkins.

ToonBoom vs Flash drawing

I decided to put up a side-by-side comparison, ToonBoom Digital vs. Flash. The reason I made the switch is because the drawing engine in TB is worlds better than Flash's (and if this ends up as a quote on ToonBoom's site, I'm suing). Usually in Flash, when I draw an object, I get a wonky sorta line with the brush tool. I have to resort to smoothing and kerning the lines. It's lots of nips and tucks and it slows me down. In TB you just draw an image and it appears as you drew it, no extra chunks on your lines.

That's the main reason I bought it; I still intend on compositing in After Effects. The learning curve for ToonBoom (or what I needed to know) was a little steep, to be honest and I'm not really a fan of the program's cute little interface/buttons that requires you to do three steps for what would have taken 1 in Flash. But it's the drawing engine that really matters.

ABOVE: A quick Brush drawing of Gabe with the Brush tool in ToonBoom. No smoothing or kerning or any of that involved..

BELOW: The same drawing traced over in Adobe Flash with the program's Brush, no smoothing or kerning involved, just a first rough pass.

...so it begins.

Just got ToonBoom Digital on Friday, educated myself over the weekend and now I'm starting to animate. Here's a shot of Gabe (miffed school bus driver) and DeSeve (angry contortionist).

SMASH IT UP

So here's the Universal car (probably the majority of the cars during the DrawBridge sequence, just with different colors). Obviously the hero vehicles are the Segway, School bus and Ferarrari.






I've been having fun smashing up the car.

Gone in 60 seconds...

At the orders of Sir Michael Carlo I, here's the first minute of the first draft of Road Rage. I completed the entire animatic back in August and I'm still fine-tuning it. In fact...there's an extra 20 seconds of footage that belong in here, a little more build-up involving the villain of the story that the main character, Gabe, accidently gets into a fender-bender with. But anyway, I thought I'd share this with you. There's no sound, and the Quicktime export frame rate is a little messed up so there might be one or two cuts that go by too fast.


Road Rage Animatic, Minute One. from matthew on Vimeo.

BRIDGING THE GAP.

...I always wanted to write that.

The making of...a drawbridge. Probably one of the easiest things in MAYA because it's just Polygonal cubes that I'm combining. The drawbridge is the climax of "Road Rage," where all story elements come together and ironically, break apart. Imagine a bunch of cars tumbling and sliding off the bridge, along with a gasoline truck and you'll get a sense of how chaotic things will get!

Below: A little Joel Silver-esque imagery of showing the same take from multiple angles...yes, that's a school bus attempting to make a jump

Flock Off tidbit..

FLOCK OFF, the one minute gross out short film I made in May 2007, will be part of Spike & Mike's Twisted Animation Festival schedule 2008-2009. Which is cool, considering that I've always wanted to get a film into Spike & Mike. It recently screened at Comic-Con in July along with other funny shorts...

Let's go for a spin

I'm still getting used to drawing these two characters (which, if you are just joining this blog, were designed by Matt Jenkins ). Also I am not positive if this sequence will be in the final film. I thought it would be fun if the crook and the cop get into a fistfight on a segway, utterly straight-faced :) Then again if I even have a prayer of gettin this baby out by summer of 2009....

Size-up

I'm still debating on whether or not Officer Dot (right) should have the beard he sported in Road Test.

one of those days

Heads II

Left to Right: GABE, DeSEVE and DOT.

Above are the three main characters. DeSEVE and DOT were designed by Matt Jenkins. I'm digging the redesign of Mr. Dot especially. (See the original film below) In Road Test, Dot was sort of like a big bear in design; in the new story, I wanted him to be more muscular and ripped because he has a lot more to do. Gabe (Left) is more pudgy than the skinny kid he was in the first story (Road Rage takes place almost a decade later). Most sequels I've noticed have elements that are the reverse, flip-side of the original...i.e., Woody suffers from Buzz's disillusions he had in Toy Story 1; instead of 1 Alien there's dozens in Aliens; McClane in claustrophobic environment in Die Hard 1...McClane in an open environment in Die Hard With A Vengeance ...you get the point...