animated cartoon, scene 30

worked on my short film a bit today; this scene: Here's what I did today:



This is just a cg model I created to help me get a rough idea of the perspective I need for a shot in my short film. It was quicker than making an actual model and photographing/filming it. timing and animation are pretty much poop, but it at least get me an idea of how the car looks from the angles I need to draw out the scene.

thumbnail acting

before I start animating, I sometimes will do rough thumbnail drawings to plan the basics of what I want to have happen in the shot. This is an assembling of the thumbnail drawings for a scene in the cartoon I'm currently working on, which I've roughly timed to the music here:

all the basics of what I want are there- a lady pig is in bed, is awakened by noise outside, leaps out of bed and angrily stomps to the window to look out. the last pose is supposed to tie into the action of the next shot is her opening the windows then covering her ears.
the shot before the one in the clip is a vertical pan from the following image:
up to her window:the empty space beside the "Louie's Granola Bar" sign is going to be filled by a building that is bouncing about in time to the music, and will be animated separately and added later.

My next step in animating this "bedroom scene" of my cartoon will be to re-draw the scene again at the actual size I want to work in; first I'll create a layout drawing that includes all the details of the bedroom, and places the character and any other object where I want them to be for optimal compositional effect. On some of my shots I'll do some video reference at this point, though for this shot the actions are simple enough I may be able to skip that step and get right to animation.

another title card

having decided on a title for my animated short, I've finally completed the last of the title cards for the short. Now to finish the animation...

edwin cartoon progress: scene 18

I'm slowly moving forward with the short cartoon. this is a still frame of the Hedda Gobbler character, from scene 18B, which is all of 38 frames long, meaning that it is on screen for less than 2 seconds. I have it basically animated, just need to clean-up the key drawings and do in-between poses before I can ink and color the entire scene to look as nice as this image...

the Secret Project is progressing...

and here's a couple sneak peeks! I don't want to give too much away, but I'll say this much- it's a 3 minute cartoon, all musical pantomime (no talking!) and it's all done in the same kind of 30's cartoon style as the Edwin Aardvark comic strip series I based it on.

It's got everything you'd expect from a great 30's-style cartoon:

Musical animals:




a dancing moose:
an angry battle-axe:

Impossible visual gags:

Lovely ink-wash backgrounds:
Pathos:
Inanimate objects come to life:
policemen:and looped animating 3/4 perspective backgrounds:

this is actually kinda big...

I've decided to begin a project that may take a while to complete, but here's one small part that's already done:

meet the cast

here are my characters for the next animated shot:I'll probably be refining their appearances as i go along, but i think this is basically how they'll look.

Facials Complete

Here's the final version of my latest animation piece.
quite a difference from this:

or these planning sketches:

I got the audio from the 1944 movie Murder, My Sweet.

polishing!

I'll have my final polishing pass on the animation done this weekend. until then, here's a sneak peek at my alterations I made to the character's appearance, as well as the additional scene elements I quickly modeled to give a more complete feeling to the scene/layout.
ideally the final render would be b&w to simulate that film noir feeling I want the scene to have, but lighting/rendering are -pardon the pun- a dark art to me.

Back to the animator's desk!

classes begin again this week for my animation classes, so here's a bit of what I'm working on instead of doing the comics you came here to see...

these are poses meant to hit a couple of key facial expressions in the scene I'm currently animating:

The main physical movements are pretty much done, and now we're moving on to facial animation...you can see the animation sans the facial expressions here:

and the reference video I based it on here (number 5):

when it's all done (in 3 weeks!!!) I'll post the final version...

