Sun Maker

A little late to the show, but I'm finally getting around to sharing the film I created with my friends for Sylvania's 2016 Tree City Film Festival. This film was a part of the 50-hour challenge during the festival. This basically means we had 50 hours to write, shoot, and edit a film (not a lot of time for those of you who don't know!) Before the teams break out and begin they are each given a genre (ours was western), a prop (lightbulb), a character name (Robin Chandler), and a line of dialogue ("it's in the trunk."). All of these elements must be incorporated somehow into your film for you to be accepted. So, we got our elements on Friday night and set off into the weekend of work and filming. We honestly used EVERY bit of time we had to make this film come to life, but I've honestly never been more proud of something that I filmed. We shot the whole thing on just my iPhone using the Filmic Pro app and a Moondog Anamorphic lens. After all was said and done I'm happy to say that this year, our 3rd time entering the festival, we won best picture! Ok, enough suspense, please enjoy both the film and the behind-the-scenes below.

機関銃ポップコーン - Machine Gun Popcorn

Over the past weekend the Bun House Films team and I entered the 2014 Tree City 50 Hour Film Festival.  It was certainly a challenge to get a film out in just one weekend, but we managed to make it by the skin of our teeth while still upholding the quality and humor that you've all come to expect from the Bun House name.

We were given a genre (Bad Martial Arts), a prop (National Geographic Magazine), and a line to say in the film ("If a tree falls").  With those ingredients, below is what we collectively came up with.  We call it, Machine Gun Popcorn.  Enjoy.

Almost King

Another submission for Animade's Full Secs project from Unter freiem Himmel. I really enjoy his character design and painterly style. It reminds me a lot of the old Monty Python animations.

120 BPM

Jean Brochefort created this for the Vimeo Weekend Challenge "One to One hundred", but really it's just another one of those simple and effective ideas that I wish I had thought of first.  I love how our brains only need a second of audio to recognize a song, and how all the songs put together almost create a new song.

World's Fastest Snail

I've sort of lost track of Animade's Full Secs project, but every once in a while I catch one on Vimeo that I really enjoy. This is one of them from Erika Bernetich.

To This Day Segment 21

Not long ago I stumbled across the To This Day Project. A spoken word poem written by Shane Koyczan on the topic of school bullying was to be split into 20 second segments and given to various animators. It was then up to them to create something meaningful that would be shown at different schools around the country. I knew I wanted to be apart of something so powerful and collaborative, so I signed up immediately. I was given Segment 21, which I soon found out was the second to last segment of the poem. I recently finished my animation and you can view it below. I went in a bit different direction than my initial storyboards (mostly in style choices), but for the most part I held close to what I envisioned. I wanted to do something a bit different for me stylistically and tried to use this opportunity as a way of experimenting with a few new things. I will be sure to post the full video when it comes out so keep your eyes peeled.

To This Day

Well this is my first post of 2013, and it only seems right to start it off with a new animation community project. This one comes from Giant Ant.  The project is simple: Shane Koyczan wrote a spoken word poem and you are animating it.  All you have to do it go to tothisdayproject.com/, listen to the poem, sign up by January 10th and you'll receive your 20 second chunk of the poem to animate any way you see fit.  The poem is about the lasting impact bullying and violence in schools can have.  Seems like a worthy cause to me, I've already signed up.

Animade Full Secs

Yet another thing to submit to. This one comes from the guys at Animade. They've made this system of animations consisting of a 2 second intro, 1 full second of animation, and a 2 second outro. Some are pretty brilliant, some are ok. Below is one of my favorites, but you can check them all out at Animade's channel here.

