This is all created with the drawing and painting tools in ToonBoom Animate Pro.

Bitey plush became my travelling companion after it was given to me at Comic-Con
by MoriChax. I love it like a brother. It took her 4 hrs to make!

After Comic-Con, I flew up to San Francisco courtesy of EA2D for about 8 days  of work on Dragon Age Journeys and a little more partying. I’ve been working on Journeys for almost 2 years now so it was great to finally meet this amazingly talented, passionate and creative team. On the Journeys front, there will be an announcement soon.. until then I can’t say who what where when, but I will post info here when I can.

..no it’s not a postcard.. I took this! EA put me up here for the duration of my stay.
Best hotel I’ve ever been in, or even near.

OK seeya!

]]> http://bitey.com/2010/08/sdcc_ea2d/feed/ 8 http://bitey.com/2010/07/17-years/ http://bitey.com/2010/07/17-years/#comments Tue, 13 Jul 2010 06:13:25 +0000 Adam http://bitey.com/?p=401 ►►]]> Anyone here 17 years old? Today is the 13th of July, the 17th anniversary of my animation career.

As a kid I hated school. I hated being a little fella craving acceptance from footballing kids who detested non-footballers. I didn’t want to pretend to like football or cricket, but wanted to be accepted for who I was. I was a clever kid but in the small town of farmers, trade apprentices and sports prodigies, I didn’t know who I wanted to be. Should I take up sport because everyone else did? Should I try to be a tough guy and command respect with my fists like so many of my friends and enemies? Should I silently plot revenge and use my ingenuity for evil? Should I avoid people altogether and keep my artistic talents to myself?

I tried all of these. Like so many of us, my teens were the angry years. I wore black, carried knives, picked locks, invented and built small weapons. I was obsessed and involved in martial arts for all the wrong reasons. I was daring the world to mess with me. OK, I wasn’t a complete psycho.. I had friends and girlfriends and I liked to make people laugh but my dear mother was scared of what her son was becoming and where he might end up. It wasn’t until I moved alone to the big city, embarking on an animation career that my life really changed.

At the end of year 10 at school, despite having never taken art as an elective subject, I had dreams of being a successful artist of some kind but decided I’d rather shovel shit for 2 more years than stay at school. For years after, I worked on horseback mustering sheep and cattle, in kitchens washing dishes and frying food and in a factory dragging steel into a welding machine.

1992 found me working as a farm hand, driving tractors, moving irrigation lines and squinting in the dust. All the while I was dreaming and drawing in my free time. I had narrowed down my ambitions to becoming a famous comic-book writer/artist. I wanted to be the next Simon Bisley, or Eastman & Laird.

My mother took some of my ink drawings to be framed. The framing guy at the store remarked on the drawings and mentioned that Disney had advertised for trainees. They wanted talented artists to train in the ways of animation. Mum brought the details over to my flat where I lived with my younger brother. My dream job fell into my lap.

I applied for the animation trainee position and was accepted. I hugged my mum and dad goodbye at the train station and my first day in animation was July 13th, 1993.

It’s a few years old now but no less playable, so I think it easily deserves a resurrection in the shiny new place. Unfortunately I haven’t figured out how to embed the game into this page (it uses some funky programmy component loading) so for now, you’ll wanna play it on its own page. Enjoy and please don’t forget to leave your feedback here!

Pilliga Scrub
1978

Visit any Australian trucker’s forum and search for “Pilliga”, or “Piliga”. You’ll soon be rewarded with stories of “min-min” lights (an old aboriginal legend), vicious unseen creatures, ruined vehicles and sightings of the Pilliga Princess.

A common sight reported by truck drivers is that of small lights travelling at high speed through the trees, keeping pace with the trucks. Sometimes at ground level, others rising high above the trees. Others talk of localised wind storms, like mini hurricanes that shake and rock trucks and other vehicles, while coloured lights dance and sparkle in the air.

Image of a ruined vehicle in the Pilliga. Note the signage on the
door: Coonabarabran Contracting. Image ©local-legends.net

One story I heard many years ago was that of a truck driver who stopped for a couple of hours sleep on the roadside, right in the middle of the Pilliga. During the night, he was woken by a terrific banging and screeching of twisted metal. His truck was rocking violently and terrified, he cowered in the cabin without a wink of sleep until dawn. When he finally emerged in daylight, he was struck with the sight of the trailer tarpaulin shredded and strewn for a hundred metres up the road. The metal ribs of the trailer cage were twisted and bent beyond repair.

