Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo

I can't wait to do another one of these. Maybe I should do the whole Mario Bros. movie over like this. Nah, at a pace of 9 seconds a weekend, that would take forever.

Sketch-Mation

Most people have lives or do fun things in their spare time...and I do this...

I enjoy the results so much that I don't mind the wasted weekends.

Maybe I should just switch to tumblr

I originally got this account because a few people from work were here, but no one's active and it feels like a waste.

Web Cam Archives

Trying to edit a walk cycle is confusing for me. It involves a lot of draw -> scan -> edit -> print -> rinse and repeat. I wish there was some way I could test an animation without scanning everything. What I need is a lunchbox. I've already got a camera. Or even a web cam with a stop motion program like what I used to have on the old Win 98 computer. I used to have a set up where I could sit the paper upright and click each drawing in. The quality wasn't good, but at least I could see what I'd drawn. I did do some originals, but the only stuff I kept on file was the stuff that was copied frame by frame from a vhs recording, mostly from Sailor Moon. I believe it dates back to the 2000s, high school. I would pause the tape and sketch out the frames and then ink them with a Sharpie. Here's a few of them.

 

I didn't finish this one, it was getting tedious.

 

You can see where the paper is bent and the reflection from the scanner on Jupiter.

This video looks cut off at the end, but you get the picture.

Doing this sort of thing actually helped me understand how Japanese animation works. It's a mix of slow closely resembling frames and fast paced frames that all look very different. It gives a nice actiony effect but it is an easier type of animation to pull off than if you were trying to do a consistent medium-paced movement.

Eat Pray Love

Next time I animate this character I'm not basing the keys on anything. In my head he is not a stiff character, so working with stiffly animated digitized humans might not be the best way to go. The first one is the full length animation. The characters start at a 3/4 view, so it looks better when a standing pose merges with the win pose than it does just seeing the win pose.

Another day another montage

I dug up some more oldies on this one, but they are mainly new-ies. Youtube cut the copyrights off early. I hate when it does that. The screen's not even that short and it's still hacked off.

One armed Reala, Rocky and Bullwinkle parody, and Rotoscoped dancer are unfinished recent (within the past 365 days).

Jump Rope Blossoms are animated gifs from 2003

NiGHTS pencil animation from 2007

Knuckles Knuckleduster run from 2007

Everything else is a finished exercise that has been posted

I found my old Mugatu fan art and now I wanna animate a quick moment from "Zoolander"

Friday and Saturday

 

I'm animating more often than I used to. I get anxious to work on more exercises but I have trouble thinking things up.

Here, the character's poses are based on Rayden's from MK1, but he's so in his own style you couldn't tell anyway. The whole set up is meant to look like the Test Your Might segments in between fights. It's a little stiff over all, but considering what I had to work with, that's no surprise. There's actually no reason I needed to mimic Rayden's keys for this. I probably could've done it better on my own, but I initially had intentions of animating Rayden. Unfortunately, I wasn't used to drawing him in an altered style, so I decided to use one of my own characters because he'd be easier to draw and pose. Plus, I've been wanting to animate this little fella. I did the background in photoshop to make it look a little more like a tv cartoon and less like a flash cartoon. It's originally 15fps, but was sped up to 20 since it was so slow paced.

Portrait commissions

I don't know this woman, but I was asked to draw her in in a clergy outfit.

Mario Hand Animation Challenge

I knew my initial drawings weren't consistent to begin with. How could they be, they were sketched side by side. In flash I was able to resize and adjust things to the point where it wasn't as obvious an issue. However, now that I've gone back to the initial sketches, I run into the same problem but with no do-overs because I was too anxious to start and too lazy fix my keys. Other than that it looks all right considering I've never animated by hand at 24fps, the hand drawn animation I did was straight on, AND I haven't done hand drawn in years. At first I couldn't draw by hand with keys and tweens, and now I don't know how I managed to do otherwise. I don't know why I thought hand drawing an animation would be so impossible a task. It is more work, but it actually doesn't take as long as I thought. Now clean up and coloring? Forget about it.

