From Prom Party Girl to Wetsuit Soldier

Being a writer means you have to kill your darlings.

RIP, Pink Party Dress

It’s sad. Pour one out for the pink party dress that was originally supposed to be in the pilot but now has gotten the axe because we do not have time for the party lead up fight scene.

I like showing photos from my sketchbook directly. It makes you understand I’m a mere mortal.

I had originally written the pilot to include an opening scene where Vanessa is at a big, splashy birthday party and she’s in a pretty pink dress (that’s conveniently designed for the brawl she would have later). I loved the design and I loved the spunk of this concept art, but sadly the scene got deleted in a recent script revision.

Look, it’s a show about teenage punk surfers and whales. That’s what needs to get shown first. Not a birthday party gone wrong. Sorry, guys. We gotta go straight to the final square on the right of the Scene sheet. Creating artwork helps inform the writing process.

I may use this dress design later, but it’s not gonna stay in the pilot at this point. This is the process, folks. You start with one idea until you figure out an even better idea. And being my own director means being my own studio notes exec. Marketing informs my decision making too. I have to be two people who hate each other at once. It’s tricky. If everyone had infinite time, sure I could have a bigger birthday party scene, but we don’t. This is what we call cutting to the chase.

Anyway the new beginning cuts straight to the chase of the story: Teenage Punk Surfer Freedom Fighters. And here’s the start of that design process.

Happy Birthday to Me

So, yesterday was my birthday. I figured I’d take this week’s post to celebrate me, Jules Effin Rivera. We wouldn’t really have any of this without me. so let’s talk about my incredibly obvious self insert character in Hurricane Vendetta and why she matters.

This is Justice. This is the Love, Joolz insert character and she’s here to impart surfer wisdom on Vanessa. Justice is the Surf Jedi of the story and she’s the one adult who doesn’t admonish Vanesssa for blowing up her life by giving a Joke Speech at School. In fact, Justice celebrates it. She even rewards Vanessa with a gift we’ll see later.

In the beginning of this story, Vanessa isn’t very sure of herself, especially not after her speech bombs spectacularly. You’ll notice her friends aren’t really around to support her either (Why yes I am packing a lesson of unreliable friends into this adorable surfer whale cartoon). By the time she gets on the C Train, she’s alone and sad. But a chance encounter with whales and later Justice helps to change all that.

We all wish we could’ve had a “cool adult” in our lives as teenagers who could guide us through life without judgments or expectations. Sometimes we get that in school. Sometimes we’re even lucky enough to have that in our family. But for those of us who didn’t get that growing up, I wanted to show you what that could look like.

In a way, the story of Vanessa and Justice is a way to give surfing to my awkward adolescent self. I didn’t get that kind of mentorship, so the least I could do is render it in ink and paint. And this isn’t just about me. I’m doing this for all the awkward, shunned girls who said Too Much Truth and got in trouble for it. I may not have gotten a surf mentor as a kid, but I can pay it forward.

Animation is more than a product. Animation and storytelling can be the gift you give to the next generation of kids just like you.

Happy birthday to all of us.

-Love, Joolz

First Time in a Surf Shop

Still need to get sound done, but I would love a weekend off.

Anyway, this follows Vanessa’s trip to the surf shop, where magical, fun things happen. I had a great time creating this surf shop based on my own experiences. The fiction surf shop was based on the now defunct Boardriders in Malibu. (Sad to hear about their closing, that was the first place I ever got a wetsuit.)

I wanted to feel like this trip to a surf shop is the most fun, exotic thing Vanessa’s done in a while. This poor gal has been through it, and now she’s finally treating herself with a gift from a stranger.

This scene was all about the wide shots.

A surf shop is a very specific kind of experience. There’s a lot of beach stuff on display but then there’s a lot of wetsuits and surfboard stuff most newbs have never seen. It can be overwhelming, but fun. Vanessa is lucky her surf shop is run by this super friendly, character, Randy.

