Metimdan "Epic" Battle

A million points to anyone that gets the movie reference.

Metimdan

Quick animation-doodle I did at work today. I can't really think of a way to describe what this is. So I won't.

15-ish minutes

I Hate Snow

I had planned on this animation being more elaborate. As you can see, towards the end I got a little frustrated, so it's a little unfinished. But it's still a satisfying end.

I got a message from home at 12:00- it had just started snowing. I got a message from home at 12:07- it was coming down heavy. I left at 12:15, at which point it was absolutely fine in Watertown. When it did start snowing, I was staring at the ground at a stop light watching the ground literally get whiter within the span of time it took for the light to turn green.

I got home an hour and a half after I left work, an hour and a half after the storm started up in Franklin, and was greeted to this, which I took IMMEDIATELY after I entered the front door.



That's over 2 inches of snow.

Crazy Shenanigans

Based off of another family email conversation. Again, severe lack of time = severe lack of quality.

I <3 Videogames

Things have been kinda nuts, and I haven't had much free time for my own stuff, so I figured I'd make another "what's my inspiration" post.

I like videogames. I like them a LOT. The "Final Fantasy" series is one of my favorite series. I played FF7 for the PC back in the summer of '98, and I was hooked. My brother and I bought a Playstation after that, solely in anticipation for "Final Fantasy VIII," which came out September 1999. In the many months between summer of '98 and fall of '99, I did a TON of research on the game, and analyzed every screenshot I could get my grubby paws on.

What struck me as odd were the prerendered screens of the two main characters, dancing in a ballroom. It was odd because it seemed like such a trivial event to have to fully render using CGI. Videogames weren't really like that yet. When the game finally came out that fall, and when I ever saw that scene, I was completely blown away.

Keep in mind, this was 8 years ago. Pre-Shrek, Post-Toy Story. And while you can hardly call it "animation," since it's clearly motion captured, it still absolutely blew my mind. Especially when their previous effort, just two years earlier, looked like this... and people considered that pretty amazing at the time. I'd never seen characters really come to life like this before, and I still can't help but smile whenever I watch it- even 8 years later.

Scolding

This is what happens when your brother wants you to do an animation, and you're falling behind on an impending deadline.

This is "Animation of Dan being silly and Tim scolding him."

about 5 minutes

Math and Global Warming

I did some math. A few months back, I discovered these facts (though they've been updated since then):

Number of miles put on my car since I got it (roughly 1 year ago): 17,000
Amount of money spent on gas since I started my most recent job (March 2007): $930

I never really minded my commute. I've been working at Soup2Nuts for just about 8 months. The drive just never really bothered me after I got used to it. I've wanted to move for a while, and I know I have to, but it wasn't until a few weeks ago, until I started thinking too much, that it all began to bother me. So, with the help of a calculator, this is what I've discovered.

Hours spent in car per day: 2.5
Hours spent in car per week: 12.5
Hours per month: 50
Hours per year: 600
Days spent in car per year: 25

That's right. The amount of hours I'll spend in my car, should I have this commute for a full year, will amount to 25 days. Could you imagine sitting in a car by yourself for 25 straight days? Could you imagine how much you could get done in 25 days?

That's right. I am the sole cause of global warming.

The Auditions

This is my UMass Dartmouth senior project. I'm not quite sure how I feel about it. I don't think it aged as well as some of my other projects.

It was a different approach for me. The idea was, we were told as students that there are certain things that some studios look for in animators... some specific things, like being able to push an object with a good level of realism, expression changes, walk cycles, etc etc etc... so for this project, I wanted to try some of that out. So this project is about a digital character, trying out for a part in a 3D animated movie.

He... probably wouldn't have gotten the part. But hey! Much of this was a first for me, so at least it was a learning process.


In other news, 5 days ago was the one year anniversary of the completion of my Zelda "Wii Adventure" video. It managed to rack up 528,519 views on Google Video in that time, and 177,491 views on YouTube (the Google version came first, and it's the one that all the gaming blogs linked too... hence the larger amount of views). The YouTube version also has 674 comments (ALL of which I've read, because I'm insane) and 2,624 favorites. I'm....... insanely flattered. Although, also a little sad to think that if it wasn't for the Zelda theme, it wouldn't have gotten nearly as many views. But there've been so many comments about how people liked the pacing, and how they thought it was funny, and all that, so that reassures me, and makes me feel much better about it. I truly am grateful.

(On a side note, there's another version of my video someone else uploaded on YouTube that has 389, 149 views, and 1,217 comments... I wonder why it's got so many more than my own???)

