Ancient Miners

Here is a silly little animation piece I did for work.
"Staying on model"? Never heard of it. I need to work on my weight heaps.
(not my actual weight, I'm in shape I swear)

Boatmurdered SHEESH

So we have gotten all of the organisational stuff out of the way for boatmurdered. We've been annoyingly busy with graduation and then Christmas! But I'm personally going to dive in at a comfortable pace this week.
To warm up I was going to draw up a new wallpaper, here is the rough composition.

Dorkly Diablo Animaiton

Here is a freelance project I recently finished for Dorkly.com
I worked with two other uni friends Troy and Tom.

Was fun!
http://www.dorkly.com/video/28510/dorkly-bits-how-diablo-destroyed-tristram

Wedding Compositions

I had gotten into a semi rut with my film recently. It came about from iterating my animatic too much and losing a little faith in my narration. I had recorded my writer Jack doing a narration and I had thought it was pretty good. But upon getting some fresh eyes on it and then really looking at it I realized it was both too fast and sounded a little forced. I have now taken a step back and decided that my film length shall be completely dictated by what should be the appropriate pacing to make it as good as it can be and that perhaps I should narrate it myself (I'm undecided). So to give me a break from all this I have started working out my shot compositions.
I started by making a complete list of all my shots and taking inspiration from Pixar's process begun creating the foundations for a colour script/story board. Here is my first page.

It is unfinished obviously and uncoloured.

I was in a bit of a panic about how I would go about framing these shots. I felt I had infinite possibilities and perhaps not the skill to pull it off interestingly. Then I found an amazing blog by Up! Colour board artist Lou Romano. It is his second blog and called CINEMOSAIC.
Basically he has been making collections of shots from great movies and throwing them together in a kinda colour script style. He has heeeaps. Basically when I need to make a shot I look through all these panels and find other examples of similar scenes or shots for inspiration. That way I have some degree of confidence with my composition due to being able to say "Well Citizen Kane bloody well did it!". I watched Citizen Kane last night actually, I've been meaning too since forever. It was great. Unreal sets and scope.

Here is another stupid animation line test.


Simon C Head Moves line test from Simon Cottee on Vimeo.

I've also discovered that Joe Brumm's friend Damian Pin has joined our vimeo line test group to check out our stuff, Damian recently won the 11 second club and has some INSANE 3D Animation. Oh gawd.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Happy Xmas and New Year friends.

I have been holidaying with family and all that, but now the new year is here I am back to UNI WORK (work is a funny word for me cos it is more like fun). I have to get a pre production pack finished during my holidays before I go back to uni. So I am starting concept art and things like that for my big new animation. It will be called "The Wedding" (perhaps working title, but I like that). I'm not sure if I have mentioned but I will be adapting my house mate Jack Vening's wonderful short story. I also have a pretty exciting sound guy on board to score it!
Here is the first peak of concept art! I have been playing lots of monkey island so I am pretty influenced by their art direction at the moment.


I also just made this pencil like brush preset for photoshop, My first brush design.

Tom and I are also diving back into Boatmurdered to finish it by uni start!
Here is proof, a shot of Tom's flash file.

Mud Walk Roughs

Today I finished off my roughs for the mud walk. I'm also testing out doing my key frames without ONION SKIN! Crazy hey. I figure the less I rely on something like that the better I will become at redrawing characters. So lots of flicking between frames.
I ran into the age old problem with creating a cycle... my character pose and proportion changed a chunk, so instead of fixing it I just forced him back into the starting position. LAZY!

Animated in Animate Pro
I'm starting to realize the value of this exercise now. After looking back on that I thought "hey... a standard walk wouldn't be so hard!"

Next step is: Either ad secondary action items, like fabric and stuff to this. OR begin new exercise with a simple step, pickup and throw.

Laika to the Stars

I have this assignment for my post production class to make "something awesome". That is really our only guideline. Well I guess we have to use after effects a bit too.

I have this short film idea that I had completely forgotten about until recently, which I think I will try and see through. It is pretty ambitious for the size of the assignment.
I'm real interested in space travel and have always found the story of Laika (the Russian dog sent into space) super fascinating and tragic.

The idea is I tell the story from the dog's perspective and act like a dick and anthropomorphise the heck out of Laika by making her narrate it too. So what I need to do is get a girl with a russian accent to do it with! That is the hard part. Finding music is pretty hard too. I would love to use The Motherland hears, the Motherland knows somehow, so it is royalty free. It is the song Yuri Gagarin hummed as he went into space. I also need to work out how to make the visuals... Do I draw it all?! WHAT DO I DO!?

Here is an image for Laika I made a few years back. Says something about from the streets of Moscow to the stars.

Video and Animation

I forgot to post this video up when I finished it like a BILLION years ago (few weeks).
Was for a uni thing, using only sourced visuals from google.images to create a visual sequence with some kind of loose narrative.



