Reel

Here's my current reel. As much as I'm improving in computer animation, I'm still fond of my traditional animations. My design ability has gotten better, but life is simpler when it's just your creativity, a pencil and paper. I hope someday I can animate with Maya just as easily.

Story progress

Today was the first faculty crit on the second pitch for our thesis. As usual it was helpful.. I'm just glad my story is far simpler this time, I can mess with it more.

Like I said before, the story follows a little boy who is shocked by static electricity and declares it his super power. To get started I drew a ton of kids. They are existing characters I made younger, so I could just focus on design, already knowing their personalities.

Here are the current beat boards.

Some animations

I don't have any animations up! I'm an animator, what's wrong with me.

Above is my most recent animation, which I was holding off becuase I intend to fine tune it more. However I'm working on a lipsync right now, and between that and other classes, haven't had time. It was animated in a week, the rig itself took about two months, and perhaps a few weeks of design in Drawing for Animators the semester prior. It's a self caricature, which I assume we were assigned for simplicity. Easy to understand the character, easy to voice!




This was from last semester, animated in maybe four to five weeks. "Push pull exaggerated". While I'm happier with this than the "realistic" pass, I notice I do worse work the longer I have to animate something. Perhaps my train of thought isn't as cohesive, perhaps I put too many keys. Even though it rendered a bit ugly, I think that this project was a pretty big leap in my understanding of computer animation.

Painted Birds WIP

Here is a painting I'm working on for my portfolio. Corel Painter 11. This file has gotten huge and unfortunately very hard to work on. but I want to finish it since I never do anything polished anymore. The image is based off of a short scene I wrote last year. Eventually there will be a painting on that huge blank wall, and Wyn will have a reason to have that paintbrush.

Sketches and WIP

Break is over, so here's some of what I worked on..Other than portfolio. These are all pitch images for Pre pro, we're moving onto doing a completely new story, regardless of how the last one went.

My teacher told me to go with this first one, (a little boy discovers static electricity and thinks it's his super power), but I still have to have others ready for the rest of the staff to look at.


I others, about a waffle house waitress, and one witha mouse that lived in a pumpkin that is turned into a jack-o-lantern. The Last is a spy at a birthday party I like a lot- but I would need a crowd and that's mostly no can do.

Pin Ups

pitch passed! That means all that work I've been posting could potentially become my thesis. I'm lucky, and well aware that this story is too much for one person to handle, so I will work hard on making my second pitch more doable. Or..doable to the quality I'd like it to be, ha ha.

Since it's break, I did these to cool down. I like drawing ridiculous things, and old pin ups are awesomely campy and classic. So this was a lot of fun. The tattoo is only there because it is a specific character. I think it sort of clutters it a bit, but I don't like to be inconsistent.

Tomorrow, it's portfolio time. I also figured out how to get this thing connected to my facebook, if anyone is wondering what that huge white box is over on the right. Sort of an eye sore. (and hilarious, with the only follower being myself)

Designs

Here are the final designs for my potential thesis. I'm very fond of how Gasalt (the designer) came out. He's been around for a long time between my friends and I, so I was excited to get a chance to work with him more, pre-pink.

More Thesis work

Still in the process of developing a thesis idea. We go through this process twice, but this is the first time. The designer and the cat are reaching more finalized designs, but I hope to play more with proportion before it's done. The challenge of this piece is that everything must be white, save for things that can not be changed, like skin and eyes, or things that are important to the plot, like a red mouse toy.

Meanwhile, we're working on building rigs for a separate lipsync project. I rather like how my UVs are going in that, so I intend to show off a bit of that later.

Character exploration

Here's a bit of character exploration from the past week. I'm having fun with the cats.

Here are some works I did for Animation Pre Production, which is a fancy word for thesis work. I used these images to pitch separate ideas, and the faculty chose one I would work on for the next few weeks. They chose the fashion designer in the white room with the pink boa. I'll be sure to post more on that later. All are done in Corel Painter 11.

