Animation II: Culmination

Another semester done, and it's time to reflect

Well, first, here's the final day's exercise: rigging a character's head/facial features in Harmony and making it move




And here is a compilation of all the projects completed for the class



Looking forward to moving on to Animation III!

Design For Media: Finale

Here it is, the final product:



not up to the quality that I was hoping for, but I'm still mostly proud of what was accomplished, and I'm looking to grow even further with my next endeavors.

Fan Time: It's a Funny Book Christmas!

At the Animation Student Collective meeting yesterday, we hosted our Christmas party for the end of the semester.


As a way of giving out meaningful gifts that cost nothing (for we are your run-of-the-mill poor college students) we also hosted a "Secret Santa Art Trade", wherein everyone provided their name and their favorite animated character. I ended up doing two, because we ended with an odd number of people.

I got a DC character AND a Marvel Character, so allowing me to continue to not play favorites!

Here they are:

Character Design: Gavin Complete

Here's Gavin, my finished Character Design Final Project:

1 Main Pose, full color
5 Frame Neutral Turn-around w/ Head Height Chart, Clean Lines
3/4 Front and Back views, Clean Lines w/Construction
12 Facial Expression (w/ upper torso), Clean Lines
12 Action/Acting Poses, Tied-Down Sketches
12 Hand poses, Sketches w/Construction
5 Alternate Concepts, Sketches w/ Silhouettes

Alot of work, but definitely fun to do

Character Design: Phineas and Ferb Extras

Our last assignment before the final is due: Match the aesthetic of "Phineas and Ferb", and create 3 extras for a single episode. 1 "kid", 1 "animal", and 1 "guest villain" were the guidelines

here's what I came up with:

Animation II: Puppet Theater Hour

This week we messed around with some of the tools on offer in the Harmony software, specifically rigging a character, as well as using the deformation tool/bone structuring.

It's an odd way to animate, more akin to stop-motion. Kind of boring, considering this is only one drawing split into separate pieces.

Design 4 Media, Final Project Update

This week I have the finalized animatic, with final dialog and sound effects.

All that's left to do now is to finish up the two animated scenes (which will be replacing the two "rough" sequences that are still left in the animatic, drawn in light blue).

I'm back on track, and hopefully in a position where finishing is doable.

any comments or thoughts are appreciated!

Character Design: Gavin the Gallant

Managed to finish the majority of my Character Design Final, and wanted to post the progress thus far.

First, the written description:

Gavin Barlow Bio

The Color Concept (including Alex):

Character Turn-arounds and Facial Variations:

Early Concept Work (Sketches and Hand Poses):

And that's all thus far. All that's left to do is the Action Pose page, which I hope to get around to next weekend.

Thoughts are always welcome.

Sketches: Digital Lifedrawing

A quick lifedrawing sketch done digitally, and saved in two states of completion (in case i messed up and didn't like where it was going)

Animation II: Odds and Ends

Just a couple of recent tests/exercises from my animation class:

First a multiplane test:


and a rough animation of a character interacting with objects of differing weight. Unfinished:

Straight DUMPIN'

Hey all, It's the busy season, so I'll probably be posting more frequently, and to start things off, here is a bit of a dump of recent work, as well as an "exclusive sneak peak" at my character Design Final project

First is a rejected character that I was initially going to finish for the final. Never let it be said that I don't acknowledge my failures:

Then some hand sketches:

A sidekick to the time-traveling Lars, and color variations for her as well:

And finally, the new character I'm using for my final, Gavin the Gallant:

Sketches: Spongebob

Character Design: Quantum Leapin'

The Product of two assignments in Character design: First was a "MadLibs" style construction of a character, wherein the descriptors given to me were "Short, Bulky, Triangular Construction, and Ditzy Personality".

From there we had to come up with attire suitable for 9 different time periods.

enjoy!

Animation II: MAIL'S HERE

Character Design: Eliza

For character design, we continued our focus on the fairer sex.

Eliza was a character I made for a story I was writing in high school. The story was pretty terrible, as are most written by high school students, but I feel like most of the characters are salvageable, and I wanted to try my hand at redesigning her.

