"A Time for All Seasonings" on Vimeo

For those of you who didn't know I made an animated short film, well...I made an animated short film. I uploaded the video to Vimeo and it's a bit larger than the video posted to the film's website.

So here it is. As a film, it contains some very beautiful and cheerful animation, a great(improvised) piano score. It also has all the short comings of a first film by a first-time filmmaker.

To this day, I'm grateful to everyone who worked on it (all the animation drawings and mattes were individually scanned, cleaned and painted). That's why the list of assistant artists is so long. Even if someone just worked on the project for a day, I put their name up there.

A chunk of my animation on the film is from back in college (ten years ago) along with some great animation by professionals Mike Owens and Joe Merideth who came in and matched my style of animation extremely well.

A Time for All Seasonings from bj crawford on Vimeo.

Subway animation inbetweened

This piece was roughed out for an in-class demo at Columbia College. And it sat there.

Then I cleaned the keys up. And it sat there.

Then I added an ending to it in rough storyboard form. And it sat there.

This week I finally inbetweened and scanned it. And now it sits here:

Subway from bj crawford on Vimeo.

RUN!!!

Hello all. This is a run I did a few years back. I like it because it's in perspective. It feels a bit all over the place, but it undeniably has an energy to it.

SO, SO, SO Close

I am one step away from calling the Panda animation DONE. I started this piece a year and a half ago after being inspired by Jon J Muth's work. I've tirelessly chipped away at painting each frame level by level until this week, when I finish the final section and exported the movie with a bit of sound added to make it feel complete. The only additional task is to add some movement to the foreground branches. I wanted to add them in this time, just to show the overall composition.

Almost Complete ZEN PANDA from bj crawford on Vimeo.

The very first test I did of the project looked like THIS:



It's come along way since May 2008. I enjoyed combining animation and watercolor but I can't say that I'd do it again. It's very time consuming and only a fraction of the time was devoted to the character animation.

Again, thanks to the inspiring work of Jon J Muth and since this is more or less a holiday post here's the cover art from his lastest book "The Christmas Magic":

Meltdown

***UPDATE*** This piece of animation got added to a Vimeo channel called MOTION FARM. Anyone who is a fan of animation should check this channel out.

The sound clip for November's 11 Second Club contest was too good to pass up. I laugh every time I listen to it. The folks that run the website are always offering up interesting and different tracks to work with. Plus, I work best under deadlines, so there you have it.

Meltdown from bj crawford on Vimeo.

My first impluse after hearing the track was to go and look at all of my Norman Rockwell books. He's the best artist to draw inspiration from because every piece he creates is teeming with rich narrative. I try and start every animation with an idea, not a specific piece of acting, but a narrative idea, and then the acting flows out of that. Here is one of the many images of Santa created by Rockwell:



I didn't get the idea of using Santa from Rockwell, but I thought of the idea while looking through his books, so I thought I'd just focus in on using his version of Santa as a starting point.


Here is the very, very first pass I did of the animation. This test is at 50% of the size I ended up animating the actual drawings at.



Thanks again to everyone who stops by to read my blog.

A Day For Hand Drawn Animation - 2009

Today I'll be enthusiastically celebrating the hand-drawn holiday, here:

WALKIN'

Here are a few great videos for you to enjoy:


The first one is a robot walking like a human. Uh, WOW.



And here is my great friend Joe Merideth teaching a class at Columbia College Chicago on the mechanics of a walk.

Walk Demo Prt 1 from Joseph Merideth on Vimeo.

And finally, here is Joe's key test of his walk cycle.

Rough Key Test from Joseph Merideth on Vimeo.