Run Robot Run!

*Update: I’ve revised the run to make it more rickety, after getting some feedback from Keith Lango. Character modeled and textured by Patrick Hughes. Rigged and animated by Sunny Kharbanda. One of our graduating students, Patrick Hughes (http://www.pat-tactics.com/) has some cool characters he’s designed, modeled and textured. I asked him for two of them, to ...

Elk Hair Caddis: More CG Cartoon Fun

Check out this impressive student animation from Denmark. “Elk Hair Caddis” is Peter Smith’s graduation film, and it just makes me eager to see what he’ll come up with next. Granted, it’s inspired (and he lists his inspirations on the vimeo page for the film); but he’s drawing inspiration from the right places and it’s ...

Zoetrope fun

Two things I’m a sucker for: Stop-motion, and old proto-animation toys like the Zoetrope. The two come together neatly in this recent commercial:

On the run, part 2

Here’s the counterpart to the prisoner run cycle I posted earlier. Like that one, it’s got plenty of issues, but it was fun to animate as a quick study. It’s a heavy run, contrasting the prisoner’s extremely light one. His size and shape got me thinking he’s a mean cop, but somewhat dull and oafish. ...

On the run, part 1

Here’s a run cycle I animated as a class demo. I’m teaching a Game Animation class this Fall, and I needed to brush up on Character Studio! Here’s what came out. It’s a 10-frame run at 30fps. Since his feet are tied to a chain, I imagined him running with short, extra fast steps, and ...

Bee Chase, scene one

He loves flowers. Too bad he’s terrified of bees. Another cartoon animation exercise. The focus of this one was to come up with a simple story and animate it to a musical beat. It started as an assignment during my last APT session with Keith Lango. Big thanks to him for the assignment, and for ...

Steppin’ up

Here it is! The cartoon test I’ve been finishing up. I did most of the animation during my last APT session with Keith, and then tweaked it afterwards. I also wanted to try a loose, rough style of rendering and backgrounds, to go with the animation style. Nothing ground-breaking here in terms of animation, but ...

Coming soon

La Maison en Petits Cubes

or “The House of Small Cubes”, if you so prefer. Whatever the name, it’s a deeply elegant and touching animated short. If the goal of art is to evoke and amplify what it is to be human, then this short IS art. Directed by Kunio Kato. Winner of the 2009 Academy award for best animated ...

Scifi: You Are What You Eat

A little over a year ago, the Scifi Channel commissioned our department (the animation department at the Art Institute of Washington) to produce a one minute short based around their “if” theme of promos. Here’s the result, created by a hand-picked group of students working in and outside of class. The preproduction was supervised by ...

Looney Lessons

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been step-framing through my Looney Tunes DVDs, to study them for my APT work with Keith. This stuff is a gold mine! You can pick any golden age WB cartoon at random, and learn a ton from it. Here are a few things I picked up. I’m using a ...

Jumpin’ flour sacks

This was the second — and definitely more fun — part of my APT 5 class. I wanted to try my hand at classic cartoon animation. The good stuff! Keith had me animate two flour sack exercises, and rather than struggle with a flour sack rig in Maya, I went ahead and drew them out ...