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."

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.

Computer Animation!!

We've had two assignments so far and I have to say this is by far my favorite class. I'm not sure if modeling will be for me but the animation part is loads of fun. The first assignment was to animate two balls, one living and one nonliving, bouncing/rolling around in some kind of environment.




The second was to tell a story in ten seconds with primitive objects (known at Ringling as "Primitive Theater"). This one was a lot more interesting and I learned a ridiculous amount of stuff about setting up a scene, interacting characters and, most importantly timing. People tell you stuff here all the time about creating thinking characters - considering the characters' inner monologues and allowing them to register with the audience...but all that advice is really just so many words 'till you get to test it out for yourself. And test I did.

Elvis

One of our assignments for Traditonal Animation this semester was to make an exaggerated version of a quadruped walk cycle. We got to design the character, and could use any animal as long as it had some sort of grounding in real-world anatomy. My origional idea was to make a really heavy pig that really had to pull its wait up and forward to get around. Unfortunately the animation gods had other plans, and I had to settle for something a little less crazy, but as usual it was a learing experience.

In the end I ended up with something kinda like the guy above - he seemed like he had a pretty good sense of weight and that he was really bouncy, almost like he was walking to music. So I pushed that a little more and adjusted the character to fit...and thus was born, "Elvis"

Figure Stuff

Some drawings from my figure class this semester. I feel like I'm improving incredibly fast this year, probably because my teacher Marianne Chapel has been so helpful. She basically adjusted everything about the way I used to draw the figure down to the way I was holding the pencil, and it feels like it really paid off, especially for my drawing work outside of class.

Character Model Sheet

Model sheet a put together for my Traditional animation class. Our asignment was to design and turn a character that we would eventually animate delivering some sort of dialogue. I'm not especially thrilled with how the character turned out, but I feel like a learned alot from looking at everyone else's designs, and from my teacher's comments. On the plus side, even though the character alone could be more interesting, I think he'll be fun to animate because he's nice and simple, and he fits the dialogue really well.

From Morel Orel (delivered by the dad as he greets his family on a crisp winter morning)
"EVERYONE GET DRESSED, WE'RE GOING CHRISTMAS CAROLLING!!"

Shinbones

Did this for my concept class at Ringling. We were given a strange version of the classic "Gift of the Magi" story and had to create a rough image for the moment where the male character goes, "I sold my x for you y." In this case x was "shinbones," and y was "cuticle frames." I was confused too. In my version of the story, the two are serial killers and get the "shinbones" and "cuticle frames" they sell from their fallen victims.

Summer Toons

Some doodles from over the summer, inspired by some of the work at the Avalanche Software Art Blog.

More Portaits

I was watching the day the Earth Stood Still, and sort of lost interest, so I decided to draw a bit. This first is a portrait of Christopher Moore, an author whose stories I really enjoy despite their complete lack of redeeming social value. The second is some random political guy. Both took about an hour and a half.

Sketches

I did a few digital Sketches over the course of the summer of models, actor, writers, or whoever else I could turn up on Google Images and DA. The first two sketches are of models from DA. The third is a caricature of Steven King.

Ultravisitor

This was the next big project I did after the portraits. The alien robot guy was inspired by Ultravisitor and album by Squarepusher. If Squrepusher had asked me to design the album cover for him and I'd managed to maintain consciousness long enough to nod "yes," this is what it would have looked like. Also if you haven't heard of Squarepusher and like drum and bass (or just good music in general) I'd recommend you check him out.
I did this after reading some excerpts from Andrew Loomis's Successful Drawing. I was having a lot of trouble coming up with lighting on my own and that book was incredibly helpful. This took about 9 hours and was completely from imagination.