Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Cube Spin Test

Recently a coworker approached me with two videos he had seen online (https://vimeo.com/13458659, https://vimeo.com/7576197) and wanted to know if it was possible to recreate the cube spin seen in them without using Cinema 4D or any sort of 3D program. So in an afternoon I whipped up something similar completely within After Effects and you can see the result below. It was made with a few lights, a 3D cube made from 2D shape layers, and some faux shadows.

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

A Guide To American Football

Fraser Davidson has been a LONG time animation inspiration to me. This recent animation he's created that gives a full tutorial to American football is no different. Not only are his colors brilliant and character designs quirky, but his animation is always smooth and drives the story in an engaging and unique way. The best part of this whole animation? He wrote and animated the entire thing himself!

Monday, January 20, 2014

Jungle - Platoon

This music video for Jungle's hit, Platoon is one of those videos I know I would like before I even watched it.

The Bun House Gang: Cutting Room Floor - Update 1

Hello all!  Seeing as how The Bun House Gang: Cutting Room Floor animation is going to be a constant work in progress for me over the next year, I figured it made the most sense, both for me and my audience, to give updates as frequently as possible. This way everyone can see all the work that goes in to something like this and hopefully interacting with fans will give me a little extra boost to keep working when I'm getting in a slump.

I've made a few updates before, showing you the characters I've created.  I now have the full Bun House crew assembled (see below).


My next step in the process was to take these characters into After Effects and get them rigged up and ready for animation.  Seeing as how Cutting Room Floor is going to be heavily based on old Scooby-Doo episodes, it only made sense to copy their iconic title screen.  So below you can see breakdowns of each character's run cycle, and then the final product at the bottom.  Remember to stay tuned for more updates in the future.







Thursday, January 16, 2014

Life Updates

Hey all, I've been fairly busy with a lot of stuff so I apologize for my lack of posts. My life is pretty focused around the things I'm trying to get accomplished. For one, I'm trying to finish my 2013 reel before the end of January. After that I will be working on the first episode of Life of Slim. I was going to try and push it out before the end of the year but it didn't seem right to rush. I want it to be able to take my time with it and make it better than before. I've also been super preoccupied with creating characters for the next Bun House film. This one will be fully animated and I expect it to be one of my biggest projects of next year. In preparation I have been creating the members of Bun House in Life of Slim style one by one. I only have one more to do, but here are the characters I created most recently.


Wednesday, January 8, 2014

Louis C.K.: Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee

Crackle is being a huge butt and not allowing embedding of this video, so you'll have to just click on the image below to get to the video. For those of you that haven't seen Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, it's a show where Jerry Seinfeld does just that.  He picks up various comedians in cool antique cars and gets coffee with them.  This recent episode stars one of my favorite comedians, Louis C.K.  However, that's not the only reason I was excited when watching this.  About half way through Louis tells a long story, which the editors chose to animate over.  I really like the simplistic style, it's just enough to help make the story a little more entertaining.

Thursday, January 2, 2014

Creating and Rigging Spike Timelapse

With Monkey Man: Origins only a week behind me I'm already beginning to think of what new and exciting short films I can make for Bun House Films. The more I thought about it the more it seemed obvious that our brand of humor, gore, and horror would be great for animation. So one of the projects I want to start next year is a short animated horror flick involving all the Bun House crew up to their usual antics. If you've seen my Mean Mug & Slim series then you already know I have an animated character for myself; however, that still left Spike, Dusty, Danny, and Kevin from Bun House to be created before I could start animating anything.  To make it a little more fun I thought I would create each new character one by one, and then release them in a series with each new character killing off the last.  For the first installment I created Spike, and naturally he killed my character.  You can see the making of Spike's character below, and make sure to keep an eye out for the next kill...