Hey there folks! We’re back with our next Hiveswap developer interview, right on schedule. This week we’re chatting with our animation director Angela Sham, who – as some of you may already be aware – was already creatively contributing to the Homestuck universe before she started working on Hiveswap. So let’s jump right in!
Introduce yourself to the fans! What is your specific role on the Hiveswap team?
Hullo!! My name’s Angela and I’m the animation director on Hiveswap. I’m responsible for overseeing the development of sprites, cutscenes, and basically anything that moves. Together with our lead animator Adrienne, I help to make the pictures go. I’m very lucky to be drift compatible with her.
When and how did you get your start on the Hiveswap project?
Two years ago What Pumpkin (WP) brought me on to animate Act 7, and then I transitioned into game work! Speaking of Act 7, you can check that out right here if you’d like.
Tell us a little bit about your career background! How did you get your start in animation? Do you have any advice for others looking to enter this field?
I didn’t ever expect to be an animator, to be honest. I didn’t go to school for art, and animation was a manic sort of hobby that helped me concentrate. When I graduated I decided to give it a shot as a career and happened to start freelancing for Sparkler Monthly, where another WP employee was also working, and that was when I joined the Homestuck team. My advice is, there is no one “right” way to enter the field, so draw what you want and put it out there. In my case, I drew fan art and a Homestuck fan animation called “A Lullaby for Gods,” and… here we are! In fact, you can watch “A Lullaby for Gods” right here if you’re so inclined.
We’re making a video game, so of course the question must be asked: what’s your favorite game of all time, and what games are you playing currently (if any)?
This is an impossible question; how could you ask me this!? You’re gonna have to settle for categories of favorite/influential games, including hits like I Cried for 50 Days (Shadow of the Colossus); Why Am I Doing This to Myself (God Hand); I Have a Mouth and It Is Screaming (Rule of Rose, Haunting Ground); I’m Just RPG Trash (Final Fantasy IX, Okami, Paper Mario, Kingdom Hearts);and Gitaroo-Man (Gitaroo-Man). I’m currently playing through NieR: Automata, and I drive around in Grand Theft Auto V when I really need to relax.
Are there any games that you currently use or have used as inspiration for your own animation work here on Hiveswap, or just in general?
Street Fighter III, BlazBlue, and Skullgirls for sure.
As an animator, you must have some favorite cartoons and/or anime – tell us about them!
Tekkonkinkreet was the film that made me want to animate. Something about it made me realize it was possible, that such an incredible thing was made by people, even though I grew up on a healthy diet of cartoons and anime. Some favorite cartoons include Hey Arnold! and Ed, Edd n Eddy, while Samurai Champloo and Escaflowne rank among my favorite anime. Animators who have been especially influential to me include Hiroyuki Imaishi, Yutaka Nakamura, Norio Matsumoto, and Sergio Pablos. I could talk all day about animation, so I’m gonna do you all a favor and head myself off at the pass.
What’s your workstation like? Do you like to listen to any particular kinds of music while you work? If so, tell us about it!
I work from home, so it gets very… uh… listen, there are a lot of snacks within arm’s reach, between my monitors and just a bit too close to all of my art books. Nobody should be told about this, let’s move on.
Favorite Homestuck character?
HMMM. The beta kids are nearest and dearest to my heart; I can’t rank them because they wouldn’t be great without each other. And their patron trolls. So I guess I have eight favorite characters, and are we only being asked impossible questions now.
Favorite Homestuck ship?
GUESS SO. In the early days, I was really ready for Karkat >3>John to happen, but after all these years, the long-buried ship that I think of every so often when I’m lying awake at night wondering where it all went is… Dave/Terezi.
Favorite Homestuck flash?
Lord. I’ve been going through flashes for like 40 minutes now, and this one is actually impossible. This isn’t an answer, but the first one I checked was Jade:Enter, then Jack:Ascend, then Descend, then Make Her Pay, then…
Do you have a personal message you’d like to relay to all the Homestuck and Hiveswap fans out there?
I know. You don’t think I know, but I know. I’m there too.
This is me, I wrote most of these words and animated most of these things. I haven’t had a lot of time to post recently because I’m living and breathing this game right now, but I’m trying my best and I’m excited for people to see.
There is probably an official post up (edit: cohen did a write up!) or going up soon, but here is the second trailer for Hiveswap! They used part of another song by everyones favorite band The Grueblers The Grubbles. I wrote this song in about 25 minutes with the concept behind it being “what would it be like if two teenagers were passing eachother in the hallway and the first one had listened to the white stripes one time and tried to explain it to the other but they were running late so they couldnt stop to talk so the second teen was like, what?? uhh??? yeah ok, dont worry i got it i think.” I think I had also just listened to the intro to spectacular spiderman.
Once again, featuring the incredible @jeffliujeffliu on guitar, who did a way better job than i needed him to. There was another cut of this with sound effects (since these scenes in the game have sound effects that i did, etc) but i like it this way because now its like a cool AMV.
That part at the end is the only joke I half contributed to the game which is just “what if when you find this shitty cracker the music is like.. really ostentatious.” I had to look up ostentatious to make sure i was using it right and i was sort of right but not really. Anyway, keep an eye out for that door.
