Back To 2D

Here's a 2D piece i'm working on, needless to say I'm not doing an 11 second club for this month. The computer can really piss you off sometimes.
Either way it brought me back to doing some hand drawn stuff, this test is actually my first acting shot in 2D.


If you can't tell whats happening due to the light line quality or my failure to bring out the emotion of the character, I'll tell you.
A bored guy is sitting down, rolls his eyes, pauses, see's something, he now see's it's something he likes, in his joy he jumps up and out towards it.

This is my second pass (Click here for detail on process) and I've pretty much nailed down my timing.
I'm going to start cleaning it up and either put a more complex character in, or just animate it fully as the "glorified stick man".

Jump Shot

Here's what came out of a bit of random animating in flipbook.
I guess the idea of a jump shot just slowly climbed into my head and voila... a jump shot. Albeit I think i should have treated it more like an actual test instead of just a quick bit of fun.
Theirs so many pops and lack of proper physicality, not to mention all the jitter's due to lack of proper attention.



Oh well, it was fun and only took me a little over an hour.

11 Second Club - December

I'm pretty sure that i'll be submitting a final entry to the December competition.
This audio clip was something I couldn't pass up.

OK Here's my flipbook pass.
Now this is a new approach i'm testing out, it involves doing a rough pass of animation in flipbook. The key is to not get attached to any drawing, this is done by only using rough drawings. I'm not gonna be hesitant to delete a 6 second stick man.
So instead of getting beautiful drawings, your focusing on your characters acting and performance.

This approach was one i took from Dreamworks Supervising Animator, Jason Ryan.

Anyway here's my rough.


Overall, i'm pretty satisfied with the performance. I think that I really avoided cliche's and went with originality in my acting. But that's just me, you could think it sucks worse than anything you've ever seen.

Lip Sync Number Two

So I really liked the audio for this month's 11 Second Club contest.

I decided that I would animate the lip sync first because i need the practice.
Normally in animation you would animate the body movements and then add the lip sync to make what should already be good, better.

This way I get my lip sync practice, and already have the lip sync plotted out for me if I decide to enter the contest.




Overall I'm pretty happy with this.. the older man's sync seems to be off at times, but I'm sure in time I'll get better.

So I Lied...

Well my dad bought the Jason Ryan Webinar set for me.
He's been an animator for a while and has worked for Disney, Bluth, and currently Dreamworks on Shrek 4.

The Webinars are basically 2 hour long tutorial's that come in purchases of 12.
Ive been going through them and saw that their was a really interesting one on Lip Sync, which I clearly have an issue with.
So I guess hand drawn will have to wait for a bit.


Above is the Flipbook version. I can quickly put in mouth shapes and see how it works together in motion.


And here is the 3D version. I import all the stills of the previous test into my 3D application and use it as a guideline.

Jason Ryan's really helped I think. Even with this single test I can tell I'm improving, just look back at my August competition entry.

Last Flipbook Test!

I'm posting what I hope will be my last digital 2d peice. I'm missing pencil and paper.


I'm actually pretty happy with this, no big complaints really.
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My Very First Quadruped...

Here's my first attempt at a horse's walk..


Definately needs aloooott of work.
I wanted to try this due to a short story idea thats been floating around my head, needless to say, it involves horses.

I'm actually starting to fall into a flipbook trap almost haha. It's so much easier and i can see how it looks in motion without taking a picture of each drawing and importing them... but i need to get back to legitamate hand drawn stuff..

For Lack Of Something Better...

I don't really have anything interesting to post, so I just thought I'd put up another quick Flipbook Test.

I Love My New Tablet

My aunt bought be this awesome "Bamboo Tablet" from Wacom and as I said it's awesome.. Heres something I whipped up in Digicel Flipbook Lite in about 15 minutes (Need to buy it to get rid of that stupid watermark)


Edit*
Wow I diddnt even notice this, although I said I would pay attention to it!
Clay Kaytis (Disney Animator of 15 years and Supervising Animator of Rhino the Hamster from Bolt) left a comment on my test of the Genie, and one of his main points was Volume control. The guy is smaller at the top of his jump and larger at the bottom... ugh, i gotta think more.

