A Bun House Christmas 2015

Made a little animated holiday card featuring the Bun House crew. I was listening to a lot of Charlie Brown's Christmas while making this and it definitely affected the whole vibe. Enjoy.

Metal Gear Solid V: Snake's Worst Day

This animation was inspired by a series of doodles I was making while playing through Metal Gear Solid V. I enjoyed a lot of the games gadgets and mechanics and thought it would be fun to explore those in an animated short. I also got to test out and play with the most updated version of Duik, which was pretty educational. It is far more robust that the older versions and rigging is now much more powerful.

New Walk Cycles with Duik 15

Yes it's been months since I've updated this ol' thing, but I haven't forgotten about it. I've just been doing a lot of freelance work and not a lot else recently. However, Duik just recently released they update to Duik 15 and it has a lot of awesome new features. The one I was most excited about was the ability to finally rig and animate 4 legged animals. Below are some walk cycles I've done so far with it. The dog isn't perfect but for a first trial I definitely learned a lot.

Reddit Gets Drawn (Animated) - 2 - Man with Orange Balloon

It came as quite a surprise to me that after my recent Reddit Gets Animated entry I received a personal message from a fellow Redditor.  In the message they explained how they loved the style and had a friend for whom they wished to do something similar.  Being a good Redditor I could not refuse such a request, so below is the result!

Reddit Gets Drawn (Animated) - 1 - Man in Orange Hoody Holds Cat

As many others do, I often find myself browsing Reddit throughout the day while twiddling my thumbs at work. When I am especially bored I will venture to the subreddit Reddit Gets Drawn. In this particular subreddit various users will submit photos (much like the one I've shown below) and other users will draw them in various ways. I decided to try taking it to the next level and making a short animated .gif of the person instead. I hope to do this more in the future, but here's the first ever Reddit Gets Animated.

Fox Run

Being slow at work means more run cycle tests. I'm always trying to figure out and get better at animal run cycles...they are a whole different beast.  Here's my attempt at a fox.

After Effects "2D/3D" Head Turn Rig Tutorial Follow Up - Run and Walk Cycles

So in the post prior to this one I shared a little tutorial I made about created a "2D/3D" character head turn in After Effects.  I played around a little more to see how this would fit into my full body character rig workflow and I was pretty pleased with the results. I even took it a step farther and made a torso turn that was parented to the head turn.  At the end of the day it may not seem like a huge difference, but being able to freely turn a characters head back and forth is a new achievement for me and really opens a lot more doors when it comes to what's possible with some light character animation in After Effects. No tutorial this time, but enjoy a few .gifs of the results.

After Effects "2D/3D" Head Turn Rig Tutorial

Recently I've been wanting to push my animated characters to the next level, and for me that means turning heads. It's the obvious next step in the progression of making your characters that much more dynamic and believable. I've seen many artists rigs and animations with this sort of idea implemented, but I have a tough time finding solid tutorials or guides into how to truly make this rig. However, I did find this video from Ross Plaskow on simply making a 2D head turn.



This is an amazing tutorial to get started and I definitely suggest you watch it before mine; however, this video stopped just 1 step short of where I wanted to actually get to. I wanted to see how to actually take that head turn and then implement it into a full body character rig like one might make using Duik. After some experimenting and fumbling around I ended up creating the tutorial below. It's not the most in depth thing you'll watch all day, but hopefully it unlocks just enough inspiration for you to take this and use it in your own rigs moving forward. Hope you enjoy.

Foxy Walk Cycle

It dawned on me recently that I have never made an animal character before...and this is a huge problem. So I decided to work some in to my most recent project. I designed a little foxy lady and made her walk today, I was pretty pleased with the result.

