Busy Bee

I feel like I dropped off the blogplanet a wee bit. I have been super busy both interning at Buddy System Studios, and working on this commissioned wedding bit I will explain below.

A couple weeks ago a friend from college contacted me to do a super quick animated sequence of shots to insert into a wedding slideshow for a friend of hers. My goal? 50 seconds of animation to be completed in 2-3 weeks. woooweee. I like a challenge, so here we go.

The style I am doing is in the vein of my paper cut out animations. I finished drawing all the elements last week and photoshopped them all in the past couple days. Ideally I will have everything animated in the next 6 days. If not, I technically have a few more days after that... but shipping would be involved if I wait that long. It's tight, but I know I can do it.


On to the project!!!

I've never showed my process with my cut outs before, mainly because I am very self conscious about showing my sloppy "pre-photoshopped" drawings/paintings. There is a method to the madness. Since I animate in After Effects, I see no point in wasting time and paint in fine tuning the images on paper. I simply do my quickest drawings in pencil, paint rapidly a few layers in watercolor, ink everything with a black pen, and then photograph it all. It is much quicker to strengthen the colors and labor over the "likeness" of the characters in photoshop.

Here you can see my quick general drawing of Ash, and then the version I tweak in photoshop using the Transform warp tool to push and tug her face to resemble the real person more.



I put the photo as a layer underneath to use as reference.


Once I get the likeness, I start cutting out things and making movable layers for all the moving parts... eyebrows, irises, mouths, hair etc...

same thing with Dirk, sorry I don't have the photo of him up here.


Ash's father, Valentine


Scotland pre and post photoshop


castle before and after


Jamie, do you prefer the blue sky or sunset sky for the castle wide shot? Both will have sunlight inserted in after effects either way



wedding dress and bouquet- I need to elongate the dress, she looks a little squat


I know there are no hands. That is because to save time, I have a stockpile of hands and feet and other things from previous projects that I will reuse by simply adjusting the color and skintones in photoshop. Trees, hills, etc...

To Jamie:
There are a few things here and there I haven't put up, but these are the main things I wanted your input on Jamie - I didn't have any images of Ash face forward with her mouth closed, so I am still iffy on the likeness of her mouth from the front in resting position. If you have any pics of her without her teeth showing it would be great- or if you have tips on how her lips look if they are different from what I have. Any other likeness tweaks, let me know. Dirk from the front isnt done yet.

wee

I am the new intern at Buddy System Studios, which is a place full of awesomeness and stop motion goodness.

I know it seems like it's been awhile since I posted any progress on the music video, and that's because it's basically done but I can't post the final version here. You will have to wait until the band puts it up online, when I will promptly publish a link to take you all to see it.

final day of animating

I am on my last day of animating! I can't believe how quickly this project has come along... it wasn't even a thought a month and a half ago. 3/4 is done being edited and color corrected. I will have a first cut up for approval in a few days. Til then, here are a couple stills.








The last week has also been really lucky regarding what I am gonna do next. I will have a couple pages of interview and pictures for DPI Magazine(a taiwanese publication that looks really neato), I have an interview on tuesday for an internship at a lovely little stop motion studio here in LA, and a few people have contacted me that are interested in possibly working on commissions. I say "interested" and "possibly" because I never like to get too excited about things that aren't in writing, but I had a few interested groups so maybe at least one will pan out. We will see.

Bubblegum and Lip synching and Color Correction, oh my!

Only one more week of animation left. I can't believe how quick this project has flown by. I have never done a project with this much to do in such a short amount of time. Yesterday alone I animated 30 seconds. I didn't have to, but I was on a bit of a role.

Some more stills....


Once I cluttered up her apartment with all the assorted goodies I made and acquired from ebay, I was highly pleased with the outcome.

You can't tell in this picture... but when the camera rack focuses onto Isadora stirring something in a pitcher, you can see all the cool kitchen stuff I got on ebay. there is even a miniature working cheese grater!


