loopdeloop

Yeah, yeah.  So I've been bad about keeping up this blog and just bypassing it with tumblr - but I have been doing things!  Most of it has been a series of small explorations and other things in between jobs.

One of the things I've gotten really into is Loopdeloop!  It's a really awesome bi-montly internet & real life event where people from all over the world make looping animation based on a topic.  They can range from a few frames to almost a minute, can be gifs or movies, and run the gamut in style and media.  They all get put up on the site for everyone to see and then get screened at regular loopdeloop events in Melboure and Los Angeles.

It's a awesome place to sandbox out ideas or new techniques or just get motivated to animate something without being overwhelmed by the magnitude of a short film or other project.  It's a great way to discover new animators/artists and keep tabs on what the regulars are up to.  I actually got a freelance gig from a creative director seeing one of my loops, liking the timing, and reaching out based on that.  It's kinda crazy.  But the best part of it all is that making loops is fun!

I'll admit most of mine get done in the few hours before it's due because I'm busy with work and/or the deadline always surprises me when I convert it from Melbourne to California time and it turns out to be way sooner than I realized.  As such, most of the ones I've done have been pretty quick and show it, but I'd rather make that push to get something new made than do nothing at all - and besides, it's all in fun!  Some people go all out and make small films out of their loops.  I try to keep mine small, as on the scale of a walk cycle.  This is partly so I keep the project small and manageable so I can worry about other aspects of it other than sheer production volume, but I also enjoy the challenger of thinking about things on that small of a time scale and exploring what works for it.  Since January I've made 5 loops.

#1 - Hollywood

This was my first go at it and the most involved.  I used this one as a first foray back into 2d animation, which I've neglected since sophomore year.  The rough was done in flash, final frames in photoshop, and then everything was taken back into after effects for the flicker and editing.  Since making this I've found Alex Grigg's super helpful photoshop animation tutorial which everyone should check out.  Animating is photoshop is pretty straightforward but Alex shows some super workflow actions that he's put together that really streamline the process.

#2 - Sports

I had just learned how to do basic rigging in After Effects before I did this loop so I put my new found knowledge to work to make this whole thing in an hour during one busy work night.  It's super simple but I really enjoyed working with the graphic quality of it.  I'd like to do some more stuff in this vein in the future.

#3 - Frantic

What if a robot was frantic?  Another quickie made from non-motion blurred and randomized sections of this project (which is also to get a blogger write up eventually).

#4 - Food

Getting the downshooter I made back in use.  Cut up a strawberry, did some stop-mo with it, and edited it to music by Craig Smith.  Full song and original video collab with Sishir Bommakanti over here in tumblr land.  I shot some other material that night as well but didn't have time to developed a layered edit with everything, so it stayed just strawberries.  I've been revisiting the footage though, so expect to see that.

#5 - Frustration

I had recently ordered an LED light pad to get back into doing some traditional animation and had discovered tailor's chalk while wandering around the garment district of down town earlier that week.  (Tailor's chalk is awesome!  It comes in both clay (chalky) and wax (crayony) compositions, features very limited colors, and is shaped in chunky rectangles or triangles that let you really leverage it and get some neat marks!)  Anyways, I put all those things to good use in a five hour chunk of night after work.  It's all straight ahead, which was really really fun.

things that are on the internet now

The Ballad of Poisonberry Pete! (made by Adam Campbell, Uri Lotan, and myself!) (It's our thesis!)


My demo reel! (!)


My 24-hour film! (It's really stupid, sorry!) (I made it for Ashlyn Anstee's annual film fest MANIMATE!) (Check out the other films!)

sick tissues

The third card I worked on at JibJab was Sick Tissues. The animatic and original sound design was done by my mentor Jeff Gill and the end card was designed by Will Staehle.

This project was a ton of fun all the way through. I was the given the animatic and the option to do it in stop motion. From there I spent several days building the puppets and doing some simple tests to figure out how to approach animation and better understand how the puppets would function. I shot all the final animation in one day (quite a long day it was), and then spent a few more to composite the footage and finalize it.

The original drawings in the animatic were basically cubes with stick limbs and three fingers. They were simple and had a lot of appeal. I decided I wanted to keep that best I could and so made simple wire limbs to be coated with plasti-dip (a black rubbery plastic much like you find on tool handles) (special thanks to Jeremy Fisher for telling me about the stuff in the first place!) The arms were made with braided floral wire and the legs with galvanized wire twisted 2 ply. I then wrapped them in duct tape to bulk them out before dipping. In hindsight I would look for an alternative to duct tape. It ended up stiffening the limbs too much in places, making it harder to bend and harder for it to hold its posed shape. Something a little less resilient like cosmetic foam might have been more forgiving and uniform. Each limb got about 3 coats of plasti-dip and between coats got to chill out on my makshift drying rack of styrofoam with t-pins stuck into it.



The tissue boxes I opened on one side and gutted. I got some scrap wood from a local hardware store and they even cut it down for me. These pieces of wood I epoxied to the inside of the box where the legs and arms would attach. The cardboard wasn't that strong and I didn't want to risk over-stressing it by bending the limbs directly against it - so I brought the wood in as reinforcement. Once dried to the box I drilled holes through them for the arms and legs, cut away the extra plastic on the limbs, untwisted the wires, cut them down, threaded them through the holes in the box, and epoxy puttied them onto the wood reinforcements. They held up quite well during animation.

For the feet we decided against tie downs and went for the simpler approach of building nails into the feet of the puppet to hold it to a block of dense styrofoam. Since the tissue boxes wouldn't be walking all over the place I could foresee no obvious limitations in using nails, and they really worked out great. They were long enough and the foam was strong enough to avoid any torquing issues with puppets falling over when the weight was at an angle.

