The Spare Tire

Pastels--

For reference, I'm afraid I don't know the artist. If you know it
please let me know:

Back from Asia, Back to Animation!

My final project from the Vancouver Institute of Media Arts Classical Animation program, "A Faun Farewell," with music by composer Ryan Leach. I love the soundtrack, it adds so much to the animation. Check out him out at www.ryanleach.com

A Toddyssey of Epic Proportions!

I'm working on a new blog to follow my adventures abroad:

Kevin & Todd's Excellent Adventure!

Join Todd, the intrepid young explorer and artist, along with his devil-may-care brother, as they travel to the far flung reaches of the world. Journey to magical islands, to the deepest jungles and highest mountains...

New Character Design!

For our third term of animation at Vanarts, we're focusing on dialog. Our second exercise involves a banter between the first character we designed (ol' Boots Newton) and a new character. For our mid-term crit today, I had to put together some model sheets. So here they are for your viewing pleasure:

A Spaceman obviously influenced by Doug TenNapel's Earthworm Jim:

and we'll go ahead and throw a Boots mouth chart in there for good measure...

The letters under the mouth shapes don't represent the actual letter he's forming. When animating, you keep track of your drawings by numbering them. With mouth charts, you label the poses alphabetically. The reason for this (in the working world) is when an animator is calling for various mouths for inbetweens, there is no mistaking that pose for a numbered drawing. So instead, you're only mistaking the sounds he's making for the mouth shape on the chart.

Panning Background!

So we're in Adobe Premiere now. We're learning about editing and all that. It's all stuff I'm all pretty familiar with. However, we did go over exporting specifically for web which I found helpful. So here's a re-edit of my panning background that includes all the things we learned today. I added some audio (K.K. Western from Animal Crossing). I keyframed some fade-ins and fade-outs. Then I added some titles. Unfortunately, Youtube sucks any amount of quality out of uploaded videos, so it's not as clear as it should be.

The Gift (in two parts)

The last project for term two. A character comes across a gift and something happens...

Scene One: Long shot, character comes across the gift.

Scene Two: Medium Shot, character opens the gift.

Not bad...I wish I had more time to finesse and tweak, but that's life.

The Take

Alright, here's another project from classical animation term 2 - The Take. Just in case you don't know what a take is, it's a sudden change of emotion, usually conveyed through a wild and crazy action, such as the character's eyes popping out, his jaw literally dropping to the floor, and/or pretty much anything else you could possibly think of. The take is one of the most enjoyable things to animate. For good examples of takes, check out some Tex Avery cartoons, especially the stuff he did for MGM. He loved takes so much, he created several cartoons just as a showcase for them. A personal favorite is Northwest Hounded Police:

Now here's mine:

Personality Walk

Finally got some animation on here. I finally finished some animation. Easier said than done. This was the first project of the term - the Personality Walk Cycle. For my animation, the buzz word is "cautious". I have a whole background story to go along with it too, but that's something for another time...

I'd like to get some of my older stuff up here, from term 1 and beyond. Not because they're particularly good, or because anyone other than my mom cares, but mostly for posterity's sake. It's good to have all this stuff in one place so I can look back at it someday. And laugh.

And yes, I realize that it's 3 o'clock in the morning and that I'm still at school. The best part is, I'm not even close to being the only one here. There's people in classes on the floors above and below me. That's what I love about this field, not just animation, but the arts in general. People have such passion and drive for what they do. I love it..they're crazy.