Genie Test Number 2

Wow two tests in two days, very fun but very time consuming,
I also thought I would show how I progressed through the shot.

And yup, it's the genie again, I really just love the character and the design, Eric Goldberg did a fantastic job as well as all the other animators including my cousin Joe.
Below is my first pass, after thumbnailing out my action I sketch out loosely the main poses. Then I shoot them and roughly time them.


Below Is my second pass, I added breakdowns (positions between two main poses) and secondary breakdowns to determine how the shot will look, then I shoot them again and fine tune the timing.


And Finally my final. Once I have my timing I add in all the nescessary inbetweens to slow down or smooth out actions.


Overall I'm very happy with the result, and he is much more on model on this test.

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Quick Genie Test

Here's my first test using the genie, I've been trying to nail down the construction of him so I could do some work with him. He's very much off model and for my next test I think I'll have it right. Only a few things bother me, one is the head's bobbing, 2nd is how only the head goes up on the passing pos and not the whole body, and lastly the arm darts back a tad too fast.

I also thought I would show what the difference between 1's and 2's are.

Above is on 1's -> 24 frames per second

Above is the same as the last one but with every other drawing removed (17-8) and going at 12 frames a second

Above is the exact same as the first one, but is run at 12 frames per second with no frames removed.
My favorite is probably the last one, it's very leisurely and doesn't draw to much attention to any errors.

11 Second Club August

Well this month's entry was a humbler, ha ha,after my last post I went and spent a lot of time working on my 11 Second Club piece, although seeing them side by side makes me realize I should have spent far more time. Anyway I was actually feeling very confident.. a bit too confident, I didd'nt really take any steps to look at it objectively, ie: Watching it in a mirror. Well I learned from my mistakes and thats what matters.

Here it is for you to judge,

This Month: 83/188, beat about 60% of competition.
Last Month: 112/ 163, got beat by more than 70% of competition
I'd say that's a good improvement.

On the up side I learned a lot and I think I really improved from my April piece.
I think I'm gonna come back to this soon, theirs a lot that needs to be fixed, especially the settles.. It seems that too many moves just come to a stop unnaturally.

And on a side note, a whopping 25 people (Sarcasm) voted on my poll and it seems that people still like Lion King, and second to that, my personal favorite Tarzan.
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A Slight Slump...

So I've hit point in my contest entry where I know it's looking crappy.... BUT I don't quite know HOW to fix it...
Sadly I'm at a point where I've all but given up on my animation and have just spent time on making the scene look pretty.

Hopefully some inspiration will pop up.
Here's where I'm at right now..

To some surprise, their IS lipsync going on
maybe i should push it more...

Sketches

Heres some drawings i did while watching the documentary "Planet Earth"
Each gesture is a 30 second at most, can't do much longer without freeze framing.

Work In Progress - 11 Second Club

Here is my near final blocking of my 11 Second Club Entry,
(Blocking: Poses run together without computer inbetweens, so images "jump" from pose to pose)
For me, blocking is done when it "looks" splined.
(Spline: Basically the computer putting inbetweens inbetween your poses so you will have 24 frames of images a second)
At the moment I have the standing guy nearly finished, but i have nothing but the main poses for the guy sitting, I chose to work on him last because his emotions are all reactions.
So how can i have him react with out the actions he's reacting to.

*Note that lipsync is generally the last step in the animation process.

And blogger has crappy video quality.

Some Competition

Well to keep this blog updated I thought I would mention that I am going to do another 11 Second Club entry for the month of August.

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New Look

So I did some slight changes to my blog,
I think I like it better.


Oh ya, and here's the new face of my blog, sketched it out and then had to wrestle Photoshop for 5 hours until I got something half decent. Weeell I think it was worth the time, I'm happy with my little self caricature as you could probably guess with the new banner.

