Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Construction Paper and Animation

I made these last night from some colored construction paper, pen, and a few markers. I don't have access to a larger format scanner to capture the entire first image. Perhaps a future investment once I start paying rent somewhere again.





About a year ago, while working in the lab, I made this simple animation (below) in the wee morning hours before bed. I have a bigger story in mind, but these 20 seconds were the preliminary attempt to see whether or not I could actually do it (animate); 100% hand drawn and colored. I used free software available through the National Institute of Health to assemble each individual drawing (12/second) into a stack that can be played as a digital flip-book, in a sense. (In the lab we used the program to assemble time-lapse snapshots of developing fruit fly embryos into movies). In the near future I hope to put in a strong effort to make a few cartoon shorts. I like the format of Looney Tunes and the grotesque aspects of Ren and Stimpy. We'll see how it plays out. First things first I need to streamline the process, draw more efficiently, and figure out the wonders of PhotoShop in terms of coloring hundreds (hopefully thousands) of images.

So what you first see here is a hairball bouncing across the screen. I want to animate a sequence to appear before this of a cat who hacks up the hairball. After the "dripping faucet bird" (my idea of showing he's dumb) I will eventually have a bird hunting scene, whereby a short fat bald man hunts these birds from inside of a mechanized bird suit, driving it like a construction crane. Eventually he kills a bird with a cowboy gun and the other birds freak out and peck him to death.



As this production process continues hopefully I'll be a little more professionnel and post character designs, storyboard thumbnails and all that other good stuff I see animators posting on their blogs (which if you haven't noticed, can be accessed through the links on the right not dealing with music or climbing. Pencil Test is a good one. It shows the rough pencil sketches of classic Disney, as well as other independent animations before they are cleaned up, inked, and colored) to track how the animation develops. I have ideas for three ~2 minute cartoons, so I'll probably be working on these in a fractured and stop-start sort of fashion, but that's ok.

Enjoy!

1 comment:

Carrie said...

LOVE THIS! Way to be creative with scientific tools. And other stuff.

I'm constantly impressed.