Clockday Collab 2025: xposted just for my pal slurpeeclock

[Slurpee]

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

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


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 , 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 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

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

some of you may have noticed the problem already



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?



1024     
1024 1024 1024 they're all 1024 how HOW DID THIS HAPPEN HOW DID I NOT NOTICE HOW NARROW THEY ARE WHILE I WAS DOING THEM

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.

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

[JellyClock]

happy clock day

my sympathies. i can relate. you have no idea how many abandoned movies 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.

[PhantomCatClock]

jssfuckin reupload it with slurpee's part like next week or whenever. it's the clock crew not star wars. you can edit it

[PhantomCatClock]

....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

[PhantomCatClock]

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

[FLOUNDERMAN_CLOCK]

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.

[PhantomCatClock]

.........oh yeah, letterboxing. could even copy the gradient on the outside of the newgrounds player, too

[PhantomCatClock]

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

[PolyhedronClock]

i sent slurpee a credit on the first wave of invites, we can reupload it whenever you want should you feel compelled

[PhantomCatClock]

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

[PannacottaClock]

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

[Slurpee]

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

[PhantomCatClock]

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

[PhantomCatClock]

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