Birthday Aliens

Here's to cartoon aliens helping me enjoy the last of my last winter break from school.

Another week, another blog post. A lot has happened within the past week - I had a 22nd birthday, I survived an icy/arctic blast of weather (a pipe even exploded on my street, flooding it with water, which was a sight to see), and the animation computer labs at school finally opened. Tomorrow morning I have my last Orientation session with CCAD, and Monday I start my last semester. A-times, they are a-changin'.

The labs opening meant that I got to create this animatic for my thesis project (see below). I realize that the way I created this animatic seems pretty backwards overall - I made the drawings in Storyboard Pro. Finals kicked in, and I never caught the time to time out the frames. My personal computer has one step behind of the school's version (Storyboard Pro 10), so I could not open my file over break. Just before Christmas, I timed out small screen-caps of my frames in Flash. When the labs opened, I swapped newly exported images. The result is this animatic as well as files ready for me to work in. The moral of the story: work with what you have!

The blog where I am posting updates on the project isn't just for me to post in, but also for those who are helping me out. Right now, the team also consists of my background artist/friend, Kevin Deasey. I couldn't be more excited about working with him. Stop by his great blog!

Here's some more links I'll share this week:
1. The latest from Chris Oatley's Art Cast is extra up my alley: http://chrisoatley.com/wouter-tulp
2. Here's a website my friend Don sent me on my birthday: http://procatinator.com
3. Pianos make me cry. Lions (plus Hyenas!) and a guy who hugs them to raise awareness of their lives, plus pianos around 13:00? Not saying that I cried, but this Go-Pro creation is great: http://thehigherlearning.com/2014/01/05/wow-the-man-who-hugs-wild-lions-brought-a-go-pro-this-time-video/

 

HARDCOW! Boards, Roughs, Clean Pass

Finals week was especially fun animating, cleaning, and coloring this lovely Hardcore-Hardcow idea I have had for awhile now. The project was for Animation III class, and it is something I plan on revamping, finishing, and reworking the rest of the summer. The bit was featured in the End-of-the-year 134th Annual Student Show at CCAD. Music credit go to locals Hollow Like Me (https://www.facebook.com/HollowLikeMe)! There's 32 seconds here of all that I managed to get done; the summer goal is to finish the thought and story to be a little more complete:
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Space Puppy - Animatic Attack!

Lots of process updates for the animation I plan on making my senior thesis film!

First off, in class, we started timing out the drawings we created for our storyboard:

After these were done, it was time to start timing out the entire piece. My instructor brought up a really good point: I timed things way too fast. We tried playing it at double the time, and lots of scenes instantly read better. Here's the fast pass (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CU9mx-JKKOc) vs the double-timed:

After playing with the timing, I came up with this. There are a few drawings missing, but I am overall happy and ready to take another pass at this sometime this summer, as well as really start digging into the animation before senior year begins: