My Mickey Mouse Degree

You may or may not have seen

I did this for my Creative Character Animation module at university. I got an A for it, which was nice. I dunno why I haven’t put this up before to be honest, musta forgotten.

Anyways, here it is:

He's Dead!

Animation, Lighting and Background Modelling by me, Character Model & Rig by Chris Wyatt.

Okay, I’m gonna link this at last. This was my final animation project at university, the animation and rendering and all that took about 6 weeks in total. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad, but I’m not that arsed, I got it finished on time. Anyways, click the image below to view (and make sure you select the high quality version on the left menu, because the small version drops frames like you wouldn’t believe). -

Title copy.jpg

I’ve done a few sketches and stuff since finishing the course, too. Mostly it’s been Hanna-Barbera stuff because I’m trying to get some of the style to rub off on my designs (it’s gonna take some serious work). Nothing’s really scanned yet, but I’ll stick it here when it is.

At the moment I’m applying to jobs all over the shop and working on a portfolio site, and a showreel for the games industry (apparently they like cycles, I don’t have any cycles on my other reel). I’m working on a few cycles right now, typing this is my break.
S’all going good I guess, the money’s running out but I suppose I’ll have to get a normal job to sort that out, which is a shame. Normal jobs are shit.

Now I’m off to see what the damage is on this walk cycle.

Being an animation student (no more!!), I have done some animations over the last 8 months or so. I’ve not put them up online yet, but there is one work in progress and an older showreel, have a gander if you like, sirs:

• Old Showreel
• Character Animation WIP

They’re both finished now, and much better, but I’ll upload those and link to them later.
Cheers for looking anyways, feel free to let me know what you reckon in the comments.

They do, or rather more accurately, visiting our university. Not just to look around, oh no, but to tell us stuff about things. It’s good.

Last Friday we had Roger Mason, a storyboard artist (mostly for advertising) and independent comic book creator who helped me with my drawing skills (not with a z, I have no use for skillz right now) last year, and returned to tell us all how to sell out and make a bunch of money.

I’m seriously down with getting me a bunch of money, but I’d rather get paid sod all to be an inbetweener at the moment, it’s this month’s official ‘Bohemian Artist Dream’. The bohemian part is just to sound cool.

Today we were visited by Peter Dodd (I can’t find a site for him), an excessively good 2D animator who’d worked on all kinds of stuff, and is currently working on the keys for Sylvain Chomet’s latest film: The Illusionist.

He gave us a few tips on showreels, timing, portfolio and 2D animation in general, it was effing good. It reminded me of how much I want to be a 2D animator, which is pretty hard to do because I’m ALWAYS thinking about how much I want to be a 2D animator. Especially now because I’m writing about it.

Other things that happened today -

• A visiting lecturer for my Studio Business Practice module called in sick half an hour before he was supposed to show up, so the lecture was cancelled after we all got there.
• A water tank leaked in one of the buildings so the Linux server had to be shut down, which meant we couldn’t do any character animation in uni today. Of course, we found this out after we turned up there too.
• I finished reading Tunes for ‘Toons by Daniel Goldmark, it was immense and has helped me verily with my dissertation research
• I wrote some crap about Scott Bradley for said dissertation that I will probably revise, right now

And that’s about it for today.

(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?

.

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.

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.

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.

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.