This month marks 10 years since I first made this channel. Here, I go back to talk about the videos that got this channel started. Aka the Minecraft animations.
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Take me to your leader
A poster for my semi-scripted improvised animated short ‘Take me to your leader‘ which I made in July.
I made this with the intention of printing, framing and gifting as a Christmas present for my friends who were involved in the making of the short.
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NTBTS Fanzine
Nirvanna the Band the Show is the greatest show ever made. I first heard of NTBTS in late 2021 when I saw Update Day shared on Twitter. I then watched the series and became obsessed. I can’t express how much it feels like it was specifically made for me. Afterwards, I watched The Dirties and Operation Avalanche (movies made by the same people) and Matt Johnson became one of my top 3 favourite filmmakers. I travelled over an hour just to watch Blackberry in cinemas.
This is a comic I made for a NTBTS fanzine (titled Nirvanna the Band the Show the Discord the Zine). At first I didn’t know what to contribute, until nearing the end of the deadline, when a thing happened on Letterboxd.
In September 2024, a Letterboxd account supposedly run by Matt Johnson was discovered and shared in a NTBTS Discord server. One of the reviews on the account was a negative review about Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, stating that it made Back to the Future look like Bicycle Thieves by comparison. Shortly after the account was discovered, it was deleted.
For my contribution, I wanted to represent as many facets of the NTBTS world as I could. Thus, this piece is full of references to NTBTS and Zapruder Films adjacent productions, including but not limited to: objects representing Kazik Radwanski’s features that Matt Johnson appears in, a little poster of The Kid Detective (a movie scored by Jay McCarrol), and a Flash t-shirt Matt wears in Matt Johnson Live At Comic-Con.
The complete fanzine with everyone’s contributions can be downloaded here: (insert link here)
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is your refrigerator running?
I made a silly little comic based on a bit I did one time in a VTuber’s live stream chat.
A couple of weeks ago, I discovered ‘Mia Fenimore’, a new Vtuber who does chill talking streams. For whatever reason, I asked “Is your refrigerator running?” in the chat, and somehow it turned into a regular bit. I’ve never drawn fan art before and to be honest I feel a bit embarrassed that I have now; But I had an idea for a silly joke so I put the shame aside and made art.
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Doctor Who: The Collection – Series 13 Artwork
A Series 13 Thirteenth Doctor fan art piece in the style of Lee Binding’s work for Doctor Who: The Collection.
This piece covers Flux + the 2022 Specials (Eve of the Daleks, Legend of the Sea Devils & The Power of the Doctor). I thought about including Revolution of the Daleks as part of this since I always thought there’d be a DVD box set collecting all 4 specials + Flux; Then it’d be a 5-disc set, but alas it has not come to be. On the Series 12 cover I’m doing (which as of writing is unfinished) I use a picture from Revolution for a hand and it fits better in that season anyway what with Graham and Ryan.
Did you know that the Doctor only wears a blue shirt in Series 13 for one episode? And that there’s no pictures of her facing straight on the camera while wearing that shirt? And that if I want to have her hold the ice cream from The Power of the Doctor, I have to frankenstein a blue shirt because she wears it during that moment? Yeah! It’s true! Fun! I’m having fun!
Special thanks to The Black Archive for their much appreciated work compiling high quality images.
Series 12 is next… and the last… until Series 14.
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International Asexuality Day 2024
A 2-page excerpt from a comic I’m working on about asexuality and love. I posted this on April 6 for International Asexuality Day 2024. I have around 9 pages sketched from when I was working on it in March earlier this year, but I haven’t worked on it in a while. Hopefully I’ll finish it one day.
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Doctor Who: The Collection – Series 11 Artwork
A Series 11 Thirteenth Doctor fan art piece in the style of Lee Binding’s work for Doctor Who: The Collection.
Before I made this piece, the only 13th Doctor episode I had seen more than once was her first, The Woman Who Fell to Earth. I really had no ideas for what I could put in her hand for this season other than the sonic. When I went through The Black Archive photo gallery, I thought about using the cube thing from Resolution, which would free up the sonic to be used for the S13 cover.
Other people have made their own S13 Collection-style covers and used the fob watch and glowing pyramid thing; I always try to do something different with mine, but if I can’t find anything else, then at least I’ll have the sonic left. Basically, if I can save the sonic until it’s absolutely necessary then I will.
Having now rewatched Resolution, I still have no idea what the cube thing is. I swear it just shows up suddenly with no explanation. Might be a DNA sample?
