HRA: short films ahead

Alma
Produced and directed by ex-Pixar animator Rodrigo Blaas.
Website




This one I was more interested in the making of.



And lastly
my new favorite Simon's cat.

Broken animatic update

Updated animatic for Broken.
- all the rough animation is in place.
- Backgrounds and effects are still WIP.

The Secret of the Stage

The entry I did for the 2011 Sixty40 ProtoNinja awards is now available online for your viewing pleasure :)

14-9-2011 Website Update

Couple of updates to the website:
- Updated the About page
- Updated Illustration and Animation galleries
- Added content about current projects to the Projects page
- Culled a couple of out of date pages
- Reworked some of the CSS

Animatic update

Updated animatic for Broken.
- 45 seconds of rough animation.
- Backgrounds and effects are still WIP.

Also a handy video I found for rendering out of After Effects.

Rough animation - Broken - SC05

More rough animation for my student film :D

Rough animation - Broken - SC04

I didn't quite do what was asked of last monday, however here is the rough character animation of the 2 scenes I've been working on this week.
The second one is just the first pass at the animation. Still gotta go through and do a detailed pass.

Run cycle test

4 frame run cycle test
BAMF!

Eye darts

Eye darts.
I like the 3 frame dart more than the 4 frame dart. 4 frames feels to slow.

Head turn turn turn turn

I'm not good at writing reflective stuff.
Holding for 6-12 frames before and after the EAP (the last 2 turns) is definantly eaiser to figure out what's happened.

Eye blinks

The first is my usual blink. Animated on twos.
The second is the first one on ones.
The third is on ones and has slight differences in the eyelid position to the first two.

Mytho Logique

Stumbled upon this beautiful little french student film quite by accident.
The website is full of concept stuff. Including designs, storyboard samples & color script.
mytho-logique.com

Mytho Logique is a full-cg animation short film, directed by 5 students during their last year at ESMA (Montpellier, southern France) : Jessica Ambron, Amandine Aramini, Alexandre Belbari, Guillaume Poitel et Yannick Vincent. The short film was finished in september 2010.

Below are the film and behind the scenes.

Directed by J. Ambron, A. Aramini, A. Belbari, G. Poitel and Y. Vincent.
ESMA students short film, originally made in stereo 3D.
More info on mytho-logique.com

Lighting test

Lighting test of my set.
I've had alittle trouble getting the lighting to work how I want. Found a way around it by rendering 2 backgrounds (one light and one dark) and editing them together in post. Gives me the effect I'm after :)


I'm having alot of trouble leaving comments on peoples blogs (blogger thinks I'm not logged in and has me going in circles to trying log in), anyone else having this problem?

youTube finds

Just a couple of Youtube finds. Enjoys.

Amination part 2.

Finished this scene to full colour last Wednesday.

Calculated the entire character animation (from sketch to full colour) took about 18hrs. Wowzers.
I was showing some online friends and they didn't believe me when I said that. So I made a breakdown of the process to show them how much work went into it.

On the upside I finished a second scene on Friday and I've almost finished a third. I'm getting faster at this. 4 scenes left to go :)

This isn't for my major either by the way. I should do some work on that.

Amination! Feel the burn.

Over the past few weeks (since holiday break started) I've been trying to be creative... and doing a lousy job at it. I mean I want to draw! I want to get these ideas out of my head but I found I just couldn't focus and my head felt very fuzzy.

Turns out I burnt myself out creatively. After a week of sulking I talked to my flatmates and they suggested trying to do something else creative to get out of my rut.
So at their recommendation I started writing. And lo and behold 2 days later I'm back feeling creative as ever! Huzzah!

So my point. What do you guys do when you're feeling in a rut, burnt out or just not at all creative?

With my creativity back I'm animating like crazy. I'm behind schedule.
Here's some rough animation I did yesterday. Got a few bugs to fix, but otherwise I'm very happy with it :) on wards final cleanup and colour!

I also won acompetition a week back. It was more a 'make a creative video' comp than and animation comp. Anywho this is what I came up with:

Please ignore the horrible lip-sync. I messed up and uploading it pushed it even more out of sync. I loved doing the swirls though, maybe I'm better suited to special effects animation rather than character animation.