Ghiradelli Brownies

A friend and I were emailing back and forth, talking about brownies (of all things). This "animation" (if it can be called that) was a response to her comment: "Those Ghiradelli's though - best brownies out there." I was more just trying to be funny than anything else.

about 15 minutes

Animation Test

Just something I did quickly at work today. I'll take any excuse I can get to animate long hair... though I'm sure it'd probably get kind of annoying after a little while.

about 15 minutes


And I just saw this post on Cold Hard Flash, and I gotta say, watching that video made me giddy. Inverse Kinematics for Flash = awesome, and will do wonders for Flash animators.

More Sketches

More random sketches of my dynamic duo. I don't know why they're always in crazy action poses, but I just really love drawing bodies in such energetic positions. It's fun. It's a good way to release energy.

Music is also a big motivator for me. I was listening to specific songs for each one of these drawings, and they were all pretty upbeat high-octane types of songs. I wonder what would happen if I listened to folk music while drawing them.

...I'll save that for another entry.

Head of the House

Here's another spawn of a long string of family emails.

See, my sister wants to hold a "coffee seminar of some sort" for the Starbucks she works at, so she can be eligible for a promotion, so she emailed my family to see if we liked the idea. And some of the emails that followed....

_________________________________________

From: Flynn, Timothy
Sent: Thursday, October 11, 2007 9:10 AM
Subject: RE: Coffee, with a side of Ice Cream!

That sounds like fun. As head of the household, I deem this a worthy event for the Attleboro Flynns. hahhahahaahaa

From: Flynn, Meghan
Sent: Thursday, October 11, 2007 9:16 AM
Subject: RE: Coffee, with a side of Ice Cream!

good thing sharon was added to that... MAN OH MAN!

maybe MAN of the household (when trevor isnt around) ... but HEAD of the household?????

I'm pretty sure sharon is going to put you in YOUR place tonight! LOL

_________________________________________

(Sharon being my brother's wife)

Then I replied with the following animation-

Yeah, it sucks. Haha. But it's something. If I were to spend more time on it, I'd totally redo the slap. It's all akward.

about 15-20 minutes.

Urinetown the Musical

Another small update. This is an animated intro I created for the UMass Dartmouth Theater Company's production of "Urinetown" in 2005. It was really cool, because they played it on a giant screen on stage, and it was set to live orchestrated music, which was REALLY awesome to see in person. I had a recording of the song being played on the piano, so it synched up really well when the live band played.

The director, Terry Berliner (I believe) really liked it too (or so she told me). I didn't realize till afterwards that, at one point, she had apparently been a resident director for "The Lion King" on Broadway, which was also pretty awesome.

And......... I got to animate a bouncing toilet. VERY AWESOME.

"The Tell-Tale Heart"

When I was a junior at UMass Dartmouth (Sophomore in my major), we had a storyboarding/animatic class. One of the projects was to take a short story, and create an animatic in Macromedia Director. Then we had to create an alternate ending to the story, and make the animatic interactive.

I chose Edgar Allen Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart." There's a part in my interactive animatic right before she attacks the old man (yes, I made the main character a "she," instinctively) , and you could choose whether you wanted to attack him, or suppress that desire.

After all this, I was asked to make a shortened version of it for one of the Electronic Imaging festivals, so I took all the pictures I drew for it, and used Final Cut to make it into a pseudo-movie trailer. That's what this is. I tried making it as dramatic and over-the-top as possible. I love the song in the 2nd half... unfortunately, neither me nor Sarah can figure out exactly where it came from. We know it's a Beethoven arrangement, "Allegretto..." something or other... but beyond that......

The drawings kinda suck, we had very little time to put this together, and I definitely tried doing too much with them. But the best part about it, and the aspect of it that got the most comments from my classmates, was the voice work. My good friend Sarah Hartley, who really is my favorite voice talent, provided the narrator's voice... and to this day, I still can't get over what an awesome job she did.

I'll never forget when I asked her to do the screams. I can picture the moment in my mind- I was on one side of the room holding the microphone, while she was on the other side standing on a bed, screaming at the top of her lungs. And of course, the one that she thought was the worst was the one I ended up using. Her voice cracked about halfway through it, but because of that it just made it the most crazy, disturbing, unconventional scream ever. I just had to use it.

She's since moved to NYC, went to acting school, and is on her way to becoming a crazy-famous actor.

UMD EI Show 2005 Intro

This is my intro animation I did for UMass Dartmouth's 2005 Electronic Imaging festival. It's a bit over dramatic and silly.. I think it was all just an excuse for me to animate a puppet, which I'd wanted to do for a while.

