Glenn Davis - Be Honest - UNOFFICIAL Music Video

I recently had the pleasure to work on one of my first full fledged music videos. The musician in question is Glenn Davis of the band Way Yes.  At the end of this month he will be releasing his very first solo album titled Waves & Webs.  Glenn recently helped me create the music for my 2016 reel and as a fellow Ohio native I felt extremely connected to helping him create a video for his single, Be Honest.  His entire album centers around the turmoil that followed a failed marriage, so all of his songs have a shared meaning in love and loss.  Be Honest is unique in that it has a very driving beat and higher energy than his other singles.  When we discussed ideas for the music video we tossed around all things relating to what honesty is and what it means in different forms.  We landed on the idea of chameleons and their ability to shift their colors.  How this effects their ability to be honest or dishonest with their surroundings and who they are.  We took the idea a step further by having a central character who did not want to conform with the ever changing colors he is being bombarded with on a daily basis. With this in mind I took off to sketching out and developing more ideas, characters, and storyboards.

As you can see my sketchbook is very stream of conscious and rough.  I like to spend the majority of my time actually developing the art and animation.  I use my sketches as a quick way to just put my ideas on paper.  I did everything from research about chameleons to looking at all shapes and sizes of the species. Once I had these things locked down I went into creating my characters and assets.  I knew I wanted the look to be vibrant and alive to match the emotion of the song, so instead of using a clean vector look in Illustrator, I decided to use hand drawn elements in Photoshop to give everything a much more textural feeling.

Now that my assets were created, I was free to bring everything into After Effects and just get down to the nitty gritty of rigging and animating.  When rigging characters I use a program called Duik.  This is a free program that works great with setting up character rigs within After Effects.  All you have to do is label and parent your elements properly and you have a working character rig within minutes.

It's a little challenging showing all the layers in one shot, but this is what the set up looks like after the rigging is done and Duik has performed it's magic.  Basically I get a set of about 8 controls that let me easily manipulate the character in a way that makes sense.  Once this is complete with all the various characters I do all my animating.  After many hours and hundreds of keyframes you end up with the music video you see below.  I hope you enjoy it as much as I did making it!

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.

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!

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!

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.

17th Brussels Short Film Festival - Supervenus

Amazing animation and story telling by Frederic Doazan in his piece, Supervenus. I love the Monty Python-esque style paired with the absolute grotesque and dark humor.

Montenegro

A beautiful short animated film from Luiz Stockler about thoughts, life, anxiety, depression, and going bald.



See more about Luiz' process for this film below.

Ohio

A strangely captivating and oddly engaging story from Maria Blasucci, Andrew DeYoung & Tony Lewellen.

Don't Fail Idaho 'Turning Point'

I've always loved the way BUCK can take small animations and turn them into something bigger through the art of storytelling. This animation could have been created in such a much simpler way, but BUCK goes the extra mile to tie emotion to the piece, which in the end makes it 100% more authentic. It makes you care. That being said the animation itself is smooth as always and I absolutely love the character style at the end of the video.

Ripple - The Future of Money

Really enjoying this animation for the new global payment network, Ripple. Animade has done a wonderful job creating "fluid" transitions and I love how they carry the ripple motif throughout the entire piece.

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!

The Great Heidecker/Scharpling Twitter War

Loving this short from Tim Heidecker about the pains of social media, the tortures of LA, and how we manage our friendships and expectations through this new form of contact that makes us all so accessible. The writing is tight and the animation from Titmouse is a great pairing. I love the use of color in this piece.

DisneyShorts Releases New Mickey Mouse Cartoons

Apparently Disney has been releasing some new Mickey Mouse shorts. I used to absolutely adore the old Disney shorts with Goofy when I was a kid so I was excited to check them out.  I was pleasantly surprised immediately to see that the style has taken on a little bit more of a modern edge (I especially love zombie Goofy), but the slap stick humor and animation is still on par with what you'd expect from Disney.  I only wish now that we could get some new Looney Tunes that were as good as the old ones.

LEFT - trailer

Eamonn O'Neill has just released a new trailer for his short animated film, LEFT. His work is always so emotive and inspirational, I can't wait to see this one released.

The Art of Editing in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

A very interesting analysis of the editing in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly from Max Tohline. It's always intriguing to me when people are capable of breaking down scenes to their core components. Normally I'm just enjoying the film, but it's always fun to see exactly why I'm enjoying one film more than another. That and Clint Eastwood is just a badass.

Night In The Woods - Kickstarter Trailer

Welp, Scott Benson is at it again, and this time it's with the help of Kickstarer and indie video game designer Alec Holowka.  Literally every job Scott works on would be a dream job for me, and this one is no different. Scott and Alec are creating a new indie game called Night In The Woods, and the work they have done so far looks pretty impressive.  The game looks exactly like one of Scott's animations, you almost can't tell that it's gameplay.  The game also looks like it's going to be fairly character and story driven, which could make for some memorable gameplay.  Needless to say, I've already pledged my hard earned dollars to them, now it's just time for them to make it!

I Didn't Know That - Episode 1 (Elton John)

Really like the visual style and audio used for this animation by Young. I've always wanted to see an infographic made out of a shoe.

A Relationship in 5 Minutes

Brilliantly written and acted piece from the folks at Restless Short Films.