Clockday Collab 2025: / Nap Time / Dream Study / Name Pending
Phantomcat Clock is conducting a sleep study to learn about what Clocks dream about, and you will be doing a part where you animate your character's dream. What's in the dream is entirely open to your interpretation, but you must include Phantomcat Clock observing the dream from within at some point. Your part will be completely contained in the dream, so don't worry about it conflicting with other collab parts.
You can go as wild as you want, it's a dream and logic doesn't have to make sense. What kind of dream it is is entirely up to you. During the Outro, all the characters will be woken up, and Phantomcat will debrief your characters on what kind of weirdo you are and what he's learned from your subconscious.
Specs:
Length doesn't matter, make it short or long.
MP4 format
30 fps
16:9 aspect ratio (720p or above)
Tentative deadline is 08/10/25 (five days before clockday) so we can do all the post last minute.
Usual content guidelines. Don't be a fuckhead.
Participants-
(Intro)- PopTart Clock
[insert signups here]
Polyhedron Clock
Pannacotta Clock
Mustardbottle Clock
Juice Clock
Js Clock
Flounderman Clock
Vuvuzella Clock
Monsterenergy Clock
Peanutbutter Clock
D.va Clock
Brazil Clock
(Outro)- Flounderman Clock
Post Credits- Phantomcat Clock
haha aw {{{}}}
thank you for thinking of this grumpy old forum hermit
I have a pretty cool idea that I've actually been sitting on for like 20 years since the last time we were going to do a dreams collab, but I'm still not confident I can pull it off
I'll take some time over the next week or two to do some like visual planning and tests and stuff and get back to you
another collab? i'll join
SIGN ME UP!
Also @me on Discord to tell me what I need to do because I am so forgetful I forget to wake up sometimes
clockan in :duelin:
You know what's funny, I didn't even read what this collab was about, but when I had my idea, it included phantomcat clock
how funny is that guys
I know I didn't even officially sign up but can I have one or two more days?
ye
brazilclock i can't find you on discord, are you still doing a part or nah
oh shit
i'll do a five second thing, shit, sorry
it'll fit anywhere randomly, don't have to edit the credits or anything, if I'm not done by tomorrow stick to the pirate's code
all good pcat, we got a few late entries and the 10th deadline was a ruse to get people to finish up by the 14th
the 16th you say
of clocktober yeha
collabs ready to render, will the slurpee/pcat power couple have a part by tonight?
OH FUCK I FORGOT
what does pop-tart charge for animation commissions these days
can't be more than two million wades
it's down to the wire, but the only other thing I have on today is dinner, I think I can do it
so sleepy, but starting
that is the fastest i've ever crashed flash
at least all i lost was setting the aspect ratio and framerate and importing my sounds
so weird having a art program where my muscle memory hotkeys actually do what i wanted them to do
i'd like to congratulate myself for the least hard i've ever worked on a clock day proportional to the most i've worried about getting a video done
shit, wait, seeing the post-credits scene... damn, I had a joke i was going to do for that. what was it
WHAT WAS IT
damn it
man I was really looking forward to showing you guys my part
I set out working on this thing back in June
if you read ccbt, you saw the color tests
Quote from: Slurpee on June 02, 2025, 10:49:41 PM(https://i.imgur.com/O2t7ahMm.png)
Quote from: Slurpee on June 05, 2025, 07:17:25 AM(https://i.imgur.com/tl31llsm.png)
that was for this. it was, like, pre-production. I was figuring out if I
could do this before I dove in. I was pretty sure I could do it
I learned to use Procreate Dreams to storyboard and created a loose animatic to get the timing all right
(https://i.imgur.com/GvZIp13m.png)(https://i.imgur.com/APcMofvm.png)
which I used as the foundation for when I learned to use FL Studio, and also learned a bit about synthesizers, and even a little music theory, and composed my own score (https://voca.ro/15wkSi9oHAGW) :duelin:, which is not great but I was pretty proud of. it sounds mysterious and a little eerie and a little mischievous and then it really starts ramping up before the end, even if it was nowhere near as cool as I imagined it
I upped my goddamned fucking 3D modeling and animating skills to create a creepy low-poly approximation of the anglerfish from the actual nightmare I had decades ago that my whole idea was based on, because I knew I couldn't get the effect I wanted in 2D, and I wanted the 3D rendering to contrast uneasily with the 2D elements, make the fish really feel like a Wrong Thing
note the warmer colors to further the contrast
the light stem, that was the bendy physics thing I was posting about (https://clockcrew.net/talk/index.php?topic=8531.msg2018804#msg2018804) that I didn't want to spoil
it was all going so perfectly, I was so pleased
I created the 3D animations I would need, timed everything out- I'd planned carefully to hide my weaknesses, using... essentially
cinematography to disguise that I'm just not really that good at 2D animating, I thought things out such that I could sell the action in a way that wouldn't require a lot from me in that department. hiding my budget, so to speak.