From hankstruckpictures.com (trucker’s forum)
“On a 120 km stretch of the Newell Hwy between Coonabarabran and Narrabri is the Pilliga State Forest… It’s a beautiful drive during the day but at night, some of the toughest men fear to travel along this stretch of highway unless they know they wouldn’t have to stop, even down to hearing about drivers blowing out a tyre and driving it flat until they reach the other side.”

On a late night-early morning Australian radio programme called ‘Overnights‘ (2am – 6am), they held a few special nights dedicated to stories from the Pilliga region. Listeners could call the station and tell their Pilliga stories on the air. On that night, the radio station had two of their people in the Pilliga Scrub reporting live by satellite phone. At one point, the connection dropped and the signal wasn’t restored for some time. When it finally returned, the reporters were OK and the cut signal was unexplained.

During the programme, one caller who identified himself as “Bongo” told a harrowing story of the night he endured in the Pilliga way back in 1978. The ordeal he endured that night affected him in such a terrible way that, to this day, he remains in psychiatric care.

The recording of Bongo’s call is freely available from the radio station’s website, so I’ve put it on the Flash timeline with a play button.

You absolutely must NOT listen to this unless it’s late and night and you have turned off your lights. Good luck!

Here is the map of Bongo’s journey that night. Running low on fuel, I imagine he intended to fuel up in Boggabri, or one of the other small villages outside Narrabri.

I have one other particularly intriguing story about min-min lights in the Pilliga that I’d like to post in the Stories section eventually.

(ps. if you find it difficult to understand Bongo, you can listen with subtitles here)

]]> http://bitey.com/2010/07/pilliga/feed/ 14 http://bitey.com/2010/07/a-long-time-coming/ http://bitey.com/2010/07/a-long-time-coming/#comments Sun, 04 Jul 2010 02:12:31 +0000 Adam http://bitey.com/?p=238 ►►]]> So whaddya think? Smells lovely huh?
If you know me, you know that a site overhaul has been on my to-do list for several years. And yet, it’s only been 4 days since the ball finally got rolling. I’ve made several attempts over the last couple of years, waving cash under the noses of friends or acquaintances. I only finally got it done by posting a job on oDesk and working with someone I’d never met before. That someone is Pavel from Russia. Thanks Pavel!

It’s a huge relief to finally have the site organised. With the former setup, updates were irregular and infrequent simply because of the outdated method I was using. I’d be writing them in Dreamweaver, embedding images, video, links, whatever.. then uploading them through FTP. Now though (in case you were wondering) it’s all powered by WordPress, so everything is done in the browser.

Anyway you’ll notice that you can comment on pretty much anything now, so have a look around, search, subscribe, register, comment, report broken links, make suggestions, complain about ad positions, otherwise enjoy! You may come across one or two things that are “coming soon” and they’ll be updated over the next couple of days.

If you’re new here, thanks for dropping by!

Chapter 1 has been online since late 2009 and has received favourable reviews (you can also play it here on Kongregate). We are currently working on the next bit which we hope will be announced in a matter of weeks.

As over the years I’ve become quite comfortable illustrating with vector I mostly used Flash for my illustration work. Since discovering ToonBoom in 2007 however, it has become my new illustration tool of choice, so I used Animate Pro for these images.

I did 6 illustrations for various parts of the book. Here are 3 with some closer detail shots:

(some of these you can click on for high-res versions. All of them ©Wizards, of course)

Where did he come from – this fleck of spite in an abandoned paradise? Who is this peace-shattering scourge of the forest? He is the last of the Dashkin, but in the rough language of wild creatures, he is known only as Bitey.

click above image to get high res.

The Last of the Dashkin fills in some of Bitey’s back story and poses a few questions about the world in which he lives.

This movie is my answer to those who said Brackenwood was nothing but a series of pointless scenes strung together. Up to this point, I’m inclined to agree so each new installment in the series from here on will be loaded with questions and answers on the history of Brackenwood and the future of her inhabitants.