This was a college assignment, we got a chunk of 12 seconds from a song (in this case Crystal Method – Keep Hope Alive) and we were free to animate whatever we wanted to it. So I made a guy free-running across rooftops. Admittedly not the éasiest thing to animate , but it turned out surprisingly awesome!
All hand-animated with my tablet in Flash, NO tracing, only some reference from freerunning clips on Youtube.
Trying out something a little more realitic.
I was watching Below recently, and besides being a really good movie, it has some great cinematography. I saw some shots in there where I was like “Wow, that would look great in a comic panel”. There was an awesome shot that I unfortunately can’t locate right now, but the above one was a good excercise too. You got that foreground/background dynamic there that I enjoy using in Dinerdate, and it’s a good practice of body shapes. I really want to ‘get’ light, so I can draw stuff like this naturally and don’t have to ‘cheat’ by tracing it.
And I did a quick portrait of Alison Sudol yesterday to warm up for the graphic novel.
Right now I’m gonna get back to work on the 12-second free-running animation that I’m working on for a school assignment. That should turn up here in the next week aswell.
I’m geting back into drawing again, and here’s a couple of caricatures I drew of some classmates. The bottom three are teachers. These were all drawn from memory. It’s hard to draw a caricature of just everyone, there has to be something about them that captures your attention, that stands out. If you learn how to spot that, it’s real easy to put a good likeness down with a few lines.
I realize I haven’t talked much about what we’re doing at college for a while. This term there just isn’t much going on really. We’re busy setting up a kinetic line (you know, stuff tipping eachother over. Made famous by Der Lauf Der Dinge. And Japan). It’s going down this Friday, so I’ll take some pics, and it’s being filmed aswell. Other than that it’s mostly theory. And some graphic work and animation. We spend most of the time working on side projects. There’s a few people making a game for the Tokyo Game Show, and I’m still setting up a few things myself including a live-action trailer for TMC, a comic and a top-secret game. More on that heat soon.
But mostly I’ve been doing field research the past few weeks. That is to say, playing games.
(if you didn’t get that reference you missed one of the best tv series ever)
I’ve been toying with the idea of doing some animation for a gwhile (koogwhip), and now that we have to for college I’ve been playing around with Flash a bit. I don’t want to resort to lame tweening, so I’ve been trying my hand at some rotoscoping with my tablet.
A quick 5-minute ’scope of a running man
(a cookie if you know which movie it’s from. Hint: Laurence Fishburne and SPACE)
And this was a more detailed face test.
You think it’s easy to draw her sitting relatively still, but drawing the entire face exactly as you did the last frame for about 25 frames gets pretty tedious after a while.
You can see the source footage edges moving around a bit, there was some camera shake in it so I had to correct it. I could’ve done it with the motion stabilizer in After Effects, but I thought of that afterwards so I just did it by hand.
Speaking of AE, if you’re familiar with the program you’ll know it can interpolate between keyframes, sort of like Flash does with tweening. Apparently that is the secret behind Rotoshop, the animation program from the makers of A Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly. I really want that program! It makes animation much easier. But I can understand why they don’t sell it, because you can bet your ass there’ll be a bunch of cheap Scanner Darkly knockoffs.
, but it turned out surprisingly awesome!