Animating these guys was super fun. They're basically just a cog with arms and legs, which really simplifies things and helps you stay clear. As I said above though, it was difficult to keep the arms to maintain more extreme curves. This made it almost impossible for the tissue box to put his hands on his face or hold his head. You could bend them there no problem, but they would always bend back some and you'd lose contact. I found this out very quickly in my short animation test. The impromptu solution of clear tape, however, turned out to work rather well for getting hands to stay and was barely visible in the photographed frames. Though, whenever you introduce a fix somewhere other things tend to happen.... In this case the tape, while it was largely fine during the test, started to pull off small bits of the box coating during animation. I would paint fix certain areas as necessary. Another limitation that I ran into was not being able to rotate the box back far enough while it was on its knees. Physical space just didn't allow for it, but thankfully compositing did, and it really helped to boost the impact of the end.

The card was animated on twos with Dragon Stop Motion. A word for the wise though, the twos setting in dragon will still play back as if it were shot on ones, even though it's numbering as twos. I didn't realize this until after doing the final animation, which made things rather difficult along the way. For this card I was to stick to the timing in the animatic as much as possible. In my test I animated a portion of the animatic and I noticed very quickly that the motion was just too fast and started adjusting the timing while I was animating. The test was still fast, and when later corrected, too slow. I tried to hold strong anticipations and important contacts as much as possible to keep things reading. It was when I was finished animating and tried to sync it with audio that I realized that all along it had been playing back at the wrong frame rate. Setting it to the correct rate finally made a world of difference. And, since I had stuck to the timing of the animatic and my x-sheets (x-sheet are so awesome when you're doing stop motion) everything played quite well. Overall I think the mismatch worked out in the end. It made me animate snappier and clearer out of necessity, and the final was better for it.

If you like boring progression reels, check this out! (20mb, 2:40ish) It's a compilation of quick tests and few progression renders of the final. You can see some of the stuff I was talking about here.

tie the knot

The first ecard I worked on this summer was "Tie the Knot".
It was animated about a year ago, and already had a working edit with some keying and effects. Initially I was just brought on to the card just to do some rotoscoping in areas like the clamps holding the shoes. That didn't take too long, and I was given the choice to work on the backgrounds for it too, which I jumped on. From there I kept doing more stuff like keying, some motion tracking, sound editing, and the end cards until the piece was done.

These are what the raw shots looked like.


And here are the backgrounds I made. Shot three has all the elements separated to create a multiplane effect in after effects. That second row of shoes in the shot is just the first row of shoes duplicated and moved around.





Props that needed repeating I would make as assets and then skew as needed. I Dug through some psds and made these gifs. It's so much the actual progression, just turning layers on/off, but you get the idea. (click them to see them not cut off)



For the end cards I made the lettering out of shoe laces! I pinned them to a template (printed backwards to keep the backside of the letters as the working surface) and super glued them to hold their shape.

take2 + reel

Take two! The last assignment of the year! Special thanks to Alberto Beguerie for his super model/rig.


*edit: Just cleaning up my vimeo a bit, I switched this video to private so it wouldn't show and clutter things, but it's still viewable if you want to see it. Password: take2

Oh, and a demo reel:

ta2

Our last project for traditional was a collaborative dance (so play this while you're listening to some music and pretend it works), this was my section. Medium was fairly open, though pretty much everyone stuck to hand drawn. I used cut out paper that was watercolored. The pieces were also covered in contact paper, which cause a reflection issue at the beginning but really protected the small paper pieces from all that abusive handling. Since my animation required a camera move and I couldn't get a hold of one of the HD cameras to crop the image down I had to rig up a moving set with foamboard, tape, and a couple of pegbars. When finished I had a great big piece of plotter paper that I attached punched paper to for registration and could roll up on the far edges. The super pegbar (made up of three) could slide up and down and side to side in the foamboard. Probably took around 8-10 hours to animate, with a lot more time in planning things out. I don't ever want to work with a puppet consisting of parts that small.

seagulls also love doritos

I did this at the last stop motion club meeting. It's my first time animating cut out paper, or really seriously animating anything in physical space, and I'm really happy that it came out as well as it did (I was kind of expecting a train wreck). Animating paper is so much fun, really hard to keep everything in the right spot (none of this except for the background sheet and the blue stripes where fixed down), but fun nonetheless. Work also goes a lot faster since it's all straight ahead with no turning back. I probably only spent around 3-4 hours actually animating it and a couple more to get things figured out, cut out, and set up. I had also just finished up my pantomime just a couple of days before this so my mind was still in animation mode, which certainly helped make this come together. I'm definitely happy with how loose things ended up feeling despite not being able to deform any of the shapes or work with distorted frames. Everything stayed exactly the same except for the wings, which were only three interchangeable shapes and still read surprisingly well.

This was made with a camcorder checkout out from IT and Frame by Frame, a super piece of freeware (not too mention the only good and really workable stop motion freeware for Mac that I could find). http://web.mac.com/philipp.brendel/Software/FrameByFrame.html

lolwut

probably done in ten minutes... I spent longer just putting the broccoli guy together and in the end kind of gave up with those copper legs and keeping them right... why he gets bow legged at the end. I had to pull out a lot of bad frames too, not that this was actually intended to be anything good. I'm still just getting my feet wet and even from this learned a lot about materials and method that will be useful in the future.

I ran out of paper...

...so I screwed around at the shooting station.