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.