The First Second

Well, it ain't much and I certainly hoped to be farther along with this than where I am but Life Happens, ya know? Anyway, I'll be having around 14 different cuts to animate. This is about #12 in the process but I wanted to start with the Morlocks reacting to the matchstick light. I have another second of animation to add to this where, once his arms block his view, the eyes open a little more. And when all of that is done, I'll be tilting and zooming with a motion tween for effect (see my animatic for that).

So why this little snippet? Well, I wanted to see if I'm on the right track. Originally, I had planned on animating this on the Twos (each drawing getting two frames) but the look was too slow and resembled more of a transformation rather than a quick reaction. So while I'll still animate on the Twos for 24 frames per second, I'll be dropping it down to Ones if need be. Essentially, whatever is appropriate to make the animation right as long as it all runs on 24 frames per second.

Misc. Morlocks and Weena

More misc. drawings of the Morlocks and Weena from my sketchbook.  Although I'm already locked in on what drawings I'll be doing for my final animation, this is more of an effort to just draw the characters often to really get them down pat.

Morlocks Gone Wild!!

To break up the same ol' Morlock drawings for my animation, I decided to do some cartoons of the Morlocks in some different settings. We never see this side of them in the novel and movies but maybe they have social lives? Maybe the working Morlocks have union rules on breaks? Maybe they drink beer and do the "Pull My Finger" joke? Probably not but it is fun to imagine.

Animatic for the Time Machine

Time's a wastin' with only about 3 to 3.5 weeks left in the semester. So time is limited as to what I can physically animate by semester's end. So what I THINK might be doable is the story beat where the Traveller meets the Morlocks for the first time in the caves. To get a rough draft of my composition, timing, and set up, I created an animatic.

At first, I thought my timing and pacing were too slow but, after coming back to it a few hours later, it doesn't look too bad. It seems solid enough and I really need to get moving on it so I'm going to go with this. Doing the math, it might take me about 312 drawings, which averages out to about 14 or 15 drawings a day plus scanning and assembling in Adobe Flash. I'll be able to use some motion tweens, especially for tilting and zooming effects, but most of this will have to be hand-drawn. In the end, it will only be a pencil test with no inking and coloring.

THIS is why I was never an animation major! Too much damn work!! Ugh!

Time for the End-of-the-Semester Push!!!

(Insert whip-crack sound effect here)

Smashing Pumpkins

Here's the quick and dirty animation that Jessery, Joey, Paula, and myself did for the group animation project. Not my best drawings but it was more about working quick and in groups.

Class Portraits

During our ACME Animation video conferencing Tuesday night, we got a lot done. When other schools drop the ball (and I don't mean a ball bounce) and don't have work to show or don't join in the video hook up, that's our cue for our college to just run with it and show a lot of work from our class. But in between all the leaf drops and storyboards tonight, our instructor had us doing drawings of our classmates. Some lucky soul would get picked (glad it wasn't me!) and sit for 10 minutes while we draw them. I took the caricature route. Ideally, we should have had the ten minutes to sketch in blue pencil, clean up in the red pencil, then ink with a marker. Only one drawing did I have time to do all that and only a second got the red pencil clean up. But scanners pick up a lot, even blue pencil, so here are all the drawings...

Above is Jessery. Her face is probably rounder though. She's an attractive lady that also has that street smarts look to her.

Above is Nick. Nick's got a smaller top of the head while his lower jaw is wider. His eyes are very distinct too along with his close-cropped hair.

Heather, above, is a cartoon come to life. She's got a voice that is perfect for voice animation but she's got an adorable child-like quality to her as well. I thought I should have had her as a Disney princess but here I have her in a realm with butterflies, castles, and blue skies. She's known for playing with her hair, which I don't have here, but her eyes are distinct as well. In this cartoon, they are very "Susan Sarandon". They aren't quite that distinct in real life but getting there.

Above, Meinard, was a good sport. He was our first victim....I mean...model and probably sat longer than the 10 minutes (hence the thought balloon). He has very distinct features although here I probably made him look a little too much like the leader of Iran.

Above is Paula. This was my worst drawing and the toughest one. Paula has a really pretty face but between my drawing and her hat she likes to wear, she looks older and homeless. lol That is a post-Halloween lollipop in her mouth too.

Above: Joey. Round face. Short lower hairline. And a large bill on a baseball cap.

Thanks to all for posing.

All Hallow's Eve

Halloween 2011. I've been trying to scale back my front yard productions over the years and have but I still do more than I expect. With the good if not great weather and no rain in sight, I felt okay putting more lights and extension cords out into the lawn.

Soup of the Day: I have collected so many little things for Halloween over the years that I don't use everything each year so every year is a little different. This year, I didn't use the always popular fog machine but did bust out the human remains jars. In truth, these are old Red Vines plastic containers from Costco that we use to have at work that I'd collect and relabel. The "soup" is just water, ketchup, and some salad dressing. The plastic skull just popping up from the muck just makes this.

Cauldrons: In the past, I've have anything from colored lights inside to fog spewing out. This year, I had the motion activated pumpkin but no one was looking in and triggering it so I moved the pumpkin out into the open with the Soup of the Day jar.

I only used about two of these candy pumpkins this year. A light year with maybe 35 kids total. The neighborhood changes every few years with more kids to less. I think we are in some waning years with kids since what kids we did have were older. Not many of the traditional teen boys who show up late and can't bother to wear a costume. For those kids, I usually throw some Taco Bell sauce packets into their sack quickly so they think they are getting candy. Slackers do NOT get rewarded at MY house!! lol

The front of the yard from the side. Lots of lights.

A raven sits on a chair next to a table (TV tray) at the front of the fence. In reality, it was to cover a big old tree root that I didn't want the kids tripping on.

A hand-me-down from another haunted yard down the street. They use to set up a huge dungeon in their front yard every year 10 years ago and, when the word got out, parents were trucking in their kids from out of town to see the dungeon. It helped that the guy handed out huge candy bars too. We use to get the run off of kids from that yard down the street so things were hopping a decade ago. But about 7 years ago, the police cracked down when there were just too many kids. Just as well since it prompted many lazy kids and parents to just drive their kids to only certain houses that looked promising (Drive-By Trick-or-Treating). So after the police closed down the dungeon, the owner gave us a nice tombstone and trunk. The owner gave the dungeon to one of the cops, in a brilliant move to forge some goodwill between him and the Po-Po.

My lack of motivation to do some yardwork helped to make the yard more suitable for Halloween.

A gift from my brother from 2004: The inflatable pumpkin. This thing is huge. One day, and I thought today might be that day, I'll figure out how to rig it onto the roof. I point it to the side street as an attention getter.

My talking pumpkin, which lights up too when it senses motion. This seemed to get a few kids jumping this year.

Lots of lights. The purple web lights normally hang in the porch but they worked well hanging on the hedges.

Normally this guy is a motion sensor prop as well but I didn't have the time or batteries to outfit all the devices this year.

By day, the walkway looks terrible with pine tree roots, the bane of my existence, pushing the bricks out of whack. But for Halloween, other than the ones that might be a tripping hazard, the funkiness works well.

This year, I was worried that I didn't have enough candy but I really didn't get many kids. There were some memorable costumes though like the two girls dressed up as a Krispy Kreme Donut and a slice of pizza. We had a Jango Fett and a Boba Fett (brothers), a cowboys, two flappers, and the Teen Age Mutant Ninja Turtles although the fifth guy in the group decided to be the oddball and wear an Obama mask (Huh??). In general, less kids but older kids (usually polite girls who were old enough to drive), not many punk boys in no costume, but some good costumes.