Please make sure your speakers are on! (or even better, your headphones)

This is a rough animation I made in the spring, and recently polished up for release on the web. In it you can see my first attempts at digital painting, my first tweened animation, and some procedural environmental effects. The backgrounds were painted in Photoshop, the characters drawn in Flash, and all the rain is randomly generated in real time from ActionScript code.

The character you see is a komuso, a priest of emptiness, playing a shakuhachi flute (look up those terms if you are interested). That's me playing the background music. You could call it a poor rendition of the song Honshirabe, or you could call it an improvisation. I prefer the latter.

There was actually supposed to be an action scene in the middle, but I'll save that for the final version once I get some actual animating skill and a lot more painting experience. Without that scene, the themes of the animation don't come together as well, but I can explain the basic idea:

The overall theme of Komuso, this animation, is of moving from the extremes of stagnation, agitation, and violence to energetic balance and wholeness. There's more symbolism and such, but I'll leave that for another time. Anyway, please enjoy the animation.

Just remember to breathe.

*if you like this, you might like these too: [link] [link]