It's a DRAGON?!

So I promised to try posting things more often, and here's some stuff!  I made this little guy a few months ago.  He was my second 'felty' experiment (after the dog for my sister and before little Harry).  I wanted to make a dragon that looked a bit like the 'Terrible Terror' from How to Train Your Dragon.  I had found some wonderful scaly looking felt at Michaels and thought that it would work perfectly.  I did some quick sketches of how I wanted him to look and then tried to figure out some sort of a pattern off of those to cut the pieces out.  There was a lot of trial and error involved, but this is what the main 'body shell' (for lack of a better term...) ended up looking like.  I made sure to give him some lovely bulgy eyes and twisty looking horns as well!

You can really notice all of the nerdy things that I have in my closet in this picture...  Superman is gettin' his creep on.

The little white pins in his back were to mark where his wings were supposed to go.

I put a little armature inside of him so that he would stand up and I could put him in dragony poses.

Then he was given the power of flight.  One wing at a time.

And a lower jaw as well!  I left the end of the 'snout' open so that I could stuff the head once the neck was sowed onto the lower jaw.  I could push the fabric in a bit and it made it look like he had a hilarious little mouth.  I quite enjoyed it.

Here's more of the armature inside.  And look, he has little toes too!

Voila!  The finished Dragon! Also, my pitiful attempt to create a plain 'backdrop' with one of my sketchbooks....

Precious.

Class 4 Progress Reel

Happy 2012!!!  One of my resolutions this year is to post more often, so lets kick it off with this first one!  I got quite busy and didn't get a chance to post my class 4 progress reel from AM before the end of the year, but here it is now!

Dimos was an awesome mentor!  I think that his background in 2D really made it easier for me to understand things as he was explaining them.  He also made time to look at my updated work in the Q&A each week which was super helpful!  He's also a super cool and fun guy.  I feel like I learned and grew a lot this term!

Animation Mentor Class 4! Part 2

For our second assignment of Class 4 we got to do a single person lip dialogue shot!  We had to find a clip between 5 and 10 seconds long to work with for the next 6 weeks of the class.  We were only allowed to work on the physical movement of the body this term as the actual lip sync and facial animation is something that we get to tackle at the beginning of next term.  

I had to find 3 different audio clips to choose from, film video reference of myself acting them out and do some thumbnail drawings for each of them.  I had a hard time narrowing the clips down to 3, I started off with about 12 of them...

So I picked my 3 lines.

Did my video reference.

 And my thumbnail drawings for each clip.

Dimos helped me settle on clip 2, and we decided to cut off the end where he says "I don't want to go back to London."  Dimos also gave me the awesome idea to make the character homeless and standing in front of a cardboard box which would be his new home.  The shot would start out closer in and then move back to reveal the box house while he's saying "Residency Issue"

So I shot some new video reference with that idea in mind

And then I did my first blocking pass.

Getting the camera move to not look like garbage was a little difficult.

Then I did my blocking plus pass and added in some breakdowns.  I also moved the camera in tighter in the beginning and gave him some suitcases and a bucket to go with his box house.

We also had to do a hand pose that week portraying anger.

I kept getting weird bends in the fingers and had a little trouble with it.

Then I started refining and added in yet more breakdowns.  I also started adding in some up and down in the jaw movement.  Dimos got me to break up the arms a bit when he gestures to the box at the end so that they weren't quite so similar.

We also had to do a 'relaxed' hand pose.

The next week I did some more refining and took this baby to spline town!

And the hand pose of the week was 'surprised'.  It didn't turn out as well as I would have liked.

The final week we had to work on this shot (for this class) I did a bunch of polishing on the hands and tried to add a bit more movement into the upper body to make it less stiff.  I also tried to smooth out my arcs a bit.

Overall I'm pretty happy with how it's working so far.  I'm pretty excited to get into the facial animation next term and finish it off!  I'm even more excited that we get a 2 week break over Christmas though... I love my school and animating but it can get exhausting!  

Animation Mentor Class 4! Part 1

So I've been pretty bad about keeping up with posting and such lately, but I'm going to try and get a bunch of stuff up here over the next couple of weeks!  First of all I started Class 4 (Intro to Acting) at AM!  The acting side of animation is a pretty big part of why I wanted to get into it in the first place so I was pretty excited to start this class!

My mentor this term is Dimos Vrysellas, which is pretty exciting for me because he started out as a 2D animator!  He worked at Dreamworks back when they were still doing traditionally animated films and got to work on Prince of Egypt, The Road to El Dorado, Spirit and Sinbad!  He worked on some 3d stuff there as well!  On a couple of the 2D features he got to work under James Baxter, so it's pretty cool to hear stories about that!  Dimos is not only a great animator, but a pretty cool guy as well!

