Sophie Roach

Very vibrant and detailed illustrations from Sophie Roach.  Wish I could animate this work, I love the line quality and hand drawn feel.  I could see making looping animations in where all the elements are moving and interacting with eachother. Call me up Sophie, let's do this!

Photo of the Moment - Ghost Dog

I'm definitely doing this to my cat.

House of Wine / Morandé

I'm very fond of this animation from Fluor Films on the process of making wine, from start to finish. Where to start? I love the ink like quality of the graphics paired with the texture throughout. I also enjoyed that they only stuck to about 6 colors. The pacing is great, I never felt overwhelmed but I also never felt confused or bored. Lastly, the compositions and transitions really make this a solid piece. The conveyor belt scene is one of my favorites. If you like what you see I suggest checking out Flour Film's site for more work.

Cel Animation Tutorial // Mr Cube Breakdown

Today I bring you a fantastic little tutorial from Casey Latiolais on his amazing Grey Scale Gorilla 5 Second Project called Mr. Cube. Before I say anything else, take 5 seconds and watch this beautiful piece of animation.



Wow, still looks great even today. What I love about this tutorial is that it didn't take a lot of fancy plug-ins or secrets to achieve this look. The process was actually quite basic. I think that really says something, but go ahead and look for yourself. You can also find Casey's project files here.

Photo of the Moment - Berlin Märkisches Viertel VI 2012

Berlin Märkisches Viertel VI 2012, a photo by derkleinekönig on Flickr.

OLO for iOS

I've played OLO and it's quite a lot of fun. It has a great style that Sennep has utilized in this animation promoting it. I'm also quite fond of how they used the split screen in this piece. You can find out more about the game here.

OLO for iOS from Sennep on Vimeo.

The Story of a Man Who Thinks He's a Dog

Alex Goddard shows us all what you can do with 4 days, a pen, some paper, and a scanner.

Friday Sketch Day

I'm trying to sketch more damnit. I promise. Today it's a cat, tomorrow who knows. Probably another cat...

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.

The Wiki Man - Film 1

Quirky little animation illustrating an excerpt from Rory Sutherland's book, "The Wiki Man." Created by Moth Collective and Animade, this animation's personality is as charming and engaging as Rory when he speaks. I find them to be a perfect pairing. To find out more about the book go here.

8-Bit Titles

I've been thinking for my new reel this year that I want to have a video game title screen style opening. When looking for references I stumbled upon this treasure trove of a website called Title Scream.  Here are a few of my favorites from back in the day.

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.

An Afternoon Sketch

Just sketching out my Halloween costume idea...

Cartoon Network turns 20

Well, she's not old enough to drink yet, but she's more than legal. Seeing as how this one channel had a great role in molding me into the person I am today, I felt obligated to post this awesome music video Cartoon Network has created to honor their 20 years of existence.

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.

Photo of the Moment - Untitled

Untitled, a photo by Clemens Fantur on Flickr.

Star Wars Uncut - Landing at Bespin

I finally completed my first Star Wars Uncut: The Empire Strikes Back scene, and with only about one day to spare. I went through a few up and downs with this piece but I think in the end I came out with something I'm pretty proud of. I'd say the most challenging thing was making the ship look convincing in 2D without doing frame by frame animation. What I love about doing a reproduction like this is that it really makes you appreciate the little things that go into the scene. Things people probably won't even notice in my scene. A plane in the distance, a shadow falling across the ship, etc. I'd say the other thing I had fun doing was trying to push the color of the scene to make it a bit more dramatic.

Here is the original scene I was working from.

 I've added a few pictures of the backgrounds I used. For the fly by shots I overlayed images in sequence to make the entire pan in one shot.

BBC Radio 4 - 'Shortcuts'

It seems to be a popular trend with these animations of individual letters that make up a full word. I think this one from James Hatley is one of the more creative and interesting ones I've seen. I love his cartoon style...and Andrew Bird isn't bad either.

Owen Davey

Simply loving the illustrations from Owen Davey. His work has that rustic folk quality that I adore and also fine very challenging to recreate in my own experiences. It would be a joy to animate some of his work and as I came to find out, he actually has animated some. Check out his site for much more inspiring work.

Grizzly Bear "Yet Again"

A very well composed music video for Grizzly Bear's new song "Yet Again" by Emily Kai Bock. After watching a music video of what I thought looked like a series of photographs, it did not surprise me in the least to find that Emily also has a wide range of wonderful photography on her website that is definitely worth checking out.