I just love living in a constant tire fire, so this was inevitable. GTAV ruined me in a very unique way. This is only the beginning, you should probably unfollow.
Paperseverywhere tells me you did Joey's little pirouette fight motion. I love the way she makes a proper ballet preparation, plié, arms in second, before she starts the pirouette. It's little details like that that make animation sing, and just as important as a good walk cycle.
I animated Joey’s ballet moves yeah!! Thank you for the kind message, I’m so glad people like it. I did a lot of research to make sure Joey was using proper form, haha. That week was a blur of ballet videos and half-buried memories of childhood dance lessons.
It makes me so happy to see people picking up on and appreciating these details, it is what makes my job so fun. Thanks again <3
I’m pleased to announce that Hiveswap is finally actually for real happening, January 2017. Been working very hard on this game all year, and on this trailer all week. Thanks for your patience everybody, you have no idea how grateful I am.
Do you plan on ever releasing high-quality versions of Collide and Act 7? The versions on Youtube look like they lost substantial quality due to recompression.
There are no plans to at this moment, and since we’d have to rebuild it’s not going to happen soon. I understand fans wanting to see the “purest” version, but it was planned as a video from the start, so there is no final swf-only version. I assume Andrew’s reasoning was that Cascade was a nightmare and flash collapses under its own weight for an animation that long, and he wanted to avoid that again. Sorry! Maybe in the future.
When they asked me to edit the Homestuck 2.0 video, Andrew wasn’t in
it yet. So I said to him “if you send me even just like a shitty vine, I
can do something with it, I’ll make it work”
and he said
“sure I’ll send a vid of me communing with some horses”
You've probably got a billion asks like this by now, but it's a question that's been burning me up for a while: Why was Terezi not included in the flash forward to everyone on the planet?
I have gotten a bunch of these so I’m just gonna say, it’s my suspicion that there is no greater meaning to it. Guess we won’t really know until we get an epilogue, though personally I like Tang’s explanation.
1 year ago / asked by Anonymous
Q & A
My biggest complaint about the act 7 animation is why did you give John and Jane's dad a mouth when he never had one?
Because I want to believe in a world where he can bake his cake and eat it too. Is that so wrong, anon. Is it so wrong to have hope?!
1 year ago / asked by Anonymous
Q & A
I was wondering if you could talk about your process working on the End of Act 7 with Andrew and the kind of direction he gave you if at all possible :)
Sure! The programs used were Toonboom, After Effects and Premiere Pro (some Photoshop and SAI for stills). I’d animate in Toonbom, composit the animation, bgs, and add effects in AE, export a clip, drop them into the PP animatic, then export a full file for review.
Andrew would send me back screenshots with notes written on them like “make tadpole flashy” or “lets redo this asset”, sometimes he’d send me sketches for characters or he’d make flashes to visually describe the type of effects he wanted. One of the hardest parts was pinning the black hole shots down. We were both kinda “uhh how do we show black hole”, so I threw test clips at him until he liked one.
Once we had all of the scenes at a finished place, we did a pass for
timing and transitions, where he sent me time cues to make sure certain
scenes started at precisely the right point, not a beat before or after.
I had a lot of fun working on this, and it brought me out of my comfort zone as an artist, since I wasn’t as experienced in compositing when I first started. I learned a lot from this project.
BASEMENT DWELLERS VOL. 1: NOW AVAILABLE FOR PREORDER.
I’m so excited to share more photos of our latest publication: Basement Dwellers Volume 1 by Leland Goodman. You can now preorder yourself a copy! The first 100 preorders will also receive a very special secret sticker set!
What does it take to become a Guitar God?
For Zoe Rashida, the first step is passing Biology. Nobody ever said the Rockstar life was easy. With college applications, short attention-spans, a crippling obsession with her guitar, and (mandatory?) extra-curricular study hall threatening to pull the plug, Zoe needs to crank it to 11 in order to make it to the next gig… even if she’s only booked in her bedroom. With the help of a supernatural Deathmetal spirit-guide, stubborn teachers who won’t budge, and a family with immortal resolve, she just might make it.
This one goes out to anyone who’s ever felt like an idiot in High School.
“A beautiful, intimate reminder of how confusing and upsetting being that young can be, when you want to have control over your life but barely have control over your body.” - The A.V. Club
“Basement Dwellers is an incredibly insightful comic, a warm and thoughtful work of art.” - K.L. Ricks, Country Darkness
“Basement Dwellers proves some of Life’s truths: friends move away, school ends, but Rock and Roll will never die.”- Hansel Moreno, Mother Made Us To Die
Leland Goodman is a freelance illustrator and animator from Amherst, Massachusetts who currently resides in Queens, New York. She began publishing Basement Dwellers in weekly segments online in 2014. Leland graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2012, and is as Metal as they come.
A good while ago I was invited to work on the backgrounds for Homestuck’s final animation. A long time passed and I didn’t think they were going to be published, but here they are! Warning for Homestuck ending spoilers. [Disclaimer: Please note that I did not do all of the backgrounds, just the ones screencapped here. My stuff begins around the 4:32 mark]
Signal boosting these! I did only a little bg work for the Act 7 animation. A lot of them were done by this talented artist, and they deserve credit!
