Friday 27 November 2009

Super Hero Animation: The Final Product

Here it is! After many hours spent drawing and on Flash, I've finally finished it!

It became really hard towards the end because I had to get it done in time for the expo so I spent 2 days straight without sleeping at all working on it. The last time my hands hurt so much was when I played Tekken 4 ages ago...

It's almost as good as I thought it would be even though I had to cut out a couple of scenes but the timing is better than the animatic.

Can't embed this one either, i must find a way to upload my swf properly....

http://www.swfcabin.com/open/1259394424

Feel free to comment/criticize :D.

Expo 09

Wooh, it's been a long month but the expo is done and I've finished my animation. Before showing the final result I just want to go back a bit on the opening night of the exhibition.

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(sorry for the poor quality, it was taken with my phone :P)

So, Expo 09: a 3 days exhibition starting with an opening night for industry people only, with prizes and potential job intereviews. We've been working on it since the beginning of this year and I must admit the organisation was pretty well done. We had around 20 people from the industry, we were told it was great. Personally I thought it was alright, I would have expected a bit more people but hey, can't have everything.
The night went smoothly, people had foods and drinks, they talked and had a good time even though the afternoon was pretty full-on as all the students had to prepare their booth, making sure everything was working and ready to go. Most of us didn't get lot of sleep the last couple of days before the expo and you could tell that 1 hour before the opening just by looking at people' faces.


My impressions:
As I said, I would've liked a bit more people. Other than that, I was exhausted after a all day of running around and standing next to my booth, my feet were killing me. The night was kind of akward sometimes, the thing is you stand next to your booth, waiting for people to come and have a look at your work but when they do, where are you supposed to stand and what are you supposed to do/say? Looking over someone shoulders isn't a good idea and standing right next to your booth starring at people isn't good either. Also the Animation section wasn't as successful as I hoped. Anyway, over all it was a pretty good experience.

What I've learned:
After a quick talk with the Guest Speaker we had from Quebec(speaking French helped a lot :D) the main thing I learned is : Originality is the key to success in the kind of event. 50 students showing the exact same things make the audience getting bored. So if you want to show some of your works, display only the originals one, things that others won't have. Even if in the end there's not much to show, you will stand out by your creativity.
Let people breathe, usually people didn't like me around the booth looking at what they were looking. So don't stand too close to your booth, if they are interested in what you've done, they will be looking for you.
Make sure you're business cards are somewhere people won't miss them. Below the screen is too dark and way too far for people to reach out(yeah everybody had really really small arms lol). Put them next to the mouse or even put a message on the screen pointing at your business cards: Take me =>. Anything really, so people don't forget to get one of yours.
Put something that moves on the screen, it will be more likely to attract people than something static. Showreels are a good ideas, playing them in loops on the front get people a pretty good ideas of what your work is made off.

Leftovers:
Great showbags! I love the stress ball and the mouse pad, I haven't tasted the loli yet but I will soon hehehe.
Congratulations to all the winners of the night! There were 8 prizes giving out, within which 3 work experiences. All the winners really deserved their prizes but I'd liked to aknowledge my good friend Handi Tan for his prize as best use of Flash as he worked really hard for it and Flash isn't really one of his assets. To conclude:

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Yeah, that's right! xD


Wednesday 28 October 2009

I'm not dead...

...yet. Wooh, a month already since my last post, it's going so fast. I'm so busy right now with our end of the year expo coming up with all the deadlines for our projects...

I'm still working on the backgrounds so I won't update anything related to the SuperHero animation(if anyone got a name for it, please...). So many things left to do and not so much time, it's gonna get really tense towards the end and my frequency of posting may be the same as it was recently. So, for you to wait until my next awesome post(yeah, modesty is my middle name :D) here is a couple of links to look at whenever you've got some time to kill:



This one is a cover made by a good friend of mine. He sings so well, it kinda anoys me... I almost like this cover more than the original but I can't tell him(his middle name is modesty too hehehe). He's got some others if you want to check them out.



This one is an awesome 3d movie made by the French school "Les Gobelins". One day, in a distant future, I may get to their level... I love the colours and chara-design :).

