Print-a-Palooza!

I worked on this piece over winter break and finished it late January but wasn't allowed to share until today! So this was for Print-a-Palooza which is a non-profitable art print sale for charity, centered around 3 popular Cartoon Network shows! 100% of the proceeds will be donated to the charity Angels on Stage. The 3 Cartoon Network shows are Adventure Time, Regular Show, and Steven Universe!

My characters were were these dudes

   

Iacedrom and Ybgir, which is Mordecai and Rigby backwards. They're from an alternative universe where they hate giving speeches. So my thinking was I can either make them more realistic, or make them cartoony BUT if I make them cartoony people might mistake them for the regular Mordecai and Rigby so I went with realistic.

This was an initial concept with all kinds of gumball machines in the background.

One of them is Pops

Then I had this idea of the park being its own planet like King Kai's planet in DBZ

I wanted most of the piece to be traditional so I painted the space background out of watercolor.

 

The rendered drawing for the dudes.

And the finished version! I tried to make the grass and trees in front of the house be a Shrunkenheadman Logo but maybe its too subtle, or just enough. The planet and characters I colored digitally. But yea check out all the other prints too, everyone did a great job and they're only 8 bucks each! 

http://printapalooza.storenvy.com/

New Header

Old header was boring and old, this ones from a painting I did a while back and heres a quick step by step till finish!

 

I forgot to save so jumps to this knight

Textures make everything nice

Personal Film!

With all the BFA projects and other projects happening, I decided it would be smart to also work on a personal film project during any free time I don't have! Just in case it somehow get's done in the future I won't give out much detail about the story but basically it's about a reverse relationship between man and parrot. This being the first time I started completely digitally for a film project, I wanted to share my progress so far! (This is in Flash)

This shot is not too complicated, the parrot is watching tv, hears the coo coo clock, and realizes it's feeding time. Here is a rough animatic for it done by Samia Khalaf.

For my first pass I just wanted to try moving this new character in space and get overall timing close to what I was thinking from the animatic. 

I felt it was a little simple so I tried changing the action in a second pass. After looking at some parrot videos I made his turn quicker like parrots do. Trying to get the subtle movements down is tricky but in Flash at least it's faster and easier to inbetween.

So I have a lot more to go but so far really enjoying working on this thing!

Behind my Behind!

That was the title of the film project I worked on over the summer, directed and created by David Chai! This one I felt was a real challenge because none of us on the crew ever did stop-motion animation so the whole process was a good learning experience for us all.

Some character sheets I made for the main character

Before I get to the stop motion part I'll go over what I did for the 2D side. The film is about Ernest Knapp, a man who feels miserable with life until one day he discovers something right in his own home. My first task was to animate people in a subway train with Ernest, then a bunch of other people piling in and squishing him.

Although that wasn't always the case, the original animatic had Ernest just sad on the train.

This is the animatic for the updated version.

I really liked all of Dave's design for the subway characters so I wanted to keep it as close as I could to them. Here they are one by one.

and here's the finished version! Inked by Melissa Paff, background by Catharina Sukiman.

For stop motion shots we had to animate in pencil first to get rough planning and timing for the shot to make it easier on us noobies. Luckily it turned out to be more helpful than we thought since we found out in DragonFrame you can import a video file and follow it frame by frame! My shot was Ernest blowing a kiss. This was hard because I had to get the right feeling of longing, loving, sentimental and happiness.

The animatic for the shot.

My first test for it was too happy and carefree.

 He needed to feel nostalgic and sad but a happy sadness like he's moved on.

After getting somewhat close, next came animating it with puppets! The fabrication part was challenging as well. We only had one person creating the puppet the entire time as she had the most experience and access to the lab equipment. The awesome Rosie Diaz had to go through many trials and errors with different types of puppets before the final one was made.

Here's two early versions she made before casting and molding the final version, which is on my head.

Animating this guy was fun and challenging. It got a little frustrating sure when it wouldn't cooperate the way we wanted it to but we had to make do with what we had! We would use other people to help hold the puppet while another person animated and took the pictures. I learned a lot from stop motion, in traditional and CG animation the movement is thought out and can be easily manipulated, for our set up since the puppet wasn't really held down, we had to be quick and hope the shot in the end would work. It was amazing how little and how large you would have to move him for the pose you want to work.

With the help of Samia Khalaf, we were able to create this shot in the end. I'm very pleased with it and feel we kept it pretty close to the original!