Animation Hellhole Memories Part 2

Colored versions of the Allan Hancock Animation Hellhole crew playing Worms: Armageddon at my old place, and the Calarts Cube 5 crew playing Halo at the ever leaky Woodglen Venture apartments.

Below are more WIPs / beatboards of the Allan Hancock College days. Some liberties were taken with the cast of characters, in case anyone was wondering if I went to school with a salamander, capybara, Samus, or a witch. Which is still uncertain with at least a few of those, truth be told.

But again, the whole exercise was to try to recreate the Fine Arts Department from memory alone, especially the courtyard outside of Buildings E and F, since there's next to no reference for this other than Google Maps and my own hazy recollections.

There are more images and details posted over at my Wordpress page.

Animation Hellhole and CalArts Memories, WIPs

Series of recent unfinished sketches revolving around memories of both the pre-internet days of the Animation Hellhole at Allan Hancock College (panel 1), and the later post-internet days at Apartment 131 across the street from CalArts (panel 2).

As you can see, a majority of the time in both situations revolved around carefully researching the emerging world of interactive software.

(The second set of panels below are mostly based on the Hellhole days:)

The actual animation hellhole was literally a renovated janitor's closet inside the Arts Department at Hancock. It still had a working sink and some leftover mops, but it was also stuffed with state of the art second hand animation gear, both digital (two pieced together PCs, security cameras, a VCR) and traditional (an animation disc with several 80W bulbs cooking overhead and underneath).

One notable exception to the historical accuracy of these pics is the super model time traveler featured in the last frame, but otherwise I tried to keep it faithful to the crew, situations, and atmosphere of the time: Endless days of drawing, shooting animation or the sh*t, running off to Chopstix for cheap Chinese food (a miracle for the Santa Maria/Orcutt area in the early 2000's), digging around Gamestop or Blockbuster for Playstation games, endless nights playing Worms: Armageddon or Puzzle Fighter, planning our next trip to San Luis to either get art supplies at Law's Hobby or whatever art books and comics they had at Captain Nemo's.

Again, keep in mind that for most of us it was pre-internet, pre-Amazon, pre-smart or even cell phone. You got by with what you could find and took it all in with the company of friends.