Flash Introduction (Dialogue)

First animation in Flash... Good for tweening effect and for lazy animation that doesn't involve actual drawing... For classical character animation... it is the most unintuitive tool I've ever come across. It makes me miss TVPaint. However, I had fun with this particular excercise...

We had to make our own character and lipsync to a soundclip. It had to involve some acting of the hands. Basically we we're told to go nuts with the various tweening tools. This was mostly done using Classic Tween, but after dailies I have now thrown in a bit of Motion Tween as well. Also, we didn't learn how to control easing in/out in tweening until afterwards, but I threw it in where I could, without messing up the parented symbol-motions.... :S

Dialogue is from 'Deadwood', I think...

"Escape" Project Animation

The final outcome of the 2-scene excerpt of a story, thought up, written and storyboarded by CG artist David Crisp and myself.
David did the backgrounds and compositing, while I did the animation part (plus that last silly credits title-card)
These are the last two shots of the story called "Slaughterhouse Dreams", in which the main character, a little pig, accepts his fate...

We are going to hell for this one.



Due to an economical (read: easy) character design, I even had time for some serious procrastination at my workspace... So I put my old photoshop skills to use and made myself a wallpaper (and some silliness)

Have you hugged a derpy-looking salamander lately?

Dance Animation

Very rough - too rough, actually; but I went loose this time becuase of experimentation. Clean-up failed spectacularly because of this. So here's the rough animation, just the motion, no character... I still like this, but I should've picked a character I could actually sketch freely...

Looks like croquis come-to-life because of that brush-choice.

Croquis done in Light Blue Prismacolour - yes, the un-scannable. Which was a bad choice of course, because I couldn't use my OWN scanner to scan these pages. Had to use the fancy, powerful ones at school which actually CAN pick up that shade of blue.

Didn't dare think at the time, I was finally on a roll, making lines that I liked and I love the rough blue look, so I regret nothing! WIll probably use coloured-sketch pencils more often for these things...

 Small sketching seesion with friends out in Viborg during the first peek of lovely weather we've seen this year so far...

And then I had to get ice cream... No other option.

Layout

2 out of 3 layouts I did for Layout class, taught by Marec Fritzinger - very charming fellow.
I had no idea what layout was until then, and now I have even more people I must pay respects to, when watching my favourite animated movies.

These are two layouts done by hand with light blue prismacolour and HB pencil, based on a deleted-scene storyboard from "The Emperor's New Groove".

Here, showing first the actual, full layout and below it, the final 16:9 composition. I wanted a sad and oppressed feel.

You do get to brush up on your "perspective-drawing skills". Here's the second one and it's final version below:

I even did a style guide, to use as reference for what Mayan symbols to use within the city, the scale and shapes of things and such. ANd then I just taped on a clean-up version of the character for model reference.

Dialogue Animation

Characters chosen are Gerald McBoingBoing and 'the cat who hated people' (no name given).

I chose this sound clip because it had a lot of energy to work with. This taught me a great deal about how to move a character in a fast way, using smears and rapid settling, over-shoots etc.
Lip-syncing was surprisingly easy; hadn't expected that.

The backstory for this scene is that Gerald has some anger issues - he doesn't take well to being told what he can or can't do... He's a child, so he throws a fit.

I really enjoyed having Mike Polvani as teacher. Swell guy, I'll miss him.

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Also, here are some sketches of the day...

AfterEffects 2 final compositions

1 week course in Adobe AfterEffects for compositing. Used the bird flight-cycle from our previous TVPaint class and threw it all together. The plane near the end is a mood-killer, teacher and I agree, but it was part of the assignment to have a plane in there... I chose the creepy, rainy evil caste mood.

The final, "close-encounter" assignment... put onto a screen and played with camera-movement. This assignment basically involved a UFO flying around a background element like the tower here and to abduct/or beam down an animated character (animated using AfterEffects, here the Pin Tool)

This was so much fun, and very useful in our future projects...