Smoke and Fire

The fire assignment has been cut to 4 seconds instead of 6, which is nice since I'll have to do less smoke. At the same time I'm a little irritated because i did 6 seconds of fire. But oh well, just more practice with fire i guess! Tomorrow the fire and smoke is due, so I'm currently finishing up my smoke and then I'll be heading to Monty to capture it. The worse part for the smoke is the timing, you wouldn't think it would be that hard and time consuming.......and then you start animating it. That's when you realize "What did I get myself into?" but in the end, it's actually pretty fun. So for now I'm off to draw slow loving smoke over and over and over and over and over........

Fire!

I finished my 3 levels of fire last night, and came back to Monty to capture them today. I think it looks really good, and it was a lot of fun to animate. Now, I have to do 150 frames of smoke! That will be more challenging than the fire. I'll actually have to key it out and pay attention to where the smoke flows and swirls. Well, here it is and let me know what you think!

First Fire Test

Here's the first test for my fire. It's only 2 seconds and just the first level of fire. For the assignment we have to have at least 3 levels of fire. But, I'm finishing one level before moving on to the next one. I drew in the logs as well. We have a background we're working with, same as with the ball. But I didn't feel like I needed to capture it for my test. Again, any input is encouraged!! Please let me know what you think, I'm rather nervous about how it's going to look in the end.

Ball Animation Redo

Well, this is the redo for my bouncing ball with tones and shadows. I took out every other drawing and recaptured it, that got the speed of the ball right and got rid of the sticky, plunger effect the ball had when it landed. Also, at the end I redid the shadows so they were coming from the correct light source. I had them shift too far over at the end of the animation. So here's the revised version! Oh and it pushed my grade up a little by doing this! ^_^

First 2-D Effects Assignment

Well, this is my first 2-D effects assignment. Troy gave us the background and we had to animate a ball bouncing through. Not only the ball but we also had to animate tones and shadows on the ball coming from a specific light source, the window, and at a specific time of day, 3 PM. So here it is, and I'll probably be posting the redo up here as well, so you can compare them too.

Ridiculous

Well, for some silly reason it won't let me upload the first 4 pages of my comic.... So as soon as I get this figured out you will be able to read the beginning so you can read the set up and understand the joke. Thus making you laugh and telling all your friends about this rib-tickling post that they just HAVE to read.

Mini Comic

So I had to do a mini comic for my final in Intro to Sequential. I took two old comics I had already done before. The ideas the character has in the comic are actual thoughts that went through my head during class while my Professor was droning. Although, I didn't yell my thoughts out to the class, as hilarious as that would have been. So I hope you enjoy them. Unfortunately I have to post them one at a time so it's going to be a long list of pictures... I just won't make them as big as I usually do. Oh and ignore the Anatomy at the bottom, it was originally going to be a 3 part series, each gag having it's own title corresponding to the joke. So the actual title is Biology 101.

Moustache Men

So I drew this last year some time and just never got it up here. He's the beginning of a line of characters with, as you can see, ridiculous moustaches. Each moustache will determine his vocation, such as the first one. He is a cowboy with an amazingly fantastic handlebar moustache. Well here he is, let me know what you think!

Backgrounds

Well here's the other half of the animated assignment. I had to take a background and recreate it in a realistic and stylized version. Then I chose one of those and added the ball to see if I could composite them together well. And like i said in the previous post, I hope it worked out well. I mean I think it did! And I'm pretty proud of it. Well here are the two backgrounds. Let me know if you like them, and which one you prefer and why; if you don't mind.

Fun with Compositing

Well, here's my first attempt at digital compositing using Toon Boom Animate Pro. Like I said, first time, so I hope it looks as good as I think it does. The ball bounce isn't the best, but to be honest that's not exactly what I cared about in this project. The ball and the background just need to look like they go together. So, let me know what you think!!

Another Tack Test

It's just exactly what the title says. Not much to say about it other than I can't wait to finish it!!

2-D Character Test

This is a quick test of my latest 2-D character assignment. The character is Tack from The Thief and the Cobbler. It's an old animated movie, pretty much Aladdin story wise, but it was made before Aladdin. It's really a good movie with some great animation, and Vincent Price is the voice of the bad guy!!! Anyway, here's my animation.

Summer Projects

Working on a few different ideas during the summer, well doing more prep work and design than animating. I can't exactly animate since I don't have anything to animate with at the moment. But still working is really fun, I love the set up and getting the idea together. Right now I've got an animated music video for "Who Let You Go" by The Killers. I love that song, it's so fantastic!! And I'm also working on a new comic series, the details are still fuzzy but it's coming together. I'm using a style that's a comination of Flapjack and Scott Pilgrim for the music video and the characters look great! I'll get some sketches up of them and a few of the backgrounds.

Still deciding whether I should animate this in Flash or traditional, that's really my biggest road black at the moment. I just have to make up my mind before Septembet 14th. Guess that's all I've got for now. I'll get some sketches up soon.

Nuts

The End is Here

Here it is, the last day of Digital Cel Animation, and I have to say it was a lot of fun. Of course there are always things you would do differently in every situation, and looking back on this class there are a few things I would do differently too. First off I would practice more with Flash outside of class. I mean yeah, I did work on outside projects but they were shorts. It was fun and I did learn from it, but if I could do it again they're would be more of them and they would be longer. Also, I would settled on a topic sooner. It's not always easy to decided on a topic when there really are no limits to what you can do, but still I took too long and changed near the end. Though it did give me extra practice! I got most of the way through one when I decided that it wasn't what i wanted to do, I wasn't having fun with it. So then one day while I was walking to Norris Hall I saw some squirrels and the idea just hit me. Now this one I had a lot of fun with, and that's one thing I wouldn't change if I could do it all over again. Being happy means doing what you like, and I loved this class. Not much else I would have done differently except maybe not wait until 10 pm to start working on this. It never failed, every time I would sit down to work on this it was around 10, weird. Also, I probably would do the entire thing on a mac with a Cintique monitor. The mac becuase it's easier to get sound into the file on a mac, just drag and drop. And the cintique just because it made everything a whole lot easier. So I guess that's all I've got for the last day, other than posting the aniamtion. Bye for now, just until I get another project up here.

Almost

Well it's being exported right now from Flash and I'm really excited!! I just hope the colors will turn out ok. If not I'm gonna be really really upset. I know I used the color palette our professor gave us with web safe colors, so I'm not really sure why the colors are messed up on the still images. Oh well, hopefully they'll turn out ok!

A Few More Images

Here are a few more images from my animation "Nuts", these are the poor squirrels who get their nuts scared away from them. And the colors are off, I'll get that fixed soon.
Here is the white squirrel's nest, once again weird colors...

Character Sheet

This is the main character for Nuts. He's an adoreable white squirrel!!

And here is the little valley where the white squirrel lives in his nest. Yes, squirrels live in nests.

Changes...

OK, so I know all I have left is this week, but I have a change for what I'm doing. I've been working on 2 projects and I've decided to post the other one on here instead. Neon Tiger will make in eventually but I'm really enjoying this one a lot more and I just like it better. So I'll put the premise, character designs, and some short animations on here tomorrow. It's really fun and the title is "Nuts". I'll leave you with that for now!

The End is Near

Ok, well I lied about getting stuff up this weekend. Lots going on and my computer was loading really really really slow. So, that's going up this week so you can see what's been going on with my project. I'm still on that elusive hunt for music, but I think I'm getting closer to what I want. The animation in coming along nicely and I'm pretty excited to see it finished. So that's about all I've got for this post, but I'll keep updating til I'm done with the project. Then that will go up!