Randy is low key based on another helpful guy from a whole other shop (Val Surf in Valley Village). I had such a good experience there, I figured I’d draw inspiration from that. Surf shops aren’t always the safest place for women. Sometimes the guys there can be real jerks, just because you’re smaller and easier to punch down to. I at least wanted Vanessa’s experience to be ideal. Good surf shops deserve to be shouted out.

But Vanessa has no idea how ideal it’s going to get for her.

I’ll save the reality of those other shops for a Love, Joolz comic.

Recycled Boyfriend

So we're getting to a very interesting part of the story: meeting Asa.

Vanessa is a hormone-addled teenager. She's going to make some choices you or I wouldn't make based totally on those hormones. And one of those decisions is Asa.

Asa is a hot young buck on the island who meets Vanessa in a chance encounter. He has dreamy blue eyes and gorgeous curls. And he surfs! Oh, Vanessa has her hands full with this guy.

Now some of you who've been following my work for a while might recognize this guy. This guy is based on Biscuit from one of my previous comics, Misfortune High.

Misfortune High is a story about a magical school, teen wizards, and class warfare. Truly the spiritual successor to Hurricane Vendetta. (HV is slightly a magical girl story if you count Vanessa's ability to talk to whales). The character I specifically based Asa on is called Biscuit. He's a spoiled rich kid with more dollars than sense. He gets expelled from the magical school because he's a cheater and a liar. He spends a good chunk of the story as a punching bag or a punchline because he's a joke.

But what if Biscuit wasn't a joke? What if he had the same privilege as Biscuit, but was actually a capable fighter? And what if I made him a whaler? Suddenly, he's a much more intriguing character. Now he's a credible threat.

We've all seen those DOGE teenagers blow through government offices empowered by sheer privilege (and sadly their disposability). Asa is this but with a yacht and a thirst for whale meat.

What does that mean for Vanessa? We'll see. I'm sure going on a date with a whaler will end totally well for her. 

-Love, Joolz

Flooded Island - From Fantasy to Reality

A big part of Hurricane Vendetta is showcasing life on Progress Island, and while life there can be chaotic due to the elements, it's otherwise beautiful. I wanted this animation to take you somewhere. And that somewhere is based on Puerto Rico.

The key to making a great fantasy/sci-fi story is to set people in a place that feels alien...

...But it's absolutely real.

This photo I took of myself is from Parque de las Palomas in San Juan, Puerto Rico. My crappy, little storyboard does it no justice. It's an amazing place, filled with life and color. You go to this one square kind of off the beaten path, and suddenly you're surrounded by pigeons. This is because this park is dedicated to fostering the pigeons for centuries. You can even pay to feed the pigeons some bird seed, but if you do, watch out. The birds might want to fly on your hand, shoulders or even your head.

You thought I was kidding about that?

Anyway, here are a few more shots from this sequence inspired by real places in PR.

Colorful houses on a hill.

Stands selling rice and beans and bacalaitos (fried fish).

Artisan stores selling casitas, small ceramic house sculptures we Puerto Ricans all love hanging in our houses. (I got a small one for my fridge.) Why do we hang a tiny ceramic of a house in our house? I don't know! But these little ceramic doodads are a fixture in many Puerto Rican households.

Obviously, gorgeous views showing the water is everywhere.

But some things I did embellish for the sake of the story. Puerto Rico doesn't have the level of flooding Progress Island has. But that's the point of the story: to show a world flooded out by Climate Change. Nobody actually solved Climate Change in this world. They just adapted to the floods and learned to surf to get around.

If you're wondering if I'm creating a fantasy land out of a place that already exists, but I'm just slapping some new labels on it, you're correct. That's exactly what I'm doing and for two reasons: 1) We don't talk enough about the island of Puerto Rico and 2) If JRR Tolkein can call his London-flavored city of elite magical white people "Lindon" and still get called a genius, then I can do whatever the hell I want.

