The Willie Nillie Project

November 2006 marked the 15th Anniversary of Willie Nillie. Because of this, The Willie Nillie Project was started. The Project involves the digitization of the flipbooks that he was created for. As explained on the page about Willie Nillie, he appeared in many adolescent flipbooks drawn in 1991 and 1992. After the first run, the odd one was done from time to time until 1995 when I started drawing them again regularly. This time they were much less stupid and more for experimenting with animation techniques. Needless to say, there are 210 flipbooks just from me.

The process requires taking apart each flipbook, scanning each frame (usually in groups of as many can fit on the scanner at once), separating each frame into layers in a Photoshop file, aligning them as best as possible, saving each frame as a file, bringing the files into Flash, and exporting an SWF. Since I only have access to the flipbooks that I drew (the other 2 sets may be lost forever), those will be the only ones I am able to do. But at 210 of them, I figure I have my hands full. If I am ever able to get a hold of the other 2 sets that were drawn, they will definately get digitized as well.

The other part of The Willie Nillie Project will be an attempt to make a small sculpture of Willie, as well as try to remodel him in 3D. Time will tell how sucessful those attempts are.