Another Bouncing Ball

Here's another bouncing ball, this time in 2D.
I'm relatively happy with this, it's the first time I've ever mixed 1's and 2's together in animation and I think it turned out fairly decent.


Hmmm, it seems blogger cut off the last bounce, oh well, it's pretty obvious nothing special happens.

Sheridan Head Turn Final

Yesterday I put up my work on the head turn assignment that Sheridan does, I finished it up and so here it is.
For more info check my last post.

Sheridan Head Turn

A thing I like to do a lot is look at students work and try to do it myself, of course, I don't have the teachers helping me along the way but I think that may make me a little more independant in the long run.

As far as I know, this one of the earlier projects Sheridan College students must complete.
It's a head turn of an existing character, then an expression change, then lip sync to the word meow. For now I think i'm just going to stick with a head turn only, it seems I have a lot of work to do.

See for yourself,
At the moment I have half the work done, 21 drawings out of a total of 42.


My main issue with it is the hair and the line continuity. The hair constantly changes shape above his forehead, and his eyes and nose jitter too much. I guess i need to put more time into my inbeetween's (Drawings between the main drawings - Keys).

Also if you couldn't tell, the character is Zeus of the movie "Hercules" by Disney.

Thats Better

The Gramma Test i did a about a month back was pissing me off everytime i saw it, so i went back to it, altered a few things and fixed up the render.
Its definately better than before, not very good but better.

The Princess and the Frog

Check this out!

http://www.awntv.com/videos/the-princess-and-the-frog-featurette

A Disney Featurette about their upcoming hand drawn movie,

so far it looks great!

School's Out!

Well grade 10 is finally complete.
now im gonna have 2 months of freedom, fantastic!

And on a side note Montreal was great, i learned a ton.

Aaaaand heres something amazing that was done by the talented animator Keith lango (http://keithlango.blogspot.com/)
This is some inspirational stuff, really groundbreaking. He threw in 2's and even 3's into CG animation which is generally unheard of. I think im going to give that a try soon.

I cant mention enough how great this is

Pixar Masterclass in Montreal!

Nice!
A masterclass by pixar! and its in canada!
only 8 hours away too!... well i suppose thats a bit of a drive and the class costed me 450... plus theirs hotel costs.... wow it better be worth it lol!

The event is being done by Animator Andrew Gordon and Story artist Matt Luhn on the 13 and 14 of june.

I cant wait!!

Pixar's UP

I saw up last night!

it was absolutely fantastic, it had the whole package.

For the person who accidentaly stumbles on this blog, i think you should see it.

My 16th

Nice, as the title says, im now 16 years old

Last Animation While Being 15!

Heres an animation i started a little over a week ago,

i decided a couple of days ago that i would have all my work that i started this year done by tomorrow, i met my deadline!

Im not too happy with the lip sync and the render is a bit bright.

The sound clip is from the movie "Transformers"

The Bouncing Balls

Here are my attempts at the Animation Mentor Bouncing ball assignments

Here's the regular bouncing ball,



Here's the Comparing weights Ball test, (which i hate more than anything)



And Here's the obstacle course,

Here's A Walk Cycle I Did

Although this is my first walk cycle i was getting really annoyed with all my posts starting with
"My First"

I did this one about 2 weeks ago

First CG Animation

This was my first crack at CG Animation i did after coming across a fantastic site called the,
"11 Second Club", it's a character animation contest,
of course i didnt do so great lol, 112/160.

here's my entry for their April Contest


I decided to pass on the may competetition to practise my fundamentals some more,
maybe i'll try again in the june competetion!

My First Animation!

I did this one about 4 months ago after looking at the preview site of Eric Goldbergs book, "Character Animation Crash Course",
The book itself is fantastic, and the CD filled with animated examples just makes it even better
I highly recommend it to anyone.

My First Post

I made a blog

so im gonna put it to use and put up my animations when i get around to it