She's a graffiti artist, as well as an urban explorer. An all around punk and street-urchin.

For the assignment we had to include 3 varying costumes as well as the characters attitude in said costumes. I think I went a little far with these, but I really wanted to draw a pirate and a luchador...so that's that.

This Week in Sketches: Ladies Night

we were focused on drawing ladies in character design this week, including drawing from models and trying to "Ariel-ize" them.

plus I threw in two sketches of Captain Hook for good measure

Design For Media Project Duncan, Week 00: Final Proposal

attached is my proposal document:

Proposal

As well as a final Cast line-up sketch, in case you've forgotten who's in it:

I kinda like the fact that this poor man's entire life is subject to the whims of people who are smaller than he is.

Rough Stuff: Acting and Timing in Animation

a first rough pass at my latest assignment, a pantomime scene about someone getting an important letter of some kind, and what their reaction is

hopefully everything reads clearly here.

Line Quality Exercise: Cats Don't Dance

Design For Media Ron Saks Project, Week 04: FINAL

I managed to finish on schedule!

Included in this post is the storyboard/animatic in both PDF and Video form. Unfortunately, Vimeo won't allow me to post anything above 500mb, so I had to turn to Youtube, as I don't have the means to compress the video before this is due. I'll go back this weekend and upload to Vimeo for better quality

Untill then, here is the Youtube version:



and here is the PDF, for your viewing pleasure:

StandOut

and lastly, here is the original version, again, from last year if you'd like a better idea of how it was improved, or maybe not improved:



There are aspects of both that I like, but I feel this new on is the superior version

Character Design: Don't Feed the Animals

some of the images I made during a 2 week group project wherein we had to design 7 characters that fit together into a film of which we had to have a loose plot worked out. From there we had to illustrate 3 scene ideas

The film my group came up with was of a young girl who discovers an shady underground "lunchbox cartel" while on a school trip to the zoo. She discovers that not only can the animals talk, but they are all forced into collecting children's lunchboxes for an evil emperor penguin. The penguin once found a RingPop, and has searched his entire life for another, and it just so happens our young heroine is in possession of one.

My contribution was designing a pushover pachyderm, this poor elephant who's bossed around by the penguin. He is paranoid and rarely sleeps. He befriends the girl, thinking she can rescue him from the zoo and get him away from the penguin.

I also pitched a scene where all the animals are attempting to escape the zoo, but are cut off by the zookeeper. The girls only friend (originally), the sparrow, see's some funnel cake on the ground (of which he's become horribly addicted), and flies off towards it, and towards danger

enjoy!

Animation II: Beach Babe Strut

Revisions plus color to the walk cycle from the other day

Design For Media Ron Saks Project, Week 03:

This week for uploading purposes, I switched to Vimeo, so as not to run into audio desynchronization (thanks for nothing, Youtube)

Stand Out Animatic WIP from Tyler Crowley on Vimeo.

Due to time constraints (especially over this past weekend when I normally get alot of work done), I wasn't able to get quite as far along in this revision as I had hoped, but I've mapped out time to work on it, and should hopefully have it done before the end of this coming weekend.

I think that thus far the changes made have been constructive ones, and I'm really happy with how it's turning out.

let me know what you think in the comments, if you'd like!

Rough Stuff (Again!)

More sketches/rough WIP type stuff for now!

Some animal sketches for a Character Design assignment:

And another "beach" walk cycle I made today, this one got further along than the last:



Enjoy! Let me know what you think!

Rough Stuff

Just some sketches and a pencil test exercise from various classes over the week:

Design For Media, Ron Saks Project Week 02:

After talking with Tom last week, it was decided that I was headed in the wrong direction with the project, in that my second pass wasn't differentiating itself enough from the original, and I was really just muddling things further by adding in superfluous motion to the animatic. Last week was a failure, but we grow from our failures, so this week I went back to the drawing board and re-thumbnailed the story from start to finish, toning down alot of the antics from the first attempt , and the initial emotions of the hero and the villain in particular.

