I never posted a behind the scenes for
Steamed Hams: The Presentation from last year's awards. Let's get those posted before we have new awards to get behind the scenes of.
The main story
With the main story I mean the connecting drawings in between the winning presentations. I wanted to stay true to the original Simpsons skit in style, which meant that I drew everything on paper.
Because I still can't just draw anything, I posed a bunch of 3D models and printed outlined versions of these.
You see that the two top left images are the same, but one was too dark to properly use, so all other ones are brightened before printing.
Then, using a drawing table with a light (although the actual light was broken, I used my phone's flash light instead), I traced the outlines with a pencil.
The backgrounds from inside the house I didn't trace from anything, I just used a ruler to draw the lines in logical places.
You may remember my treehouse from my presentation in 2016 (gosh that's three years ago now). I never did a BTS from that one, but here is the full render of the opening shot from there for orientation:
It, in turn, was based on this background I made for no apparent reason
another year earlier.
Anyway, I then scanned the drawings, thresholded them and coloured them digitally. I blurred everything slightly, backgrounds moreso, to give a bit of a loss of quality by VHS effect, as well as a slight subtraction of contrast, although both effects are fairly subtle.
For the mugshots I used the more traditional method of creating vector drawings for each "speaking" role. For the mother role, I actually asked my mom what she would be represented as, and made a small drawing while discussing it, and then made the mugshot of that. I didn't just make any random mom Lakitu for that! It's a neat touch that makes it just a little more personalised.
The sprite comic
While I had a background of the 'ground' floor, I didn't have one of the first floor/attic. I had visions of that as well when I made the ground floor background, so I could make something suitable.
I did only make the portion visible for the comic though.
The banner
Not much going on here other than that I had to emulate Anton's style for this. Luckily he has a lot of drawings of himself in
Dear Anton and other productions, and
Dragon Problem features him in a style that already fits fairly well, so that was not too much of an issue.
I made the banner in Inkscape like the other vector drawings, then added a filter to it to slightly distord the lines for a more sketchy effect, which is another property of Anton's banners.
The Japan World Cup video
I just edited the pacing and added a slight echo to my voice recording, otherwise nothing spectacular here.
The Paper Mario segment
I can't tell much about the scene without duplicating what I already said in the behind the scenes of my original in 2017. I basically just edited the scene to resemble my treehouse.
I re-installed my laptop in the meantime, so I don't have 3DS Max installed anymore anyway. I'm also moving on to Blender going forward, so re-installing Max just for this post is not worth it.
I can however tell more about the sprites I made of Anton and me. I wanted to make higher quality sprites with more freedom of movement, so I made the sprites from scratch, or well, traced them from existing spritesheets. For this I made the body parts separate from each other, so it is easy to make new sprites.
As you can see I took a bit more freedom for mine. I don't particularly like the way Lakitu is sitting in his cloud in the original games, and instead prefer him sitting upright, so I did that. I would have expected them to upgrade Lakitu just like they improved on Dry Bones back in
Sticker Star, but oh well.
Not pictured: the white outline. I added that separately before importing it into 3DS Max.
I think that was about all of it. Bit late, but better late than never! Hope you enjoyed!
