About 36 hours into this but it's very close to being done and could actually be used now if I had to. I saved some of the characters I made as just geometry I could import into Blender so I could reuse them, hopefully. I figured it might get me faster to the point I was at in Cinema 4D skill wise with Blender. Charles is someone I want to use again, I had a lot of fun with Mike Luce making his series. He was very fluid and stretchy and I think I can get working again.
The eyelids have been the biggest challenge, I had a plugin in the old software that set up eyes and lids and a control panel for them with a click. This time I have to use geometry nodes and set it all up manually. I have that all work except the control panel. There were issues separating the top and bottom beak as well. I would like to ad short fur but not sure how to go about that yet and finally, I use saved poses like for fists, eye blinks and facial expressions so they don't need to be done from scratch each time and I hope to start that today.
The rigging plugin I got for Blender (Auto-rig Pro) is pretty sweet and saves me so much time, the learning it has not been terrible even for a bear of little brain like me. It has some features that were a pain to do before even on character like this which is basically a human like bode with a giant beak!
I have a few more old characters to revive and that should teach me a lot.
This is the first promotional video for the series of children's books that I illustrated last year. I used Apple Motion for the animation and motion graphics. Garage band for the music.
Over the last 6 months or more I have been working with authors Danny and Melissa on a series of children's books featuring Cirru the travelling cloud. The books teach young children about colours, shapes and how to count to ten. I not only designed the books but did all the illustrations.
The books are available to buy on Amazon, so buy them and leave a good review, especially for the illustrations!
More animals from Mobius Meadows farmstead. It was a bigger challenge than expected. This is the third iteration, the other two were... not good. mostly because I was too biased towards realism and couldn't seem to get my head around the cartoon part. In the end this came out OK.
I have wanted to make cartoon versions of some of the animals on the farm in Vermont. Earlier attempts went... not so well. As I have been cartooning my heart out lately for a client I gave the alpacas another try and I think they came out ok. The sheep... not so much. I will need to rethink how I want to draw them. Made with affinity Designer.
The last time I did a honest to goodness 2D drawn animation was when I was a teenager. I had built my own animation stand, filmed it with my Bell & Howell Super 8 and edited on my hand cranked film editor. That animation was a dragon catching the wind then swooping down and then upwards past the camera. I made a pipe cleaner model with plastic bag wings and photographed it in the key frame positions for reference. I sketched it out on paper then inked one side of plastic sheets and hand painted the colours on the opposite site one by one before adding a painted sky and placing them over that to be filmed. It was FANTASTIC. Well, I remember it being fantastic. It's been lost to time so I have a feeling my memory of it has been more than slightly enhanced over the years.
Times have changed, for the better with computer based animation software. I was going to redo that dragon but instead I decided to try a new idea using one of the many (it turns out) application on my hard drive that can handle 2D animation. I have done some 2D for explainer videos more recently and to add something to3D animations that I couldn't achieve using that software. Out of practice - but not unaware of what I was getting myself into.
After Effects, Motion, Krita, Rough Animator, Photoshop, Procreate, Blender all have 2D potential and components. Rough animator seemed perfect but it was... too rough for what I wanted. I think I will use it for what it is named to do, to make rough tests, in future. The others were Ok if you were mostly using puppets, characters broken into segments and then moving the segments, but Krita has an awesome set of painting tools so I decided to try it out. It had much of what I was looking for and the interface was clunky but easy for me to understand. I got about a second into the animation when I had to stop. Krita was just too slow and buggy in animation mode, it needs some love from the developers still. I will keep an eye out for improvements.
I had downloaded but never really used Open Toonz, a free open source software that had a really large feature set. I would love to have a copy of Toon Boom but it's subscription only and not cheap enough to play with so Open Toons won out. It was faster and handled the layers and number of frames better than Krita but it lacks all but the most basic of drawing tools, something that I think is its biggest problem. Any backgrounds or elements that need any detail of refinement I would do in a paint program and import them.
Though buggy at times, the eraser doesn't always work and the interface is somewhat primitive and one might say ugly, it does do the job. It has vector tools, puppet tools, great onion skinning to see what came before and after you current frame and was free. Exporting is funky and you need an add-on to export to mpg video while jpg and tif exported fine, png which I needed to use dropped a few frames on my first export. Clearly it still needs work but it also provides pretty much everything I needed to do the animation.