I decided on starting the song later on to give myself some breathing room to give more screen time to each of the principal characters and give a better idea of the roles they play for eachother. The cartoony-ness of the main character has also been softened (now he can't magically make props appear like in the first one). It's not a direction I necessarily like, but I want this animatic to seem new while still following the basic story beats of the first one, and wanted to try it nonetheless.

Here are the thumbnails I finished, forgive my chicken-scratch notes to myself:

From here I'll be looking for ways to better improve the composition of shots, making them more interesting but still clear. Any thoughts or suggestions at this stage of the game would be greatly appreciated.

Hopefully this time next week I'll have a good chunk of the new animatic to show off, once I salvage what I can from last week's attempt.

Character Design: Myriad Expressions

A quick homework assignment from Character design, just doing a bunch of variations of 5 expressions

Character Design: Redesign a Character! (plus a bit of animation)

An assignment from character design, take a character who's design we're not particularly fond of and try to improve it.

I chose to rework Gwen Tennyson from "Ben 10: Alien Force". Here are my results:

I was really disappointed when the show was revamped in 2008 to age the characters and make them more "angsty" (read:generic). Gwen in particular got a weird design, given that her facial structure is almost identical to her male teammates. I also didn't understand and was put off by her 180 degree shift in personality from a snobbish, feisty, confidant girl with a believable "cousinly" relationship with Ben, to a shrewish "team secretary", boring love-interest to the brooding, "misunderstood" character, Kevin.

My thought process while working on this was trying to evolve the character in the opposite direction of how it actually happened. Basically I wanted her to maintain some of her qualities from the original series, which is why I included a picture of her as a kid as well. I wanted to make her more confidant, a bit feisty looking, and able to hold her own. She does fight in the series, but personally looking at the design they gave her I don't really believe it. I wanted her to look like she would be more comfortable in a fight, so I started to draw inspiration from characters like Kim Possible (a bit too much in one costume design, perhaps) and even Katara from Avatar. Katara in particular, because she fills a similar maternal role, but still works as an action character.

Let me know what you think of the results!

Also, when I was trying to brainstorm from this assignment, I also filled my time starting on a walk cycle. It's going to be a guy at a beach who doesn't particularly care to be there. I want to push his poses a bit further to really get his depression across, maybe even drag his feet some.



enjoy, I guess.

Animation II: Lil' Sludgie's new coat of paint

I'm still not entirely done with this, but all the linework is cleaned (well, more cleaned than before, anyway), and everything has at least temporary colors. I may go back and play around with some of the other tools, such as giving him a pulsing, radioactive glow, or something like that.

what do you think?

Design For Media, Ron Saks Project Week 01:

As I began to discuss with my last DFM post, I made an animatic for a short I'd like to produce called "Stand Out", featuring the song of the same name by Tevin Campbell as the driving force of the story.

As with any story though, an important part of the process is refining what you've already made for the sake of both clarity and entertainment. Over the course of the next few weeks I'll be remaking this animatic to strengthen this story to the best of my ability.

If you'd like to see my completed first pass at it from last year, it's right here:


THE STORY "SCRIPT":

We follow the tale of a young man leading a dreary and monotonous life in gray-scale world. The girl of his dreams doesn't know he exists and spends her time with a conceited man concerned only with his own self-image. Our hero musters the courage to try and impress this girl, and he finds in himself the power to "stand out", to literally become the color of his emotions. He gets her attention, but the conceited man's influence on the girl is to strong to overcome so easily.

Our hero is not dissuaded, and intensifies his pursuit, trying ever more elaborate ways to "stand out" for this girl. He knows that if he could only get her alone and away from the conceited man, he would be able to prove himself more loyal and affectionate. The conceited man continues to push back, and knowing that he is losing this battle, decides to flee with the girl.

Our hero at this point becomes desperate, wondering just what he has to do to win this girl over. He places his faith in one last gamble, climbing the tallest building in the city and hijacking a blimp so his message can be seen by the entire populous. Upon seeing this, the girl finally frees herself from the conceited man, and discovers that with the support of her new friend, she too has the power to "stand out" from the sea of grayscale faces.