And here is my first go at a perspective walk. I traditionally suck at perspective anything and try avoid it at all costs. Joe Brumm got us to do it for out Post Pro. class and it turned out to be super useful. I just don't do enough animating these days (as none of our current classes actually require it!) This is obviously a very rough animation test.


In unrelated boring personal news I have finally gotten around to getting the next few Song of Fire and Ice books. Radical. HBO is turning it into a series too! Wicked.

Design

Back at uni...
HEY LOOK. Here is a rough WIP design image for a poster I'm doing.

I'm about to start working on the cleans and then colouring. Pretty happy with those Deagle wings.
And here is a little animation I did for a small chunk of a tropfest entry. True story.


Animated in 1 day. All boiled baby!

Wallpaper and pro. cont. PRO C*NT?

HEY. HI. So production is going along and all. I'm about to go away for a week to visit parents and ol friends. Tomorrow I will be working with like 30 other animators on a Tropfest entry!
We have almost finished all our backgrounds, which has been tedious and taking heaps longer than we thought. I've also picked up a few freelance little things.
HERE IS A TREAT FOR YOU. A wallpaper by Tom. It is so good. Click for full screen PLZ!

Production AGAIN

We are churning through making our backgrounds. Pretty tedious work. But we should hopefully be able to then have plenty of fun doing ambient animation passes and character stuff.
Here is some recent STUFF. Click for BIG:
Crude character designs

An awesome background by Tom

And a wallpaper for a dude on the Dwarf Fortress Forums


I have also been thinking about what to do next. I might just start my life goal project, which I would be working on at random over the rest of my lifetime. MORE NEWS ON THAT

animatic finished

The animatic is done and hopefully refined and readable.
Here is some backgrounds stuff by Tom.

Production Continues

Production has been going ahead pretty smoothly. The animatic is underway and a few shots have been worked out. It's still going to be tough to tell this story in the timing of the song and make it clear with no dialogue or narration. Here is a bit more concept stuff.

Above by Tom

Holidays!

I've gone a little into holiday mode hence the lack of updates. I've been playing HEAPS of Dwarf Fortress this past week. I've tried to get into it about 4 times in the past, but it's always so hardcore that I give up. I finally cracked it this time! I've watched about 2 hours worth of youtube tutorials. Such an amazing game, with so much depth and creative inspiration.
Speaking of which, I am starting up production on a little holiday animation colab with my uni friend Tom. We are going to do it in flash to capitalise on the newgrounds.com market of hyperactive teenagers. We are going to adapt a famous Dwarf Fortress Something Awful forum game session into a short animation. Can't wait!

Here is some quick concept sketches for another idea that I was planning on doing but got bored of.

Click to make excessively large

Spike and Mudley Crime Police DONE

Woo! Here we go. After a stupid few days of animating here is my "proof of concept" Spike and Mudley Crime Police episode. So think of it as a taste of a much larger story (which I may do next year).



Music
Arkady Michalik - Parkingi
Mr Jonathan - Gerald Lee
Grant Green - Luanna's Theme

Spike - Simon Cottee
Mudley - Jack Vening

I also threw it up on newgounds. Perhaps the largest advantage of using Flash as an indie animator.
My uni mate Tom uploaded his awesome animation in unison with me.
WE ARE NOW COMPETING!

Loose Lip Syncs Sink Ship Syncs

2 More days left to work on my final uni animation for the semester. This 2 character dialogue sequence is pretty unusual. It runs for over a minute and is voice recorded by myself and my house mate. This would kill me for the week or so I have been working on it, but I'm trying to embrace limited animation for this thing. It's tough though, having previously been working on FULL animation. I think it is going ok, the line work and actual animation is pretty horrible but the end result should be entertaining.

You may have seen this but if not you should now see it:

Directed by A.F.Schepperd
Commissioned by Ninjatune Records
Music by Blockhead

On a totally inconvenient note: Our landlord is going to try sell our place we are renting. Garg!

Natalie Portman the Prostitute Mime

Here is my 2D character acting sequence for uni.

From the film Closer (2004) - Stolen from 11 Second Club
I think I've come some way since last years lip sync!

Zoologic

I just finished writing a 1500 word scene analysis from this great short animation.
I find the timing, design and confidence with posing and limited animation amazing.


I've recorded my dialogue with my house mate for my long dialogue animation. My uni has a pretty wicked professional recording booth set-up. Makes me have aspirations to be swearing at Robyn Williams through the glass as he acts like an idiot for my animated films.

PIXEL - A pixel art documentary

Finally finished my documentary!



I hope somebody watches it!

animation exercises

I have a really great character acting class, where we do fairly basic animation exercises, such as inbetweening, breakdowns, facial acting and full body. I threw them together in this video.
This stuff is the not so good and the ugly! Don't expect much. None of these characters are my own. Well maybe the dialogue ones.


I'm also almost finished my documentary. It's running at around 11 minutes, which is the longest video I've ever done. I think it's flowing pretty well with some cool chiptune music.
I might try finish it today!
The real problem in my work life is currently Red Dead Redemption coming out friday. Oh damn...