My Mickey Mouse Degree

I can’t seem to get a job in what I want to do right now, games was as hard to breach as regular animation, so I’m backing up and looking at my reels, and am currently working on some new stuff that should help me stand out a bit, or at least tick more of the boxes that people want ticking.

Learning Maya is one of the boxes that must be ticked, plus I’m building a much better 3D portfolio as my current one consists of naffness galore (probably a reason games don’t want me).

Still, I’m relatively positive. I’m spending my days working on my skills and not looking ahead too much, and it seems to be moving along a lot more smoothly than trying to work on skills, find an animation job and look for a normal job at the same time was.

I guess I can live with being skint for a while longer.

Here’s a coupla drawings I’ve done recently:

Flippin’ animation is extremely hard to get into. I knew it would be, but it really is, really a lot more than I knew it would be.

At the moment I’m applying to pretty much everything that I can, so hopefully something will come up soon, but hell, it’s getting a bit tedious emailing and sending out letters all the time. Meantime I’ve just started trying to get a normal job, as in, a rubbish job that I don’t actually want, because that money stuff that everybody loves so much is starting to become sparse in my general vicinity, and I need money to drink, and buy stuff. And eat.

Not been doing much drawing or anything because of all that crap, but I think I have a couple of sketches, hold on…

YogiJump

Apparently that’s all I have scanned that I can show right now. I’ve got a few comics that I did but they need inking and stuff.

But yeah, I was working from that fancy ‘Hanna Barbera Treasury‘ book (which is astounding) for a while, trying to draw the characters from model sheets and stuff and then giving it a shot on my own, this was my best Yogi, which is still pretty average, but I’ll have another crack at him when I stop applying for these blasted jobs. I did some Quick Draw McGraw too but that’s not scanned.

Suppose I’ll leave it there. Oh, and the spam keeps on coming, anyone got any ideas on how to get rid of it other than having to delete them all the time?

I’d like to apologise for two things.

1: My absence - I’m very, very busy with animation at the moment and I have no time to spend updating this. Even the time I’m spending now should be being put into some animation. Regular posting will resume in couple of months.

2: The huge amount of porn spam I’m getting in the comments sections. I have no idea how to stop it but am attempting to delete them as often as possible.

Apparently Geoff from Hanna-Barbera Town liked my Yogi Bear sketches from a while ago and will be sticking them up on his blog, which is nice of him. You should probably check the place out, there’s some great stuff on there.

There’s not really that much more to say at the moment. I might get some blogging time early February as I’ll be at Animex (the university’s animation festival), but until then I’m going to be trying to make stuff look alive even though it’s not through the magic of computers.

Cheers for reading,

- Matt

(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

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.

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.

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.

Bleh, been in a bit of a slump recently, I dunno what it is, I think I’m getting impatient with the rate of my skill development as I tend to every so often. Still struggling with anything bordering on realism as usual, and I’m not happy with the poses I’m putting out in my cartoon sketches.

I’ll get over it soon enough.

So today I’ve been looking at some cartoons that I haven’t really checked out since I was a kid. Generally speaking since starting my degree I’ve pretty much ignored most television animation that I grew up with, assuming it all would be disappointingly cheap and nasty looking if I saw them now, but today I had the sudden urge to take a look at Alvin and the Chipmunks (the 1980’s series) on YouTube and was pleasantly surprised by the opening titles.

It wasn’t superb, certainly, but it was compared to a lot of the stuff that was about in the 80s, and it leant much more towards Disney than it did the limited stylings of Hanna-Barbera.

As often happens when I get suitably impressed by an animation, I’m now on the lookout for a DVD of the show, but it looks like I’m going to have to delve into Region 1 because I can’t seem to find an R2 release.

Anyways,

From today’s Chipmunk realisation.

Street Scene

I wanted to see what I came out with without using any construction lines (how I used to draw).

Yogi

The one on the left is copied, so don’t give me credit for the nice pose. The one on the right is all mine.

And this final sketch is part of some concept sketches for what should become my final year project at university, I’m putting it up here in good faith, so please don’t rob me blind, as it were.

Final Year Project

That’s all for today, come back soon.

I cleaned up and coloured that Raz pic today, but I’m not too pleased with it. I still need a lot more practice with digital painting, but hell, you may as well see it.

RazCol.jpg

I dunno, I prefer the original sketch by a mile. This is a bit naff. Plus I somehow forgot his backpack and didn’t correct the horrible eye mistake. Ah well, live and learn and other cliches.

In other news I finished BioShock today. It was blimmin’ amazing. I felt the ending was a bit abrupt though, didn’t really give me chance to muse over the climax as I tend to do when I’ve just been told a good story, so it kinda deflated the whole thing. Still, never before has a game told a story so well without any cutscenes whatsoever (ignoring the beginning and end), Half-Life 2 has been officially dethroned. Though only just, mostly because of G-Man’s voice. That is one fine voice he has, and I don’t even swing that way.

I also did a bunch of drawings today, but I can’t really be damned to photograph them now so I’ll post ‘em up tomorrow, just for you. Have a pleasant evening.

Man, I’ve been playing BioShock a lot recently, mostly because it has the best story ever, in the world, and I want to kiss it.

If you have an Xbox 360, or a fancy PC, you really should check it out, it continues to amaze me every time I fire it up and consequently wet myself with fear and joy simultaneously.

But enough about BioShock for now, I’ve finally attempted to get my head around Burne Hogarth’s Dynamic Anatomy (a book, not his actual anatomy, which may or may not have been dynamic). I’m kind of starting to grasp it, but I’m not reading all the words because they scare me. Actual muscles names may indeed be useful, but they’re a bit daunting for me, so I just draw the pictures and read the distances between each body part. Ah well.
Anyways, here’s the best of today’s produce (there were many others that sucked royally) -

Ears and Necks

Eyes and Nose 2

Eyes and Nose 1

Ugly Looking Blokes

And one more from BioShock, just for kicks. I forgot the canister things on his back, but I’ll add them on when I clean it up.

Big Daddy

Speaking of cleaning up, I’ll hopefully have chance to stick that Raz picture up from yesterday with inks and colours at some point this week, I quite liked that one. And possibly the Clown picture too.

Well, that’s me done for now.