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.