Production Stills

I figured it was about time I post some of these...Here are few stills from my film :]

Hobos!

Even after my initial explorations, I tweaked Hubert the hobo's design a lot before I ended up with the one I based the model off of. The first couple that I really liked were big and fat with skinny legs. I had this idea of a big silly guy rolling around happily in an old back-alley.

I worked on my story more, and it started to become more important that Hubert wasn't just a hobo but a hungry hobo. Eventually, during one of my crits, someone pointed out that Hubert looked like he was pretty well-fed. Touche. I kept the design pretty much the same, but skinnied Hubert up quite a bit.

 

Over the summer, I took my character designs and worked on them till I felt like they were significantly more silly than they were when I'd started. I ended up giving Hubert his weird face-beard, adding liver spots, and making his smile goofier. The drawing on the bottom left is still one of my favorites :]

Characters!

Since I'm still getting concept art and stuff together, I thought I'd start with the two main characters from my film. Hubert the Hobo and a cute little pigeon.

O hey I have a blog

We just finished our thesis films at Ringling, and things are slowly starting to wind down. I've been so busy this year I sort of forgot this blog thing existed. Promise I'll update with cool stuff soon though :]

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."