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Out of Sight
Another inspiring student animation, this time from Taiwan. Heartwarming and full of quiet wonder. Enjoy!
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Le Royaume
I’ve seen plenty of impressive animation come out of the Gobelins school, but this one blew me away. An obvious homage to Hayao Miyazaki — both in form and content — “Le Royaume” is fun, expressive, visually delicious, and true to its point. Hats off to the team behind this film. Enjoy the short!
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Flat Life
I like the deceptive simplicity of this short from Belgium. Little pieces of the typical human drama play out in subtle, quirky ways. Stick with it through the end credits for the real ending. Well, it’s an “ending” in a delightfully cyclic sense. To me, it nicely wraps up the metaphor of the apartment as ...
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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 ...
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The Pumpkin of Nyefar
Now this is my favorite kind of animation: whimsical, joyful and freewheeling; but not random for randomness’ sake. Co-written by Maurice Noble, who sadly didn’t live to see the finished short. This is a great example of limited animation that doesn’t feel limited. Enjoy! Question: How do you keep creativity alive in the face of ...
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The Lady And The Reaper: more CG cartoon fun
I just saw this oscar-nominated short. It’s not everyday we get to see fun, cartoony exaggeration done right in CG. This one’s well done, and nicely storyboarded too. When Pixar’s Presto came out, I was pretty excited to see cartoon animation in CG. Over time I’ve realized that while Presto had some great movement, the ...
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Geometric me
A sketch of “me” for a class demo on building characters out of simple geometric shapes.
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Behind the ‘toons, part 2: The Shader
Wanna know how I made this toon shader? Read on… Toon Shader Basics If you know the basics of a toon shader in Maya, feel free to skip ahead to Building Moom’s Shader. A simple toon shader in Maya is a surface shader fed by a ramp containing two colors: The fill and the outline. ...
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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. ...
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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 ...
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Behind the ‘toons, part 1: Backgrounds
Some folks have asked about the process behind the look of my recent scenes, the Bee Chase and the Stair Fall. I’m starting a series of posts to answer those questions. I’d like to start with the backgrounds, even though (as you’ll see from this post) they were created after the animation was done. I ...
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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 ...