Kirby's Amazing Disappearing Feet

Here's the latest in random flash animation. Aside from Kirby's botched feet logic (how it pops in front and behind him) and the fact that this comes from a game and not from my head, it turned out okay. I didn't time it perfectly, and the original dance in-game doesn't sync up exactly to the music, so it plays back and 28 fps instead of 24, 87 frames total, I believe. I timed 88, so where'd that last frame go? I also forgot to make him blink.

I started trying to animate Mario without motion tweening like Rusty suggested. It's tough and a very slow process. I've been doing it with the pen tool, making it the most difficult to draw. I've been using the pen tool more lately for a clean looking, consistent line, but flash vectors are a pain to deal with. I thought about doing it all by hand, but then I have to go through the process of printing each key and hoping that the onion skin effect works well enough with my paper and the light table. Plus, when I work by hand I lose consistency. When I work by flash, I can fix it. The tablet still feels awkward and I feel out of my comfort zone using it, so I generally don't. What to do...

Mario Talks

Welp, I had high hopes for this animation, but I didn't quite reach the level I wanted. I'm still proud of myself for working at 24 fps, drawing a bulk of it frame by frame, and actually getting it done. It just doesn't look the way I expected. I guess I thought that if I worked at a higher frame rate then I'd be blown away and it'd look so great, but I think that'd only happen if you really know what you're doing. One problem I have is that I don't know what my keys should or should have looked like. I sketched them side by side, cleaned them up and added one more, and went straight to flash. They weren't sized consistently or edited or otherwise fleshed out. How do you know if your drawings are working? Or your timing? Trial and error? That's the only way I figure it out, but it'd be nice to be able to tell in advance.

I learned a lot by doing this, mostly "dont's". I jumped back and forth on body parts before I finished any. This meant that limbs, bodies, and heads weren't attaching correctly all the time. God forbid something's out of place. I moved part of the body downward which meant I had to adjust all the arm and hand frames from that point. The arms are duplicated 3 times, within the body, behind, and on top, and the hands twice. This gives the effect that the arms and hands move in front of and behind the body. Then there are layers with frames there just to cover up any imperfections. If I were to do it over I'd still work in pieces, but I would've done the whole head, then the whole body, then the hands and then the arms. But I'd LIKE to be able to do this sort of thing without the aid of computers.

Tracking progress

I decided to tackle this thing the best way I know how. With a mouse in flash.

For timing's sake, I'm sticking with 24 fps over 15. I'm using a combination of drawn frames and symbols. The head is mostly symbols. Things like his nose and ears and face parts stay the same while things like the rim of his cap and his mouth switch up. Even the M is split at the middle so that I can create an angled effect by squeezing one side while stretching the other. His eyes will blink as well, but for now I have sleepy eyes holding the place.

On top of a big fat mess of symbols and keys is a layer of keyframes. There I draw in over the imperfections of the symbols. Because he's drawn in chunks from a frontal view while he keeps turning sideways and his hat moves both in front and behind his head, pieces don't fit together flawlessly on their own. The top layer is drawn in to make it look like it does.

His arm is almost all keyframes except for long pauses. Same goes for his hand, which I found was a little more complicated to draw tweens for, but it's turning out well so far. I've been jumping around with the body parts. When I get tired of working on one part I'll work on another.

I'm looking forward to seeing it done. It's a lot of work, but it's worth it to become a better animator. I've got to keep pushing myself. And since this is a higher frame rate, and a character in a moving standing pose with a longer line of dialogue, it's more of a challenge. One concern I have however is that even though I put in the work, I need the aid of a computer to animate. I drew the keys by hand, but I don't know if I could do a full clean animation by hand or not. Flash makes it easier to fix inconsistencies in the drawings.

A week or so ago I saw Jake and the Neverland Pirates and have been watching it off and on since. The animation style inspired me to do something in flash. It makes me hopeful that I can get some very non-flash and more cartoony looking results with the program. When I look at the animation, I analyze it. I look at it as if I was animating in flash and see the break down of parts, the squash and stretch, the separate keys.