My friend Simon (Tweetlord) suggested using the custard cream biscuit from The Ghost Monument. She only holds it for two seconds at the end of the episode, but it’s far more interesting than the sonic (and it’s funny). How could I not?
I put consideration into the colour(s) to use for each season. I don’t want use the same colour for two seasons in a row, so if Series 11 is gold and teal (or whatever blue this is), Series 12 has to be something different. I think I might use blue for S12, so I had to change S11.
Special thanks to The Black Archive and Tragical History Tour for their much appreciated work compiling high quality images.
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Doctor Who: The Collection – Series 6 Artwork
A Series 6 Eleventh Doctor fan art piece in the style of Lee Binding’s work for Doctor Who: The Collection.
I really wanted for this cover to use the green coat outfit from the second half of series 6, but ultimately I couldn’t source the pictures needed to construct a composite in this pose even going through the Blu-rays looking for frames from the episodes.
I was adamant about putting the sonic in his hand for this cover. I gotta make sure the Doc holds their sonic on one of their covers, and since S7 had the glasses and S5 had the mirror, that left S6. I must have seen every picture of Matt Smith holding the sonic while trying to make this composite. The arm for this composite was taken from the DVD insert for Series 6 which I had to digitally scan to get the picture since it wasn’t available online.
The torso and head of this composite comes from a photo shoot for the Children in Need 2011 special episode.
The hexagonal shapes in the background come from the cage holding Idris in The Doctor’s Wife.
Special thanks to The Black Archive and Tragical History Tour for their much appreciated work compiling high quality images.
With this cover, I’ve finally completed covers for the first 10 series of modern Doctor Who!
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Doctor Who: The Collection – Series 5 Artwork
A Series 5 Eleventh Doctor fan art piece in the style of Lee Binding’s work for Doctor Who: The Collection.
Making the composite for Matt Smith seasons are so difficult cause there are so few pictures of him facing the camera. I have to give credit to Tim Hill who last year used the same torso and face pictures I used for this for his own art piece (which is incredible). I try my best to avoid using the same pictures as others who have made similar art pieces, but at the end of the day the only pictures that can be used are ones that have been taken. I can’t make a composite out of pictures that don’t exist, so this was inevitable. I’m probably more disappointed than I should be.
I do wonder that if Lee Binding ever creates his own versions of these modern series Collection covers, will he end up using the same pictures as I have for a composite? He’s far more experienced and skilled than I am, so perhaps he’ll identify a better, more suitable picture of Matt Smith in the archive.
Special thanks to The Black Archive and Tragical History Tour for their much appreciated work compiling high quality images.
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Doctor Who: The Collection – Series 3 Artwork
A Series 3 Tenth Doctor fan art piece in the style of Lee Binding’s work for Doctor Who: The Collection.
I started working on this piece way back in January when I found a great picture to use for the torso, but I almost abandoned this one when trying to get something into the Doctor’s hand.
The obvious choice for this season was the fob watch from Human Nature. It was a challenge putting the hand composite together, even now I’m still not sure if I succeeded. There are pictures of the 8th and 13th Doctors holding a fob watch, but a challenge I set myself with these covers is to only use pictures from the respective season, so I had to get creative. I thought about using the timey-wimey detector from Blink if I could find the right pictures for a Blink outfit composite, but that didn’t pan out.
Special thanks to The Black Archive and Tragical History Tour for their much appreciated work compiling high quality images.
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one panel collab
These are the pages I contributed to a one panel comic collaboration that happened in the Chris & Jack community Discord server in March 2024. The concept of the collab was to ‘yes, and’ the previous panel drawn by another artist and build the narrative through improvisation. These pages are presented without context… and tbh the context probably wouldn’t help that much.
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Jet Set Radio – 3D Cover Animation
In December 2023, a friend of mine @scoot_digital who co-runs @Buzz_WRLD shared with me an Instagram post presenting a very creative 3D cover animation for a Sonic the Hedgehog game. It’s been years since I’ve done anything with VFX or animation, but we thought it’d be fun to have a go at making something similar for another game called Jet Set Radio.
This project is not affiliated with Sega nor Smilebit; The video was created by fans of the game for a non-commercial purpose.
To start, I needed to reconstruct the cover art. I had an inkling that the cover was originally made from reused assets, so I checked the Jet Set Radio fan wiki, and luckily I was right. I’m very grateful to the fans who post and maintain the wiki cause without the original artwork this video couldn’t have be made.
I separated each character into parts so I could animate them later, and filled in bits of torsos and legs that were hidden by limbs and the spray can.
