My finished scenes from "The Celestial Ox"

So we finally screened our FINAL film this morning, so it was a big YAY and PHEW all at the same time! I am so, so, so, so, SO proud of my fellow Mo-Cap Penguins - we actually did it! It's finished, and in my humble opinion, thanks to the hard work of everyone, fab.

I shall try to post the finished film on here once we get the go-ahead. It's a little sketchy right now with guidelines and copyrights... we are trying to submit it to a few festivals, so there's some things we have to wait on before we post to the web.

Anyway, stay tuned, and in the meantime, here are my finished scenes! Yay, finished! Sorry they are sort of out of context, but think of it as a trailer. Sort of. :) And once again, major props to our narrator, Allen Stewart-Coates... perhaps better known as the voice of Rataxes in Babar. He totally makes our film amazing!

Scene 12 [the black is scene 13, I didn't do that one]

Scene 14, 15 & 16

Scene 17

Celestial Ox - ruff animation

So we are in the last stretch of this year, which means - final leg of production on our Group Film "The Celestial Ox"! I am in the midst of cleaning up my ruff animation, which will then be coloured frame by frame and composited with the backgrounds to be put into the final film.

Here are my scenes a la ruff animation.
Stay tuned for the final film, to be completed by the middle of April!

Scene 12-13:

Scene 14-15:

Scene 16:

Scene 17:

A Finito Action Analysis!

Okay, well, not FINISHED-finished... but it is completed in terms of what was required for the assignment... and lemme tell ya, THAT'S a miracle in itself!

The third scene, where the "Ann" character is side-stepping the old lady, is the completely finished one; cleaned-up, painted, complete with ground shadow and two-tone shadow on "Ann".

And amazingly enough, after working 13 weeks on this puppy, I'd still like to finish the rest of it! I am happy with the way it turned out [thanks to everyone who helped! - see the credits].. PHEW that was alotta work! [Pardon the low-res for web, it will be much clearer on my reel!]

And now it's time to jingle all the way to a holly jolly Christmas!

A rendered Elf

So here's my final render of my Thinking Character assignment - my first character animation in Maya. It was so fun!

And just in time for Christmas :)
Enjoy!

Demo Reel v1.0

Here's the first version of my demo reel...I shall continue to change and add to it when I get more experience [specifically 3D] under my belt.

For now, this is what I have to send to the Disney peeps for the Internship deadline tomorrow. I can't even believe how many hoops you have to jump through to apply...it is crazy times!!! I am just elated I even got it in on time, sheesh capeesh.

Props go to Cody-man for helping me find a groovy track for my first reel o' demo. Thanks muchos, bro!

Stay tuned for v1.1....coming to a computer screen near you, Summer 2007.

Beak ruff animation

PHEW, my second last animation for this year. And the one after this is just a clean-up animation of this one. SO....if I didn't like these drawings the first time around, I am sure as heckfire gonna love 'em the second time around when I have to draw every minute detail with a mechanical pencil.

I am happy with this one though, Napoleon's line was WAY more fun to work with - such ticked off energy, gotta love it. I think my fav is the shaking fists. It makes me happy.

Now....me gotta sleep.

Kip talks. The rough version.

PHEW what a craaazzzy week. Lotsa stuff due, namely animation on Thursday [the biggie] and a few paintings plus a proposal thrown into the mix.....

But it's now SPRING BREAK!!!!!!! WHOOO BABY!!!!!!!

Wait – Spring? Doesn't Spring mean flowers blooming? Skipping rocks on the water in my tshirt and cargos? Going for ice cream in mid-afternoon??

Nope. Not in Canada. I can't complain – here is much milder than Winnipeg, but there is still snow around, in which case that means to me that Winter is still here.

But what I DO like about Spring Break is... NO classes, NO deadlines, NO pressure!! Well, still a fair amount of work to do, but after a week like the one that just finished, lemme tell ya, not this weekend!!

Besides....the Oscars are on and that's my fav award show of the year!! [Esp since a previous Sheridan grad is up for Best Animated Short - woohoo!] And...of course....Ellen is hosting! Ya can't get any better than that. Really. Ya can't. I can't wait to do some fun Oscar sketching too.