Star Wars Uncut - Something Is Wrong

Star Wars Uncut scene 2 complete, and with only hours to spare. I honestly believe the only reason I completed this was because I had so much energy behind it after creating the first background. This was actually the original scene I was going to choose, and now after completing both I know I should have followed my gut. However, I'm still glad I got to do both because they were good experiences for different reasons. As I said in my Landing At Bespin post, I appreciated the attention to detail that went into these shots, and I also had fun playing with color. For my 'Something Is Wrong' scene I got to play around more with character animations which was a lot of fun. Yet the attention to detail was still there in this scene as well (I love the ship that flies by right as Han kisses Leia.)

Here is the original clip:

One of the challenges of replicating this scene was that there are a lot of human movements that are difficult to recreate using 2D characters. For example, right at the cut Leia spins around to look at the door. This movement is almost impossible to achieve the way I typically animate, so I had to do some "frame by frame" animation to achieve the look. If I had had more time I would have liked to add a few more tweens in this sequence.

I got lucky with Han, I could pretty much fake all his motion with only one 2D character.

Here you can take a closer look at the backgrounds. I had the most fun making these environments simply because they are so visually perfect that when you replicate them they are bound to look good. I put the frame around it because I wanted my final video to remain compositionally close to what the original was, and 16:9 simply wasn't cutting it.  Once again it's all in the details, I especially love the light that comes in from the ceiling and splashes on the wall.

Lastly, my final challenge was to make Han talk. I have never really done lip syncing in any of my Mean Mug & Slim work, but I had recently seen a tutorial and wanted to give it a try.

Below is the tutorial and an image I was working from to help create the different mouths.  I am pretty happy with how it came out, the only thing I would do differently next time is add a few more mouth variations.  There were a few occasions where I felt like none of the mouth shapes worked.

The Past Re-imagined As The Future

Came upon a wonderful little video contest today that involves two of my favorite things: audio tracks from Free Music Archive and video from the Prelinger Archives. I don't see the point in explaining much further when someone has taken the time to create an awesome video that does so.  However, for more information check out their site here. Deadline is November 4th.

Star Wars The Empire Strikes Back - Uncut

It's baaaaaaaaaack. You heard it here folks, they are finally doing another uncut version on Star Wars and this time it's for The Empire Strikes Back.  For those of you who aren't familiar, this is a user generated version of the Star Wars movies. You go to their site, Star Wars Uncut, pick your 15 second scene, and then you have 30 days to recreate it in any fashion that you like.  Then when all is said and done the pieces are stitched together to create a completely original and often hilarious masterpiece.  For inspiration check out how A New Hope came out when they did this the first time. Now that so many more people are aware of the project I expect The Empire Strikes Back version to be even better.

Grey Scale Gorilla 5 Second Project - Command-Z

Yes, once again Grey Scale Gorilla's 5 Second Project is here. They come so rarely that you really have to take the opportunity when they come around. This project's theme is Command-Z, and anyone who has ever worked on anything has used this function before. What would the world be like if we couldn't undo?

SQU - Animation Sequence Project

I did it. I don't know how I did it, but I did it. With literally no time and what seemed like for the longest time no ideas, I created a piece for the Animation Sequence Project that I am happy with. I suggest going to the site yourself. A lot of the entries I've seen are pretty amazing.

Animation Sequence Project - Julien Martorell

I recently posted about the Animation Sequence Project and since then I have seen a few very promising entries. This one below comes to us from Julien Martorell. Very slick animations backed up with some solid audio. I am still hoping I can finish one before the end of the month.

Gerhard Human

Animboom along with Radiohead came up with an animation contest in 2008. The winning video would launch Radiohead's new album. This particular entry from Gerhard Human was a finalist but not the winner. However, I think his style is fucking awesome and I love the space and depth he creates with this piece.

Animation Sequence Project

Alright, another animation contest!  This one is called the Animation Sequence Project and what's special about this contest is that it is collaborative in a way.  Everyone will start with a 250 pixel square in the center of the screen, after that it's anything goes for 10 seconds, and then the video must end again with the 250 pixel square.  The top animations will be spliced together to create a unique 1-3 minute piece which will be shown at animation festivals around the world.  This sounds right up my alley, can't wait to start.