String man is about to pull out the gum,


a little example of some of the post production before and after work...

I do quite a bit in After effects with my footage, I usually add all of my practical light sources like lamps and suns etc... using the "generate, light rays" in after effects. It is a fabulous little effect that is so customizable, and even refracts light on items within the image as they move. Really sophisticated effect. You can see it here in use by the lamp and the sunlight from the window. I also use desaturate and curves in color correction a lot.


Here I add light rays to the objects in the background to give a glow, and I adjusted the Curves to give the image the "tealish, red, and yellow" hues I picked out for the film.

I used a new technique today when animating to get light on the puppet faces without putting a light below them... for a nice soft bounce of light on their faces, I put a paper towel down on the set floor, it bounced light nicely.

I am always open to questions on after effects if anyone needs any help.

And here is a tad little bit more animation... some lip-synching! I have actually never done much lip synching before, so it's been a really fun experience. The pig did a line in Siberian Farmland, but I am doing a few lines this time around in both stop motion and traditional form. This isn't entirely done yet, since I am adding the mouths in after effects, I have to move the mouths around while his head moves. It's not perfect yet, needs a bit of tweaking. I am really happy with how the gum flops around though! I apologize again for the cruddy, washed out internet quality.

buttons and paper dolls

I don't remember if I mentioned before, but in the "floor sequences", that Isadora creates for String man there are paper cut out versions of them that move around to create the memory sequence from their past. These will blur out, then blur back in with the real memory and real 3d puppets.

Ryan gently pointed out while we were shooting that it looks like Isadora is doing the "soulja boy" dance. You have no idea until you see the video. Either that or the Hula, but Soulja boy is much more funny.


Um... yes, that is a mouth in the floor made out of a wad of gum. Yes, it sings. And Yes, it spits out a bunch of stuff when it is done singing. It's made out of Sculpy actually, which I had to put in the fridge so it wouldn't melt to itself so quickly with the hot lights.

The gum is one of those weird things String man finds in a jar on her side table. He takes it out, gets it all stuck on his hands and then drops it on the ground, where it rollspast the carpet and forms into a snail, slugs along to this one spot, and then forms a mouth.

a really bad Flash picture of the paper puppet next to Isadora.


string man's puppet. I'll have to take a pic of the back of the paper puppets to show how I connected them together in a way that was animateable. I drew and water colored them on watercolor paper, cut them out, reinforced them with cardboard from a Cereal box, then glued and taped rubber bands onto them at the joints.


In the end of the memory sequence in the flower field, string man kisses Isadora, only to find that he gets stuck to her lips with this blasted gum(a symbol throughout the video of things that just won't go away... and one of the lyrics in the song), and that the gum lips are attached to a pile of stuff, no longer Isadora(Howard's idea!) It transitions back to the paper puppets on the floor, and that's what you see here.


The last shot in the video. After String Man takes her back to the flower field, in the last 4 seconds of the song after the last line is sung, the image transitions back to the paper puppets on the floor, who float up off screen. All the items on the ground scatter off screen. She lets go of the flower as they float away and te flower tumbles off screen last.


I am alllllll done with the floor animation, now onto the real puppets.

Good morning

I woke up this morning to a lovely e-mail from Chris Walsh, a teacher at Sheridan College, telling me he was going to write a little blurb about my blog and my work on his animation blog. You can see it if you go here http://walsh-o-matic.blogspot.com/2009/07/curious-spoon.html

Ever since I started blogging my production work, I have really enjoyed making more connections with animators. It doesn't seem such a lonely place anymore! Without further ado, I give you the first 7 seconds... I know the very end is a tad offbeat, I have since fixed it, just haven't exported it. I have just started noticing this minor sound effect in the background of Howard's song that sounds like scissors cutting, pay attention for it!

First stills

Started shooting, and while I can't put any footage up yet, I thought I would just give a couple stills from the opening shot. I must be off to continue!