Girl Run

I thought I should work a bit harder on my animation cycles, so here is a run cycle for a girl that I made in flash. I am not too happy with the character design, but the limbs are a realistic length and there was some fun secondary motion. 

Tortoise Walk Cycle

I made a tortoise (definitely not a turtle) walk cycle .gif and thought it might be useful to share a little of the process.

In flash I did a quick character design for a tortoise. I then cut the design into pieces, turned each piece into a symbol and used them to block out how I thought the tortoise might move. I then used the blocked out animation as reference for drawing animating the legs, and remade the shell so I could give it a 3D swaying effect. I also redid the head and neck in order to make a slightly more complex dip.

For the final walk cycle I tidied up the lines on the legs and hand drew the neck animation. For all of the tweened parts, I made all of the lines 'boiling' and removed the tweens to put the keyframes on 2s (1 unique keyframe every 2 frames).

Hope you like it, I really enjoyed it and hope to do more.

Character Design for "Tasty Spacemen"

I'm working on a new project with the current working title of "Tasty Spacemen". Here are some of the initial character design ideas, focusing on silhouette.

"Tasty Spacemen" silhouette sketches

Businessmen

Some character concepts for a short flash animation needing a "successful businessman" main character and his boss. They were all just pencil sketches initially, I thought I would have some fun cleaning them up and showing a little variety of simple styles.

Businessman & Boss character concepts

Art Tests

The last month has been pretty hectic with moving house and exciting job opportunities. A couple of which jobs wanted me to complete and art test to show my skill in those particular areas.

The first company was Spongecell and they wanted me to create a web advert for the Honda Santa Fe.

The other art test was for a Jerrard Wayne Creative and the task was to design some marketign material for an imaginary advertising  agency. I realise it looks more like music industry branding than advertising, but I like the way it turned out,

Life Drawing

I have missed life drawing since uni. I have been searching for a group to join and found a lovely bunch of people in Wimbledon. Although I have found some good online life drawing resources (my favourite being lovecastle), it was great to do some real life drawing and meet new people. 

life drawing 22md Jan 2013

Flash to Premier to Vimeo Export Settings

This is mainly so that I don't forget how to export my Flash animations properly, but hopefully this will save someone else some time too.

1. Create your Flash project at 640*480px and 24fps.

2. File => Export => Movie.

3. Save type as Quicktime (*.mov)

4. Go to "Quicktime Settings..."

5. I unchecked "Sound" as, although there is sound in the Flash project, it was only used to check timing and it is easier to manipulate sound later in Premier. Then go to "Settings..."

6. Set the frame rate to "24" fps, key frames to "All", Depth to "Millions of Colours+"and Quality to "Best".

7. Set up the Premier project at "DV - 24p Standard 48kHz". Import the flash .mov and sound (mp3 seemed to be fine for me).

8. When you are ready to export the video: "File => Export => Media ". Set the format to "H.264" and preset to "NTSC DV". I found it useful to modify the output name so that it describes the export settings. It made it a lot easier to work out which settings produce the best quality and file sizes. 

9. The export for the video will now look ok, but will have thin black bars on each side, to get rid of this, but also remove a thin slice from the top and bottom of the frame, set the source scaling to "Scale to Fill".

10. Then upload your video, I was using Vimeo, but I am sure the quality and file size will be fine for Youtube.

Lonely Drunk Lady

I have been getting in some more practice drawing females thought I would add some colour to my favorite sketch of the last couple of days. Her friends have abandoned her at a party so she is getting drunk in the corner with a comfortable wine.

lonely drunk model