flux

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

So I finally finished cleaning up the animations I made during Keith’s APT 5 session. It’s been a while since I finished that session, I know, but I first had to deal with all the things I had pushed back during the APT, and get them out of the way. This is my attempt at [...]

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!

Woohoo! It’s been an intense but amazing four weeks of animating, in Keith’s APT program. I needed someone to push me and guide me, give me honest, expert feedback. And I got that and more. The man is an Animation Buddha! Here’s the “Spanky” scene, all cleaned up. Like any shot, it’s never really done, [...]

Here’s the second scene I’ve been blocking for Keith’s A:PT. I surprised myself with this one, as I don’t normally come up with such poses. These just popped into my head while listening to the audio over and over again. Of course, they’ve been revised and tidied up thanks to Keith’s critiques, though this scene [...]

Here’s one of two scenes I’ve been blocking as part of my A:PT class with Keith Lango. This one is my shot at some broad cartoony action. It’s come a long way since my first pass, and I’ve already learned quite a bit from this exercise. I still have to block in the lipsync, and [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]