Lily Seeds

百合種子 Baak hap zhong zhi

Newgrounds: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/918000

Youtube: https://youtu.be/cvxrsighAdg?si=tGNi__WAAyoNuP6T

Started 2014, released 2024 lol.

• Director: SCUMSUCK / https://scumsuck.com
• Assistant: deflectric / https://deflectric.neocities.org/
• Sound design, foley: SCUMSUCK and Tom Davis
• Music: Arón Speer / https://danielaronspeer.com/

Animation and storyboards by SCUMSUCK. Animation assistance by deflectric. Please see production art on my site:

https://scumsuck.com/art/lilyseeds/

sound effects from Freesound.org:

• inserting VHS tape by pizzazif
• VHS VCR Static Noise and Glitches by SkyernAklea
• static varied soft good for TV white noise by kyles

Photoshop cs6 character frames, using the timeline function. Premiere for timing and compositing. Plus traditionally inked backgrounds

Shane was my animation in-between assistant and idea bouncer. We made these characters together and continually develop stories about them together.

Brainstorming self-contained stories for characters I made for my comics. The characters are actors to fit into any story i want them to act out. Script → storyboards. Storyboards become key frames. In-betweens done with Shane's help, especially with him filling in the black shadows and doing still boiling “squiggle” frames.

90% of the process was done in two semesters of school plus a summer. Then I sat on it for like 10 years cuz school made me depressed about making art. The last 10% was done here in NC, adding original music from Aron Speer, and mild cuts/edits.

Backgrounds drawn traditionally first, to fit the characters on them. Drawn with nib pen and ink on 11×14 papers, then scanned.

Characters were drawn in Photoshop, then exported as individual frames. The frames were then one-by-one added on top of the background in Adobe Premiere. It's a pretty low fps, maybe on 3's or 4's most of the time. I like it cuz it imitates the low quality of surveillance cameras. The black and white drawings were toned green/yellow and blurred a bit with a filter over the whole thing in Premiere.

I had a friend in San Francisco put my movie through his VHS machine and re-record it, and I mixed those textures throughout the animation (like the beginning blue screen).

(if you have any frames or backgrounds physically, maybe you can show them?),

I have zines with the concept art, which are all traditionally drawn because I think better on paper.

It's always easiest for me to do storyboards and keyframes - i lose a lot of motivation with in-betweens if they aren't personally amusing me with each drawing. Sketching the motion is fun until it gets to the tedium of inking and filling in 'colors'. So i intentionally work in a sketchier style with boiled lines and lower frame rate so I don't have to match frames exactly.

I will say I started using ToonBoom after Photoshop and the onionskinning is so much better in any other animation software Lol. But I already had all my work in PSDs and a brush I was used to. So i finished the project in Photoshop. Would not recommend to anyone else.

I just wanted to finally have a sustained narrative with my characters that was more than a one page comic. And I am happy now with it! It was mentally taxing at the time thinking about how I had to “market myself ” to apply to animation jobs and try to fit my nasty little self into other people's expectations. But now I just kinda draw whatever I want and people come to me to personally see how I would draw their own personal thing - rather than me having to draw for a big audience expectation.