Overlap and follow through, rough animation

Well, it's been a while since I've wanted to post any of my animation assignments, but this one's pretty cute. Characters are mine, in all their unoriginality - but whatever, I had to come up with something quickly.

Now with more Miguel

Two posts in as many days!?
The next pass of the Tulio and Miguel assignment. Hey, at least it has both characters now!

Watch at Vimeo.com
Still haven't animated a lot of it, but I have my stuff pretty much mapped out and I like how it's coming along. (You might notice the ending bit I used in the pose test is missing -- I'm still planning to include that, but I didn't have time to draw it for this pass.)

Never rebuff, never rebuff the local feeling

Why post this? Okay, well... Why NOT post this? The rough beginnings of an assignment that I feel very enthusiastic about ;)

Bumper ROUGH

The final assignment of digital 2D-animating, a tv-station bumper. AARGH still in progress!! :X If you wanna see, the password's the land I come from (capitalize the first letter) ;]


...Same goes for the version with different music that I have on Vimeo.

Thank you to Rosy and Joe for their voices!

Don't jump into heartache

Dumping!
Here's my first layout of this semester, the house I used to live in (I moved a few of weeks ago when our "my street / my house / my room" assignment was still going on). Obviously I made some alterations for the sake of composition.



And what the heck, I'll post my Alice "acting" assignment too...



And this is a walk cycle with a panning (and loopable!) background. I don't know if it's possible to loop Vimeo vids, but you'll see it pretty well if you hit play right after the video clip ends..? You can go on forever!


Made in TVPaint and I enjoyed it ever so much! Well, I half-a**ed the character design, but you can see a heavy Janosch influence. And unintentionally Garfield.

First animation assignments of 2nd year

Back in school! In the first animation assignment we did this year, we had to use Pink Panther, standing on a seesaw, picking up a boulder, attempting to catapult himself using the boulder, aaaaand then "something funny happens." The second assignment was to do a pose test using a line reading (and character, obv.) from Disney's Robin Hood. More wanky notes to follow after both videos...




(^Contains dialogue)

WANKY NOTES

PINK PANTHER:

I made a ridiculous foot placement mistake during clean up -- well, not clean up exactly, I should say tiedown. But I'm on to different assignments and it would take a lot to get me to clean any more of this up. For one thing, when I was rough animating (that's pretty much where the magic happens) I was drawing extremely loose, just racing away. Okay, volume I can get somewhat under control during the tie down stage, but this is the least loose character that I can think of off the top of my head -- especially when you're trying to stay on model. So during tiedown I was struggling to turn my "organic" (to use a polite word) drawings into these exhaustingly geometric ones.

For the second thing, I don't like Pink Panther all that much. Admittedly, when I was rough animating, I started to get into it more, because my whole "what happens"- idea emerged out of character. It wasn't about a gag for me, not really that much about being funny, but about trying to present a personality, and connecting/acting with a personality that I previously didn't find very interesting.
Most of the connection that happened at that time between Pink Panther and me was subsequently scrubbed away by the tedium of the tiedown.

Anyways, that whole personality thing was my revelation du jour. My way has never been the story way or the surprise way, unfortunately; I'm a terrible writer. My way is the character study way. For now at least -- who knows, anything can change.

And while this isn't saying much, I've never been more "in control" of my animating, and the bit about stuff "sinking in" during Summer vacation would appear to be true.

ROBIN HOOD:
I'm not very familiar with the character, didn't actually make an effort to match the model sheet, but I tried to let the emotion in the line reading determine the poses. That almost succeeded in the last expression, because to my ears Robin sounded annoyed by the fact that it just wasn't "done that way" and hoped that it would actually be that easy... But now, by explaining it, I obviously admit defeat in trying to make the viewer understand it without the aid of such a disclaimer. Result is meh but I had a BLAST especially during thumbnailing -- this, in all its suckidity, is a page that I doodled while I was listening to the line reading over and over again:

No other notes about the pose test itself (shock ;), but this was a mini-assignment designed to be completed and group-watched by the end of the class, which was all cool and fascinating.

Quadruped action: Jolly Jumper!

