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! 

A New Me!

As I was looking around on other art blogs, I began to notice that a good majority of the artists used self portraits of themselves for their profile pictures, and I thought to myself, why don't I? So last night I hopped on Corel Painter 12 and did this quick paint of me! And the result? Behold my dorky self portrait :)

Gentleman Billy Goat: Project Update

Hello there! So as I alluded to in my first post with my sketches of this guy, I have been busy building him in Maya as a 3D model. I am nowhere near finished sculpting, but I did want to include you on my progress as it stands. So I have included some screenshots I took as I worked over this past week. In that time I managed to complete turning my initial nurbs-surfaces (which are omitted from my screenshots- they were not pretty!) to a single polygon mesh (all of his body parts are made of one piece, not many), as well as started sculpting features of his face and cleaning up my geometry. I still have much cleaning and sculpting to do, and I will post another update once there is significant visual change!

early polygon mesh work

A start for the sculpting of the face

Got to have that vest!

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!

Update: Videos Fixed!

Hello there! I heard there was a few problems when trying to view my animation video. Today I went and made sure all the formatting was fixed, so from now on I will only have reliable, better quality videos! Thanks for your patience and my apologies!

Ink: Pig in a Tree?

This was my first time working with a dip pen and ink! To get used to it, I did a copy of a work by illustrator Leslie Brooke. I hope I did her justice, although I do admit I have a more heavy and much less experienced hand (at least at this point) than she, whose line work is very delicate in places such as in the leaves of the tree seen here.

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.