END

Well how bout that? a lovely 3 "act" structure

I like this story not only because of it's simplistic love story and visual potential/possibilities, but also because of the "Straw Man Fallacy" qualities of the villain character, in that we really don't know much about him other than how our "hero" perceives him.

Thus far, I've only updated the opening of the animatic, about 20 seconds, and I'm trying to play around with the camera a bit more this time to make more interesting shots/transitions. Hopefully you can see some improvements already, but it's still early days yet. Also there are some timing issues with this version because Youtube loves to desync the audio of .mov files, so please bear with me. The audio is a little bit ahead of the visuals, as you'll notice that the girl and the conceited man aren't supposed to react until the singing starts, but the singing starts before we even cut to the shot of them in front of the camera:



as always, any comments or critiques are welcome and appreciated.

This Week in Sketches, 10/10/11-10/12/11

Animation II: Little Sludge Creature pencil test

some SFX animation for Animation II, a little sewage turtle thing galloping into a bubbling mudpit. I still need to fix some things, as well as have the little guy leave a trail behind him as he travels, but so far so good.

also, there will be multiple bubbles, but I'll be cheating that and just reusing the frames I already drew.

let me know what you think in the comments!

Character Design: Kingston Face Variants!

The latest Character Design assignment/exercise, we had to take one of the 4 human and rework it. First, we needed to do 12 variations of the face, messing with proportions and placement of all the facial features, structure, and hair:

Then after that we were to pick our favorite/the most intriguing one to us, and refine it three times, changing the graphic style it's presented in:

tell me what you think!

Design For Media, Ron Saks Project Week 00: Iteration is Key!

For this next DFM Project, Biffo and Co are going on the backburner for the time being (though I plan to keep working on it to use it for the final project). What I would like to do is take a story I've already taken at pass at, but want to improve and make stronger. Specifically, this animatic I made last year:



After watching it once I finished, I already knew I could do a better job. I could change camera angles and characters and even story elements to clarify the story as well as make it look more interesting in general/more fun to watch.

So That's what I plan to do, I'll be redrawing/reworking the project from start to finish, including revising the main characters, which I've already started doing:

Let me know what you think in the comments!

Animation II/Character Design: Etchings of a Madman

I started work on some FX animation today, as well as the background for it.

here's the sketch and WIP of the background. I still need to go back in and add more "muckyness", but here's the stage its at as of today:

Also, here's this exercise from Character Design that didn't warrant it's own post.

We had to draw some human character archetypes heads, so I took the opportunity to draw some old characters in a new way. I actually hate how this turned out, but it was fun to do so I'll post it anyway

Animation II: Ratcliffe (In Technicolor)

Wow, three posts today...

This one is just because I forgot to post this last week, actually.

This was a breakdown/in-between/cleanup/color assignment in my Animation II class, a 1 second loop of some animation from Pocahontas.

Fan Time: "7 Deadly Dragonballs"/ The Lonely Island?

I, like many people, am a fan of things. On occasion, I like to draw these things, but I have less and less time to do so lately. However, today I finished my homework early, so I was finally able to finish this thing I started in August! Huzzah!

"7 Deadly Dragonballs"

Also I started a drawing of Justin Timberlake and Andy Samberg's Lonely Island R&B singers for some reason. I finished JT's lineart so here's that too, I guess:

not a necessarily cohesive post, but you already got one of those today, so I don't feel so bad

Character Design: The Final Frontier!

Our latest assignment in character design, do a 3/4 front and back view of 3 character archetypes: hero, comic relief, villain. We were then assigned the genre of SPACE WESTERN for all these characters to fit into.

I started out just coming up with a barebones story to fit the characters into, for my own purposes: Older character finds hero as orphaned baby in space wreckage, raises baby, they're both looking for some legendary mineral/substance, Villain starts traveling with them to find this mineral/substance for his own dark purposes.

Here are some sketches I liked, most of which didn't make the cut along the way (namely the snakeoil salesman being the comic relief, and the older man who found the child actually being the villain) I was also playing around with who would have the cybernetic eyes, the hero or the villain:

and here are the results for the three characters:

BONUS PROCESS NONSENSE/SHAMELESS PROMOTION OF A PRODUCT I ENJOY!

