BORIS: My student short-film!

Here it is! Finally! After two super crazy semesters and one very busy summer worth of work, it's done! When making my short-film "Boris', the goal was not to produce polished/finished animation, but to become a one-woman studio and learn all the processes of animated film making. I am happy to say that I learned a lot! I enjoyed making all the models and have a new-found appreciation for animators and riggers along with the rest of the film making crew. But especially animators and riggers (seemed to be the most difficult jobs for me)! It was a tough challenge, but I am thankful for the experience and hope you have a bit of fun watching! Thanks!

With special thanks to Amanda Leahy for the music, Zachary Aller for his creative input and troubleshooting, my family, and all my professors and classmates who gave great suggestions and support!




Also you can click below to see...

Character Models:  Boris Bear
                               Ranger
               
Environment Models:  Ranger House and Trees

Boris Bear: Ranger Character

The second main character of my short film is the Ranger! I have below an original concept sketch, along with some renders of my model in Maya 2013. She is sporting a very simple paint job right now, so she is not totally textured. I am especially looking forward to painting the textures for her face. But here she is as she appears in my short film (which will be posted soon)! Her hat appears in the film as well.

Gentleman Billy Goat: Rigging Update!

Yes Project Billy Goat is still alive and well!

In late January I began rigging him and have since been working hard on him, so I wanted to let you get a peek at what I have done so far!

His body is almost done, I'm currently in the process of getting it's bells and whistles rigged (ears, tail, beard, etc.), and tomorrow I will begin skinning him. That will leave me with blend shapes and attaching the face controls! You can see all of his controls in the picture below- yes they do make him look quite silly!

Currently all of his limbs can be moved, he can twist, he has full use of his hands and fingers/hooves, he can move his head, look anywhere he pleases, walk...all he needs now is an expressive face!

Animation: Catch of the Day

My last blast from the past! This was my very first full animation project that went from character design, to storyboard and finally to full drawings shot the old fashioned way...a regular camera! So please do enjoy!

For those who are not familiar with traditional animation, there are 24 frames (pictures) per second of animation run time, and although most of the drawings are repeated once each (shooting in doubles), you can only imagine what my desk looked like at the end of this!!! For the final piece, there are 228+ drawings!!!

My design of Rosey the Raccoon

Storyboard page 1

Storyboard page 2

Storyboard page3

Storyboard page 4/4

......and then comes the animatic......

......And finally the real animation!

 It was shot with the school set-up and camera, so my apologies on the less than ideal picture quality and lighting.

And of course as I always do at the end of my projects, I recognize the places in my work that want improvement. In this animation I recognize that my timing needs a good bit more work as it can be floaty! I will endeavor to improve upon my timing among other things in my next animation! 

Raccoon Run

After making "Bernard says Hello" I did many less successful exercise animation pieces. One of the more successful animation exercises is the one below, a test for a character that would appear in my first animation project with an actual storyline. This animation is meant to be played in a continuous loop, so if you have a mac, command and "L" should do the trick on quicktime, I do not know what it is for PC? I have not figured out how to coax the blogspot player to allow loops yet- if you know please comment and I will post here if I find out :) In any case this will give you an almost seamless loop (the playback hiccups at the start of the loop despite my effort). --All in all I do hope you like her!

Bernard says hello!

This was seriously my very first animation, EVER! I did this about a year ago, before I started this blog, and I would like to show my animation from the beginning. So in the near future I will bring you all up to date on my animation learning journey, starting with this little guy's big grin.