Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Is A-Ha still hiring?

Hey there folks. Just thought I'd give you another quick school update, since I know that's the real reason you come here. Sorry you have to suffer through so many comics to get to the good stuff.

In the event that both the movie industry and my gig with Dire Straights don't pan out, for the last month I've been working on some 2D animation skills during my aptly named "2D Animation" class.

This isn't Flash or anything like that. This is drawing on pieces of paper, lots of pieces of paper, then flipping them back and forth over and over again (like a flipbook), all the while erasing and fixing the horrible mistakes you made the first few times around. Once you've got to a point that you think looks good, you take digital images of all of your drawings, then make it into a video. The purpose of this class was to give us a good solid background in traditional "animation", that we can then carry over to the digital 3D world.

My teacher, Kathy Blackmore, was an animator for Disney for around 8 years, working on projects such as Brother Bear, Lilo and Stitch, and Mulan. Pretty amazing credentials in the 2D world. During the class, we did small projects that demonstrated various principles of animation.

So here's what I've been working on and although they look pretty simple, they took quite a bit of effort. I've looped all of the them because they're so short. Some are meant to be looped, others will have a bit of a jump when they go back to the beginning. Hope you enjoy!

Facebook viewers - click here to see the videos.





















Now at least I've got A-Ha as a backup.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow---that's impressive work! I love the running man!

BC said...

that guy on the box looks like he is taking a deuce.

good job.

Katie Goulding Sierer said...

So amazing! Great work!

Unknown said...

wow thats pretty hardcore.. nice work!

what happened to the ball under the lever in the 2nd one?

D Wheezy said...

That's a result of compositing multiple layers. I drew the background (counter top) on one, layer, each of the two moving balls on their own layers, and the fulcrum / lever thing on a layer. That way if the timing is bad for one I don't have to redraw everything.

The software that puts them all together is exactly super advanced - so sometimes it loses bits of layers that are drawn in lighter. At least that's my theory.