My Mickey Mouse Degree

(dead link) - WIP Character Animation - (see bottom)
It’s there. Model and rig by Chris Wyatt, animation (unfinished), by me, voice track from ‘Punch Drunk Love’. Super.

There’s a bit of dialogue after this, but I haven’t animated anything to it, so there’s no point me sticking that bit up.

It’s 11 meg, which blows, so I’ll attempt to downsize the bloomin’ thing and upload it again tomorrow, I just figured I’d actually keep a blog-related promise for once and get a version up today. If you can be bothered to wait for the download, enjoy, if you can’t, then you’ll have to wait even longer for me to upload a smaller version. Or you could ignore it altogether. The choice is clearly yours.
Also, never try and use cheap mechanical pencils after any amount of beer, the lead just snaps. It’s shit.

UPDATE!! -

I made it smaller! (and removed the file from here, rendering the above link useless).

Click This

Man, look at me here, posting stuff. Unxpected, eh? I only seem to post here when I’m in a rut, because the rest of the time I’m crazy happy and animating my tits off.

From the previous sentence you may have discovered that, indeed, I am out of that elusive creative juice. Still, Tuesday was a good day, I did a bit of 3D character stuff for one of my assignments and it turned out ‘right proper nice’. Today I attempted to continue with it, and it just turned into a festival of hatred, and swearing.

There was a lot of swearing.

Eventually I decided the best thing to do would be to play SEGA Rally for as long as possible, which is what happened. I feel better now, and will tackle the cursed animation head on tomorrow, full to the brim of enthusiasm giving coffee.

Also, I’ll be rendering out what I’ve got so far at some point tomorrow, so I’ll stick it up here in the evening when I get back from a crit session with some of my friends.

I really have sod all to show at the moment otherwise, and that sucks because I’ve done a bunch of stuff, but it’s all in aid of my uni work and I don’t really want to be plastering that all over the net at the moment (because clearly everyone in the known universe reads this blog).

I did a sheep animation thing a bit back - CLICK!!

It was exciting, but looking at it now, it’s nadgers. I’ll have to do better next time, eh?

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FINALLY, I found this website by some guy (officially referred to as Pete Emslie), which is a little bit awesome. It’s kinda like John Kricfalusi’s blog but without as much ranting (not that I’m adverse to rants, but it’s nice to read things from people who are calm now and again). Still, an excellent place to check out.

The ordeal is now over, join me tomorrow for some 3D character animation excitement.

Had a meeting with my Project Supervisor today, and he revealed to me that my idea was in fact almost identical to something that was submitted last year. I have never seen, nor heard of this thing from last year, yet I have officially ripped it off almost to the letter.

Clearly my idea can’t be any good if someone’s already done it, that much is obvious.

So now I’m working with something else, which is a bit more ‘researchy’ but still allows me to produce some animation at the end. Trouble is, I haven’t done research on anything in a looooong time, and even though it’s about animation, it still manages to seem overwhelmingly daunting to me. Perhaps I’m just easily daunted.

I got that list I was on about sorted, and have made SOME progress with my work as a result, which is a relief. I figured I’d be stuck jumping from one thing to another and getting nowhere for the rest of term, which would have blown monstrously.

Drawing is still going badly, but luckily that doesn’t matter so much at the moment, everything’s all ideas right now, though I am managing to produce some decent life drawing stuff on the Friday session I go to.

That’s all there is today.

Hold on, I’m just checking through my crap to see if I can find anything worth sticking up here.

…

I don’t appear to have that much at the moment, most of my time has gone into pondering story ideas and doing test animations for my projects here at uni, which I can’t really show you yet.

Still, here’s a couple of thingies from a while back -

Bugs Vector Sketches

Fox Take

Bleh, I need to get my head around all the work that needs to be done, since at the moment I’m kinda lost with it all and not doing anything other than feeling confused. I’ll write a list I reckon, should help me sort it all out in my head.

I’m also lacking a camera now and thus any easy way of digitalising my traditional work, so don’t expect any sketches to appear anytime soon (and I have a lot of those…)

I think I’ll leave it there for now, and go write that list.

Firstly, I’d like to address my frankly immoral usage of the word “ironically” in the last post. There was nothing ironic about that metaphorical arrow, and never will be, and I have little to no idea why I would write such a thing.

Regardless, I now have the internet here at last, so I can update this thingywhatsit.

I’ve got a fair bit of stuff to show, but I’m in the middle of some 3D modelling right now so I’ll stick them up here another time, just figured I’d drop by and write some words.

Oh, and check this the hell out - STREET FIGHTER EFFING 4!

Nice.

Clearly I haven’t updated recently. Why? Here are the reasons, bullet pointed to save you work.

• It was my birthday on the 15th so I took a couple of days off
• I had a driving test on the 19th so I took a couple of days off
• I’m going back to uni on the 23rd so I’m taking a few days off

Am I lazy? I think the lazy arrow is ironically resting on “yes”.

