Beneath the Night Sea Animatic

This contains all of the animation that I've worked on between May and December 2012. Parts of it are missing inbetweens or are placeholders, but I think it's coming along nicely.

Illustration 5

The assignment was to create a poster for a movie you made up. There's some ambiguity in the image as to what the story might be, but I like that kind of mystery. For this project I was most interested in drawing a colorful environment, so I focused on that.

Senior Project - Concept Illustrations

Illustration 4

Illustration 3

The assignment was to depict a scene from different times of the day. I decided to do a video that flows from one time to the next, going for a dreamlike quality. I tried to be somewhat impressionistic with it.

Senior Project - Week 8

Here is a current look at my drawing stacks. The left stack are in-progress animation frames, and the right stack are throwaways. It looks like the left stack is catching up since last time. 

My current estimation on the total number of character animation frames is 750, including held cels and animation on separate levels (for example, having the hair continuing to move once the animation has stopped). This number may be off, but it's in the ball park. Actual body animation will probably be 600-650 drawings, which oddly was my estimate at the beginning of the semester. Presently, I have 364 drawings made.

Animation Passes

I have heard differing opinions on whether or not to use separate passes for different body parts when animating. For this project, I'm experimenting using a large amount of separate passes, starting with the most important pass(es) and working from there. So my character is broken into up to seven separate passes per frame: the body/head, face, complete hands, legs, dress, two fins, and hair. Several of those passes are at least roughed in during the key animation phase; the hands are drawn as circles, the head is given its guide lines, and the legs might be drawn simply on some key poses. At this point the process seems to be working well for me and is allowing me to work on individual passes of different scenes as I am inspired to do so.

Once the scene is scanned, the process continues: the character will then need to be colored, the colors might need tweaking within After Effects, gradients and shadow maps will be added to show light, shine will be added to her eyes and hair, and some subtle blush will be placed on her cheeks and nose. 

An example containing a few of the mentioned animation passes. None of the passes in this image are final.

Senior Project - Color Script Update

I was told the next pass of the color script needs to be more indicative of the final outcome, so here is what I came up with. It might not be exact, but it's where the project's at right now.

Illustration 2

The next project for the illustration class was to create an image with a story. This story needed to combine three elements - a character from myth, a news headline, and a local setting. My mythical character was the kasa obake, which is basically a Japanese umbrella monster. The news headline was "Graveyard of Umbrellas at the Democratic National Convention" of which I just used the "graveyard of umbrellas" part. Finally, I set the piece at the Redmond Town Center, which is mostly an outdoor mall. One thing I found amusing about the mall is that there are umbrellas all around the area which people are free to use (and return when they're finished) while at the mall. So the three elements formed a natural fit in my mind. Here it is:

Illustration

A recent assignment was to illustrate a scene each from three Brothers Grimm stories. The stories were pre-chosen by the professor: The Wonderful Musician, The Elves and the Shoemaker, and Doctor Know-All.  I attempted a few different styles and experimented with methods for choosing and placing color and tone.

The scene from The Wonderful Musician where the woodsman defends the musician from the forest animals-

The scene from The Elves and the Shoemaker where the shoemaker first discovers the shoes made by the elves - 

And finally, the scene from Doctor Know-All where Crabbe, a poor peasant, visited a doctor's house. This is when Crabbe decided to become a doctor himself - 

Senior Project - some progress

Four weeks in...

The stack on the left are drawings which are "getting there." Not quite tied down, and perhaps missing some limbs or facial features, but are at a place where those things can easily be added. 

The stack on the right contains all of my previous attempts and scrapped drawings so far. I'm sure this stack will continue to grow as the semester goes on.

Andreas Deja

Andreas Deja swung around Digipen the other day, and ended up looking at all of the upcoming senior projects while he was here. When he looked at mine (a hand-drawn short), he remarked that I have a knack for 2D. I wonder if he meant it?

He was also kind enough to give me his autograph:

Senior Project - Backgrounds

Here are some of the backgrounds for my project. They're still a work in progress for the most part.

Dialog Animation

This was my first attempt at dialog animation in Maya (spring 2012). There is a lot I dislike about this one, but I still think the main idea is pretty funny. Overall, it definitely needs clearer key poses and better lip sync. My planning thumbnails for this piece are in an earlier post.




For my second attempt at dialog animation, I decided to do my "thumbnails" in Flash to give myself a better idea of how the character could move. This was simplified and exaggerated a bit from my video reference, and my final version was exaggerated even more.


The environment in the final animation leave something to be desired, and it could use more polish, but I like how it always gets a laugh.

Final style guide

Some small tweaks have been made in places since the previous version. This is the version which will be on the wall at Digipen this year.

Senior Project - Style Guide

The character sheet needs color, and the color script isn't finished, but this is basically final. The project also needs a name.

Sophomore Project

Going backwards, here is some work I did on my sophomore animation project. It's my favorite part, but it's not especially exciting. Yes, it's just 10 frames. No, I'm not posting the whole thing.

This next one is a quick effect for the same film. It's shattering wood from a tree breaking over that guy's head. In the actual film, it's not too noticeable, but it does add a nice impact.

If I could change this one, I would have added more variance to the speed of the splinters, and make some of them spin a lot more. I like how some of the smaller ones bounce on impact, and the bigger ones wedge themselves into the ground.

Junior Project

This is my junior project, made in one semester.

If I could go back, the one thing I would do differently is avoid compromise. A professor told me I should trim my original concept significantly, so I did so. However, that resulted in half the work, and I finished it quickly because of that. It would have been possible to do it the way I wanted.

Originally I wanted something much more stylized, referencing the work of Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky, and Keith Haring. I think the story was a bit more satisfying in this version, and I really liked having the world set in various panels.

Senior Project - More Color Studies

These are getting a bit better. They still need work.

Senior Project - Developing Buildings

Here is my process for developing the background buildings so far. This will be more refined as the designs become final. But I thought I'd share how I've been creating these buildings, perhaps mostly as a way to keep track of it myself.
Try to ignore perspecive issues; this was done quickly and freehand. This is just a basic setup.

This process could also work for a row of buildings, where the design of one building flows into the next.

Senior Project - Color Studies

I did 15 color studies for far for the background, and these are the better ones. None of them are giving me the mood I'm going for, though.

Strangely, or perhaps obviously, I like some of them better when there is a character within the frame. This is a somewhat more accurate representation of the final look (though without anything being final).

What I really need to work on with these now is leading the eye using tonal value.

Senior Project - Rough Environment Concepts

Senior Project - Rough Storyboard

Here is a rough pass at the story. Still in progress, of course.