dance hd flash catgroove

"How long could it take to add a cat head and a pijama to a stickman? The dance is not complicated either! LETS DO EEET"

I would sock myself in the mouth if i could

It took ages and i didn't even add the energies to add a tail swinging around: even the way the costume bends around ins't fully correct...the pimp and the gal were added only for my enjoyment, no kidding, i was very very tired at the end of this.


original in cellaction (with better music for some odd reason)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHXruge4MAU

backgrounds for uni

Since i am not allowed to post my 30 backgrounds i did for the third year animation "Crocodile tears", I will post here all the background i did recently in photoshop and non, for the landscape assignment.

 On the left you can see the original scene from my pirate storyboard, while on the right you can see on the first two, a simple layout, while on the last ones, normal colorations with different lightings.
I really like the one in the cave.
I like caves. I might go living in one if i fail animation.

Instead for the daily tasks you can see

5 examples of perspective

5 backgrounds copied from actual animations (drawn on paper)

5 foliages and plants backgrounds

3 tonal backgrounds

 Now i can safely tell that i am sick of drawing backgrounds. For a little while, i want to focus on anatomy. But yea...i enjoyed drawing most of these (except the fisheye perspective) and it sure helped a lot learning new elements of composition and applying perspective to things.

Ident Copper for Cake

Oh yea

if being a director wasn't enough



we had to make an Ident for a theoretical "mazed" channel in after effect. I have no clue how to use the program, but i bet and it looks very intriguing. I managed to make something simple reusing my animation and Midnight Sparkle's blinking copper, mostly because I was tired ( i am being honest here, cmon) and pretty nervous: using programs that crash every 5 minutes tends to drive me crazy.

Anyway the teacher said it was ok, but still, she said i could have done better.

True that, miss.

Copper for Cake

copper for cake, an animation we did for the Mazed project. Here you can see the unfinished project i put together  after the deadline.




As a project, we were divided into groups each of us had a particular task.
I was the director, but i ended up, as often happen in real animation studios (i suppose), helping in character design, animation and editing.

here you can see my first attempt for Character design: simple characters, not too friendly but cute, funny shapes and not too stereotypical.

Sam, the main character, in the first script was supposed to lose his instruments and become a farmer, but we decided with the blessing of the customer, to change the ending by smashing him. This is why i tried not too  make the viewer relate too much with him, making him grumpy looking and kind of stupid.

The knockers are based on goblins, pixies and cave creatures: their colors are the same as the environment that surrounds them and their eyes are copper-like

Here are the final versions, after we all discussed the changes

with the characters set, i managed to finish properly the storyboard, that i had to change various time to make the animation clearer to the animators and for explaining the story better to the customer and the teacher.

Here you can see the very fist one

And here is the last one (which is the definitive version)

After helping with the storyboard, i had to fix a couple of background, because they were made with actual paint. I imported them in Photoshop to crop them and define better the edges, but some of them had to be completely redone.

original drawings by Emmett Norris, these are the ones i had to fix

One of the backgrounds i had to re do because of the wrong composition

Before animating, i managed to make a couple of still for the video, so that Midnight Sparkle could add some cool effects on After effects.

The stills

I am sorry i couldn't upload either the final version (i don't have it) or the single scenes where i worked, but i can tell that i worked along with Dan and Clara in the scenes where
_sam walks outside before flashback

_sam coughs before seeing copper

_sam taunts knockers and shrugs shoulders

_sam is hit by small rock and then huge one

_hat bouncing

_knockers at the end

The experience was definitely interesting but i definitely do not feel like we were ready to take over such a huge project in just three months: we had neither the necessary practice, skills, knowledge and resources to do a great job, but still, we managed to pull out a decent piece of animation, in my opinion. 

Sad is the relationship i had with some members of the group that hardly did anything. I probably should have helped more in doing the job when they were trying instead of doing it myself, but with little time (and energies) i really couldn't do much. 

It was a pain for me to try to put everything together all the time, especially when we found out in the day of the deadline, that our video was low quality and half corrupted. I spent 12 hours fixing all the files while everybody else were partying and enjoying life.

God

the pain...

maya showreel venice

I had little/no experience with Maya, the 3d program, but I knew since the beginning how to model simple shaped things: the creation of this environment allowed me to learn how to texture more efficiently and how to play with the lights (which are a pain, in my opinion), but most important, i learnt that i have to set a project properly in the future if i want to avoid any...issues.



It doesn't look amazing, more like an environment of a game made in the early 90's, but it is something.

Also i couldn't change anything at the end, since it took 2 days and a half to render.





here you can see the various sketches that i bet you already noticed in the movie (^this one^)

the reference picture

quick sketch

Matte painting

Life drawing? MORE LIKE DEAD PAPER

Umh...these are all my life drawing pieces "that i am proud of" (try imagining those that i am not)

I found that life drawing is an interesting experience, but it made me feel awful about my drawing skills. It is tough to draw something while you are standing still and using a charcoal, and it made me realize that i still have to do a lot of practice if i want to be a good artists. 

i got to:

1) Learn better and understand human anatomy

2) Draw faster