I split Nauti into a frame by frame drawn head, while the body, arms and tail were puppet animated as were the legs. I did a rough sketch animation and then traced that and coloured it before exporting the animation in sections so I could composite it in layers in Motion. It was a pretty straightforward work flow. Originally I thought I wanted a black and white pencil sketch look but decided that something more "fully rendered" would be a better challenge.
So is it a Disney classic? Hardly. Not at all. That wasn't the point of making it, though. I learned many things about Open Toons and 2D animation. I am not a comic or cartoon illustrator so just making the dog was pretty hard and I found timing in 2D was more different than in 3D than I thought it might be. My voice is as terrible as ever but this is not an audition for my voice talents so it's fine for now.
I will make another, either another Nauti or maybe I will remake my dragon masterpiece. I need to do more and better pencil tests next time, learn more about timing and setting up Open Toonz, and get better with the drawing tools in Open Toonz as well as draw in comic style better.
After about two years of preparation and animation my animated "The Cask of Amontillado" is finished. Mike Luce is the voice of Montresor and Michael Z. Keamy is Fortunato. I tried to be the voice of Montresor at first but I was beyond terrible and Mike Luce kindly redid that audio for me. I went with human like animal characters this time instead of cartoon humans. I thought it might work better and give me more options with the animation plus added some symbolism.
I used Cinema 4D as I am not ready for something like this in Blender yet. It was edited in Final Cut X and I did not use After effects for the compositing but used Apple's underrated and often ignored Motion software instead and it worked out great. The animation still has some issues I am having trouble with, such as decent walk cycles and some of the movements were not as smooth as I would have liked but overallI am very happy with the results. Nothing is ever perfect, is it? The settings were a long haul to make as the upper and lower catacombs are huge and cavernous and lit by torches. The sound was a little more complex as I had to record a bunch of foley and sound effects to flesh out the sound and add more atmosphere and detail to the short.
During the final edit, I noticed a bunch of things I had somehow missed, one was the wrong source files were used for a sequence which made the image looked pixelated and another was a terrible clicking noise during a dialog scene I can't believe I had not heard during the editing process. My excuse is that the noise here is non stop between the construction and the fact I am not in glorious isolation but home with my spouse which does not give me the solitude I need to work efficiently. Constant distraction is death to a project like this so I am glad I was able to get it done and be happy with the end result.
I have two posters ready in case I decide to enter it in some festivals. I have had the luck to be in one or another over the last 6 years so having promotional stuff ready is a fun way to tie up a project in a nice bow.
If you like the animation, tell me! Like it on Youtube and pass it around so maybe it can get some attention and love!
A new cartoon done! This time I tried to make the motion slightly smoother and avoid having too much movement, I sometimes get in the habit of making an action for each sentence spoken and that is just too hectic to be effective much of the time. Poor Mike Luce did 2 voices this time!
This time out, Charles Webster Billingsworth the 3rd warns about the side effects of acne medications in his own dramatic style, of course.
Mike Luce again provides the voice and we pushed the performance farther this time. It's a third longer than other shorts with him as well. I originally had all the side effects of isotretinoin in the script and read out but seriously... the short would have been twice as long! I also took out things like suicide which while I could have made a joke from it, I decided against it and cut out some repetitious symptoms as well for time. It's not a real PSA afterall and I don't think Charles screaming every single symptom was really necessary to get the point across!
This project will be short, but not sweet. The sheep isn't called filthy for nothing! I am going for a completely different style here, very cartoon-y despite the language that will be used by the characters - or maybe because of it. It's not too out of the box for me, however. I think Charles Billingsworth the 3rd from my Dramatic Readings series would fit right in - stylistically anyway.
I have 2 shorts planned for this. In the first I'll use the weasel I made recently as the second character. The sheep modelling went terrible until suddenly it didn't - and i got pretty much what I wanted. The farm-scape is exactly what I pictured in my head. I wanted and outdoor, pastoral location in broad daylight to counter all the shadowy gothic horror stuff I've been doing. All the voices will be me this time around and I'll have to use all my audio tricks to pull that part off.
Not sure why I did this exactly. I am working on making my own cartoon characters and rigging them as it's hard to find work as just an animator these days. It will help me in my private projects as well and add little spice to my demo reel... I hope.