Why yes I did steal the name Progress Island from an industrial video that became a MST3K skit. Who's stopping me? I reiterate I can do whatever the hell I want. It's my story.

Love, Joolz

Talking Whales and Transforming Surfboards

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve posted anything significant. I’ve been busy trying to figure out the best process for doing storyboards. When to do roughs? When to do clean ups? What should finalized boards look like? How do I break a scene into sequences? This week, I've storyboarded the scene where Vanessa boards the C Train and meets some interesting characters. In this sequence, we see Vanessa talk to a whale.

I’m so ridiculously proud of this sequence.

Taking time to nail down character acting and timing is everything in a scene like this, where we see Vanessa has a supernatural connection with the whale. This is the magic of animation, seeing this come alive in a way that wouldn't have hit as hard in a graphic novel.

Seeing my ideas come together through storyboarding has been the most rewarding part of this process. Even complicated ideas such as how to make the rebel characters’ surfboards go from backpack size to full size came to fruition.

Look! I made a transforming surfboard!

According to the progress chart I set up, the pilot has been storyboarded almost halfway. Not half bad considering I’ve been doing this project in my off time. If I can rough one scene a week, I can finish the whole episode in about a month and change.

Also, I’ll be in the recording studio this week with my animation partner, doing voices and working on getting sound lock on these scenes. Sound Lock is when the soundtrack for an animation has been finalized including voices. This makes it possible to finish the final timing on the storyboard art to ship to animation.

I can’t believe I’ve gotten so much storyboarded already. I’m so excited to show you more.

The full string out of the Surfboard Scene is available to watch for Patreon Video subscribers.

Storyboard Rough Test - Scratch Audio

So this is a slightly older storyboard test with lower quality audio than more recent tests. This is what we call in animation ‘scratch audio.’ This has been sitting on my Youtube as Unlisted for nearly four months. Let's share the wealth, shall we? This is how Vanessa gets manipulated into giving a very salty speech which we'll see next week.

It's probably some of my best scripted work. See why I've gotta roll into animation? Graphic novels can't allow me to scream at you. 

Scene Sheets

As I gear up for testing live footage in my animation software, I wanted to prepare myself some basic artwork sheets for the mood and the feel of the scenes. I call this little cheat my Scene Sheets.

Since I'm the only person who has to work in this pipeline at the moment, my scene sheets are a way to consolidate designs for which characters appear in the scene and how they should look on screen. Also for funsies I throw in a couple of storyboard panels that have a rough color key on them.

Normally that's the job of like three guys in a studio setting, but I don't have time for that. I'd rather get something close enough for me to get rolling with storyboard and animation tests.

 So this is some rough artwork for the opening sequence. We get hit with some wild imagery such as Vanessa's run in a party dress, her confrontation with Asa, a rough idea of what the Scum Lords will look like (surfer radical animal rights fighters).

Vanessa is the lead character of the story. She's going to start this scene in a moment of distress. I gave her a short party dress because stuff gets real i this sequence and she has to be able to move. I kind of imagine her outfit would flow like a figure skater. Except this would be a figure skater/high diver/surfer. So uhh, yeah the dress has to allow for free movement.

If you're a long time fan of my work, you might recognize some faces here. Asa is inspired by Biscuit from Misfortune High, except what if he was actually capable? Effectively a rich kid with too many weapons, power and privilege. And Marshall? If anyone remembers my very first webcomic (God I hope you don't) Marshall was the lead character. The whole point of that character was that he always gets underestimated by the people around him for being too young and seemingly inexperienced. With our new guy, I've doubled down on that by making him even younger and skinnier. Certainly not intimidating as a hand to hand combat fighter, but his physique makes him deadly on the waves.

So yeah then I throw some test panels off to the side of the characters. I guess this is my comic sensibilities coming out.