Anyways, here’s what I did on the 14th before the lazy streak -

Before the Lazy

It’s a group shot of the main characters in for my final year project. Or rather, provisional final year project, I still don’t know what it is I’m supposed to do. I keep having new ideas for short animations that I want to do this year but they’re all wildly ambitious and I’m not sure what’s actually required of me, so for now I’m just mulling them all over and we’ll see which one fits the bill when I get a brief, either way, I’d really like to do something based on musical timing.

Not long to wait I guess. It’s unlikely I’ll be able to update for a while too, since I won’t have the internet when I move into the new place on Sunday (something to sort out, plus all the other crap you need to sign up for like phone and gas and God knows what else). Anyways, what I’m saying is I’ll be back in a bit, with something to show for my time I hope after all this slacking off.

Cheers fer reading.

Been reading Richard William’s Animator’s Survival Kit through recently. When I read it at the start of my course 2 years ago I didn’t really understand a lot of the technical stuff he was talking about, but now I pretty much grasp it. Still trying to nail timing on a real x-sheet though, I find myself confused at times since I’m used to computers doing all that stuff for me (and improvising as I go along).

Bleh, still so far to go…

Anyways, kinda starting to get out of my slump now so I’ve been doodling stuff up to get going again. Here’s some of the fruits.

Helix1

Came up with this guy this morning, just popped into my head.

Helix 2

The was actually the first drawing I did of him, but then I coloured it, and coloured images ALWAYS appear after sketches, and never before, such is the law of the world.

Pillow Walk

This was from a couple of days ago. I stayed over at my mate’s house and only took a pillow. Stupidly, I forgot that I’d have to walk through two towns and catch a bus while holding said pillow.

Initially I felt stupid, but then I got used to it and started wondering why everyone else wasn’t carrying pillows. It was great!

That’s it for now, hopefully I’ll have more soon.

He’s been done practically for days, but now he’s actually done.

Do I like it?

A bit. Not as much as I thought I would.

If you watch it and wonder what’s actually happening you’ll see its major flaw (aside from the background being “experimental/dodgy”), explained further on the page linked in the image below -

Link

Much closer to model than my previous bugs attempts though, so that’s a consolation. Also, my timing is appalling, I need to work on that. Either way, I’m done with it now, it can bugger right off.
As far as my recently discussed project goes, I think I’m just going to run with it and see what happens. I’ll have a better idea of what’s actually expected of me when I get back to uni (hopefully), so I can decide whether to scrap the whole thing or rework it or whatever needs to be done. Until then I’ll just refine the concepts and try and come up with some kind of personalities for the characters.

More amazing news from me tomorrow I expect, see you then.

Hey all,

I’ve not been wallowing in self pity or anything since my last post, I took a day off and then I started a new little animation using Bugs Bunny after watching some Looney Tunes stuff frame by frame.
Up to now I’ve really been aiming for Disney “realism” and smoothness in my work, but after looking at the WB shorts properly I’ve decided to have a bash at more snappy, energetic animation, hence me doing this Bugs thing.

It’s pretty much done, I’ve just got a couple of overlap frames to do on his ears and about three more keys, so it should be up by tomorrow, it ain’t much, but I like it.

As for the post title, my good friend Karl just got a two page interview up on IGN about Team 17’s new game - Worms: A Space Oddity, that he’s working on.

That pretty much makes him famous, which automatically makes me famous. Almost.

Check it out - here.
More tomorrow, hopefully.

Haha, oh man. I’m kicking myself now. In the face. With spades attached to my feet. It hurts a lot.

So today I’m getting on with some designs etc. for my final year project, I’ve been trying to get all the design work and all that stuff sorted before I go back to uni in order for me to concentrate on the animation and story and all that for the 8ish months I’ll have to work on it.

But recently I’ve been getting to the point where I can’t really design much more, and I need to start thinking of the story. At this point I’ve realised that none of my “characters” have any personality whatsoever, they just look nice. And thusly (nice phrase), I’ve had to start thinking about what makes them all tick, and have now realised I never envisioned them to have any personalities in the first place.

Fun.

Tomorrow I’m going to have to go back to the start and really focus on what this is all about, because I’m struggling to come up with an entertaining story with my bland, lifeless characters right now.

Silly, obvious mistakes, yes, but I figured I’d share them just to highlight how important it is to have a strong focus on personality and story from the start, after all, that’s what this animation lark is all about, right?

Ah well, I never liked doing things the easy way. Bring it on, tomorrow!

Here’s your drawing for today, keep it safe -

Beach Fight

What would happen if a beach going wolf threw his ice cream on a man with massive hands? They’d probably fight, and then I’d probably draw the moment just before they started hitting each other.

I’m rooting for the wolf.