All animated in Photoshop. In my opinion regarding the animation tools in Photoshop... If Adobe just made a version of flash that animated with the raster tools from Photoshop life would be so much easier. Animating in Photoshop the way it's presently aid out (and I'm talking CS5) is clunky and a pain in the bum.

Cars 2 & Kung Fu Panda 2. The review.

So a couple of days ago, I was fortunate enough to go see both Cars 2 and Kung Fu Panda 2. I was quite surprised by what I saw.

First Cars 2.
This was much better that I ever expected.

While I do love all the PIXAR films, Cars is towards the bottom of my list in terms of favourites. I was not excited about the idea of a sequel when it kept us away from the new ideas (and lets face it, nowadays most movies are either remakes or sequels). Part of it may also be the fact that since the release of the first movie it's easy to say that Cars has been the most solid of the PIXAR films to secure its own franchise.

Moving on. In terms of the film as I've already written it was far better than I could have hoped. Before it's release critics were calling it as one of PIXAR's weakest films. I disagree.

In terms of it being an animated sequel, well the bar just keeps rising. I believe that PIXAR have done a good job on keeping the film at as high a quality as any other non-sequel movie they would produce.

Now in terms of story; the original Cars was very much the story of Lightning McQueen. Cars 2 is very much Mater's story, while also still keeping with the cast we fell in love with in the first film.

Something I was very pleased to see was how they handled the passing of Paul Newman and his character Doc. This was something I was worried about in terms of there being a Cars sequel because Doc was a very important character to the first film and to me it didn't feel right without him. Would they just have him absent or silent, would they simply recast him? No. Very early in the film they explain his absence in a way that's believable and to me respectful to the character. He doesn't just drop off the face of the earth or prowl around in the background. This made me very happy.

Now as an action/spy movie as it has been dubbed, you would not think that in a world where the dominating species are cars it would be possible. But no PIXAR have pulled the rug out from under out feet again with some spectacular action sequences and very creative ideas.

The soundtrack is quite enjoyable, including a couple of international tracks and a pleasing score.

Overall This movie held my attention for the entire duration, which in terms of an animated feature is a big thing for me (so many films I feel don't do that any more). I laughed long and hard through the funnys and felt for the characters in their hardships. I'd give this 10/10 and see it again.


Oh I should also mention, the short Toy Story Toons: Hawaiian Vacation was awesome too and left us going awww.

My only complaint, that isn't even really relevant to the film is that we didn't see the teaser for PIXAR's next film BRAVE.
But youTube fixes that :D

Scotland. Princess. Yeah!.

Now, Kung Fu Panda 2.
As with Cars2 I had very little to expect from this film. Yeah it's a DreamWorks sequel; please lord let it be decent. It's no secret that I don't hold DreamWorks Animation very highly but usually that's because their films are so full of pop culture references I want to gag.

The first film, I quite enjoyed and kinda had me at a point where I could see them as making good movies. Kung Fu Panda 2 has left me again with that same feeling, only this time it's we can also make a decent sequel.

Immediately you're immersed in the characters you came to love in the first film and very quickly it's into the thick of the story.

Part of the film sees you exploring Po's back story, and why you don't see any other pandas; the rest is full of action and character development (particularly for Po and Tigress).

Something that caught me off guard, but I was really happy to see was the amount of 2D animation that surfaced throughout the duration of the film. I though it was beautiful and makes me wonder if DreamWorks will do more with it in the future. I certainly hope they do.

While there were many laugh out loud moments through this film, there were also moments that left me rolling my eyes going, ' did we really need that DreamWorks? Really?’ Asides from these few cheesy moments the film is overall very entertaining and proves in my books, that DreamWorks can make a decent sequel. I’d give it 9/10.


Again, I was disappointed to not see the trailer for DreamWorks next film: Puss in Boots. YouTube hasn't disappointed me; however I don't know how I feel about the story from what they've revealed. Mind it's all about Puss, so I know I'll see it anyway.

Title goes here

Just a bunch of videos/shorts/trailers I've been meaning to share for ages. There's some E3/game trailers at the end.

Sometimes the Stars from The Audreys on Vimeo.

TIJI "COLOUR" HD from AKAMA on Vimeo.

E3 was on a week or so back, out of it came some nice looking game trailers

Friday exercises

The exercises we've done with Ian on Fridays.

Max: 3 point light