ANYWAY. Sorry, I am carried off by tangents more often than I can count.... What was I saying?

Ah yes. Kip. Here it is. His line was only 4 seconds, which made me go YAY! But I stupidly added a few more seconds of his intro mumbling, which brought it to 10. Why, oh why, do I do that to myself. It was my longest animation yet. And I have to clean up every one of these for our next assignment. If I thought my hand cramped up this time...wow. I have a treat in store.

Enjoy, geeeeezz.

Stitch says Meow.

This was from first year...I came across it tonight and thought I'd throw it up on the ol' blog. It was probably one of the only animations I actually ended up feeling satisfied with from last year.

And lemme tell ya, those stinkin' ears of Stitch were NOT easy to turn around!

The film is classic though :)

Acting + lipsync, tougher than you think!

My first animation including full-body acting AND a line of dialog....is here.

I finished it around 3:30 Thursday morning....or night....wait – what day is it??

I don't think this is my best piece of animation [he DID ask for roughs!], but I am really proud of what I learned from it. Sometimes the only way to learn something is to just do it, and it may not work out. But we don't get time to fix errors in this program! Poses vs. moving gestures....hmmm, you'd think making a drawing seem alive ain't all that hard - but it is! I hope to apply what I did learn to our next two lipsyncs...and hopefully be happier with the results!

'Sides...Kip should be fun to animate no matter what :)

It didn't help either than our schedule is so nutso....four other projects were also due this past week, which left about a day and a half for actual animating time, [not to mention going to regularly scheduled classes amid crazyness], to do the animation from start to finish.

Never again will I think 7 seconds is short - try drawing every frame out!! :) [It was about 100 drawings.]

Oh - and the voice belongs to Jennifer Coolidge. I love hearing her deliver lines, she makes me laugh. I plan to animate a line she did in the flick 'Best In Show', but this was a better line for my first crack at the cat.

And now....me tired :)

Mouth-only Lip Sync Animation

This term in animation we are focusing on adding DIALOG to our animated projects! Wooooo-hoo! Well, so this one is just a mouth. Just so we ... all » could get over the whole "HOW THE FRANCE DO YOU ANIMATE A MOUTH???" thing. I think I'm over it. Guess where my line is from? We had to choose from about 10 lines. I thought, "Who's voice am I going to get least sick of hearing over and over and over and over and over and over...."


You get the point.


Stay tuned for more fun lip syncs - with bodies, even!

Sheepers Keepers Leica Reel

For storyboarding last term, we had to come up with our own stories, involving a human character, a beaked character and a muzzle character. It had to be about one minute [if fully animated], but have a complete short story involving the characters. Uh huh, it wasn't easy! My story changed so many times since the beginning...yeesh. I decided to take a leap of faith and do all my storyboard panels digitally with my newly purchased version of Sketchbook. Oh MAN do I love that program! But drawing solely on a tablet, and drawing on paper were TOTALLY different. Plus with the crunch time I was gonna make it reeeeeeaaaally tough on myself if the digital panels didn't work out. In the end, I was satisfied with the result. Sure, I lost all use of my hand due to severe cramping - but isn't what this degree is all about??? :) I then put the panels to a leica reel [timed them all out as if they were animated], added dialogue, music, sound fx, and some sweet foley, done by my friend and yours, Tammy Robson. Props to Tams, esp on the wolf-hit sound - classic! The story involves one precocious young girl named Emily, her not-so-brave bird-friend Pinky, and their soon-to-be friend, Leonard the Sheep. Oh, and there's also a mean wolf thrown into the mix. He wasn't given a name. Well, okay, "Mean Wolf". This is their story.

Walk and Run

Walk and run animation for school - I did two Italian mobsta-type dudes which were contrasting in size and personality. This made for interesting walk and run cycles. Then I added music and sound, and my own dialogue. Tams did the voice of the angry dude, but we did adjust the pitch! I did the screams of the other guy, and no, we didn't adjust the pitch :) Fun stuff!