 For a later sequence, I created this scene sheet. This is to follow an event that takes place earlier in the story where we briefly have a flashback. Vanessa comes from a fancy private school where she's an underclassman and a diversity admission. She desperately wants to be cool and respected by her elders, but it's not going so great. I wanted to capture her bright, plucky, tries-too-hard attitude with a bubbly cerulean blue outfit. My official reason for giving her a different formal outfit than her elders is that she's an underclassman, but the truth is, I just like how fun it looks. I wanted Vanessa to look like a comedian and a butler at the same time. But like cute like a teenage gir.

Her so-called friend, Lyra, provides a unique challenge to Vanessa in this scene, so I wanted to give her a dark, severe outfit. Lyra is a ruthless upperclassman who loves leveraging her status to dominate others. She's a big, oppressive figure in the scene, so I went with a Victorian style dress. Nothing says oppression like the Victorian era. I feel like this makes you go "Oh she's the one in charge." And she does nothing good with that power.

Philippe is the guy who seems to have Vanessa thinking he's her boyfriend, but has his own agenda. Philippe is a young man sowing his oats, floating from girl to girl at Silver Needle Academy. Vanessa may be his latest victim, but she won't be the last.

Both Lyra and Philippe have an odd green tone to their skin and there's a big reason for that. There's a class of people in the story called the Silver Skins. And they're resource hoarders who have silverized skin no thanks to a genetic experiment gone wrong generations earlier. They tell the world they're suffering and persevering, but they're sailing rich and free as they always have. Lyra and Philippe belong to a class of rich elites that have blighted themselves in the name of improving themselves through science.

This is not based on a true story.

Anyway, throwing those extra color key/storyboard panels off to the side help me visualize the scene in terms of animation art.

We'll see how everything ties together when I have to start painting the background art.

I swear I know what I’m doing.

Laying Down the Pipeline

So I've been trying to figure out what kind of pipeline to establish to get Hurricane Vendetta going as an animation. The last time I made a long animation, I used some archaic digital tools. I wasn't going to subject myself to animating in Photoshop again. I needed to figure out what tools would help me create web-cartoon level animation that looked good, but made the animation process smooth and easy.

First, I had to figure out which program was going to make storyboarding easy. I don't have my ipad to do storyboarding anymore, so I looked into options that can work on my Surface.

Storyboarder

This program is lightweight, free, and easy to use. Storyboarder was good enough to test out some scratch audio with imagery. (See: Speech Test) It's not half bad to get something quick and dirty out. But if I wanted to make scenes longer than a minute with more camera work, I'd have to level up.

Storyboard Pro

 Toom Boom Storyboard Pro is a little more complicated than Storyboarder, but in my opinion the juice is worth the squeeze. Storyboard Pro gives me the option to board more than a minute worth of artwork at a time. Even better, I can import image sequences from Storyboarder, so I can work with something more light weight when I'm on the go. Storyboard Pro is a fairly powerful boarding program that I think is going to be the main workhorse for creating storyboards to be turned into final animation. 

It's figuring out these tiny bits of the pipeline that gets me to how I want to create this animation. Storyboard, Animation Program, Background art, all are different parts of the creation process. (Also, I get help from my partner as he's also working on his own animation research and development.) Once I get the best process ironed out, all that's left is the execution.

So let's talk final Animation Art.

TV Paint

TV Paint gets the job done. As far as animating straight ahead goes, I can throw down new frames to animate quickly and easily. And I got the artwork clean up to not look too bad. I think I might use this software for animating more intense sequences. I'll let you know after I've done more testing.

Toon Boom Harmony

I got the idea to try out Toon Boom Harmony from my friend Fable Siegel, the animation director for Lackadaisy. They recommended I try out this program as it's worked out pretty well for their pipeline. So I start throwing together animation artwork into this program. I add the character art drawn natively in the program as well as a hand drawn watercolor background. I dig the style of the artwork, feeling sloppy and indie while also giving us a feel for island life. As long as I kept the line weights steady, I felt like my artwork translated well enough to Harmony for animation. But how did animation itself work out?

