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Spex Does Animation And Stuff (updated with older stuff)
Spectre-x
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
About time I made another one of these, it's been a while.
Right, so, as some of you may know, I've been attending the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam for close to two years now. Specifically, I've been studying animation. I'm in my second year now, and we got an assignment to make a short animation of about a minute for the North Sea Jazz Festival.
My classmates and I had to pick a piece of Jazz music, any piece, edit it for length and make an animation around it. I picked Dizzy Gillespie's A Night In Tunisia and, after several weeks of work, did this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDZfAPIp8RM
I ran out of time toward the end, which is why the backgrounds aren't as nice as they could've been, but overall I'm pretty happy with the result. Everything was done with Toonboom Animate, apart from the compositing, which I did in After Effects.
And here's some other animations we had to do for our regular animation class as well:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hko_WdCSL3k
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjV6katzxFE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAHto2IJsXY
I've been working on lots more stuff the past few months, so expect to see more stuff soon!
Comments and criticism welcome and encouraged. What's up?
Right, so, as some of you may know, I've been attending the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam for close to two years now. Specifically, I've been studying animation. I'm in my second year now, and we got an assignment to make a short animation of about a minute for the North Sea Jazz Festival.
My classmates and I had to pick a piece of Jazz music, any piece, edit it for length and make an animation around it. I picked Dizzy Gillespie's A Night In Tunisia and, after several weeks of work, did this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDZfAPIp8RM
I ran out of time toward the end, which is why the backgrounds aren't as nice as they could've been, but overall I'm pretty happy with the result. Everything was done with Toonboom Animate, apart from the compositing, which I did in After Effects.
And here's some other animations we had to do for our regular animation class as well:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hko_WdCSL3k
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjV6katzxFE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAHto2IJsXY
I've been working on lots more stuff the past few months, so expect to see more stuff soon!
Comments and criticism welcome and encouraged. What's up?
Spectre-x on
Posts
I also enjoy that you are choosing to do this in a pretty anatomically correct style instead of the loose comic style so many animators do them as.
Very clean stuff man.
Actually, it would work well as some kind of show opening.
That's why it would make a good show opening.
I fully expected the name of the show to appear at the very end. I am sad now that it does not end this way.
EDIT: what would such a show be called though? Spex, make up a name for it. I am wanting this to happen.
Progress, not perfection.
Anything can look good with full animation, but it's more of a challenge when you're working with standard, and a real test when using economic methods.
I'm not sure what you mean.
And thank you, everyone! I'm currently working on a guy riding a bike.
you crazy dutch bastard
you do good animations
24 frames a second, 12 F/S, 6 F/S
Most (if not all) companies want to see if you can deliver their product under strict guidelines. You don't get the luxury of full animation unless it's a feature film, so you usually have to rely on shaving down the frames to convey the same information full animation would.
Show them a demo reel adhering to a timing chart that showcases you can work under a certain budget and you'll have a much better chance of getting hired. Most schools don't teach this, which is why getting work is extremely difficult in the beginning.
I find this stuff interesting.
The animated music video I worked on was all shot in 12 F/s but there was one scene where the singer was singing a line while a painted snake slithered up a column next to him. We decided to animate the snake every second frame of the singer's frames (making it 6 F/s) and the result was that it looked as smooth as we needed it to, but moved eerily slow and snakelike.
Anyway, yes Spex I like this stuff, please post more.
I'm in europe, so it's 25 frames a second here. These things are almost exclusively animated on doubles, so around 12 images per second, with a bit of fiddling here and there to make it work better, which is also a common practice.
Flash is one of the worst programs I've ever had to use. You can do lots of neat stuff in it, but jesus fucking christ is it an awkward bitch of a thing to use.
EDIT: Why 25 fps? That's so bizarre.
I've never even heard of that. Even most european companies I know of work at 24 fps. Hell, Richard Williams told me himself that he works at 24 fps.
Steam
Basically this, yeah, and some gobbledygook about how our European electricity issues forth at 50Hz, while your American system runs on 60Hz.
But yes, PAL format.
All I would suggest is loosen up a little ( I guess don't be afraid to exaggerate) and most of all don't forget animation is fun!
Also have you heard of 11 second club? I would love to see some lip sync work from you.
there are some retards on there who don't know what they're talking about (like anywhere i guess) but i still think it's a pretty neat place.
e: i've spent the last 4 years using flash, and i just can't get my head around toonboom. i get this sense of hostility from it...
I suppose it's Stockholm Syndrome. Flash has been abusing you for four years, and you've just lost any sense of how a normal relationship with an animation program would even work. You poor thing.
I have heard of this 11-second club, by the way, and I shall look into it. Many thanks all around!
I vaguely wish I'd managed my time a bit better better, though, because I could've done the backgrounds up all nice with some parallax shift and animated more characters for longer periods of time, but oh well! I did learn lots about time management, though. It's going to be even better next time!
And I really love animating stuff, it's just a tremendous blast. My classmates all like it, too, but they've all commented on the fact that I actually like all of the hard work that goes into it as opposed to some bits plus the satisfaction of a job well done at the end. The actual process is just so much fun for me, as well as designing characters and storyboarding and coming up with little stories and so on. I really couldn't wish for a better thing to study.
Also, your comic is totally tits, and you're seriously improving yourself. Like dang and such!
Anyway, here's some stuff of mine that I did last year:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNPJi0s_cvs
The animations look great, and I'm excited for the action packed character of your art to start breathing more individuality into it. It looks like you have a natural sense of motion, though.
I like drawing, cartoons, cookies, and shiny pointy objects.
He is Doctor Signmund, star of a really funny Dutch newspaper comic by Peter de Wit. He's basically the worst psychiatrist in the universe on account of being extremely cynical and a genuinely terrible human being in general. It's my favourite Dutch newspaper comic, basically. Often very hit-or-miss, but it hits really well when it does.
We had an assignment to pick one of several characters that appeared in the strip, make a modelsheet for them and then animate them using said modelsheet as a guide. It was a lot of fun!