Pet Alien

Just a funny sketch.

Cocktail penciltest final for now.

This is the latest version of the cocktail penciltest that I did this week. It was a fun project to do and I learned tons of stuff about timing, texture and contrast. It's amazing how little changes in timing can affect the total look and feel of the animation.
I will revisit this animation later again when I have some fresh eyes again to polish the animation some more. Just let me know what you think of it.

Crazy

One of the end images of the 2D cocktail animation I am working on.

Cocktail first pass.

Here is the first rough pass of the first 117 frames of the cocktail animation. The rough images are cleaned up some more in Photoshop and imported in Flipbook again.

Cocktail blocking

Made some changes to the end of the animation. I tried to add an extra cartoonfactor and pushed it some more at the end. After he takes a zip he totally freaks out. This exaggerated cartoony stuff is kinda new to me, so let me know if it reads well.


First rough blocking animation in Flipbook.

Cocktail animation planning.

First rough planning for the cocktail animation. It's time to try to use all the animation principles I learned at Animation Mentor, in a 2D animation instead of 3D. I also wanna try to experiment with a broad cartoony style animation with lots of texture in the animation. My previous assignments last year where very subtle. So this will be a nice change to get a grasp of the cartoony thingy.

Daily warm up sketches

Some warmup scribbles. I kinda like the cocktail waiter poses. Maybe the waiter got potential for a pantomime test animation. Who knows;-)

First Flipbooktest

This is my first Flipbookexperiment I did today with the Jason Ryan approach to solve an animation in 2D first before diving into Maya. This is just a quick test on one's and two's and I have no intention of building this one in Maya but I am pretty happy with the speed of this workflow. This rough animation was done in Flipbook within two hours without any videoreference. Just trying to come up with a performance. 

With a template like this in Maya, the blocking stage will hopefully be faster because the poses and the timing are mostly solved in those first two hours. Also when working this way it feels much easier to let go of poses and experiment more and come up with different acting ideas. For sure there are a lot of things wrong with this first pass, like the body needs more follow trough after he releases the ball, arm is too overlappy etc..etc.. But I think this is a good guide for rebuilding the animation in CG and refine it there. 

Normally I would create a lot of thumbnails but I could not tell from those scribbles on paper if the performance really would work. Only after I created the blocking in Maya I could see if my ideas for the shot were working. And when it did not work I had to rebuild certain parts to make it work and ended up losing a lot of valuable time. Also an extra advantage of this method is that you can train yourself much faster to solve animation problems. Within a short amount of time you can practice doing a lot of shots, experiment like crazy and train your mind and eye.

This test makes me wanna do a lot more of these. Very curious btw if directors will accept these kinda blocking test in the near future. So you already got an approval in a very early stage for your performance before you even blocked out the shot in Maya. Comments and ideas are very welcome.

Acting, eyes and expressions

After visiting Kevin Koch's blog about blinking where he showed a video with a part of an old acting class of Michal Cain explaining about blinking, I was eager to see the rest of that class too. 

This class is full of acting tips that are also extremely helpful for animators to create genuine animation. It made me realize even more what you can do with subtle movements and expressions in the face and how hard it is to create that real genuine expressions so that the audience will forget that they are watching an actor in a movie. It's the same thing an animator is striving for. Making the audience believe that they are watching a real living being with real genuine emotions. So hard to do, but so rewarding.

While watching that Michal Cain class there where moments when he acted out a scene where I forgot I was watching him and was totally into the scene because of his genuine performance. It made me realize that i wanna learn a whole lot more about this acting stuff.

Enjoy the class. There are 6 separate parts on Youtube. Just let me know if you have found some more of these on the web.

The happy hunter

Daily Sketch

Strange connections

First image out of the new "strange connection" series. Will do some Flipbook 2D animationtests with these guys soon to get some more practice doing 2D animation too.

The Viking, work in progress

A funny little character model I am working on when I have some spare time.

Exploring poses

Daily exercise exploring poses.

Smile, your on camera!

Some characters I am modeling in Maya just for giggles. Work in progress. Would be nice to be able to rig and animate them later.

Ratatouille sketches

Some sketches I created while watching the Ratatouille DVD.

Jason Ryan approach

Jason Ryan, a supervising animator at Dreamworks opened his site with tutorials earlier this year. I had already seen some lectures of him at Animation Mentor and I liked the approach he uses for his shots. He works with Flipbook
an application where you can quickly sketch and test your animation. Recently I drew a lot of thumbnails for my animations to test out different poses but once in Maya it took me a long time to get my animation and the timing right.

With this method your can draw the animation with little stick figures really quick, test your animation and timing on the fly and solve your animation in no time and because it works so fast you have more time to experiment with some poses.

Once the animation is done in Flipbook, you can export the animation and use it as a template in your workspace. This way you have a great guide for your animation. The timing is already solved in Flipbook and now you can spend the time to really finesse those golden poses. I bought two tutorials last week and had a lot of fun doing some tests. I will post them soon.

Check out Jason Ryan's site .

Daily sketch

The daily morning routine. Little thumbs and scribbles.

AM graduation

I recently graduated from Animation Mentor the on-line animation school. I had a blast those 18 months. The community was awesome and it was great to finally meet my fellow classmates at the graduation in Berkeley and during Siggraph. Here is a picture during graduation at Berkeley with some fellow students and classmates.

From left to right: Jose Francisco, me, Yannick Jouneau, Olivier Ladeuix, Philip To, Kris Handley.

This picture below was made in at the cool Animation Mentor party during Siggraph the Elevate lounge in Los Angeles. This loungebar was on the 21sth floor with an amazing view over the city. 

From left to right: Ana, Andre, Ali, me and Veer.

First post

Thanks for visiting my blog. Here you can find some sketches, animations and other experiments that keep me busy during my journey to become a better animator. This is one of the sketches I do almost every morning to start the juices flowing and to get a better understanding of good poses.