Harmony Animation

I decided to take Harmony for a spin in terms of regular animation (just in case I wanted to do a sick ass opening animation). It's not half bad. I just have to figure out how to add key frames faster. I'm still learning. I feel like this program could create some very clean line work mixed with robust animation. I may not want to get this deep for animation for every shot, but this could come in handy for more "bigger budget" scenes or "character acting. Here's a little sample of how Harmony rough animation looks. (I should have a more cleaned up version of this in the coming weeks.

Okay that's all, folks. I can't wait to show you guys more!

-Love, Joolz

Storyboard Testing Begins

Since Hurricane Vendetta is slated to be an animated project I thought I’d get to storyboarding some test shots. I’m trying to teach myself Storyboard Pro so I can get rolling with doing longer animated sequences. I’ve learned from my Love Joolz stuff that I can do longer animatic videos.

So what I’m trying to do here is just figure out how to time silly cartoon sketches to voice acting. With these images, we see me messing with the style of how I want to do these boards. I feel pretty good at the direction so far, especially when adding color. We all know I have a thing for spot colors. I would LOVE to do this as a colored storyboard and turn it into something Love, Joolz looking. That would be neat.

But let’s be real. I fully intend to make this a final colored project. I’m me. This shit is gonna go all the way to the top.

This particular scene is a test shot of when Vanessa delivers a speech at at her preppy high school that makes the audience’s eyes water. But for all the wrong reasons of course. I cannot wait to act out her speech and show you the final product. It’s gonna be electric.

-love, Joolz

Designing an Antagonist

o alongside our main character Vanessa, I’ve been developing artwork for other cast members. Lyra is an antagonist character we briefly meet at the beginning of Episode 1 and will stay haunting us like a poltergeist for a while after.

Lyra is a hater, first and foremost. She has positioned herself as Vanessa’s senpai but otherwise hates her and wants nothing good for her. I love writing hater characters because it helps me explore the people who have hurt me in my life. What motivated them? Why do they make the decisions they make? I’ve attached some script to show how disrespectful and manipulative Lyra really is.

Side note: I can’t wait to draw Philippe, the terrible boyfriend, even though he’s such a tertiary character.

Back to Lyra. Her design was a bit of serendipity. I had been developing her look in a local art class I help out at, and I ran out of time to color her in, which is why I ended up with a sketch of her half done. But I thought it looked good. I liked the mostly white vibe of the private school uniform. It has this look of private school anime that I love. (Revolutionary Girl Utena was a formative experience for me). So I kept the jacket mostly white.

And Lyra’s ghost white skin has a story explanation. She’s what is known as a Silver Skin, which means she’s got a weird UV coating to her skin that makes it look gray. I drew influence from this early colonial painting I happened to see while on a museum trip with my mom. And like…those people in the paintings were white. Like creepy ghost white. I know the Spanish came from Europe but damn that was some white skin to the point the characters looked gray. Why the Spanish thought that creepy gray white skin was anything other than a blistering criticism I don’t know. But it’s to all our benefit cuz it looks cool in the story.

Anyway I’m gonna have more cool stuff to share next week now that I’ve got Storyboard Pro working. Whee! We love the progress.

-love Joolz

Designing Vanessa

The artwork for this week's post is the model sheets I'm trying out for the main character, Vanessa. Model sheets help me establish what my character looks like so I can keep her looking consistent in the story. You can see I'm trying to land that weird confluence of anime and funny pages in her artwork. In the final art piece, you can see the very first attempt I made at doing her model sheet, this time with markers. As you can see, I’ve been working on her design since July of 2023. I think I'm getting the hang of drawing Vanessa, so I'm excited to introduce you to other characters in the world.

In the story, Vanessa goes from Private school to Surfing Fool and I wanted to explore that in the first image. There's a certain buttoned-down quality to Vanessa in school that she gets to shed when she goes to Progress Island.

Why yes, I am calling the main destination in the story Progress Island, after the famous MST3K short about Puerto Rico industrialization films.