Cycles

In week 40 and 41 we had walk and run cycles. We got alot of time just for the basic walk:

We didn't get much time for the characterwalk, so the next one is on thirds (ie I've only worked on every third frame), except for the legs. I followed the guide layed out for a flamboyant walk in Richard William's "Animators Survival Guide:"

Finally we got the task of doing a "basic" run:


This was the last we did with Erik Schmidt as a teacher, who had been guiding us into maya since we started this third semester.

Evil Minion Breakdown...

Poor Evil Master's Minion had failed his master, and now had to explain himself... But under the burning gaze of said evil master, who can explain themselves?

...Mercy your cruelness, mercy!

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.