Moment of Truth

This is an animation I put together for my sister for one of her midwife classes. They were tasked with making a video on the moment they realized that they wanted to be a midwife. I said, "That's cool, but let's make it an animation." So she did the writing and provided the VO while I did the animating. In the end it was really fun to take a story like this and bring it to life in a way only animation could. Getting free creative reign is something you don't find often in client work so it was fun to just let my hair down on this one and not worry if I was hitting the mark or not.



Storyboard Images

Animation Samples

Rooties 2015 Creative Excellence Award Presentation

Each year at my work we have an event where we all get together, have fun, and also give out awards to people who best represent our core values. In 2014 I won the award for Creative Excellence, which meant that it was my duty to preset the 2015 winner with their award. To do this I decided to do what I always do, which is make an animation. Had a lot of fun making a robot...I actually found that I don't do enough random characters after making this piece. It was a nice change of pace for me.

Bun House Film's entry for the Tree City 50 Hour Film Festival: Missing Meow

For the second year in a row my friends and I aka Bun House Films, have entered into Sylvania's Tree City Film Festival. The festival is a 50 hour film challenge, which basically means we only have 50 hours to complete the entire film and turn it in. The genres are selected at random and this year we were given "The Cat Lady". I think if we learned anything from our experience this year it's that cats are straight divas. Please enjoy our entry, Missing Meow, and a view at our Behind The Scenes. Until next year!

Tree City's 3rd Annual Film Festival Poster

Last year I had the joy of participating in the Tree City Film Festival with my film troupe, Bun House Films.  This year we are back, but I also had the opportunity to design the poster for the event this year. 

I was provided with a single line to inspire my design - "The root of all evil." From there my mind started working up ideas.  I looked at a bunch of other poster designs and tried to pull things I liked from all of them to create my own piece.  One thing I liked was creative use of negative space.  Obviously poster designs need room for text so this is a useful technique to create space.  I also really liked when poster designs were kept to a very small color palette.  For my poster I ended up using 4 greens based off of Tree City's main brand green.  The actual design was just my interpretation of the line I was given.  Obviously the city is known for their tree's so I wanted to tie that in as much as possible.  The film festival actually takes place in a historic train barn so incorporating that somehow was another goal of mine.  From there I just began creating this eerie and whimsical world which you see below.  I was given a lot of free reign on this design so I really just let the artwork lead me in creating the final piece. I'm happy with how it came out and I can't wait to participate this year!

Micah 8 Year Portrait

Recently had the privilege of doing a portrait for another coworker.  When someone at my company has their 8 year anniversary they are rewarded with a much larger and more robust portrait.  This was the first 8 year portrait I've been able to do so I was particularly excited.  This was also my first time attempting pixel art seriously. It was a little bit of a risk combining two firsts like that, but I think it paid off. I really enjoy the 8bit result.

Chris Koelsch Animation Reel 2014

Hello all! I come to you quite relieved to finally present you with my 2014 animation reel. If you're checking your calendar you probably noticed that we're halfway through March already. Yea...it happens. That just means this reel has a little extra juice for you. Oh, and the music was provided by the lovely Eric M. C. Gonzalez. You can check out more of his work here. Enjoy the reel!

Bun House Logo 3D

It's been a while since I've posted, but I've been pretty busy with side projects and finishing my new reel up (which will also be posted in the near future). Anyways, enough excuses. Here is my first real attempt at getting back into 3D animation since college, which for me is about 7 years. I created this in Cinema4D and for anyone who doesn't know, for a beginner, that program can be quite daunting. Luckily I had watched enough tutorials and was comfortable enough with After Effects that most of those skills carried over. Regardless it was a lot of fun to make and animate something from start to finish. I hope to do more 3D animation in the near future.

Kurt

I created this portrait for a coworker, but he said he "wasn't the biggest fan of it".

The Bun House Gang in Cutting Room Floor - UNFINISHED

Bun House Films first attempt at an animated film. This is the first two minutes of what ended up being a little bit of an over ambitious project. However, I didn't want the work I did to sit around doing nothing so I thought I would post the first two minutes.