Heavy Guy and a Frog

So over the weekend I put together pretty much the ENTIRE Weight Lift and Toss assignment, just finishing clean up now. I didn't test it at all while I was drawing it aside from flipping a pair of frames here and there (yes, right now I can only 'flip test' about 2 frames) so I had no idea if the whole thing overall worked, at all.
So rather nervously I did a shoot of it today at the school and for the most part, it works! Was a very happy moment, felt really blessed to put it precisely. So anyways, here's what was shot, working on again cleanup, but also a few minor fixes and when I shoot the final I'll get it up here eventually, but for now:

Also having fun in sound class. We had a practice assignment where we were given an animation and had to add in sound effects. I've had some previous experience mixing sounds back in the days when I would make my own units for Civilization 3, it was fun then but it's much more fun now especially since I know so much more about how animation and sound work together:

Sound library at the school is fairly good but navigating it can be a little tricky sometimes. I've been growing my own sound library (lots of great samples taken from games) as well so for future films I've got lots of options already. w00t!

Yes, more Easter Island Heads 2

SO scanning took a bit but I got my storyboard project all digitized and ready to hand in and put up here as well! There's 8 pages, 45 panels:

I had a lot of fun with the story for this one, at one point I honestly considered using it for a film later but we'll see what goes down over the next few years, likely will get a better idea. Anyways, I used a thick graphite stick, I think of 6B hardness to get the thick lines and put down tones really quick. I think if I had more time I might have actually gone overboard with the shading, it's easy to make unimportant things upstage what is important when you start diving into small details. Well glad this is done, happy with how it turned out, and now I think I need to ban myself from using Easter Island references of any kind for about a year, otherwise I'll probably start drawing Moai even when I'm trying to draw something completely different...

Charicamature

Character design this year is a whole lot of fun, our instructor is Pete Emslie (his blog is heres: http://cartooncave.blogspot.com/), over the past few weeks he's been making caricatures of us 2nd years, we haven't been disappointed to say the least, he did this one of me on Oct 13:

This is simply a fantastic balance of exaggeration and representation, I can't decide which part I like best, the eyebrows, the chin, nose, hair shape (gracious I need a haircut when it curls this much!) anyways, it's great and I'm totally hyped for the rest of this year's work in the class.

Meantime I have to make a weight lift-and-toss animation over a whole 7 days , because I just finished an admittedly overly-ambitious storyboard assignment, which still needs one tweak and lots of scanning (45-ish panels) before you'll see it up here. Amazingly, the correction required is to add in even MORE Easter Island heads. A painting also got done and hopefully I'll get it back next week, before reading week which for once will actually involve some reading...

So a Wave, a Boat and a Flour Sac walk into a bar 2

Well it's quite dark and not perfectly aligned, but in essence this is my finished wave-boat-sac-splash animation. I shot it at home, and had to fiddle with the contrast to brighten it up, hence the lower production standard here. I'll get a better version up once I shoot it at the school, might scan it there (cause their scanners have built-in peg bars) for maximum quality, which is becoming quite an issue with this animation mainly because it's got 4 levels plus the background, so really that's 5, and so every speck of blank space that isn't perfectly white gets darkened 5 times, you get the idea. Just pretend you're seeing it through a periscope or something.

Fairly content with the result here, happy with the splash, there's about one frame of the boat that's a little wonky still and the sac moves around a bittoo much before the wave hits, but I'm very happy with the lift and drop after the wave. I felt I was exaggerating the drawings too much in that part at first, but the animation shows it's leaning towards not exaggerated enough. I feel it's close enough to the middle of these extremes to not need fixing, w00t.

Next up in animation is a crossover from character design... well actually the character project is the preparation for the 2nd animation. A character has to pick something up and toss it. Already got the character designed, just have to make the finished model sheet since our animation prof wants to see those for Monday's class. Otherwise I would've had till late Tuesday to complete that, but since for this weekend everyone decided to go nutzorz with the projectz I need to finish it tomorrow. Fun times.

And now, I needz sleep.