all I had to do was turn the storyboard into an actual animation
I started working on the backgrounds, and it was a disaster
I mean it looked fine. pretty dang good actually
(https://i.imgur.com/igAA7pR.png)
but it was taking
way too long. I started to panic. as a back-up, I pivoted to one of the other skills I've been working on- digital painting. I think I called this "lazy and crappier" in my post about it, but I realized that as long as I was conscious to work in layers, I could separate foreground elements (and shadows) from background elements cleanly and export them as different pngs, which I could put on separate layers in Adobe Animate and the pre-rendered digital paintings would actually work pretty well with a vector-animated slurpee, because he would appear to actually occupy the scene. as a bonus, the painterly aesthetic would make the low-poly 3D fish look even more out of place
over the last couple days, with the time I had, I digitally painted 20 different fucking backgrounds in Procreate, with a nifty kind of cate wurtz-inspired aesthetic
(https://i.imgur.com/yK2iMMG.png)
some of you may have noticed the problem already :facepalm:
I definitely set the resolution to 1280x720.
I know I did.
I KNOW I did, because the first one is 1280x720, and I saved that one's properties as a
preset, which I then used as the blank canvas for all the others. they HAD to be 1280. the first one is 1280. why the fuck would the rest of them not be 1280? :sadfootball:
(https://i.imgur.com/7uuJ0c9.jpeg)
1024 :meme: :rip: :suicide:
1024 1024 1024 they're all 1024 how HOW DID THIS HAPPEN HOW DID I NOT NOTICE HOW NARROW THEY ARE W
HILE I WAS DOING THEM (https://i.imgur.com/zks5CTg.png)
it doesn't work. it just doesn't.
I tried resizing them, it looks too stretched, it looks terrible. I tried scaling them up and pan and scanning, it looks terrible, blown out and fucks up the blocking. I tried expanding the canvas and just adding more to the edges of the backgrounds, it'd be tedious but I could do it if I pulled an all-nighter. nope. looks terrible. the composition gets all fucked up, because the extra bits on the side just
looks like the blank space that it is, and it's incredibly hard to match the existing colors, and the darkness layers basically have to be redone completely.
:ohdear:
no choice. the only option is repainting all 20 backgrounds from scratch.
I can't do it. it's just actually not possible, there's not enough time, and I held everybody up enough already
🏳
time spent on something you enjoy, time spent learning, is never wasted
I learned a bit, got a lot more confident about tackling big, multi-faceted projects, learned a bit about mixing mediums
it was fun.
but man I'm so fucking bummed I didn't get to the finish line.
ah well. next time I will pray harder
sleep now
happy clock day
Quote from: Slurpee on August 15, 2025, 05:17:06 AMhappy clock day
my sympathies. i can relate. you have no idea (https://i.imgur.com/Yjlgyqp.png) how many (https://i.imgur.com/An0z6a1.png) abandoned movies (https://i.imgur.com/Ui4KbDU.png) i made 30-50% of in Blender or built complex technical systems to support, but then kinda got burned out on.
your work looks cool.
jssfuckin reupload it with slurpee's part like next week or whenever. it's the clock crew not star wars. you can edit it
....oh, that hurts
uhhhhhhhh make it a standalone in a different aspect ratio or send the assets to me so I can stretch them like a heartless animation sweatshop. You did the hard part of art: the art. Now you must do the hard part: ruining the art. That is where the golden spam truly lies. Not in the creation, not in the destruction, but in the perfect mushroom harmony you can only achieve when you overpower the compulsion to make the world a better place and accept we must do what only the gods can do: make the world a place
and if you don't i'll scale up those thumbnails and do it anyway this is your rocky moment not your clocky bron't
damn that looks SO good I'm sorry you got jumped by the resolution preset devil. he's a little shit. when I fucked up the resolution in my part for the villains collab, by a significantly higher number, we just letterboxed it. your part clearly deserves a pass on that more than mine did. The height is still correct so it wouldn't have lost any resolution either. it's absolutely totally understandable if you don't want to continue it, but if you felt like it, nobody would disagree with a star wars special slurpee-shoots-first edition rerelease or say no to a solo release like phantomcat proposed.
.........oh yeah, letterboxing. could even copy the gradient on the outside of the newgrounds player, too
(https://clocktopia.net/frogbag/letterboxo.png)
WHILE WE DO NOT HAVE A ANSWER FROM OUR HERO should add slurpee to the collab to be safe, since you don't get a troph if you're added after the troph is awarded
i sent slurpee a credit on the first wave of invites, we can reupload it whenever you want should you feel compelled
to be clear i mean swap out the file, not resubmit
also be a true banksy baller and don't letterbox the first background, just the 1024 ones
i love the vibe those pictures have utterly
it's a weird dream so it'd be extremely fitting if it was in a different aspect ratio now i'm thinking more people should have done that
I appreciate the thought and compliments but I have to get back to you, idk what I want to do, I am spiritually wounded lol
also school is starting and they're dickin me around again >;P
rare opportunity to letterbox but not have it centered. random x offset every background change
also fuck i'm so bad with paperwork, good luck
also i'd send spiritual band-aids but i just forwarded my last picture of a ferret in a mailbox to somebody so i need to wait until they forward it back before i can forward it to you, sorry