Squirrel!!!

This was insanely fun. I need to do more stuff like this.

Phillipe and Pierre

So, I just realized I never made a post about "The Idiotic Adventures of Philippe and Pierre," an online web series I was asked to animate by Dave Schlafman (who created, designed and directed the series). Which is shocking, considering the animation took up a good chunk of my life this time last year, and taught me a lot of good animation tricks in the process (like smoke!! Glorious smoke!).

Here's some background on the characters, taken from the website: "Philippe needs a body. Pierre needs a brain. Join this idiotic duo as they attempt to solve each other's biggest problem. Pierre attempts to put Philippe on top of his body, but his stupid plans never seem to work just right, and in the end, Philippe is usually the one who suffers."

Dave and I wanted to have a hand drawn look to it, which was incredibly fun and challenging, considering I'd never really done that before. There's eight shorts in total, and I've picked my three favorite ones. Enjoy!

Effects and editing were done by Evan Sussman, sound design by Joe Pleiman, and the series was produced by Mike Levine at Pileated Pictures.

Rowdy Rocket


Teleportal Trouble


Snowman Silliness

Larry Bruce: Memoirs of a Bicycle

So, this past Saturday Mike Annear, Joe Boyle and I got together to make a short animation about a bicycle for the blog "24 Hour Toons." Every other Friday at midnight (CA time) a word is posted on the blog, and it's up to those who participate to make an animation about that word. It's all for fun, and it was fun (until the 2 hour "rendering" fiasco). It was probably the most collaborative "collaborative effort" I've ever been a part of. Here are our results.

Melty Brains!!!

My Head is Possessed!!

Lip Synch

Lip synch makes me want to do this-

Oh noes!

My flash just crashed!

One Million!

It was just about two years in the making, but my "Wii Adventure" animation has finally reached one million hits on YouTube!!!



Granted, it's not the version I uploaded, but I'll still take it!

Guest Animator

My former roommate and current friend, Dan Savaria, has offered to make a guest entry to my animation blog and, well, I couldn't resist such an offer. So without further ado, I present:


Yet Another Shitty Animation Post!
by Dan Savaria

This time I'm tackling the jumping jack. Throughout the years, many artists have tried to properly capture and express the jumping jack through their art. For thousands of years it was thought to be completely impossible. There were simply too many intricacies to take into account. Artists thought that the positions, movement, and emotion that one experiences during jumping jacks were impossible to represent.

But then a break through occurred. It was by none other than Leonardo da Vinci. It wasn't perfect, but it was the closest humanity had ever seen. The Vitruvian Man which is Italian for literally "the jumper of jacks." After a jumping jacks dark ages that had lasted hundreds of years, da Vinci revived all the excitement with one drawing.

I've studied da Vinci and all the top artists who have studied him, and I think I finally came up with the perfect jumping jack animation.

Enjoy.

Sexy Platypus / Anxious Cracker

These were done for the SoupyNuts blog.

Facial / Body Expressions

I've recently decided I really want to learn more "traditional" character animation. So here's my start. This one took about a half hour-45 minutes. I know there's, like, a million things wrong with it (I haven't totally figured out eyes yet, among other things). Something tells me, though, if I want to get serious about it, I'm gonna have to end up back in school one of these days. Though that's definitely something I wouldn't be against.

Till then, I'll just keep practicing. And keep analyzing Disney movies.

Quizzical Snot

Yup, that's what it is.

Manga

I haven't done this in a while. But I've decided to take another stab at fanart. It happens about once a year now. I plan on coloring it soon.

I've been doing a lot of original doodling that I'd like to post here soon too. I've also been trying to animate fire. Fun stuff. It's hard, and I'm not necessarily good at it, but I love animating the elements.

Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom

At work today, I was looking through a book that highlighted cartoons in the 50's and came across an image of a scholarly looking blue owl with glasses, and it triggered this... really intense nostalgic episode. As if it was from something I had obsessed over as a child. The subtitle was "Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom."

Luckily, since YouTube has almost anything ever made, I was able to find it, and relive this memory from my childhood. It must've been at LEAST 15 years since I last watched this, and my jaw just dropped the entire time. Nostalgia has really never hit me so hard before.

Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom

Unfortunately, I also discovered today that it was the source of my worst childhood nightmare, in which characters resembling the ones shown at 3:18 were chasing me around the house. It was terrifying!!!

Anyway, I can watch it now with a greater appreciation for it. It's really such an amazing, fluid style.

Another Shitty Animation Post!!

They'd make even less sense if I tried to explain them. I promise.

More Fun With Words!