I put it off for a while, but since I promised myself I'd try to animate something, I sketched out drawings to a Mario soundbite. "Hey, you're very good. See you next time." The keys run at 15fps on 2s as it is. I usually work at 15fps in flash, and after looking at the playback and the lack of room for tweens, I'm wondering if I should attempt draw everything myself. Usually when I draw characters, the head is mostly symbol animation while the limbs could be a combination of symbols and drawn frames. I also need more practice in toonboom and more practice with hand drawn animation. Because he moves around so much, it'll be a challenge no matter how I do it. I'm not sure what direction I should take it though.

Black History Portrait

Friday my mom asked if I could do a portrait of the mayor, and of course I didn't want to but I said okay. She wanted it by Monday. So, Monday comes around, it's some time in the afternoon and mom's like, "Are you working on the picture?" and I'm like..."OOPS". I ended up using a different technique where I shaded everything by hand in pencil. That made coloring a lot quicker and easier and gave the picture a more artistic look than my last ones. I'm fairly satisfied and it's the quickest I've ever done a realistic picture from start to finish. I wish I had thought to do portraits this way sooner. But then, I barely do portraits as it is. Something bugs me about her right eye though.

Old people reclining

A few weeks ago I sketched some people at Panera. These are them.

Howdy From the Big Bear

So here is my attempt at duplicating the the rough rotoscope job but with symbols. You can really tell where the symbols separate at the feet. I'm not concerned with how clean this is until I get it right. I think I'm doing okay for a first time 4 legged walk, but I still don't quite get what body parts need to do what and when.

In retrospect, this feels kind of pointless, or maybe I'm just in a bad mood today.

Fake Web Series Promo

Well, I'm glad I got that out of my system. 

It would be nice if I could do my own web series some day, but if I did my time would be better spent on original characters. That's the only way they'll ever get animated. Unfortunately, my characters are harder to draw in Flash. The Sega characters' round heads and bodies and noodle arms and legs make them more user friendly.

Double D

This was a commission for disneypsycho at deviant art, her character from the Darkwing/Ducktales universe. I also did another Tiny Kong. I originally did it in pink, but since refs of the character were in these colors, though not a skating outfit, I posted it in blue and showed her the pink version too. I'm putting a hold on commissions so I can concentrate on the new job and moving. Work at the old job is slow, few hours. I've got one more week and after four years I'll finally be out of that dump. I spent less time in college than at that store.

Speaking of deviant art, I got a Daily Deviation yesterday for this character image. Who would have thought?

She also appears in my Xmas Special video in picture form as a mail order bride.

Book It

The other day I received Preston Blair's Cartoon Animation book in the mail. You know those commissions? That paid for that...and some other stuff, which is beside the point.

I already had the Animator's Survival Kit, which assisted me in this 12 frame run cycle (at the bottom of page 177 yet). I said I wouldn't work on this anymore, but I'm a dirty liar.

I've also started the non-rotoscoped bear animation. I'm taking it one limb at a time. The little bit that's done looks pretty decent, IMO. It's a lot more frames and boy does it feel tedious. My biggest fear is that because I put it in flash it will turn out soulless and flat/stiff. I could add in some squash and stretch to the symbols but it's not the same. Nothing beats a good old fashioned pencil test.

Learn By Example

I thought that if I did a rough rotoscoping of a bear walking it would help me to better understand a bear walking, at least the arm and leg part. I'd converted my ref to a wmv into flash and it was fuzzy. I think some of those front arm curves are off, and I have no idea what's going on with the head. It's about 40 frames total, but every other one is white more or less, so 20, but it plays at 30 fps. I was surprised that even copying the image, it was easier to do the bear by key frames than one frame after the other. It was harder to make out what exactly was happening, but jumping back and forth helped.

I think the exercise helped a little, not as much as I hoped. I'm ready to try a more defined non-rotoscoped cycle now though. I actually think flash would help me with this. I'm used to breaking things into lots of pieces and keyframing parts that can't be motion tweened. I would sketch my bear and the key poses, build it in flash, work on the movement there and then apply it to pencil and paper. I really want a good understanding of this.