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.