Flour Sack and Hogan Animations

As with the first weeks two weeks, week 37 and 38 consisted of more basic 3d exercises. Here's some of the flower sack animations I did:


I actually wanted to convey a bad feeling of panic in the last animation, not a humorous. But alas, when someone says it should've been falling pianos its hard not to laugh :)
And then "Hogan" - a model with all the traits needed to animate a human or humanoid.

First 3D Animations

Yes! The title speaks truth, I now find myself stumbling into an entire new dimension: the third!
Ofcourse, entering a new ground of animation means reentering the familiar ground of bouncing balls, thus this animation from week 35:


We had a short explanation of the basic modelling tools, the room above I've created myself.

In week 36 we had an already made model of a lamp handed out to animate:

Drawings!

Drawings, drawings, drawings.. They are all from first half of 2010, the two top ones below are illustrations for a book. The torsos below are from a short weekend class with Lawrence's old teacher Glenn Vilpu. His work can be seen here http://www.vilppustudio.com/ - its quite impressive. The rest is drawings from my sketchbook I thought might be fun or interesting to show.

Scraps From Last Year

I'm starting at second year of the character animator line at the Animation Workshop now, hence these two animations from last year will probably be the last in 2d for some time:





Also, in week 21 we had colour class with Lawrence. Sadly, it was the last of his classes, but what a class! We used acrylic paint, but only warm blue, cold blue, warm red, cold red, warm yellow, cold yellow and white - everything necessary to create any colour nuance. The theory was gold! We learned everything, light, shadow, how colour mix, how to create long strips of nuances on the palette etc etc... We made several exercises, the last one involved creating colour thumbs for a composition sketched by ourselves, theme: monsterattack in the antique. Here's my thumb:
And here is the colour thumbs:
...Doesn't exactly match the sketch, but the improvement from the first to the last should be obvious. The final thumb took me less than an hour to create, and I had quite fun with it.

CA 09's Animation Jam

Week 17 and 18... Animation Jam. Two rough weeks where we in groups of 3 should make a 30 second long movie (credits and title doesn't count). It wasn't the whole school with foreign directors that was making movies this time, but just my class supervised by Julia Bracegirdle. This meant alot of work and alot of discussion in the group about everything from overall plot to the placement of flowers. So it was great when the movie was done! I was in group with Stine Frandsen and Adam Boklund and we made the movie "The Slughter."

Julia had made some bags from which we should pick the stylistic theme, an emotion and a random word. We ended up with the theme, "Disney 1928-1932 combined with Gary Baseman," the emotion "fear" and the random word "wig." Gary Baseman is a modern artist which can't quite be explained, but his pictures can be seen here: http://garybaseman.com/
Disney from 1928-1932 is basically all the black and white shorts with Mickey Mouse.
We choose to let the Disney shorts be the inspiration for the animation, while the style of the design was taken entirely from Gary Baseman. These choices enabled us to focus on funny animations and interesting background compositions rather than realism, in other words it gave us alot of creative freedom.
We all worked on the characterdesign. I made these sketches:

After discussing the different ideas for the design we devided the characters, so that Adam made the final design for the old lady, Stine made the designs for the slugs and I made the design for the final monster.
As for the animation then I animated, cleaned and coloured the slug's running scene, the scene were it dodges salt and the final monster scene.
Otherwise I had fun making the style for the backgrounds. We had devided the backgrounds into tinyworld backgrounds, medium world backgrounds and huge world backgrounds (Though the last one was just a sky with clouds). I made the very first background in the movie, and the mediumworld background with the floating trees and the windmills. I also made a good part of the simple bacgrounds that was just colour.


The final film:

Slughter from Stine Agerskov Frandsen on Vimeo.

Layout Class With Lawrence

Week 16 was layout week with Lawrence, which primary consisted of good theory about composition and staging, less interesting practical studio rules for numbering cameramovements and backgrounds and ofcourse different assignments.

First assignment was to make a layout for the first act and scene of Hamlet. We needed to have the three guards and the dead king's ghost in the picture, and the style was to be realistic like Pinocchio, but we had otherwise rather free hands. Good shading and toning was essential.


Second assignment focused on camera movement: We should make the backgrounds and overlays for a Yogi Bear sequence already storyboarded. A zoom and a pan:

Yogi Bear Zoom from Niels Dolmer on Vimeo.

Yogi Bear Pan from Niels Dolmer on Vimeo.

In the week's final assignment we were given rather free hands stylistically and settingwise. The title for the assignment was "Escape on rooftops," and it should both contain cameramovements and great layout. In pair of two we should make a little sequence of four backgrounds where a rough character should be escaping on rooftops. I teamed up with Bo. We got rather inventive with the style and setting. The escape was to be in a middleage-like city, but were the houses was build upon one another so that there would be different social lives at the different levels, with bridges and catwalks. So the rich people would live in the top. At the centre of the city there would be a giant castle, somewhat shaped like a big tree with small branches sticking out. I made these two backgrounds:

The sequence ended up like this:

Escape On Rooftops from Niels Dolmer on Vimeo.

Dancing Hippos and Flying Mountaineers

In week 14 the Danish animator Christian Kuntz came to teach us dance animation for the week. After spending weeks trying to make animation with uneven and interesting pace, and lots of overlapping actions - having to animate strictly within a beat that should be hit with the movement was a challenge.
I choose the hippo from Fantasia and the beginning of the Michael Jackson song "Smooth Criminal." I once worked on a musictheater where we put up the stage for a so-called "Michael Jackson" ballet. I thought it was weird back then, but now that I've tried to make a hippo dance ballet to one of his songs, I can kinda see the idea.

Dance of the Hippo from Niels Dolmer on Vimeo.

Ten seconds of animation was taking things a bit too far, so not everything is animated.

Christian Kuntz is a part of the four-man company "framebender," you can see some of their stuff here: http://www.framebender.dk/

In order to expand our capacities to make our own films, we spend week 15 being introduced to the editing program Adobe Aftereffects having Henrik B Clausen as a teacher. We did some small exercises and finally got the assignment to create something that moves really fast. Out of these two pictures:
http://www.canadasmountains.com/Java/columbola_pano.jpg
http://dhpersonal.com/images/desktops/2009-07-08pano.jpg
and photoshop and aftereffects I made this:

Untitled from Niels Dolmer on Vimeo.