flux » 2d

La Maison en Petits Cubes

Sunny — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 16:49:00 +0000

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 short.

Jumpin’ flour sacks

Sunny — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 22:41:00 +0000

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 in Flipbook. Both the animations are timed to a 12-frame beat, at 24 fps.

Flour Sack Blocking #1

Sunny — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 14:25:00 +0000

Here’s my Flipbook blocking for a flour sack exercise Keith assigned me for session 5 of the APT. The drawings (scribbles?) are really rough, but I’m hoping the action is clear enough.

C+C welcome!

Home-made frame capture stand

Sunny — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 01:16:00 +0000

Here’s a neat little capture stand you can make at home using simple, cheap materials. I based it on the photography light box tutorial at this page. It uses a regular cardboard box, two lamps (one on each side) and some tracing paper to diffuse the light. The original tutorial uses halogen lamps, but desk lamps also work if they’re bright and close enough. The results are pretty good, given how simple and cheap it is!

Once I made the light box, here’s how I turned it into a capture stand:
I cut a square hole (5″ on each side) in one of the solid walls of the box, and cut a piece of Styrofoam of the same size from some old package.
All that was left to do was fit my web cam into the Styrofoam. This piece very conveniently had a hole in the middle that fit my web cam perfectly. Even if it didn’t, it would have been an easy job to make one. Note: the hole has to be slightly smaller than the width of the web cam, so you get a snug fit.

Here’s how it looks. It’s now ready to shoot some stop-mo with small objects, or even some cut-out animation. If you want to capture some 2D pencil tests, all you have to do is get a peg bar and tape it down at the bottom.

If you try this out, please share your results! I’d love to see them.

Jekyll walk test

Sunny — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 04:45:00 +0000

Just finished animating a walk test for the Jekyll puppet. Here’s how it went down:

Planning:
I started by blocking out the walk in 2D using Flipbook. For this character, I wanted a somewhat stiff, serious attitude in the body, combined with a heavy step. Here’s the result (animated on 2s at 24 fps):

I printed out the frames from the blocking to use as reference for the shoot. There were a total of 11 drawings, which I printed on a single sheet of paper:

Shooting:
I set up a single light at a high, nearly overhead angle for a hard, film noir-like lighting scheme.
Since my poses were already planned out in Flipbook, most of the “thinking” was done. With one exception: I had forgotten to draw the tie during the blocking stage, so I improvised the overlap in the tie while shooting.
And here’s the finished walk!

As you can see, it’s not particularly smooth, and there are some camera glitches. I’ve learned a few things from this whole exercise, to use in future stop-mo efforts:

Build a bigger puppet next time. Small puppets are harder to construct, and harder to animate smoothly.
Lock down the camera and stage more securely.
Keep your elbows off the table! It’s not just good manners, it’s good for stop motion! Seriously, the smallest things can affect the camera, resulting in more work to match up the frames in post.

C+C welcome!