Thursday, August 26, 2010

Sneak Peek Stop Motion Extravaganza!

As I've mentioned, I'm currently working on my own film whenever I get a chance. It's a collection of short stories that my dad has told me about his childhood. The first story is in production at the moment with a run time of about one minute. It's primarily going to be hand drawn in Toon Boom 5 (soon to be Toon Boom 6 whoOooooOoOoaaaa), but there's a few small segments that are stop motion.

I've been working on compositing my stop motion footage I shot over at Asterisk Animation courtesy of Richard. I can't thank him enough for his help and generosity. It was ridiculously stressful trying to get everything to work together, but between 2 computers, 2 different stop motion programs, 2 cameras, and some ghetto lighting, it all managed to come together.

The big stop motion scene is underwater. Overall things went pretty well. I was very satisfied with the animation of the three fish characters, however I was a little disappointed with my animation of the plants. The armatures I used were made of steel wire (big mistake!) and the arms of the plants were very difficult to move in the small increments needed to create a subtle swaying underwater look. Right now they move way too fast and way too much. I may just end up taking stills of each plant arm and using the puppet tool in AE. I know that's cheating, but I want this film to look stellar.

Anyway, here's a little sneak peek of one of the characters. I haven't settled on a look for the ocean yet so there's no background at the moment, but you get the idea.



And here's a still that I created as a style frame for the underwater shot. It already looks quite a bit different, but at least you can see the look of the puppets. More to come in the next few weeks!

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

GLEE!!

Here's my latest from Howcast. I'm busy trudging away on my personal film, as well as several freelance projects. Expect many posts in the near future!