Archive for June, 2009

Exciting Things in the Big, Exciting Real World [Part 1]

Saturday, June 13th, 2009

Since May 2008, I’ve been taking a hiatus from CalArts, and working as an animator/character designer/vis-dev at up-and-coming Veritas Studios in Burbank, CA.

And now that our foremost project, a kids’ language-learning series called Slangman’s World, has been airing around the world on AFN as of January, (soon to call a certain major broadcast network ‘home’ this fall) I’d thought I’d periodically post some of my own work that went into this production.

First up, ‘Cammy’ the chameleon plays a one-man-band in the German-themed episode, Kaputt. This clip took a lil’ longer to execute than your average shot, but it was worth the time– and still remains personally one of my most ambitious Flash shots to date.

This next loop comes from the Fall/Halloween scene in the Japanese-themed episode, The Seasons, where kids patrol the neighborhood grounds– hunting for candy to stash.
…at least, they do for the entire 3 seconds they’re on screen.

This shot represented by the initial storyboard drawing…

20090612_jpnBrds1

Because of a time crunch by the end of production, this particular 6 minute episode (with the exception of the opening titles) was entirely storyboarded, animated and composited by myself, while the rest of the team worked hard to finish the remaining episodes.

…which means there’s a lot more art I have for this episode than many of the other ones. Such as this exploratory drawing of Mount Fuji…

20090612_mtfuji

…not to mention production artwork of some Spiced Apple Cider and Hot Tea.

20090612_drinks

And to cap this post off– a rough thumbnail of the character ‘Miss Crabby’, obnoxiously dolled-up to meet ‘Slangman’ in the French episode, Maison.

20090612_crabbysketch

This particular episode can be viewed online– like, right now. I took care of all Crabby’s animation in this one, so keep a watch out! ;)

That’s it for now. Tune in next time for more!
In the mean time, check out the studio’s new blog– I post stuff there every-so-often.

Special thanks to Jenessa for the title!

All of the artwork, animation and characters depicted in this post are trademarked ™ and/or copyrighted ©2009 by Veritas Studios. Used with permission.

I hate you, Josh Dillpickle.

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

Not much is known about Josh Dillpickle, but I’ve heard stories.
From people in the know.
joshd
Hate is what’s on your plate, Josh Dillpickle. Deal with it.

Chillaxin’

Monday, June 8th, 2009

meditate
After that last post, we need to balance some significant quantities of life-energy plasma– better known by the brand name, Chi-Goo.

waitaminute…

waitaminute…

Ah, relaxed. -.-

Flash Gripes

Monday, June 8th, 2009

flash-blasted2
Dear Adobe Flash CS4,

Why is it you work so peacefully one moment, then proceed to dramatically hell-spawn within practically the same moment?

With all the problems you present on a daily basis, and the bugs you refuse to resolve, I feel like I’m using an alpha release half the time.

So, I’m here converting (read: re-drawing) our CS3 character models into CS4, just to get the stage to respond without a lag time of 5+ seconds when traversing the rig hierarchy. So much for backwards-compatibility. It’ll drive the most patient animators absolutely nuts.

I had such high hopes for the Motion Editor too– way to junk it all up. I mean, you finally introduce a multi-key spanning graph editor, only to kill the Single-Frame looping method of asset interchanging unless you revert back to ‘classic’ tweens?! What’s the matter with you?

Would it also kill you to fix the years-old PNG exporting problem– the one where I’ll find half the stage/contents cut from the rest of the image on a +300dpi export?

Oh, and who gives a flying F about IK bones if it crashes the application shortly after being invoked? Every… single… time?

*sigh*

‘Course we all learn every day– I’d love to be proven wrong about some of these points.

Rant over. All better. ;)