Push Pull Exaggerated

Push Pull Exaggerated from Eric Prah on Vimeo.

This was the second half of the "Push Pull" assignment, and by far my favorite exercise this semester. We were told told to tell a story similar to the one we told in Push-Pull Natural but to use a more exaggerated style of animation. One of the fun parts of this assignment was playing with more cartoony breakdowns. Experimentation in animation is always fun and there was plenty of room for experimenting here. To give us more time for animation, rendering was pushed back until after winter break, and we were allowed to hand in playblasts.

Like my other posts from this semester, this assignment still needs more tweaking and polishing, but I'm really happy with how it looks so far :]

First Semester Junior Year

We're about three weeks away from the end of first semester junior year, so I figured it might be about time to update :]

Here are some of the assignment's I've been working on during the past couple months.

Push Pull Natural from Eric Prah on Vimeo.

For this assignment we had to tell a story in which a character makes at least two attempts to push and pull something. What made it really interesting though was that our models had to be based off of one of 6 silhouette character designs that we did during "Drawing for Animation. And what made it really interesting was that we weren't told our designs would be used for anything when we drew them. Not everyone was thrilled when we our teacher waltzed in and declared that we'd be animating our bizarre 6-headed 4 armed monstrosities, but we were allowed (see encouraged) by our animation teachers to modify our designs to make them more 3d friendly.

The great part about this particular assignment was getting a better feel for weight. I hadn't realized how much life a little foot shuffle can bring to a character till I started on Push-Pull.

Waiting from Eric Prah on Vimeo.

For "waiting" we had to animate a character waiting for something to happen. I decided to have a little extra fun with this one and modified Ringling's "Arty" rig to make it a little more girly.

Also, I don't think I've ever had so much fun shooting reference before.

Silhouette Animation from Eric Prah on Vimeo.

The Silhouette animation exercise was cool because we got to practice the magical art of cheating. Cheating poses, cheating shapes, cheating motion - basically animating everything to camera. The bigger shock was realizing how much you could, and actually needed to do this to get the most out of your poses in non-silhouette 3D.

Character Walk from Eric Prah on Vimeo.

This was our first assignment after summer break, and it was a nice warmup to get everyone back into the swing of things.

I'm pretty happy with how all of these came out, although I still have a whole lot of cleaning up to do before they go on any kind of reel. Time to get out the buffer and start polishing :]

Read'em and Weep!

Squids Mackenzie teaches Old Man Brummers a thing or two about Poker...

This was my entry for a bi-weekly character design blog started by some awesome people at Ringling. The theme this time was "People who look like their pets."

Updated Reel and other neat stuff

Now that it's summer and I'm not super busy, time for some updates :]



Here's an updated version of my demo Reel containing the finished version of the Sit Stand assignment. I'm pretty happy with how it came out overall, although I think if I were to do it again now, it would probably be light years ahead of where it ended up. Some of the animation felt pretty nice but the story was...eh. The tough part about this assignment for me was that we couldn't use any more or any less than 15 seconds, and a lot of the acting ended up getting simplified. And for any of the three people that visit page regularly and didn't get the joke, the director is a bear, and the actor is laughing because his line contains the word bear. I know, I know.

High Quality Version Can be found here



Punsie would be proud.

SitStand Long Panel

Our next assignment for computer animation is the "Sit Stand" - basically a character has to enter the scene, sit down, get up, and leave the scene. And of course the has to be some sort of story. My "sit stand" is going to be about "Jauqe," a bear who's traveled to The States from France to direct a romance film. The star actors in Jaque's film turn out to be amateurs and in a fit of artistic frustration, he storms off the set.

We're modeling our own characters and sets for this project, and it's supposed to take up the majority of the semester so we're doing a lot more preproduction and planning than we have for most of our other projects. This week, we had to create a long storyboard panel showing the key beats of our stories. The idea behind the long panel was that we'd get used to story boarding like animators (ie. focusing on action more heavily instead of just story) Here's mine along with a couple cleaner drawings of the character.




-Basically the bear walks in and signals to the clapboard guy off-screen.
-The clapboard claps in front of the camera(not shown)
-He then sits down and the as the actors' dialogue starts, he sighs
-The actors continue and he sighs a second time, harder and gets up off the chair in an angry huff
-As he's walking the actors try to resume their dialogue and he cuts them off yelling,
"With passion, with PASSION!" (except he's a bear so he's actually just yelling "Rawrgrlararr")
and gesturing with his hands.
-He then storms off the set.

Al

Animation Demo Reel

It cost me about 2 days worth of sleep, (NB: this is 3 hrs approx.) but I managed to put together a short demo reel of the computer animation projects and exercises I've done these past two semesters at Ringling. So far, the reel features:

-Artie exercises- a series of quick animation exercises we did using a rig/model called Artie that the school supplied.

-Simple Polygon Jump and Walk- two other exercises from last semester that we had to do using a simple character that we molded and rigged ourselves.

and Primitive theater, as seen a few posts down.

Hopefully I can use this to get an internship or at least some sort of job-like activity that I can occupy myself with during the summer. In the past, I've found that sitting at home, eating chips, and watching tv doesn't do much for my animation skills.