I like to listen to certain stuff while working, and when trying to come up with characters or what-have-you, I like to listen to music with the same tone or "genre" as that which I am working on. Luckily for me, I played Bastion over the Summer, with an incredible soundtrack that gives the feel of a space western pretty well. I wanted to include a couple of the tracks I was listening to while sketching ideas:




if you like what you hear, please actually by the soundtrack from them rather than listening on youtube or elsewhere,
It's only $10 here Supergiant Games
(little guy plugging for the slightly bigger, but also little, guy!)

Design For Media, Week 04: Final

Here is the product of my work for the past few weeks, 4 panels dealing with "4" characters that I hope to do a short cartoon with in the future. Going clockwise from the top left, there is Biffo, our hapless hero, a clown out of touch and on the brink of being out of a job, Rupert Bossman, the impatient and short-tempered CEO of YukYuk Incorporated (the clown firm that Biffo works for), Sasha, a tween-aged, conceited, and condescending "princess", who's birthday party is being placed in the hands of Biffo to entertain, and finally "The Twins", Carolyn and Carter, good kids with the bad luck of having Sasha as a bossy best friend. The intent of these panels was to portray them in a given scenario they may commonly be in, to give an idea through the visuals of what these characters are like, and how they carry themselves as people.

I had hoped with this project to create a diverse cast in many ways, such as their outlooks as characters, their different lifestyles, as well as technically diverse, such as their construction and proportions. It was my attempt to make characters that were interesting to look at, as well as being characters you want to see more of, and are interested in the story they're going to tell you.

I'm personally pleased with the results, but I'm always open to any comments, critiques, concerns, or compliments that may come my way, so please feel free to let me know what you think!

Design For Media, Week 04: Carolyn and Carter, "The Twins"

For this week's panel, which is also the final panel, I ended up deciding to to give attention to Carrie and Carter, whom I've been considering as a single organism known as "The Twins". These two are inseparable and act similarly, so just think of them as a single character. They are both quiet, well mannered kids, who are terrified of Sasha:

For their panel, I wanted to get a little more personality out of them than I perhaps had been with previous entries. When thinking them up, I was considering them to basically be unwilling lackies for Sasha. Their mother is a friend of Sasha's mother, so much to The Twins' chagrin, they are often set up with playdates with the terrible "princess" Sasha, including being the only other kids at Sasha's birthday party

Here they are pictured cowering under her imposing shadow:

Later this week I'll be combining and posting all 4 panels in a series together.

Brainstorming Session: The Meanest Little Cartridge

I was struck with inspiration this weekend, and for some reason was driven to thumbnail a "music video" for this song by brentalfloss (NSFW): Megaman 3 Game Over

I also started brainstorming about what the two characters would look like, namely the kid and his asshole NES cartridge

who knows if anything else will come of this project, but since I was working on this when I could have been doing homework, I figured I'd throw it up here for people to see

Design For Media, Week 03: Sasha Panel

This week's panel is the little girl character for my short, now known as Sasha. It features her in her room with her gigantic stuffed animals and poster of tween sensation Hart Thraub.

I also wanted to include a quick conceptual sketch I did for next week's panel. These two I have yet to name, so they're just "the twins" right now:

Because of changes I've been making while tweeking the story/animatic, Sasha's Mom doesn't feature prominently enough in the story anymore for her to warrant a panel, so instead I'll be making one for these two, the only kids at Sasha's party. They are both easily bullied by her and don't really want to be at the party at all.

as always, any and all feedback is appreciated, but mostly I want you to enjoy!

Character Design: Fred T. Businessman

Our latests assignment in Character Design was to sketch a life drawing, then to name that person and give a brief description. We then swapped this sketches and descriptions and had to expand and exaggerate upon them so they would be an interesting/compelling cartoon character. Fred T. Businessman is what I came up with:

We needed full color front and rear 3/4 views and a head-height chart, but I threw in some "flavor" sketches for fun, too

This Week in Sketches, 9/12/11-9/16/11