Paintings

Here is a painting from my portraiture class, last semester. This was the final painting. Perhaps 6-8 hours. 8x10" Oils. I really like working very small, it helps me work with plans of color.

I did this a few days ago from my hotel room. I'm back in my apartment now, so this is nice to look at and remember. Lido beach, 'bout 30 minutes, Corel Painter 11.

I don't understand why these images are allowed to be viewed larger than the ones I posted a few days ago. The only difference is that today Firefox worked. Ah well, hopefully this change is here to stay so people can see my art better than tiny thumbnails. :)

Some Comic Art.

Here, have some more art.

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This is a fake cover for a graphic novel class I took. I'm glad that Corel was stubborn with the "real ink" tool and made me too frustrated to work on it for a bit..the background was getting very static and a few days away from it was all it took for me to figure out how to fix it.

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This one is the end of a comic I did completely for fun. It is water soluble crayons on watercolor paper, with ballpoint pen. Since it was mostly for practice, some of the fine points of it didn't make sense without a huge storyline behind them. Some day I'll get these characters a nice, finished comic so I can stop explaining everything to everyone.

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These three pages were from the same graphic novel class I took. I was pretty burnt out by the end of it, since I ended up doing all three pages in about fifteen hours. However, I still really like parts of it.

Sorry to link back to deviantART, but these tiny icons don't cut it. I'd rather not link to photobucket or anything, either.

In other news: Well, I gave myself a banner and some background. Currently the background is gross and pixel-y and is making me Internet self conscious. However, since it looks great in Corel, I'm going to blame it on the site. Hooray!

Drawing For Animators

Drawing for Animators' aim seemed to be to inspire us for our thesis, and to keep us drawing. Here are some examples from last semester. These were all done in Corel Painter 11.

We had to collect quite a few mediums to create these characters- images, doodles, anything we could find cool shapes in. Then we had to use the shapes to make this characters. The fox with the peg leg ended up being my character for my computer animation class.

The aim of this project was to design a cool environment that interacted with at least one character from the last assignment. (I named the fox Quinn and got rid of the peg leg for animation)

Same assignment as last, except in color, and without character restrictions. I was glad to work with another character that I had following me around. This is Castor.

If you'd like to see these closer, I posted them previously on my deviantART account:

Characters, Environment, Castor.

Catching up

Since I'm starting this late in college, I thought I'd catch everyone (nobody, currently) up.

I'm a junior at the Ringling College of Art and Design, in computer animation. My classes with in the major are typically one in animation, and two in concept and story development.

In "concept development", we focus on creating stories and executing them as clearly as possible with as much entertainment value as possible. The end result is an animatic, or as I've heard it called, "A blueprint for animation". This means the ideas are portrayed, but not fully animated. I use Corel Painter 11 and Adobe Premiere Pro.

Here are some examples from concept development:


The Door


The assignment was to have a character interact with a door in someway, with some sort of conflict stopping them from achieving their goal. It ends at about 0:35. Sorry for the mysterious empty black video at the end.

A to B

The assignment here was to create a story in which a character had to get from point A to B, and of course faced obstacles in their path. The class and my teacher liked this much more than expected, but I think that I should probably have made sure the background kept moving as the character climbed onto the bus, as well as cut the shot where he seems to run through the cars.

Heeeeere we go!

Blog post number one. I intend to use this blog for posting my art. It's probably good to put it somewhere other than DeviantART. (No offense to deviantART, I've used it for years)

I've been putting off getting a blog for a long time. I think it's because I get so attached to where I post that I'm afraid I'll explode from the amount of internet posting. And, it's so new and shiny!

Alright, I'm not new to this- my school has asked me to create a blog for classes quite a few times, which, although I find this sort of odd and maybe wasteful, means I'm not that unfamiliar with this. (watch me eat those words momentarily)

I'll get on uploading some art in a minute.