New films on the way!

So, I finished my Animation Production Film Final today! It took a few (several thousand) hours to actually complete, but my instructor and I managed to get it all done! I'm not uploading either film to YouTube or even here until after the showing on Thursday, but once that's done and my films have been officially presented, I'll let everyone on the net see them as well! I can't wait to get some feedback (or at least I hope I'll get some feedback) but I'm also nervous... my films never quite turn out exactly as I had planned. Usually I can hardly stand to watch them for about a month after they're finished, cuz all I see are the gaping holes for things I wanted to do and the imperfections in the things I did. Looking back now at my two older films, I love and appreciate them a whole lot more than I did after they were first finished... but I guess that's just the way it goes with artists. We are our worst critics.
Anyways, keep an eye out for my upcoming posts! There's sure to be something exciting or enjoyable to someone out there.

Shamefully Overdue...

So it's been a while since I've posted... anything. And seeing as I've got two short films in the pipeline at the moment, I figured it would be good to get a few things up before I spring two more finished products on the world... and I had some free time and thought this should be done. At any rate, in a few more weeks I'll post my finals for both Animation Production and Storyboarding, along with animatics, concept art, and any other little tidbits that go along with them. I don't want to post anything prematurely, since I don't want to give my stories away to more people than necessary... I mean, they're only a couple of minutes. Easily spoiled.
Hopefully everything goes well with my finals and I'm able to get stuff posted in a timely fashion... yeah right. In the meantime, I've uploaded more videos to my YouTube account as well as the video page of this blog. They're just a few more pencil tests and animatics, but they show what I do with my life, so I hope they're at least a little interesting. I mean, I do plan on making these things for a long time. I just hope they entertain someone other than myself.

New stuff in the form of Classwork

So I'm not sure if anyone would notice, but I've been posting a few of my classroom exercises on my video and art pages. There still aren't too many things to see, but there will be over time. As such, I probably won't be posting on the front page every time I add something, so be sure to check the other pages for updates every week or so!

How things should be.

So here's one of those posts on some of my inspirations. This is actually something I vaguely remember as a kid and actually discovered a few days ago. It's a segment from Sesame Street (old school Sesame Street... not sure which decade) and is, in my opinion, a brilliant peice of animation. The way the animators used not only the drawings on the dishes but also the shapes and movement of the dishes themselves to tell the simple story is wonderful! And what's really astounding is that these types of segments (Little Super Guy) were fairly common and continually different! The mere fact that people working on a public television show for preschoolers took enough time to create painstaking stop motion animations just astounds me! And aside from that, makes me want to work in this field myself. ;)
The Sesame Street crew really went above and beyond over the years with not only stop motion animations and puppetry, but also beautiful hand animated segments, all for the benefit of little kids. If only more people nowadays would take so much pride in their work and care for their audience.

Design changes again...

Hey there! Since I seem to create art more than usual during the school semesters, expect there to be a lot more content up on the blog as the weeks go by. However, the majority of this stuff will be going straight to the art or video pages and won't be posted on the front page. And SINCE there's going to be a great deal more art and whatnot, I'm going to try and make some pages within pages so it's a little more organized and not just a huge page of pictures. So! Once I figure out exactly how to do this, ... it WILL be done!

Sneak Peak!

Here's a preview of one of my exercises in Animation Production: animate an interaction between a teapot and a teacup, using seperate layers for each character. This is just the test taken off one of the monitors we use to try our animation before we turn it in. I know it's hard to see, which is why it's just on the front page and not the video page. I'll be uploading the actual animation soon: most likely next week. And that'll be the actual, clear animation from the computer! Enjoy! ;)

Here's a sketch I did just recently of my cat Felix lounging about under the covers on my bed. It's sketched from a photograph, much in the same way my recent storyboard exercises were. I'm getting more and more used to sketching from real life, and am quite enjoying the results!