Dusting off some Internet Cobwebs...

and now for something completely different... here is a website that I designed way back in the college days for the web design class I took, oh, sophomore year? We just had to come up with a simple concept, create multiple inter-linking pages with interactive features and some extras like roll-over buttons, on-click buttons, etc. the content was entirely up to us. so I quickly threw together some special drawings for the titles and buttons, and dug up some old cartoon doodles I had laying around, filling out the collection with pictures of some friends and family I happened to have about. If you browse the site you may even notice some early prototypes of characters that I currently am using (or will be using) in my When's Day Comics that I sporadically post here.

be sure to check out the "search for a date" feature to discover such hidden treasures as:


an early version of whippersnapper kitty...


a primitive (but kinda cute) version of Edwin Aardvark...


and Hookhand Harry, a villain who has yet to appear in the regular comic strip series! (but stay tuned!)

You'll even find some visual disney references on the page, along with a couple of pretty fun roll-over animation on certain links!

I chose not to post the photographs I had used for the Toon page's Search for a Date feature, for obvious reasons, but most of the names were already falsified, so I just left the page itself up minus the pics.

Homework!!!

The latest homework assignment for Animation Mentor is...well, from the options given, I chose a 180 degree turnaround with this character, called "Ballie."


My initial reference video is a little bit different from what I've got now, but it was a nice jumping-off point...


If you jump ahead to the third angle, you can kinda sync it up with the animated version and compare the two...

Wacky Walkabouts

here is some reference video I shot for a walk cycle assignment in my animation studies.

Animaniacal Activities...

This was my assignment for this week in my animation studies; depict a pendulum reacting to the movements of its base with proper follow-through and weight :



And from the previous week, a bouncing ball navigating an obstacle course, employing the technique of squash-and-stretch:



oh, and here's a silly video i made solely for the amusement of my classmates around the globe:

whole lotta not much

I've been working hard on a billion different projects and not getting much accomplished on any one of them, but here is a glimpse of a few of those projects...

in addition to purchasing a new DV camera and updating to CS3 for my editing systems in anticipation of shooting and assembling a dvd of my younger sister's upcoming wedding, I am working on several other things:

some commissioned drawings:
animation for the "commercial" for O2:

creating more comic strips and panels for "We'n'sday Comics"- here are the title lettering and characters for one of the strips to feature in my weekly comic page:


Also I have been working in live-action for a while now, and here are some recent videos I made with a piece-o-poo camera and my little brothers as the actors:

walk on by...

I completed the walk cycle, here's a peek:



It doesn't play this long in the actual clip, I just looped the cycle so you could get a better glimpse without having to play it a billion times.

and here is a hi-res pic of one of the frames so you can get an idea what you're missing thanks to internet video compression techniques:

Commercial Animation 3

i did some more work on the o2 commercial, this time a walk cycle for the opening shot.
Only the even numbered frames are done, so it's a little choppy, but overall I'm pleased with how it turned out.

Effects animation

after finishing all the backgrounds i need for the O2 commercial, I started to work on the simpler parts that don't involve character animation.
First I created images of an oxygen tank, a loaf of bread and some water bottles for the sequence "from the people who brought you sliced bread and bottled water, it's Oh!Tu."I drew the outlines in ink and shaded them with pencil, then adding additional shades in photoshop.
I used a drybrush technique to make the rays of light radiating from the objects, but used black paint, then inverted it and set them on a separate Photoshop layer on the "lighten" setting, at roughly 80% transparency. I also added additional beams of light in photoshop for the O2 cannister.


here is another little bit i worked on today:
Next I animated the tree bags opening and closing every 12-ish frames. The final drawings were done in charcoal then inverted and set to "lighten" in photoshop. Of course, by "animate," in this case i mean I drew three different frames: two extremes, & one in-between. It sound cheap, but the actions are very quick, and if you take a peak at my test video, you'll see it works well.

commercial Animation II

I put together a couple backgrounds for the oxygen commercial and placed a sketch of the character against them to see how they would look.

Commercial Animation

I had an idea for a fake commercial, and threw together a quick video with scribbles that took about 5 minutes to draw and audio that took about as long to record & mix.



Here is a more refined character design, kinda going for the early tv animated commercial look.