Character Design

I don't consider myself a character designer. But I'd like to think my design skills are evolving along with my animation skills. When I (rarely) take a stab at character design , I tend to draw my characters in a style conducive to the way I'd like to see them animated. Which I guess... anyone would do. However, I'd often like to see my characters running around jumping off of walls and doing back flips and stuff, which is why they've usually got tiny bodies, and large heads, hands and feet.

That, and, as much as I hate to admit it, I do draw some inspiration from Tetsuya Nomura, the master of body contortion. The second you see me drawing zippers on a character's hat, however, feel free to punch me in the face.

Crying

It's an EXPLOSION OF TEARS!!!!

More Perspective

Another perspective test, not cleaned up in the slightest. I was going for an ultra-cheesey anime opening inspired look here. The one major issue being her hand is way too small. Took about 25 minutes.

EXPLOSION!!

Can I just say how much I love animating explosions? I like how this turned out, though the dissipation isn't really right. Whatever, it was fun.

Perspective Test

A LOT has happened since my last post. More than I care to go into right now. But the theme has seemed to be "change," and so I figured I'd try to bring that to my animation as well. I've never really done much with perspective, in terms of 2D animation, aside from one shot in my penguin animation where the camera does a 180. I'd consider this my first real step in that direction. This took me about a half hour or so. I've been afraid to try and tackle perspective, but I don't think it turned out so bad. Now I just gotta worry about what happens when the camera isn't conveniently hiding his lower body.

I'll probably clean this up at some point... maybe give him a cape. I love animating capes.

Running Into a Tree, part two

This was made, and posted, sometime last year, but it needs posting again. I'd say, on the whole, nothing sums up this weekend better than this animation.

On the plus side, my brother and I came up with numerous mini-ideas that I'd love to animate. Turns out all you need to do is give us each a rake, a pile of dead, wet leaves and an hour or two alone and we're golden. Although I'm pretty sure they're ideas that wouldn't be funny to many people- mostly just us. But you never know.

Emergency Brake

I think cars should have some sort of feature built in to let the oblivious know when they accidentally left their emergency brakes on... to prevent these people from driving an hour and ten minutes with it on. People like me.

Maybe some sort of smoke signal.



I guess the glaring "brake" light on my dashboard isn't enough for me.

Thinking Hurts Your Brain

It's true. For me. Ow...


approx 30-45 minutes

Is this even worth posting?

Again... this one's more about the idea than the actual execution of the animation. I spent all of about 10 minutes on it. Justin was talking about how the elevator in our building went haywire on him, and no one else seemed to have a problem with it. So this is basically me calling him crazy (though the elevators tend to act up from time to time, so I don't actually not believe him).

Anniversary

Another quick doodle. I'm trying to do this sort of thing more often. It's funny, growing up, I never dreamed of being an animator. Believe it or not, I always wanted (and still kinda do) my own comic strip. But I don't draw fast/consistent enough for something like that. Anyway, I'd like nothing more than to animate in this style. I just gotta come up with a good idea.

I also tried one with hair, but it came out kinda funny.

In unrelated news, last week (March 12th to be exact) marked my one year anniversary at Soup2Nuts. Woohoo! Go me! It's hard to believe a year has passed. Unfortunately, it's also a grim reminder of this global warming post I made a while back. So, let me say this loud and clear:

I've officially spent the sum of 25 full days sitting in my car.

I have no shame. But I should.

I'm tired

I wanted to do something productive before I went to bed. So I started to do some Wind Waker fanart. But it was coming out kinda shitty. I know a few people who are excellent at random doodling, and I'm really not. It's hard for me to express anything in a single image (let alone, making it look nice). But I thought I'd give it a go. So I finally thought to myself, "why don't you just draw what you're feeling."

Unfortunately, I'm very tired.


Does it show?

Because Evan Did So

In light of the talented Evan Sussman's recent blog posting regarding old work, I feel obligated to post what I've shown very few people. Well, granted this stuff can be found on a couple different websites, but hardly ever have I gone out of my way to show it to anyone until recently. Put simply, it's embarassing. There was a time when I thought this stuff was good (it's what I now like to call "American Idol Syndrome"). But it isn't. It truly, truly isn't. And it's all fanart, too. Bad fanart is the worst kind of art known to man.

So, here goes nothing.

I'm too ashamed to even post thumbnails, so I'm just posting links. Let's start off with the absolute worst one.

Yeah. WTF? It's like a tree grew a face and boobs, then went to the world's worst rave.

She apparantly had her hips removed so she could fit into that totally bitchin' miniskirt.

Those shins have got to be at least 5 feet long. And I think someone broke her neck.


That was all pre-Wacom tablet. Here are the first couple of drawings I did with my first Wacom tablet.

AaaAAHHh holy crap this thing weighs a ton!!!

Again with the neverending shins!