In After Effects, I imported and lined up each asset in a composite shot using the original cover as a base.
I used the puppet tool to mark joints and keyframed movements for character animation. The spray can paint animation went through a few different iterations as seen in the video below.
The animated sparks flying out from the wheels was also iterated on. I extended the line of sparks in the cover to form a horizontal loop that could infinitely scroll, and drew an alternate frame to place in front to hide where the sparks appear from.
The logo animation is recreated from the game’s title screen. A bitmap of the flat 2D logo was traced in Inkscape to create a vectorised version. The 3D extrusion present in the title screen was manually drawn in Inkscape. The separate letters and backdrops were animated in After Effects and recreated frame-by-frame from the title screen reference video.
With the cover animation complete, the final step was to attach it to footage of turning around a Dreamcast game case… which neither of us had.
We took a drive around the city looking in retro game stores for Dreamcast games but every one we found was inside a locked glass cabinet. Up to this point, we hadn’t spent any money on this project. I’m passionate about no-budget filmmaking and didn’t want to spend any money making this video. I feel that when you start putting money into a project, the expectation of the outcome’s quality and polish is different to what you expect from something done just for fun.
The cheapest Dreamcast games we could find were at minimum $70. We considered asking if we could buy just the case and leave the game. Empty-handed and about to leave, I suggested we ask the store attendant if we could inspect the game under the guise of running an errand for a friend who was thinking about purchasing it. Fortuitously, they obliged, and we took a quick video of the case in our hands before returning it to the clerk and leaving.
Mission accomplished.
I used Mocha to track the actual cover inside the case and After Effects to track the camera; I placed the assets from the reconstructed cover into the 3D space, moved them around on the Z-axis so they each have varying depth, and eventually…
Project complete!
In all honesty, I’ve never actually played this game, nor had I seen any gameplay from it until after I rendered the final video.
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The definitive TempusWare website
I’ve finally finished making my new website, superseding both my previous version of tempusware.com and TempusWare: The Archive. This time around, I used Jekyll – a static site generator to help generate the various pages as opposed to manually writing html documents for every page.
For the new site, I wanted to both present an archive of all my past videos and the new direction of my recent content (i.e. my short films). I was able to recycle the dataset lists of URL IDs, titles, and dates that I put together for The Archive, which compiled various videos distributed across my multiple YouTube channels. I converted it from JSON (used by React for The Archive) to CSV (to display the full list as a table in Excel).
A problem I had with The Archive was how bland its design was; I had just learned how to use Bootstrap and wanted to practice using it. For this site, I wanted to display thumbnails for every video, so I used batch scripts to take the YouTube video IDs from the CSV, download the respective thumbnails, and resize the images to 1280×720 with ffmpeg (for thumbnails that weren’t originally in 16:9 aspect ratio). It took some trial and error to resize the image; Rather than stretch the image or have black bars, I wanted to maintain the aspect ratio of the original video, but blur the sides to fit in 16:9.
My goal was to memorialise all the various projects I’ve worked on over the course of the past decade and a bit, and create the definitive website for my ‘portfolio’ of work (or ‘accumulation’ at least; ‘portfolio’ sounds too formal for most of the stuff I’ve made). Officially, the TempusWare YouTube channel turns 10 years old this October 31st, though I’d made content in the years before under different names and channels. I’ve always struggled with being too embarrassed to show people my work, especially my past projects that revolve around Club Penguin or Minecraft. I feel like I’ll soon shed the identity of TempusWare and go by my real name, but not just yet.
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Doctor Who: The Collection – Series 1 Artwork
A Series 1 Ninth Doctor fan art piece in the style of Lee Binding’s work for Doctor Who: The Collection.
I originally attempted a Series 1 cover in January of this year, but for ages, I was never really happy with it. I’m only a beginner with graphics design; Making these can be really tricky. I still don’t know what exactly felt off to about the original version, but I’ve had a go at revising it; completely redoing the background and colours. The Doctor composite remains the same; I started a new attempt on redoing the arms but I just couldn’t get it right.
March 2024 Revised Version:
Below is the breakdown for the original cover (version 1) from January 2024.
Special thanks to my friend Tweetlord for suggesting the anti-plastic vial from Rose to place in the Doctor’s hand. Since the RTD Sonic Screwdriver is represented on my Series 2 cover, I wanted to choose a different item for this one to ensure each piece is unique.
Special thanks to The Black Archive and Tragical History Tour for their much appreciated work compiling high quality images of Doctor Who.
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