For the first assignment of the term we got to do a short pantomime shot that showed 2 distinct and contrasting beats.  We were supposed to choose a scenario that fit our personality and spoke to us, so I decided to set mine in a fast food restaurant.  I wanted my character to go from confident and relaxed/lazy to Insecure/nervous/alert. I decided that in my scenario I would have my character leaning against the counter, start flirting with a customer and then panic when he notices that his boss is watching him.  I filmed some video reference and really got in touch with my cheesy side.  Although that never really seems to be a problem for me... :)

Apparently I'm a method actor and needed to put on an apron?  I decided against the 'Awooooga bagel eyes' (as I like to call them) and went with the cheesy finger gun off of the tip of the hat instead.  Dimos also suggested that I cut out the saunter up to the counter and just start it with the character leaning against it.  I was really glad that I took his advice, because it cut out a lot of work for me, and it wouldn't have added all that much extra to the shot anyways.

And now for some planning sketches!

I was also originally going to have a camera move to reveal the boss standing behind him, but Dimos told me that I could make it work without it.

Then I did my first blocking pass

I got some really good feedback on the first pass and for what seemed like the first time ever I didn't have to go back and completely re-block everything.  

And then there was the blocking plus pass.  I framed the camera in tighter and added a bunch of breakdowns.

The next week I started refining the animation and took it to spline town.

The last week that we had to work on this shot I did some polishing, but didn't get as much time as I would have liked to track all of my arcs and lovely things like that.  I still think that it turned out half decently though, and Dimos seemed to like it so that was pretty cool.

Monster Squad

Hello again!  I know that it's been a while since I last posted anything....but I've got something really exciting to post about now!  I decided last month that I would enter the Duck Brand duct tape 'Stick or Treat Jack-o-lantern contest'.  The basic premise of the contest was that you had to decorate a pumpkin (either real or fake) with duck tape.  You could use other materials as well, and the submissions would be judged based on Originality, Workmanship, Use of Color and Use of Duct Tape.  I couldn't decide on any one thing for my submission, so I decided to instead make a diorama and put a bunch of different monster pumpkins in it.  I was originally going to make zombie pumpkins, but I thought that the different monsters would be more colorful and fun to make.  I started off by making the actual diorama out of a cardboard box that I brought home from work.  I wanted to make it pumpkin shaped too, to keep with the jack-o-lantern theme.  I then cut out a tree shape and some tombstones.

I cut out a hill and haunted house with a creepy looking tree and started to cover them with duct tape.

Once I had the entire background of the diorama covered I moved on to the pumpkins.

I had bought a couple of little bags of foam craft pumpkins and I picked out a few that would fit the monster shapes that I was going for.  I stuck wires into the pumpkins for arms and legs and then covered them with duct tape as well.

Here's Franky

Wolfy (the plaid on his shirt was a pain...)

Dracula...y

And Zombie-y.

I then had to make an unlucky pumpkin running away from this motley crew of monsters.

Poor guy.

I also made an owl to hang out up in the creepy tree.

And here are some pictures of it all put together!  I added some clouds to help break up the sky and some 'highlights' on the hills.

I discovered that if I lit it from underneath it gave it some pretty awesome shadows!

It took me a long time to get it all finished, but it was pretty fun making it!  I did a lot of it while watching Murder She Wrote which makes pretty much everything more fun anyways, hahaha.  Even better than having fun while making it though, was having it WIN 1ST PLACE IN THE COMPETITION!  That's right!  The judges picked my submission as the winning jack-o-lantern!  They publicly announced the winner on their website today! http://duckbrand.com/Promotions/stick-or-treat.aspx

It was super cool to see my submission on their main contest page, and even cooler to win $1,000!  That should help pay off some of my tuition! Hurray!

Drawrins'

These are some old drawings that I found that I haven't thrown up here yet.  The first one is a drawing that I made out of a scribble.  It's a hippo who REALLY loves groceries.  Like, a lot. 

The second is more recent and is a dragon eating some toast with marmalade.  My friend Anna told me to draw a dragon with some marmalade and this is what I came up with.

Class 3 Progress Reel

So I've been really bad about keeping up to date with my posts....But I'm going to try and make up for it by throwing a bunch of stuff up here over the next while!  First of all I have my progress reel from Class 3 at AM!  I learned soooooooooooooooo much from my mentor Rich and from my classmates as well!  I'm starting to get the hang of this whole animating on the computer thing.  Sort of, hahaha.  Anyways, Rich was an awesome mentor and always pushed me to do better.  He taught me a lot about having a flow to your shot and about shot staging.  I feel like my posing improved a lot and my timing improved slightly, but still needs a lot of work.  Overall I had a lot of fun in this class, and I'm pretty happy with how my shots turned out.  I still need to go back and fix them up a bit.  I was going to do it over my break week but I got distracted with Xena warrior princess and season 1 of Murder She Wrote...Here is the progress reel in it's current state!