First year after DigiPen

A lot and not a lot has happened since I graduated from DigiPen. I immediately got a job at Cricket Moon Media as a flash artist where I continue to work at. There's a fair bit of animation and art I generate there, but it's mostly technical, being as it is a small game studio. It was rather difficult to transition from detailed, subtle hand-drawn and 3D animation to flash animation for toddlers, but I am getting paid to do it.

My senior film I completed almost a year ago won the Best Animation award at the recent Digital Arts Festival. It was really satisfying being handed the award directly from Tony White, an animator I greatly admire. It would be awesome to study hand-drawn animation under him some day.

My film has also been featured on studentanimations.com, where I also did an interview. Check it out:

http://studentanimations.com/beneath-the-night-sea/
http://studentanimations.com/beneath-the-night-sea-interview/

Beneath the Night Sea

Shot Progressions

Here are some shot progressions from my film.

Beneath the Night Sea frame counts

Making 2D animation equals a lot of drawing. Below is the total number of hand-drawn assets that went into making Beneath the Night Sea. I triple-checked them to assure their accuracy.

Character animation - 1304 drawings
I split the character into two layers to make it easier to animate her follow through (hair/dress/fins). Here's this frame count broken down into pieces:

     Body layer - 588 drawings
     Follow through layer - 716 drawings

Backgrounds - 182 drawings
This number comes from multiple planes of parallax in some shots; as well as a hand-drawn move through space, which was 132 drawings.

Jellyfish - 480 drawings
They're not quite characters or backgrounds, so I counted them separately.

That brings the total number of drawings to 1966. Note that these were all drawn on paper, scanned, and then colored, one by one.

I also included animated lighting on the character, which was traditionally animated in Flash to save time. I animated both highlights and shadows this way, and ended up building many layers in each shot, so the total number of shadow/highlight mattes was 2864 images. This includes only the frames which were drawn from scratch. I'm not including the dozens of layers animated in After Effects with masks, because I didn't draw those.

If you count the digital animation I just described, excluding the non-hand-drawn elements of course, the final amount of drawings that made it into this project is 4830.

4830 drawings / 102 seconds (the length of the film) = average 47 drawings per second.

Another exclusion I decided not to count is all of the animation I made and cut out, but I think I'll leave it here.

Final Paper Stacks

This morning I finished the last of the animation. Below you can see the stacks of drawings this left me with. Once I count them I'll update this with the final number. I'm guessing that the total number is in the 2100-2300 range for the drawing's I've actually used.

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.