The very talented Bobby Pontillas asked me on several occasions when I'd be doing my "Blue Sky" post. He keeps checking the blog (probably not any more) to see if it's up. Here it is Bobby..
I've been at Blue Sky for a couple months now and it's been an awesome experience. It's hard to describe what it's like to be surrounded by so much talent. Everyone there knows there stuff and sets very high standards for themselves. It's made me push harder as an animator than I ever have. Producing animation that has character, personality and appeal is tough and this studio does it the best.
Having said that, here is some animation that shouldn't be over analyzed or scrutinized. It was done entirely for fun.
Glenn Close has a fantastic voice. Her over-the-top role in Andrew Lloyd Webber's over-the-top musical adaptation of Sunset Boulevard is a goldmine for an animator. I heard the broadway recording of the musical 8-9 years ago and my friend and I knew from the start that it would be great to experiment with animating even a small sliver of her performance as Norma Desmond. I found a 30 second clip and blocked out the action. It's been good for me to explore animating an extended scene of a female character. Here's just a taste of the scene I'm chipping away at:
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.
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.
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.
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":
***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.
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.
