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

Design For Media, Week 02: Bossman Panel

Here's the second panel entry. This week it's Bossman, as I've been referring to him lately, sitting in his office enjoying a fine cigar. He's a small man with a large ego and very little patience for his bumbling subordinate, Biffo. Hopefully it gives a good idea about who he is and how he views other people:

Also, if you missed it this weekend, here's my first pass at an animatic for the full cartoon with temporary dialog (pathetically recorded by yours truly). There are still definite timing issues, but any/all feedback is appreciated!

Connoiseuraus Sketch

"Connoiseur? Sounds like a dinosaur..." -Elizabeth Michaels, 9/9/11

Design For Media, Week 01 Update [UPDATED AGAIN]

UPDATE: Recorded some temporary dialog to help better pace the shots in the animatic


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After feedback in class, I've decided to change the panels project to focus more on the characters in a location that gives you information on who they are, in their "element", if you will, and wanted to update with Biffo's entry:

Also, included is my first (very) rough pass at an animatic for the full animation I hope to have done for the final project. There's no sound yet, but it is timed with my estimation of how the dialog would fit. It will need tweeked in the future, but I wanted to post this as yet another step in the project:



feedback is always welcome, but I mostly hope you enjoy!

This Week in Sketches, 9/5/11-9/8/11

Sketches done over the course of this week, for varying classes and purposes

Design For Media, Week 01: Biffo and Friends

Thus begins project 1: Character Studies

I started with a some rough sketches of the whole "cast" (save for maybe two background party-going kids). I wanted to include this to give an idea of what my process is like when creating a character, i.e. what sort of shapes I sketch out.

Then I decided for this week to do a more finalized version of Biffo, our hero whose name I'm still not entirely satisfied with (suggestions?), and include some other, sketchy poses for him as well in the first of 4 "panels" for project 1.

As stated in week 00, all the characters will be made using the same palette of colors, so all characters after this will be made only with the colors you see on the fully colored Biffo.

Thoughts? I'm all ears.

Character Designs: Single Angle

Animation II: Construction Homework

First homework of Animation II: start studying the construction of characters. More specifically, backwards-engineer 10 poses from a Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck cartoon.

I'll do you one better: A Mickey Mouse AND Donald Duck Cartoon, Moving Day (1936)

here's the cartoon itself, for those interested:

I claim no ownership of the cartoon, obviously, this was just a learning exercise

Out With The Old...

This year I have very lofty personal goals. I'm going to be striving to create animations, characters, and stories that I can show proudly, which in turn will increase my overall skills as an artist/animator. I'm putting more emphasis into "appeal" and "iteration" as goals for my projects, as well as effort into making the projects more complete as a whole

With that, I'm posting this videos as a "starting point" for me both to inspire advancement this year, and to look back upon to gauge my improvements (hopefully)


My final project from my first animation class, basic acting, timing, character designs, terrible/rushed backgrounds (one of my weakest links), etc. all things to improve upon


A loop of animation done in my free time last semester, because i wasn't enrolled in any animation classes. I wanted to have two characters doing the same dance (a dance from the music video for the song being played), but also to try and personalize/differentiate the dance between the two characters.


An animatic for a short-story/music video I'd like to animate eventually. I'm more or less happy with how it turned out, but it can definitely be improved upon before I put it into "production". I've had plenty of ideas of how to improve various shots and make some of the storytelling more clear after analysing this dozens of times


So that's my gameplan, whoever you are who decides to read this. This time next year I hope to have improved exponentially from where I currently am, and I'm committed to putting the time in to do so.

Look forward to better works from me in the near future!

Design for Media, Week 00: A Menagerie of Characters

For this initial series project, I'm aiming to create some character studies, each from the same limited palette, for an animated short concept that I have, hopefully a minute or longer in length.


The basic story gist is of a traditional circus clown working at a clown union who is up for his quarterly review. His Boss informs him of his poor performance lately (as kids are not laughing at the same things they used to), and if our hero does not receive a positive review from his next birthday party gig, he'll be out of a job. The story then focuses on his tribulations at a young girl's (8-10 years old) birthday party where all the kids enjoy his jokes and gags, except the birthday girl. He must somehow win her over to save his job.


For this series of character study panels for the next 4 weeks, I intend to design our Hero Clown (who still lacks a name), A timid man who just wants to entertain others, but can't cope with how comedy has changed since his glory days, His Boss, a short tempered CEO in clown makeup, The Young Girl, a snooty/bratty girl who thinks she's older and more sophisticated than she really is, and the girl's Mother, a tired single parent who isn't aware at how fast her girl is growing (aka, a woman who would still hire a birthday clown in this day and age).


Any and all feedback is appreciated! Is this too ambitious, not ambitious enough, any foreseeable problems, etc?