Pony Animation v3, and learnings

I said last month I was going to upload model sheets of the characters I'm (attempting) to animate but then I realized I'm trying to emulate a style where there is no consistent way of drawing a character. Here's a rough version of the animation:



I mostly worked on this when I had a lot of free time (read: unemployed) and so it's fallen by the wayside. But! I'm trying to jump back into Flash in a big way so not only am I going to finish this animation (or as near as I can get it), I'm also reading a big book on Actionscript 3.0. The goal is to broaden my skillset to include Maya and Flash, as well as any relevant programming languages I can get a grip on.

UPDATE holy crap

Hey all! I've graduated from UCF with a degree in Digital Media: Visual Language and I've since moved out west to California! I've got an apartment, a job, and I'm stil alive to boot!

So many things going on. Work keeps me busy and I was surprised to find out the average workday in the CG industry is 9am-7pm (bummer).

I trying to decide which "path" I want to try to follow- 3D or 2D, animator or rigger, or Production. All interest me heavily but it's hard finding the time to work on personal stuff for the more art-related fields (animation especially).

Speaking of personal animation I'm in the process (ie, started but shelved due to lack of time) of animating a comic from one of my favorite authors, Kate Beaton. You can read the comic here.

Hopefully I can find the time to finish that up. I'll post the character sheets later too.

I'm also working on webcomics to keep me dedicated to art every day and you can view them here.

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:

Beat Board

Lack of updates due to nothing actually being technically "due." Deadlines are now starting to take effect, so here's a beat board.

A "beat board" is a single frame that sums up an entire sequence from the movie. This way, you can look at 12 frames and get the "feel" of the entire movie and story. I was assigned the "comic book" opening sequence. Below is the rough layout I scanned and below that is what I churned out in Flash.

Artificial Environments and Effects Final

For our final assignment we had to break down the movie once more based on the winner's idea (thus, reinterpreting it). For our group, my role was to create the plan view and elevation.

Plan View:


Elevation:

Texture assignment

An extension to the "Pallette Swap" assignment. We had to take the three pallette pictures and apply different motifs of textures to them to elicit different moods.

Idea Illustration

For Artificial Environments and Effects, we we were given idea topics to illustrate. I was given "Lust" and "Death." Since we had to get the topic across as easily and as visually digestibly as possible, we were instructed to look at advertisements or guerilla marketing.

See if you can figure out which is which. Should be easy.

Finalized breakdowns

These were all part of my pitch for my take on our senior movie:

Plan view:


Elevation


Illustrations:

Preliminary Breakdowns

In Artificial Environments and Effects we're breaking down our senior movie "Ladybug Action Hero's" script. We were assigned to individually break down the action into plan views (bird's eye view) and elevations (profile view). Here are the first versions I created:

Plan view:


Elevation1:


Elevation 2:

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.

3D Walk Cycle

First assignment for Artificial Characters Workshop: 3D Walk Cycle. We had to take our 2D walk cycles we hand-animated as our final projects from our first semester and use an already-rigged character model and translate the walk cycle into 3D by keying the character to match every frame of our 2D walk cycle as best as we could.

Pirate backgrounds

I volunteered to create the backgrounds for a friend's share of another friend's pet project he was doing for a friend of his own. So, I the first friend in the previously mentioned chain of comrades gave me two sheets of thumbnails, 21 in all, as well as two backgrounds she had created before I opted to take over. I modeled the first two backgrounds I created on hers so I could get the style right (although it was right up my alley anyway).

Thumbnails:




Hers backgrounds:




My backgrounds:

Palette swap

Another Artificial Environments and Effects assignment: Palette Swap. We were to take the color palette from three different impressionist paintings and replace a singular landscape's color scheme with the three impressionist's palettes.

However, I misheard/misread the directions and instead used three different landscapes to alter a fourth landscape.

Style switch

Here's the assignment that's clogged up my blog: "Style Switch" we were given this photo:



From that, we had to "stylize" the image into being cartoony, gothic, and impressionistic.







I ran out of time on the gothic image and wasn't able to color it. So, I kept intending to color it before I uploaded it to the log, but I only ended up not uploading anything at all.