Roasted Meatloaf S1 E4 - Robbin' Around The Christmas Tree (Newgrounds Edition)E

Links

Rating Details

This is the fourth episode of Roasted Meatloaf, originally made in 2019 (just like 2 and 3.) This animation gets a bit more ambitious, though it doesn't always have the best results.

This episode was kind of a struggle in its original development due to some stuff shaking up production. Initially there were some very direct audio and visual references to copyrighted material involved, but those were removed or replaced before the original version was rendered because it was around that time that I started getting more concerned about copyright and related stuff. For this version, I actually made a minor additional change to help dodge some potential personality/publicity rights issues. I don't know if it's likely for me to get in a scenario related to that, but I try to lean on the side of caution. Additionally, because I had moved to a new computer in the middle of development and didn't get GIMP reinstalled for some reason (I was still a kid and had to have my dad install things via admin password), I decided to complete the rest of the graphics using Inkscape (which I did have installed for some reason.) I guess it was good to start getting into Inkscape because I would eventually employ it more in future episodes, but it does create a bit of a weird shift in the animation's appearance after a certain point.

I tried to create more complex character movements for the parts where the "Santa" character approaches, which led to some mixed results. I think some animations turned out pretty decently, though other ones have some pretty obvious errors and I probably could have done them better if I made this today. Not to mention the sort of continuity issues with the character's appearance. Other visual flaws in this episode include some rather egregious examples of inconsistent aspect ratios and a bit of poor compositing.

It was with this episode that I started branching out beyond recording myself flipping through an image viewer and re-recording sped-up versions of initial recordings by making use of qStopMotion to animate some parts. As the name of the software suggests, qStopMotion is primarily intended for stop motion animations as it is derived from another application called Stopmotion. However, I found it rather suitable for animating my digital images in sequences.

The video quality gets a little weird in some parts, as if it's ripped from some degraded videotape or film reel. This wasn't intentional, but rather part of some weird rendering issues with the original. That original process was rather complicated as it took the effort of two different programs, Pitivi and OpenShot, to get some things the way I wanted. The renders for this version had even more problems with quality degradation, so alongside Clipchamp I had to employ the help of Blender's video editor to get a cleaner export. I didn't necessarily have time to clean everything up however.

Since both of my grandmothers (the one on my dad's side and the one on my mom's side) had passed away before December of 2019, I decided to put a thing honoring them in the credits (well, after them is actually a bit more accurate, but you know what I mean.)

That's all I got to say for right now. Enjoy if you would like, don't if you wouldn't like. Merry Christmas and whatever else people celebrate this month.