Pooh

A friend at work had shared some Russian animation with me recently. Super interesting to see/compare to U.S. cartoons. Timing sensibilities, budgets, gags, styles, etc. There's a lot of stuff out there but animation is probably one of the least visible art forms I'd say. Music, dance, painting, sure - all very international. But outside of Japan, it's hard to identify an animation studio outside of the U.S. Perhaps animation wasn't as commercialized in other countries as it was in the U.S., but it makes me wonder how everyone learned and shared their knowledge. How did Tezuka learn? Who were his "nine old men"? The "Illusion of Life" wasn't a hot commodity in Soviet Russia, but there were still people doing animation. Did France, an art mecca, have their version of Disney Animation Studios? How did everyone even start to learn? And once it sorta caught on, how was the information shared? Animation is referred to as an "inbred industry" because it's so small and everyone knows each other and everyone worked with everyone else even if through osmosis. It had to be the same in other countries but even smaller! It's all pretty interesting to me.

Anyway, while watching Russia's "Winnie Pooh", I had to doodle some of the characters. Pretty loose and not really sticking to their model, these were just fun to spit out. I was completely challenged by Pooh's lumpy design. But Piglet stood out as my favorite. I could easily boil him down to something shapely and almost iconic. Fun stuff!

Then I did a simple little interactive (meaning you could click on him...) animation of Piglet but since I can't post .SWFs through blogger you only get two frames :P






Right...I guess you'd hafta watch it to have any sort of comparison:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqdiEUp6s4E

Love the heavy crayon credits at the start!

Trapjaw!

It's no secret TRAPJAW is one of my all time favorite characters. Something about his frankensteined, robo-body really clicked with me when I was 7 years old. And nowadays, I think there's just an interesting mix of characteristics (sharp teeth, bullet-shaped head, jolly roger belt buckle, bionic joints, green face, blue skin, etc.) and geometric shapes that are fun to play with design-wise.

Here's a half-hearted attempt at documenting process. Enjoy!


Here's a sketch! Ran out of paper for his foot! Cropped his hook hand for some reason! Written note of head size doubts!


I cleaned up and colored this image in Photoshop with it's vectors - which I love 10 times more than illustrator. I probably still like doing vector work in Flash the most, but Photoshop has so many other features. I started with his head here blocking in solid shapes for his noggin and jaw. I went as far as cleaning up some lines and defining his face because I wasn't sure where to go artistically. Once I felt good about the head, once I felt like I had a direction, I continued blocking.


Vectoring up his upper body. Scribbling in some muscles.


Lower body vectors! And some layers turned off!


Added a vector robo-arm and the big change here is lengthening his legs. Guess I liked that option over shrinking his head.


Details! Shadow passes and any sorta line work was done with a Wacom. And lookit that - more adorable splotches next to his head!


Adjust colors, some abstract sorta hilites, call it done.

BONUS image! Here's a another fatter, messier, Trapjaw!

Dear Flash,

I need to come clean. I'm finding it harder and harder to be exclusive with you for character animation. I need to explore other options, and frankly, we're both growing in different directions. It's not you really, it's just that I haven't agreed with some of your animation “features” over the last couple years. Your bone system and spring algorithms and all your run-time enablers certainly are…interesting, but you didn't even ask me what I thought. *sigh* I'm sure you'll attract someone very technical and compile some beautiful code libraries someday. Please don't take this the wrong way - I still want to be friends. I just need some space. And please don't get upset if you see me hanging around After Effects. Sure, her shape tweens are completely stable and her parenting is an alternative to nesting symbols, but she’s still a tool. Your eases always did make more sense to me.

Friends for life,

-boob.

Ah, much better. She’ll be fine. So here's a project I was experimenting with in After Effects. I couldn’t get it to run smooth on my machine even when it was copied down locally so it might not run depending on your specs. My goal was to attempt some lip sync with animated masks at 60fps. To build a character head similar to how I might in Flash, and work out some of the set up exclusively in AE. Some things worked, some stuff didn't, 60 is harder than I thought. In fact, after the YouTube compression I don't think it's running at 60 any more. The ball bounce at 30 and 60 look the same to me.

Mega Man tribute!

I made it into Udon's Mega Man Tribute book this year! They posted a list of all the accepted artists on Deviant Art:

http://udoncrew.deviantart.com/blog/40007376/

I recognize a couple names in here and I don't doubt this is gonna be another great collection of work. Lookin' forward to gorging my eyeballs on 300 full-color pages of MEGA art.

I'm pretty stoked for two reasons:

1) Mega Man 2 is probably my all time favorite game

2) I went out on a limb and actually tried to paint something with oil bars. Real traditional media that I had to walk into an art store and buy. I still had to fall back on Photoshop for some touch ups, but it was a new process.

They asked the artists not to post their work until the book launches at San Diego ComiCon this summer BUT...

Here's a second image I submitted that was rejected. I might have posted this up here before, but this is an image of a 5ft x 5ft Mega Man mural, made out of legos, that I'm soon to mount on my living room wall. A reproduction of the level select screen from Mega Man 2. I sure woulda liked it if this one got chosen for the book, but I was skeptical from the start. A picture of a mural just doesn't have the same effect as seeing it in person. And I had no idea how to present it for a book, so I didn't take the rejection too hard. Enjoy!