The last section of it, with the fake blue screen of death, was awesome. When it played at the show in the auditorium (which is always PACKED every year), there was this large, collective gasp when that blue screen popped up, which I had totally hoped would happen. It was probably so convincing for 2 reasons- 1- they play the DVD's at the show on a laptop, and 2- there had been some sort of weird error on said laptop just moments before they played this animation. So I was really giddy when people told me afterwards "I thought that was real!" And huge props to a few people- my friend and fellow EI classmate Emily Bawn for agreeing to be the disgruntled student at the end there, and Sarah Hartley (again) for finding the awesome voice talent Dave Toomey (right? I'll never forget his name after I realized I accidentally misspelled it in the program).

Upon looking at these old animations.. I think I've decided I'm a better 2D animator than 3D (which I never thought I'd be). But then again, It's been nearly a year since I touched Lightwave...

No Animation Today

I've always liked the idea of creating a story about a kid, or kids, seeing the world in a completely different light than the rest of the world. One where they play out their fantasies without a care, where they're heroes... where they just have fun! Not necessarily with deadly weapons, but this is just a brand new idea as of two days ago.

I haven't done an original animated project since I graduated from UMD, so I feel like this would be a good starting place for my next project... whenever I decide to start doing that. I just need to flesh out... just about everything.

I came up with these two characters the other day, and I kinda like how their designs came out. I feel like it'd be fun to animate.

Gift-O-Matic 3000

This is just a little something I did a few days back for the talented Rachel Maguire's birthday.

Click me!

(though it'll probably play funny, since I'm uploading all my stuff to Photobucket... where flash document size limitations apparently don't exist!)

Anyway.. I didn't really give myself enough time for this. Or, rather, I wanted to do too much with it. But it's just a cute little animation, and I was able to give myself a quick refresher on Action Script basics!

Jojo the Juggler

And this is my very first 3D animation, using NewTek Lightwave. Again, I was a Junior in my major (senior in number of years at UMD). I was a bit worried when I started that the idea was a little too crazy. I knew nothing about 3D animation, and knew even less about juggling. And he just HAD to be on a unicycle too... So it was annoying at times, especially since I never quite grasped the concept of rigging (I do now, but I didn't then).

I made his mouth too wide from the start, so now he's in a perpetual state of excitement. But it's okay, there really isn't much time for any other emotion. Like my penguin animation, I tried to make my little gremlin dudes stand out from each other by having different personalities. I don't know how noticeable it is, but they have a "see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil" thing going on. No real reason behind that, but I have my friend Sarah to thank for that idea. It's cute.

I didn't want to overload this with effects, so I tried to keep it as technically simplistic as I could, so I could focus on the animation itself. There's some bump mapping on his shirt, but you can't even see it.


Anyway, on a side note, here's another short little doodle-animation I did a few weeks back.

"P" for Penguin

This here is my very first Flash animation, done when I was a junior at UMass Dartmouth (I was technically a sophomore in the Electronic Imaging program, but it was my third year at the school). For the project, we were to take a letter of the alphabet, and show it transforming into something that begins with that letter. We had a strict time limit for how long it could be, so it's pretty fast-paced...

First off, I apologize for the sluggish frame rate. I guess it can't handle the type of video that it originally was. The actual animation runs at 30 frames per second. So once I get that worked out, I may post it again (it does the same thing when I try uploading to YouTube or Google Video).

Anyway, I really went nuts with the bouncy effect. Maybe a little too nuts. I remember trying to pay close attention to detail... for example, I gave each letter that bounces in a unique personality (obviously incredibly limited, but it was still fun to play around with), and for the most part, they each come in a completely different way from each other.

We had storyboarded our ideas out, but a lot of the small things came to me as I was actually animating. I remember, originally the beak wasn't going to emerge from the snowball at the very end. But as I was animating that section, somehow that idea just kind of... popped into my head, and I thought to myself "...I'd be stupid NOT to do that!" Especially since the snowman had no nose to begin with. It was like it was meant to be.

My brother, Brian, provided the voice of the penguin. I'm aware that penguins don't quack, but... whatever. Around :18, if you pause it on just the right frame, you can see his initials.

Anyway... that's that. I'll probably post my first 3D animation sometime soon as well.

Vacation In Disguise

So... I guess I'll try to explain this. See, me and co-worker Justin were talking about how we both happened to be out of work on the day of our 6 month anniversary of working at Soup2Nuts. He, being on a week long vacation, and me, working from home (getting my car's brakes replaced), which he said was like a "vacation in disguise." Kinda like "Transformers." Only... we're talking about a vacation, not robots.

Anyway, long story short, if "Working From Home: Vacation In Disguise" were a cartoon, I guess it'd go something like this.