I should have all my drawings and backgrounds done by the end of this week which gives me 3 weeks to trace off all the animation in Flash(CS4 sucks by the way...) and add a couple of effects. I believe I can do it in time, otherwise I will have to delete a couple of scenes which I don't want to. We'll see soon enough anyway.

Until next time, enjoy!

Wednesday 23 September 2009

3d Turn Around

3d model of my 1st character. I may do another one for my new character if I ever get the time :P



The quality isn't great but I didn't want to spent to much time on the rendering of this one as it's not my main project. Anyway, see you soon for a couple of backgrounds :)

Tuesday 22 September 2009

New Character Design



Hey guys! Quick update to show my new Hero. She's a lot more girly, hopefully people won't think of her as a boy :P

Tomorrow a bit of 3D, See you!

Tuesday 15 September 2009

Super Hero Animation: The Animatic

For those who don't know what an animatic is, it's just a bunch of pictures taken from the storyboard, put together to get a sense of timing(which is really important making an animation).


(Sorry, I can't get this one to be embed within the post)

It's not going to be a YouTube video in the end(the file size was huge, even for a crappy result with a big compression...). So this is my animatic for the Super Hero Animation. One of the first thing I'm going to change (due to many comments I've got from friends) is Cleo's design. She doesn't seem to be girly enough as every people I've shown this to, thought it was a boy. I made all the music from loops I got from the internet except the one when Cleo is flying off with the candies(Another Life by The Faraway Places) so it's not that great but it fits in pretty well with the animation(actually it's the other way around :P). See you soon for more update on this project :).

Monday 14 September 2009

Super Hero Animation

Still need to find a better title for this one... Alright, this project is the biggest I've worked on so far. It's my end-of-the-year exam which means I still/only have 8 weeks to get it done(a bit more counting the holidays, yeah that's right, I DO work on holidays saddly...). 

The Storyline:
The original story was about bad guys robbing a bank, a Super Dude sees them and decides to stop them. We were given only this part of the story, we had to come up with the ending.

 Mine's a bit different, it's about a Evil Company "Evil & Co"(original, I know :D) whose CEO is a little girl named Eris(wikipedia is your friend). She decides to rob a candy store for herself, so she use her evil minions to get the job done but it doesn't go the way she wanted to thanks to Cleo(name still to be changed, eventually). You'll get a better idea once I post the animatic tomorrow.

The Characters:
  • Cleo: Hero of the story, well almost... She is really young(around 7/8 y-o), she's got a weakness for candy and she's got super power(all of them are still unknown, but so far she can fly and she is really cute, yes, it is a super power!)

  • Hero

  • Eris: CEO of Evil & Co. She's got a Evil Rabbit(a really vicious species) and she's only thinking of bad ways to obtain what she wants.

Evil & Co
The characters keep changing as I'm animating but they pretty much look like this, except for the 3 bad guys who are going to look a lot more like rabbits/animals(unless I find a better design).  The car was "inspired" by Ant Hill Mob's one in the "Wacky Races".

See you tomorrow for the animatic :).

Edit: I changed the pictures for thumbnails as the blog cut out a bit on their right, just click on them to get a full picture(if anyone knows how to get rid of the huge margin on the left...)

Friday 11 September 2009

Basic actions

This one is from last year, it's a linetest of basic actions a character would be using in animation/game:








As I had some free time, I decided to do another one: Brains over Muscles. They were supposed to be played together, just use your imagination ;).







Reminder: Add a Play/Pause button to the linetests...

Glups!

Really short and simple linetest inspired by "Help I'm Alive" from Metric and Kid Paddle(a comic book). Enjoy!





YouTube Videos

Here are some of my works from last semester. The animation with the monkey is supposed to be a joke but because of my crappy voice you might not get it(all the voices in this animation are mine, modified through Audacity). It was created and animated in Flash. "Arnie checks in" was also drawn in flash, scenes put together in AfterEffects and the audio was given to us. The character performance is a linetest put together in ToonBoom, the audio was also provided. All characters are mine:


More to come once I get my .swf uploader to work properly :P

Thursday 10 September 2009

Prologue

Hi guys! So this blog is about different pieces of work I've done the last couple of years and the ones I'm currently working on. Feel free to comment :).