Utter Balls

Been working on a classic "bouncing ball" animation for a sing-a-long video.

Client provided the video, I merely transcribed the lyrics and overlaid them with the custom animation.

WiP screenshot w/ Onion Skinning

Sample of the finished animation

Strolling

As part of an application for an animator position, a company asked me to complete a walk cycle, based on a character they'd already drawn up.
I didn't get the job, in the end but I thought I'd post the cycle I did anyway.

The art was copyrighted to them, so I've created rough alternative parts to replace their original pieces. This is purely for the purposes of showing off the animation I did.
Because I've replaced the parts, everything looks a great deal rougher.

I'm not sure if they choppiness is due to lag or the difference in framerate between the original and the .gif.

 It was interesting, because I'd not really done such tween-heavy animation before, but I was pleased with how it came out. Especially for only about a day's efforts.

Machinations

In my last post, I mentioned my film The Machine.

It's a dark animated short based on Franz Kafka's story "In The Penal Colony".

There is a complete version of it, that I have submitted to festivals, but I personally think it's too short and unfinished (the time constraints of uni, necessitated severe edits to the script).

At the moment I wish to extend it to the level I think is the bear minimum for release, and then hopefully add a little more until it is "properly" finished - at which point I'll release it again as a "director's cut".

Just so you know what it's like and it exists (many people haven't seen it) here are some screenshots I've taken at various points of production.

 

 

 

 

An exasperating issue I noticed during early stages, that I posted on Twitter.

 

An early version of one scene. The linework was criticised and so I moved to the style shown in the other images. (This was part of style that was to incorporate additional heavier use of comicbook-style shading.)

B&W screenshots as part of the festival submission.

The submission also required a poster, so this is a rough design I threw together to fulfil that demand.

Stephen Lives!

Since its inception, I've wanted to revisit one of the films I created for my 2nd year of animation during my degree.
The film was called Stephen and it was never fully realised to the level that I desired. I recently poured through several of my old harddrives, pen drives and other storage in an attempt to recover the original .fla file with which to continue the film.

Unfortunately all I could find was the final, unfinished export of the film and an even further unfinished .fla file. Half the final version was missing, but yet I still had the exported version taunting me and reminding me that it once existed.
I had all but resigned myself to the notion of having to painstakingly recreated all the scenes that I had watched over and over as part of the final export.

The world may never know about this chap's weird muffin obsession.

However.

I got in contact with my father and convinced him to let me borrow his old external harddrive to search for it. It was a long shot, but low and behold, it paid off!

I'm now in possession of the rough early edition of Stephen! Ready to roll into production...

Just as soon as I finally get that damn Terry Gilliam-inspired short out, and also finish the director's cut of my final year film The Machine...

Got my work cut out!

Full scene list from the recovered version of "Stephen". The tick shows the half finished scene I had at the end of the only versions I could find before.