Pony writeup

When I first moved to Los Angeles to find a job in animation in '08, I had a lot of time on my hands. You can only cold-call so many companies in a day. So, I decided to make an animation out of a comic I liked. That comic was "MORE SHETLAND PONY ADVENTURES!!" by Kate Beaton:

First I recorded myself doing funny voices for the characters,  broke the comic into panels, then timed out the panels in Flash to what I had recorded. However, before I went any further I actually e-mailed Kate and asked for permission. She graciously said yes, and I could begin.

A big reason I chose a Beaton comic was because she has no consistent style. At least, not a strictly consistent style- characters change proportions from panel to panel. For me, having just completed an animation education, being "on-model" was supposed to be the most important thing, and here was an artist that simply drew and didn't worry about that stuff. It was invigorating.

Trouble is, I wasn't a very good artist then. Here are some of my pitiful '08 attempts:

The project went well, until I found a job. I pretty much stopped working on it from then on. Fast forward to 2012 and I was working at Animal Logic on the LEGO movie. One of our editors, Doug Nicholas, had the idea to have a crew film fest where we could showcase our ideas. I had no idea what to do, but then I remembered my Pony animation. I dusted off the old files and began again.

Starting again after 4 years was pretty surreal. At that point I had been storyboarding for about three-quarters of that time and I noticed my draftsmanship had really improved. I also employed habits I picked up along the way. I adjusted the frame ratio from 4:3 to 16:9, and I even made a few model sheets, despite my earlier idea to go without

Having model sheets really helped, and as I drew I didn't worry about staying perfectly on-model anyways, so I felt I sort of matched that Beaton-style in essence:

Eventually I was able to draw an approximate Pony that looked close enough:

After 12 hours of labor spread over a couple of weeks, the animation was completed. Here's a compilation video showing the work at different stages:

And, finally, here's the completed video:

The video was received very well at the crew film fest (and everyone else's videos were great too). It felt awesome to be done with the project after four years of "development," and I'm very glad that Kate Beaton was ok with me making it.

"The Locals" episode 6 write up

In August 2012 my friend Ben asked me to animate for his YouTube show, "The Locals," where they capture audio from TF2 matches, cut it down into a mostly coherent conversation between players, and then hand out sections to animators to bring to life.

I wasn't able to complete it until January 2013- a shameful delay, I know! But, keep in mind I was  working on the LEGO movie at the time, as well as a Sonic Bunny animation, and a side project for an inner-studio Film Festival. But complete it I did, and I'm happy with what came out.

Here's the video:

Here's the bits I animated:

Here's an animation breakdown of that fight sequence:

And here are some Pentagram doodles, doodled tonight to cap off this blog post:

"An Okay Place to Eat" (2010)

In 2009 I worked as the board artist, background artist, and an animator on Sonic Bunny's "An Okay Place to Eat" pilot. It was a lot of work, especially since it was all on the side (I was fully employed at a studio). But, it was worth it.

[Selected] Storyboards:

[Selected] Backgrounds:

Animation:

Indies Flash Class- Week 2

Lip Sync!



We created a character with a nested mouth symbol and we lip synched an audio file they provided. I ended up having extra time so I animated the eyes too.

They liked it!

I was accepted into the Indies Flash Class! I'm beside myself... I also just found out it'll be held at the studio that creates Metalacolypse. This is crazy exciting!

Tried out for a Flash Class

I've been attending a Traditional Animation class offered by the Animation Guild and this week my instructor sent out a link to a Flash competition. As it turns out, local Los Angeles Flash animation studios are banding together to offer a professional Flash animation course that's free, but you have to compete to gain entry. You download a test, make an animation, and resubmit it with a resume. By the time I received the e-mail with the link and began to compete I had only 3 days to make an animation. I tried my best, and here's the result:



It's pretty stiff competition... there are only 24 seats and its open to ANYONE in Los Angeles. Even if I don't get in, although I hope I do, I'm proud I was able to put this together and meet the deadline... with an hour and a half to spare (a new record)! According to the contest website winners will be notified starting May 5th. I'm all a-twitter!

I've decided to make this blog art and animation specific and create a tangent LiveJournal that I'll update with my more-personal posts:

The Lost Angeles

Some Flash intros I've made

Towards the end of my senior year at UCF I worked on creating a new animated intro for CUNY TV's program, "Brian Lehrer Live." I did, they loved it, but I never uploaded the entire video. Until now!



Music by the amazing Chris Heckman!



And then, about a month ago a friend asked me to create an animated intro for his graduate thesis, a game about a man losing his moustache and going on a quest to get it back. All that he gave me to go on was "guy waking up, going to the bathroom and looking into the mirror and freaking out when he realizes his mustache is gone."

In less than two weeks, I sent him this!

Update and Evolution of a Scene

Lots of news since my last post which was, good lord, almost a year ago. We finished our movie, Ladybug Action Hero, and I'll try to get some scenes that I worked on up. I've graduated from UCF with a BA in Digital Media/Visual Language and I'm planning to move out to LA by the end of July.

I've also been involved in a bumper (intro) for a local TV show in New York City. I don't know if I can say which one or show that much of it, but in the process of creating the animation I made many, many graduated saves. I went back through them and took several interval versions of the same animations and uploaded them to YouTube so you could see the progress one shot went through, from start to finish:

Stepped Character Animation

For the next assignment in Artificial Characters, we had to do a character animation that carried a certain "attitude" or "motivation"... generally, some sort of "gimmick" that would make a basic action more interesting/entertaining. For mine, I had my character getting out of a(n invisible) chair that he was stuck/glued to.