...I guess you had to be there.

~45 minutes

Two Old(ish) Ones

Here are 2 little animations I did about a month ago (maybe a little less). I forget how long each one took... I'm not a fan of how the monster shrinks a bit in the first one towards the end, but... oh well. The second one... It's complicated.

Introspection

This is why people hate going shopping with me.


1 hr, 45 minutes

Capeman

It's Capeman. His super power is... wearing a cape, apparantly. It's an invisible cape though, so that's kinda cool.

about 1 hour

Running Into a Tree

There was once a time where I would've liked nothing more than to run full speed towards a tree, yelling at the top of my lungs. Luckily, I don't feel that way anymore! :D This one gets a little more abstract, but it was fun, and a great energy releaser!

45 minutes (would've been shorter, but I added the leaves in last minute)



EDIT: coincidentally, this is very similar to how I broke my collar bone when I was younger.

Raspberry Jam

I'm not a morning person. So when I'm getting ready for work, anything could set me off. This has never happened, but I imagine if I was caught in this type of situation at home in the morning... I would at least THINK about doing this.

:D

45 min - 1 hour

Inspiration

I've been really busy lately, so I haven't been able to devote much time to my spanking new blog. But I figured I'd make a post about my #1 animation inspiration. Adam Phillips is the master of flash animation, hands down. If you haven't seen his stuff, you seriously need to check it out.

I've learned an incredible large majority of what I know about animation from studying his work. I only hope I can one day be as good.

Screenshot Dumpage

Just a quick dump of screenshots from old 3D projects...

Screenshot of the Wind Waker island I made in Lightwave


Link and Aryll from my WW animation


Also from my WW animation. I was really proud of those trees, hah.


My 3 characters from my 3 school animation projects. The one on the left is a marionnette. I loved animating the hat.

Swinging From Pipes

This is what I felt like doing when I went into work today. Haha. I wasn't upset or anything, I was just way overly tired to do anything (yet I somehow found the strength to do this). And I can't drink coffee, so I need to find another source of caffeine.

ME - part deux

So, in my last post, I detailed how I discovered the world of digital art. Somehow between then and now, I started taking animation seriously. I should say, it was always something I dabbled in. When I was a wee lad, my parents got me an MS DOS program called... "Animator." Once I got the hang of it, I used it quite a bit. I animated balls bouncing around and... er, other things. Can't quite remember what. My childhood friend, Justin, and I used the animation tool in Mario Paint a lot...

I probably got the most pre-college animation experience through a little program I bought called "Klik & Play," which was a program that let you make your own computer games. It blew my mind at the time. They had a huge library of pre-existing sprites you could use, but about 90% of the games I made, I made using my own sprites. Even at this point, animation as a career never even occurred to me.

And it didn't when I started college either. I went to UMass Dartmouth as a computer science major, but quickly switched to Liberal Arts. I wanted to take some art classes, but after getting a work-study job in the Design department, I discovered Electronic Imaging as a major. Basically a conglomeration of all things "digital art" related. Animation played a huge role in this major, but there were many other factors to it as well. Towards the end of my college career, I focused mostly on 3D animation. I was fortunate to have my work shown in 3 UMass Dartmouth Electronic Imaging festivals (so far?). Unfortunately, I've gots no website anymore, so once I get that back up and running I'll be sure to post them all.

Back in October, before I started working at EMC, came the highest point in my life as an animator (until I got my first real animation job). I created a 3D animation in the style of "Zelda: The Wind Waker" for a very unofficial contest. I spent about a month from start to finish on it (I only gave myself about a week and a half to do the actual animation though... gulp!). Long story short, I didn't win... I got around 3rd place or something, which was still pretty cool. But what was even cooler was that somehow, word got out about it, and it was featured in some very popular gaming blogs (including GoNintendo.com and Kotaku.com, sites I visit daily). I uploaded it to Google Video, and it recently hit the half-million views mark... which BLOWS MY MIND. The Youtube version of it was uploaded a little later, and "only" has about 160,000 views, but it gets a lot more comments. I love reading the comments. :)

So it's kind of funny that after all this, I got a job as a 2D flash animator. But the thing is, if you know animation in any form, you pretty much know animation as a whole. I was able to take everything I learned from my time as a 3D animator, and apply it to character animation in Flash. It's just the software that gets in the way (but I picked up on that quickly as well).

And so now we come to the present day. A few weeks ago, I started to dabble in frame-by-frame flash animation. It started out as retaliation to an email debate between me, and my 7 siblings over how to pronounce the word "integral." I was the only one pronouncing it "in TEG ral," while everyone else pronounced it "IN te gral" (turns out both are right). Anyway, I'll cut to the chase. Here's what resulted from that debate, on my side.