My family and other friends of the Lucky Luke comics will understand my mirth at getting to cast the coolest horse in the West, Jolly Jumper, as my character for our quadruped walk/jump assignment.
I really appreciate the way the original Lucky Luke artist "Morris" drew horses (among everything else, obv). Not only was it inspiring to work on the personable Jolly, but Morris' rounded caricaturish style fit this assignment perfectly, because it helped me so much in maintaining the character's structure. And yet it was rooted enough in anatomy to teach me a lot, give me reason to research. All in all I enjoyed this exercise like crazy.

This assignment was a while ago but I didn't have it in a condition to post it online until earlier this week. I might actually try to clean this one up. I mean, Jolly's not Jolly until he has at least his mane and tail, if not his face.

"Andy & Granny" - 2 character dialogue

...limited animation style. Oh so limited. Missing the background (the kid's chair and a table) among other things -- but I really like the characters I came up with.



Well now, I've been mostly voicing teenage boys in my animations so far. :P (Lee voiced Granny.)

animation dump

Some recent assignments.


^ Pink Panther swinging on/climbing a rope


^ Minotaur weightlifter


^ A monkey (orangutan? Supposedly King Louie from Jungle Book) on monkey bars

Croqs and a way special effect

Okay, I know I'm turning into somekinda posting maniac but I have family in faraway places (helloah) and, unfathomably, they like to see what I'm up to...

Life drawing club was happiness today, like more than usual
Happy!
Bunch of croquis from today (30 sec - 2min)



I didn't post my animated effect yet, so here goes (it's pretty rough, like I didn't draw the other, still-staying eye in every frame etc.):

There's no explanation

A final assignment animation by Kendall, inspired by (=ripped off off) Chelsea.



Voice cast: Joe as Captain Aubrey (by way of JFK?), me as one-armed Blakeney.

I don't like myself and I can't blame you if you uninvite me home for christmas

My final animation assignment. We had to animate a character jogging into frame, saying a line, getting hit in the head from above, staggering, and falling. Like I said I chose to animate (and voice, just for the heck of it) Jay Sherman, and I like the character so much -- but especially in the face it doesn't look a lot like him.



I returned the assignment late and I still hadn't been able to clean it all up. Stupid me... I will get super frikking organised next year.

Mr. Balowski at the door

Acting/lip synch assignment.
The character is "dog catcher" from the Ren and Stimpy ADVENTURE "Big House Blues".
My recorded voice manages to sound even more grating than Rik Mayall's, who originally screeched the line (which is from The Young Ones).



It's pretty instructional. Sorry, I meant to say cautionary. The volumes are all over the place; whenever any timing principles make an appearance it's almost completely accidental; the squash-and-stretch in the face is amazingly random; no character consistency; lacking antics etc. In a word, it's a mess, but hey, everybody's putting theirs up.
I'm not fishing for compliments over here -- this was just a genuinely bitter lesson for me as far as juggling school and work goes. And at least I like the hand rotation near the end.

Walks (...or waddles)

We had to use an existing cartoon character as our guinea pig for animating a walk. So here goes Donald:



Perspective walk:



To me the walk cycle was by faaarrr the most difficult part of the exercise:

Stitch by stitch...

Hellloooo again... I don't think I'll be posting as much life drawing in the near future, just because I currently do so much of it that I'd be photographing and optimising and blogging until my fingers were mere nubs.
But here's some animation! It's not my first, but anyway... The first I've posted.



^The school assignment was to do a rough three-jump animation of Stitch from Disney's Lilo & Stitch. Above is the first step, where the character is just basic shapes. (Oh, and it's missing the ending...)



^I'm nowhere near the stage where I can tell how many inbetweens an animation is going to need just by flipping it, so after the first pencil check, I refined the timing and also added ears that drag.



^Then I darkened my blue-pencil roughs with a pencil to make them more visible.

So, this was rough animation. Neither character details (like facial features) nor inbetweens were necessary. I think I'll try adding those sometime later just out of curiosity -- although I have a feeling that if I try to add an actual face the character will end up looking less like Stitch instead of more.