Happy Pride Month! Happy Wrath Month! Happy Caspar-is-planning-for-Halloween Month! That last one is a joke. I’m always planning for Halloween.
Anyway, it’s hot. Summer weather is both enjoyable and inconvenient, in that I’ve been going for lots of nice scenic walks and otherwise overheating to death at my computer.
This month: BEETLEJUICE and VRCHAT and HALLOWEEN preparations.
Hi. Are you ready for some Beetlejuice art? How about two pieces of Beetlejuice art? Sound good? Ok.
Here’s the first piece I did, based on the stage show’s ending – Beetlejuice rides in on a sandworm to save the day, all while wearing his wedding attire. He has a cowboy hat. He’s having fun. It’s a great little moment. I have a soft spot for this outfit and I think sandworms are great. They are just a worm.
I had a lot of fun with colours on this one…from the start I knew I wanted some kind of green underlighting and it evolved over time until it turned into a neon nightmare. I think I managed to get the entire rainbow in there. I consider this a homage to the show’s incredible lighting work which was exactly my sort of aesthetic. I love to see it.
This didn’t entirely satisfy my need to Draw Beetlejuice even though it rules, so I started on another piece. There are two songs omitted from the official cast recording that I absolutely love: That Beautiful Sound’s reprise and A Good Old-Fashioned Wedding. They’re short Beetlejuice solos where he demonstrates that he’s capable of being somewhat malicious instead of just insufferable. I wanted to draw one of them.
I ended up choosing the latter song because the stage show has an incredible red/blue/purple palette going on in that scene and I wanted to play with those colours. I started this sketch with a thumbnail made of neons, spent over a week agonising over the final palette and inevitably couldn’t stop myself from putting green all over it, but at this point I feel like you should expect this from me.
When I sat down to draw some fanart I was thinking about how much I wanted to draw Beetlejuice in his original outfit and palette, because we share a fashion sense and I want to celebrate that. Instead I keep grabbing all the neons from the paintbox. In no way is this a bad thing, but maybe there’s still more Beetlejuice art yet to come. We’ll see.
BEETLEJUICE’S DESIGN - I took some inspiration from Shnikkles’ amazing animatic for ON THE ROOF, her interpretation of Beetlejuice just really clicked with me. Her work is really cool and she’s still making incredible BEETLEJUICE art even now (including another animatic!) so I highly recommend you check her stuff out!
It was shark week at some point. I know this because YouTube kept putting clickbait shark videos on the front page and I kept watching them. Sharks are just really cute you know? They have little confused faces and they’re just swimming around. I quickly deviated from watching SHARK VS ONE DROP OF BLOOD?? videos to 10 HOURS OF SHARKS WITH RELAXING MUSIC because you know. Current times. Sometimes you just wanna lie at the bottom of the ocean with some sharks, sometimes you just wanna draw a shark.
Grah-ha-ha, it’s HALLOWEEN! Soon. In a few months.
I have been working on HAUNTED HOUSE (2021 EDITION). I had a lot of fun making the BIOME GHOULLERY last year and I want to make More. Three scenarios to be exact, and this time I’m aiming to add a little bit of interactivity to them. During the initial brainstorming I dabbled a bit with survival horror, escape room and choose-your-own-adventure style mechanics, but in the end decided that simple is best. Right now the plan is to make three straightforward scenarios with some minor variance – that way I can focus on making cool and coherent visuals without tangling myself up in branching paths.
I’ve been working on this stuff for about a month now and I am aware that THREE SCENARIOS is overambitious if I want to have everything ready in time for Halloween Night, but I’m not worrying about that too much.
I hope you are afraid of corridors
Admittedly it wasn’t the smartest idea to strap a VR headset to my head in this weather but I did so anyway. In lieu of being able to hang out in the real world I joined a few friends for some VRChat adventures. We played pool, we drew fish, we fed ducks. It was great! I’ll put my summer photos in the GAME ZONE below.
But most importantly I was blessed with custom content privileges! And you know what I made recently? Daft Punk models.
The first step in creating custom VRChat content is to download an old version of Unity. It’s not a horrendous inconvenience or anything but looking at the old UI was simultaneously ageing me rapidly and sending me backwards in time, as if I’d logged onto a computer running Windows XP in the year of our lord 2021. Strange but bearable.
