Dialog test update

Emotional Dialog Animation Stepped Keyes with breakdowns from Matt Long on Vimeo.

Here is the current state of my dialog test, animating it a little bit here and there during the week and spending a few more hours on weekends. The blink/eyes and mouth are just place holders so it will read for the time being. We'll see where it goes from here. Feel free to leave me any constructive criticism on it in the comments.

3D Animated dialog

Emotional dialog animation stepped keys from Matt Long on Vimeo.

Here is my first blocking pass of a 3D dialog I started working on, the dialog is "Are you trying to say you're jilting me?" Right now it's just stepped keys of the main poses with generic mouth shapes and expressions to convey the idea. I'm still changing the timing pretty much each time I view it after a long break, like making it have more contrast from beginning to end. It's still not quite there. I'm generally pretty happy with the phrasing, but need to break up the poses so it's more natural looking and ready for the overlapping animation when I add breakdowns. It sure does take a lot more tweaking than hand drawn 2D to not make CG look lifeless.

Sorry for disappearing!

It's been a while since I've updated, sorry to anybody who reads this and the 2 people who follow my blog currently (I feel honored to have repeat readers). I was in Japan for the new year and after that got lazy with the blog. So now I'm back in full force and will try update it at least once a week.

I just started as a production assistant for Transformers Animated at Cartoon Network for the next two months, no longer will I be working in recording as a part-time employee. Becoming a full-time employee though means I will not be able to spend my Monday and Friday afternoons with Mike and the crew at July Films. I'll miss my time there, I know there's so much more for me to learn and everyone was so talented and nice to be around. I hope to drop by from time to time to say hi and get feedback on my animation.

I'm currently working on a couple of things, one is too early to share, but here is a more up to date (but still old) version of Princess and Tiger getting excited.


Princess and Tiger animation from Matt Long on Vimeo.

Merry Christmas

Hope everybody has a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Sorry for the bad digital photo, 16-field paper is too big for my scanner.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Started a new animation

Princess Animation from Matt Long on Vimeo.

Well it was fun to post something in color, but now it's back to the good ol' graphite on paper. This is part of a new animation I started at my internship at July Films. There will be 3 characters in the scene. The context of the scene is they'll be seeing something that they've all been waiting for and become excited by the reveal. This is Princess with popsicle in hand. This is just the first pass and I was pretty happy with how it turned out, so I'll be starting to refine it and making adjustments to it as I work out the two boys in the scene to make sure they all work well together.
One of the things Mike saw in my animation was as I phrase out my animation I usually work from one idea then another and then another. I don't transition from one to the other smoothly, it's too sudden. So when I go over it again I'll be working on that, getting her excitement to build up a bit in the walk before the hopping. Something that seems simple and obvious but somehow eludes me still. Also the skirt reacts too much to the hop, it needs to be scaled back a bit and she should maintain a little more control over her popsicle hand. I'm also trying to figure out a way to make her move a bit more feminine to differentiate her movement from the boys.


Here are my thumbnails for the whole scene. The two who are hopping move right to left, and the other left to right.

Color!

Here's something out of the ordinary for this blog, I did something in color and not just col-erase pencils either! This was for a flier I did for a person at work for a Christmas themed charity event coming up in early December where people tour decorated homes. I created it on a PowerMac in Photoshop but when I look on my desktop monitor the colors look way off, much too bright, not sure which monitor is more accurate but I tried to correct it as much as possible. I was inspired by John K's posts about Mel Crawford and experimented a bit with colors, still a long way to go but I had fun and learned a few things along the way. Some of those being I'm way too slow when it comes to color and I always feel like I've run out of color choice so I end up with too many similar colors near one another. Oh well, hope you enjoy it since it will be back to the good ol' black and white for awhile.

I ran out of time and didn't get around to indicating the slanted ceiling which is causing the tree to bend and the chimney to get cut off at an angle, but I think it's obvious enough that it isn't necessary. As for the dog, it seems everybody I talk to these days has or is getting a Maltese or a Shitsu or a mix of some other similar breed as can be seen here, so I put one in rather than the cat I had originally planned on.