That's the worst of it all. I think. Anyway, I can't bear to look at any more. But just to balance things out a bit, let me quickly post some more recent stuff, which again, isn't anything amazing, but it's better. It's pretty neat what a few figure drawing classes can do.

A - B - C

That's all.


PS- there's also my very first flash animation ever, somewhere deep in the bowels of newgrounds.com. I think it might surpass anything I posted here in terms of badness. That'll take a whole new level of courage for me to show anyone. Maybe some day.

Falling Girl

Bah. Wasn't really turning out the way I wanted it to, so I gave up towards the end.


-about 15 minutes

Ready for Spring

Something I did in about 5 minutes at work today. Nothing special.. just had the urge to animate something on a spring.

It's interesting. I tried doing an independent study in college. It was going to be a 2D/3D hybrid about a drawing of a girl with a spring instead of legs coming to life. I remember how much trouble animating her gave me back then, and it's interesting comparing that, to how easily this came to me today.

I never did finish that project (did something else instead), but I always liked the premise behind it. Maybe I'll revisit it someday.

Breeding Zombie Bunnies

A friend and I were at work discussing how to create an army of zombie bunnies. I guess it would go something like this. Yeah...... not too successful.

Whipped it up last night... and spent WAY too much time on it.

MEGA ANIMATION POST... #1

It's come to my attention that a lot of my animated gifs run really slow, unless you have a pretty decent computer. So, I've decided to compile almost all of my little "doodlemations," as I like to call them, into one streaming video file. So everyone can see how they were meant to be seen... well actually, it's still not running as smooth as the SWF file. But it's close enough.

It's also interesting for me to see it all strung together like it is.

These are just my "short" animations. There's a few longer animations, which I'll put together in a new post in a few days. I'll also be posting animation tests I made a few months back for a freelance project I worked on late last year.

Till then... enjoy!




PS- there's an extra scene at the very end after the "credits." For some reason, it keeps pausing right before the scene plays though, so just move the ticker a tiny bit to the right if that happens, and it'll finish playing through.

First fanart in over a year...

Yaay, I remembered how to draw! ...Sort of.



One truth will always remain, however: I suck at hair. And I draw large heads.

I should have a few large-ish animation posts in a couple of days.

Sneezing

Me and my friend used to make fun of how much attention some of the popular students got in High School. I'm pretty sure this situation never actually happened, but it was funny to think about.

-about a half hour

Another Non-Animation Post

Just going through some old Photoshop artwork....

I did this for a friend from school quite some time ago. It was fun.



This is kind of the process of how I would do fanart (these characters are from "Evangelion"). Well, pretty standard stuff... this was one of the last fanarts I did, which I did in August of '06, just before my life became crazy-busy and had next to no free time.

Shinji's left hand is weird.

Still Imagery

I made these recently for Blair Baker, a friend, and a talented actor living in NYC. I made them in Flash by tracing over a series of photographs, then colored them... in Flash. Simple process I guess, but there was some guesswork involved in creating the shadows and highlights. It was fun getting to do something comic booky like this, considering I hadn't in months.

I kinda like how it turned out in B+W also.

Email conversation @ work

Justin:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv-tmqV99U0&NR=1

Me:
Hahaha, pretty awesome

Justin:
Yeh.. I want to be in a dining hall.. where that happens. But not be a part of it at all. Just.. just see it happen. It would be fantastic

Me:
Next time we have a gathering at the long table in the back, we should try to start that up. But somehow I feel like it would just end up making us feel awkward.

Grief

I was going through my photobucket account, and came across these screenshots I took while I was making my "Wii Adventure" animation, when my Aryll model somehow became corrupt-



And for the record, here is what she was supposed to look like-


I was just thinking recently about how much grief this project caused me. Insane amounts. INSANE amounts. This is the point where I almost lost it. I was on the verge of going into fetal position on the floor around here... I forget how I fixed this issue, but I remember for a while thinking that the entire project, which I'd spent days, nights, weeks on, was corrupt. I think fixing it involved remodeling her a bit, but it eventually got done.

I used textures for mouth expressions. At certain frames, I obviously had to change the texture to show her emotion for that section (smile to frown, etc). I remember, after setting all that up for both Aryll and Link, all that data mysteriously vanished. 5 or 6 times. It got to the point where I had to write down on a sheet of paper what expression goes at what frame... it became this sort of math equation. In fact, I bet if I go into the file right now, the facial expressions will be gone again.




Oh, and here's some mock posters I did about 2 years ago for a "Silent Hill" movie contest that I completely lost in.

A
B
C
D

I know, cheesy. Well, that's what most movie posters are. :p

Gamblor

I made a reference to "Gamblor" and his "neon claws" in a family email conversation today, and I was told to "Danimate" said creature (and yes, that term is now used regularly in my family). So, here's Gamblor. Well, his hand, anyway.

15 minutes