My sister said I went against the grain, and warned me that if they ever cross a bridge without jumping, she'd bring a rope with her- just in case I decided to be different and jump.






My other sister tried making a fool out of me in front of everyone. This is me getting my revenge, in stick figure abuse form.






It ended around this note, in which my brother said it would be scary if we all had group therapy. I thought it would go something like this.







So these are just stupid little things I did in about 10-15 minutes each, and realized that it's a great stress reliever, since I don't have to worry about precision... the excess energy I have almost flows right through the pen. Yeah, I'm weird, I know. That's my abstract comment for the day. Anyway, my doodles usually suck too much for me to want to post them, but I thought maybe people would get a kick out of my doodle-mations.

And so this blog was born. Next time I'll post the other short animations I've done since these, and then I'll continue posting the new ones I make, as I make them.

ME - part une

Yo.

I've been in the world of blogs for a while now, but I've always wanted to have a dedicated art/animation blog, and after seeing that a bunch of people I work with have one, I decided to hop on the bandwagon. So that's what this will be.

I guess I'll start off by saying a little (lot) about myself. I've always, always been interested in art. More specifically, digital art. I started off with... "observational" art, as many people do. I remember when "The Lion King" came out in 1994 (my all-time favorite movie, by the way), I was 11 years old. We had an IBM PC, with Windows 3.1, and I tried to recreate a screenshot from the movie in MS paint, with 16 colors. Luckily, a few years ago, I found it on a REALLY old floppy disk, and uploaded it to my deviant art account. It's pictured below.



Kinda hideous, eh?


That was my very first taste of digital art. I started taking digital art more seriously once I got into this PhotoDeluxe program (a watered down version of Photoshop) during my senior year of High School. I visited a lot of online forums, and got tips and tricks from tons of talented artists from around the world. That, coupled with the fact that I eventually became an Electronic Imaging major at UMass Dartmouth (can you believe I was a computer science major before I switched majors?? What a different life I'd lead...) and was taking all sorts of art classes, I'd like to say I became a better artist, and Photoshopper. At one point, I recreated the above Scar and Simba drawing, using all the tricks I've learned. This one is pictured below.

















Eventually I became a full-fledged fan-artist. That's all I ever did. I learned quite a lot from my experiences in the world of fan-artistry. I've posted some of my favorites below:

Zelda: Twilight Princess compilation - I did this for a mini-contest, before I really knew anything about the game. I forget how I placed... I tried to color it, but it turned out kinda crappy.

Esmerelda: Triforce Hunter - a character I created for a contest, in which we had to create the alter ego of a famous Nintendo character. I chose Zelda.

Terra in Magitek Armor - at this point, I was learning Lightwave 3D in school, so I made the armor, and the background, in Lightwave Modeler.

Another Zelda Compilation of characters - Here I was playing around with styles, trying to go down a not-so-realistic route.

Justin and Feena - a simple piece I did, depicting a scene from the end of "Grandia," one of the best RPG's ever created.

Kingdom Heart character comp - not a big fan of the series, but it was a good lesson in how to draw clothes.

Grandia 3 - CLOSER - A silly little thing I did... in case you couldn't tell, I'm mimicking the poster/cover for the movie "Closer" with these characters. This one's actually pretty horrible, because if you try to make full faces by mirroring the halves of their faces, they look like deformed freaks. Their eyes are way too far from their noses.

Asuka from "Evangelion" - title says it all... going for the more realistic shading again. ...Meh.

Cast of "Haruhi" - Again, title says all. This was done in March of 2007, and is my last fanart (that I ever colored). The drawing was a little rushed I believe...

But I save the best for last...

"Zelda: Wind Waker" compilation - this is my absolute favorite thing I've ever done in Photoshop. It was my most successful contest entry, which won me a brand-spanking new PS2 (well, technically it won me a "Nintendo DS," but I already had one preordered, so I used my winnings to get the PS2 instead...).

So, I've done a lot of fanart. This is just a small fraction of all of the fanart I've ever done. In case you couldn't tell, I'm also a huge videogame nerd. Seriously. No, seriously. You don't have any idea. But anyway, the unfortunate thing about fanart is that it kind of restricts you from coming up with your own sense of style. But that's why I created this blog- to correct that.

This entry is already way too long, so next time I'll post about how I got into animation. From that point onward, the entries will be much more short, much more concise- I only plan on posting short animation doodles.

Till next time, folks!


(PS- I also have a weird and offbeat sense of humor, though it takes a lot to get it out of me if you're just talking to me)