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.

Sorry for the delay in posts, been busy the last couple of weekends so I don't have much to post tonight but here is the final combined composition of the sack hopping boys. Time to move on to something new.


Sack Hop Race from Matt Long on Vimeo.

Also I'm in a sort of grieving period right now, my 2nd Xbox 360 has died within 1 year. How's that for quality control eh Microsoft? Error code 74. The first one died within a week of getting it for Christmas last year, so I returned it and got a black Elite system which is supposed to be built with newer more stable parts. And I just got a new game too, if you haven't played Fable 2 and have a 360 check it out, it's really cool as far as I can tell from the couple of days I had it before my system flipped out.

Another animation clip and some thumbs

Run and Hop Animation from Matt Long on Vimeo.

Here's the 3rd of the last set of boys hopping. This one is taking off from a run and into the hop. There's not much to the rest of the hop so I'm just showing the first part. Some minor things to change but overall this conveys what I wanted. I originally did the whole thing and it looked horrible, so I erased it all and started over, some of the old one can still be seen on this as a ghost image. This is all on 1's done straight ahead.



I had these thumbs lying around and figured I would share them, this is the first set that I did above. Not much analysis or anything being done here. The very first tests I posted on my blog of the hops were following this.



I went back and watched some videos, further acted out some hops, and broke everything down into the basic mechanics and did this sheet of thumbnails. The animation I posted above is a mix of the 3rd line here and the line drawn on the back that you can see showing through lightly on the bottom.



I call this one "My Little Land of the Lost" my take on Mike's My Little World. During a break from doing the hops after the first pass failed I sketched this really quick on the side of some scratch paper, just a random drawing that I thought was fun. I learned I shouldn't draw dinosaurs from memory.


Just a little teaser, I'm animating something in my spare time at home, above are some quick lunch-time studies for it from stills of Disney's "Wonderful World of Color" with Ludwig Von Drake. So stay tuned for some stuff from that in the next few weeks if it's worth posting.

More Straight Ahead Animation

Sack Hop Race Animation from Matt Long on Vimeo.

Here's what I've done recently. As you can see these two have a bit more personality than the last ones and are breaking away from their patterns a bit. It helps add a lot of life and interest when you break the cycles, which is something Mike has been trying to get me to break away from. I have a tendency of finding something that works and sticking with it, and it gets repetitious and boring, so that's my next step in this journey.

One of the things I've noticed is I'm getting much looser with my drawings and speeding up quite a bit but am still able to maintain and even increase the quality of animation. I think because of this I'm able to keep my thoughts and feelings within the first pass more than before where I'd get new ideas mid way through and start losing the essence of the animation. With the first boy I wanted him to think he can get ahead with a larger bounding leap only to find it takes time to recover from and ultimately doesn't pay off. The 2nd boy I wanted him to lose his hold on the bag and then regain it while for the most part maintaining much of his momentum. Hopefully it comes across clearly.

So that's all for now, also if you didn't know Vimeo lets you download the original video file (you may need to register) if you want to frame-by-frame any of these recent animations. I like it much better than Youtube for that.