Animation Fills

Here's the same scene filled in. Oh, and I wanted to give credit to Brian Phillips for the work on character design and look/feel.

Another Pencil Test

Another pencil test for some work we're doing to remind college females to be careful about the information they post online. In this portion the girl is tweeting about how she's at the coffee shop and that she's bored because her roommates are out of town. In the background you can see our character Mr. Creeper (one of her many twitter followers) sneaking around the coffee shop up to no good. The idea is to attempt a more light hearted reminder as opposed to a preachy off putting approach.

Just a quick pencil test

Here's a quick pencil test for a new set of animations we're doing. I've been doing so much design work lately it's fun to get back into animating.

Playing around with Biped animation

I can't remember the last time I animated in 3D. A few weeks ago I opened 3d Studio up at work and played around with the biped animation to check it out. I chose two quick little dances to animate for fun and learn the tool. Obviously there's gobs of room for improvement, but I thought I'd share my first attempt.

Timeline Animations In Flash are Fun!

I love putting together a fun timeline animation in flash to add some bells and whistles to slick interface animation. You wouldn't want me animating the entire site, but I like to think of what I do as like the sprinkles on top of the cup cake. Tiny bits of amusement here and there to add a little fun. Here's a sneak peek at our new Basement website. We knew that we wanted the buttons in the 'who we are' section to have some personality so we came up with the concept of these pipes building a sign of sorts. I sketched the thought, drew it up in illustrator, then animated it in flash. This is a type of task that makes my day go by quickly because I have fun doing it. I'll be sure to post when we've got the site up and running! Until then!

Transitions Lenses Eyeglass Guide 2.0

So I just realized I'd never blogged about the launch of our latest project for Transitions Lenses.

We worked with Brandwidth to create an online quiz of sorts to educate the user on lens options that might fit their lifestyle. At the end of the quiz it allows the user to print out their results in a format that will help her eye care professional work with her to decide which lens options would best suit her.

My job was the general look and feel of the animations. Stanley and I worked together to create assets, and then I animated the videos. Brian was in charge of general art direction, interface design, and 3d assets, and Mark did all the flash work for the tool.

Check out the tool and anywhere you see a yellow button like this:
you'll be able to check out one of my animations. I'll try and work out a way to get the video's in my blog.

Elizabeth's Story Animations

Here's a quick preview of some Elizabeth Story animation progress.

Philosophy Video for new MS Website

Here is a quick animation that I put together for the Philosophy section of the new Mediasauce website with Larry's help on initial concept, Mitch as writer and voice talent, Mike as the Creative Director, and Andy as audio extraodinaire. It was nice to have some freedom on the direction of the design and animation style. I enjoyed sketching some of the elements with a pen that were included in the design, and it was fun to jump into Maya briefly to create the root animation. Thanks for the Maya crash course Joseph!

I have to say, the project went relatively smoothly until I tried to mess with the temporal properties of my position key frames in the graph editor. I dont quite understand why the key frame splits or why you cant angle the handles to make the curve you're after. It's something I definitely need to investigate further because it was driving me crazy! I look forward to spending more time on the next piece like this one and incorporating more pizazz and 2ndary movement.

Here's an image of the design I used for the animation. The photos all came from personal travel photos I've taken and the flower designs are the result of some fun with pen and ink. I liked how they turned out and would love to make a funky fabric based on them at some point.

This Year's Holiday Greeting from Mediasauce

Here's this year's Holiday greeting from Mediasauce. Vince, Dan, and I did the white board time-lapse illustration, and Mike and Mitch worked together on the interface.

Click here to watch the greeting.

Bookend with Audio

After working with Andy on what I was thinking on the audio, he produced this lovely sound track for the bookend. Dan made the scurry sound for us with a couple pencils on a pad of paper. Well done guys!!!

Mediasauce.TV Bookends

I've been working on a little bookend animation for the videos that will be posted on mediasauce.tv The "network" hasn't launched yet, but should sometime within the next couple weeks. Dan created this little tv character that will be used throughout the site. A lot of the videos will be that low fi production feel so I wanted to animate his little character to feel that way as well. I liked the idea of seeing the paper flip and change as the poses changed and gave a slight wiggle to the lines of the tv character to simulate that hand drawn wiggle. (It's a bit hard to see on the small video) I've still got some sound effects and a nice little music track to add. Dan is going to play some snare drum for the music track. I cant wait to get it all together.

Old School Work Archives

Very old Photoshop work. (Photoshop airbrushed illustration of Edgerin James, an airbrushed illustration of a girl viewing the streets of chicago from her car window, a collage design using some photos I'd taken around Lafayette, and a scientific illustration of a garden spider)

Old segment intros I did for a college show I worked on called CG-TV. They were created using Illustrator, 3D Max, and After Effects.

An old flash project I worked on for ITaP one summer. Created the characters and animation using Illustrator and Flash.

Tonight I found my old external hard drive from school. I had to search through boxes of cables to find a power supply and cable to hook it up. I found some of my first photoshop projects, an old ITaP flash project, and a couple of little animated intros that I did for this computer graphics tech tv type show we did back then (You can see Alex and Kindari as hosts at the very end of the Tech spot intro). It is so embarrassing to look back at most of this old stuff, but it's all part of the process so we cant just pretend it never happened! Although, I'll admit, there are definitely things too terrifying to see the light of day that will remain on the hd for the sake of anyone actually viewing this blog.