It’s normal to have this many bones
The second step is to re-rig your character because you didn’t think you were going to add it to VRChat when you first made it and now all the hand bones are messed up aaaaaahhh his entire arm is bending backwards what’s happening. Once that’s fixed you can move onto ~facial expressions~, which leads you into step three: have a fight to the death with Unity’s animation timeline.
Finally, you learn that this version of the Unity mechanim system is cursed and your model will be repeatedly forced into what is known as “bike pose”, a state in which your model refuses to T-Pose and therefore cannot be properly uploaded. Once you have solved this (by modifying animations on a copy of your main model), you will have yourself a shiny new avatar.
Lo and behold, my cool robot avatar. So far I’ve only added GM08 because he has the cooler helmet but I am adding TB3 out of fairness too. He’s almost there, all that’s left is to fix some weighting issues and set up his facial expressions. For now I am taking a break because I did genuinely have a dream about the Unity animation timeline and I think that means I should stop looking at it.
VRCHAT – My friends finally joined me in the VRChat dimension. When I last played there weren’t a lot of worlds that used the new UDON scripting features, but there are so many now that we got to explore a feast of cool little locations. Our favourite is probably the Duck Pond, a peaceful island with the incredible game mechanic of ‘feeding duck some bread’, but we visited many a place on our travels. Here’s some SUMMER PICS.
RESIDENT EVIL 2 – I love Resident Evil. I’ve never played Resident Evil. My affection for this series is fuelled entirely by the nostalgic memories of staying up to hang out with my brother while he played through the original collection of games. There are numerous reasons as to why I’ve never played them myself (mostly to do with the eternal battle between me and tank controls) but the remakes promised to clear up most of the sticking points, leaving me with no excuse not to have a go. So in I went, the roles reversed as my brother sat and watched me suffer through My First Resident Evil (2).
So far I’ve only completed the Leon A campaign but I think there’s a good balance of stress and comedic timing, which I think is mostly the fault of my own hubris. I would successfully escape from Mr X only for him to immediately catch up because I’d run into a room with a Licker that I forgot about. Adding to this is that my most recent exposure to the Police Station has been via the DEAD BY DAYLIGHT map, which has a slightly more generous layout for escaping big scary monsters with loud footsteps, meaning that I had to re-learn viable routes through the station or risk being cornered.
My brother appears to have been enjoying things as well, we get to chat about the differences between the remake and the original and he provides interesting little bits of trivia that I forgot about. He also laughs whenever a zombie catches me by surprise because I involuntarily yell “oh christ” every single time. Next up is Claire B, and then RESIDENT EVIL 3…
spaghetti
It’s film night 2 babey. Turns out I am willing to sit still and watch horror films, a previously untapped genre for me. In hindsight the amount of times I put horror let’s plays on in the background during work should have been a good indication that I’d probably enjoy these films, but nevermind. I’m watching them now and boy did I watch a lot of them, too many to give each a dedicated paragraph of Thoughts. So here’s FILM ZONE: QUICK FIRE ROUND.
FEAR STREET 1-3 – A Netflix offering about cool lesbians versus the devil. It’s very fun. There were some good twists in there. I’m especially fond of all the UV/neon palettes in the 1994 portion because of course I am. If you’re looking for a “things to watch at a Halloween get-together” recommendation this is mine.
SCREAM 2-3 – SCREAM 2 feels like it’s going to be eternally relevant in a world where True Crime is a thing, and SCREAM 3 wraps up the overall story pretty well. I’ll probably end up watching the other two sequels at some point if only because I like Ghostface. Light spoilers but I like the varying identities behind the mask just because it’s different from the other slashers I’ve watched so far, I just wish the killer motives were a little less predictable.
TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE and HALLOWEEN – 70s slasher films! I had a lot of expectations for TEXAS CHAINSAW because it was banned for a few decades and ended up surprised at how tame it was compared to modern horror. I think that’s a strength though, it made the ending feel that much more unsettling. I watched HALLOWEEN immediately after and enjoyed it’s similarly quiet and slow approach, although Michael getting a music sting every time he appeared on-camera broke the tension for me a little.
FRIDAY THE 13TH, NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET and FREDDY VS JASON – I watched these three in the same night, it was cool to go from a very visually pared back film to one that was full of weird dream imagery. I capped off the night by watching the crossover film and I genuinely wish more films were willing to be this silly. You don’t need to know much about either Freddy or Jason, there’s basically no plot and it plays pinball SFX during a fight scene. It’s a complete mess (compliment).
That’s it for now! I will see you all in October for Halloween (REAL).
Caspar 👻
