Animation is like an onion...

...it has many layers. Or perhaps its more like a parfait, people like parfaits. Anyway the last month of my life has taken me though every layer of the animation process, from story development to visual development, and finally to production. (This is a long post so you'll have to scroll down.)

Animation: Below I've posted my final push/pull animation, and I've included all the benchmarks we had to hit as far as progress goes on this assignment, they appeare in this order below: 1st the final animation, 2nd the initial poes test (the starting point, just key poses, usually the 1st thing you'd show a director or supervisor where you have to sell your idea for the shot), 2nd pass (with inbetweens), 3rd pass (more porgress more inbetweens), 4th pass (nearing completion but still in need of some work). You'll notice that the set comes up around my character as time goes on, I had to create it as I animate. (Each video requires quicktime to play):




Concept: Concept is our story development class and our big project for this semester was the One Minute piece, in which we had to FULLY develop our story and characters, treating it like pre-production for our senior thesis, which begins next semseter. Anyway here's my final product, its a piece about a child who dreamed of being an astronaut, and even grew up to become one, but teh job wasn't as great as he thought it would be (requires quicktime to view):

Drawing For Animators: Here's my 1st digital painting for DFA:

Something Awesome

Here's a very cool animation I saw on cartoon brew yesterday that I thought I'd share, its in French with subtitles:

Skhizein (Jérémy Clapin,2008) from Josef K. on Vimeo.

FOR THOSE ABOUT TO RIG...

Finally our self caricature project in DFA (drawing for animators) is complete, and here's the result! I'm pretty proud of my self caricature and I can't wait to model it next semester... which is not as far off as I may think... In addition, the altered AC/DC logo on my shirt, which now reads IK/FK, is a joke that will only be understood by 3d animation nerds, so sorry anyone who reads this and has never rigged a character in 3d before, but your missing out! Also, spoilers for those of you I haven't seen in a couple of months but I am indeed no longer bearded, so excluding that from my caricature was not a misstake.

we found your WITNESS....

So this is my witness animatic from concept 3. For those of you who don't know what an animatic is it's basically storyboards in motion, its part of pre-production for most all films these days. (Requires quicktime to view).

Push/Pull Character Model

So I just finished 1st pass textures on my character model, so forgive the colors just being blocked in and not cleaned up, but you can see how I went from the concept in the previous post to the model.

Big beginning of the Year Post

Ok, its been an intense year thus far. We've knocked out 3 animations in CA, 2 animatics in Concept, and a character design project in DFA (Drawing for Animators). So, in order to catch up on all that I'm just going to make one big post! Here we go:

Walk Cycle: given the model and rig we were to come up with a character walk cycle. I made a distracted head-in-the-clouds type walk with a stumble in there (Requires quicktime to view)

Silhouette: We had to show 3 emotions in complete silhouette, I'm not going to tell you the feelings because if you don't get it, I didn't do my job (Requires quicktime to veiw).
Waiting: We had to have a character waiting for something, this was an acting drivien excercise. Lets go to the show! (Requires quicktime to view)
DFA Silhouette and Texture:
Silhouettes: In our inaugural DFA assignment we had to draw 100 silhouettes and then find characters in them, eventually narrowing it down to 5 silhouettes and finding 3 different characters in each, and finally 5 finished designs.


Textures: For this half of the assignment we had to take 100 photographs of something that has some texture to it, like gravel or a stuccoed wall, and find 30 characters in those photos, and finally bring 5 to refinement:Character Model Sheet: In all of the madness of our DFA project we were supposed to find a character we could use for our big animation this semester in CA, Push/Pull. Here's the one I choose and have begun modeling:There we go! I'll post the character model probably at the end of this week or early next week. Other projects I'm currently working on include a self caricature in DFA which I will probably post some progress on next week.

Blend test

Here's a blend test for my finished modeled and rigged character, its still a bit rough but I wanted to move on so I could do a quick little animation with my character:

Summer Character Model

Here's the model for the character I've been working on this summer:

the Astronomer's Dream

Cool animation I found on Drawn today by animator Malcolm Sutherland. Cool design and an interesting, all be it strange, story.

The Astronomer's Dream (2009) from Animalcolm on Vimeo.

Cartoony Self Portrait

I was bored and needed a profile pic for the blog so I decided to draw this:

Summer Character Sketches

So to keep myself sharp and to have some fun, I have designed a character, the magician Finnius the Great, to build, rig, and animate this summer. I have modeled him so I'll post some screen caps of him a little later on, thanks!

Reel

Here's my reel from the end of sophomore year that got me an internship at bazillion pictures this summer:

Demo Reel 2009 from James Graff on Vimeo.

Finally made a blog

Alright, I finally got around to making a blog! YAY! I'll post my demo reel as of the beginning of this summer and I'll consider that my catching up.