"An Eye for an Aye-Aye" July Preview 2010

Here is a preview segment from my short cartoon. It's most of a sequence, there are a couple of shot's which I haven't Cleaned Up yet and so they weren't included. I won't be putting up a lot of video's from "Aye-Aye" anymore, not until the cartoon is finished anyway. I will be uploading video's from other animations I work on though.

This is just a short sequence from my cartoon. I'm quite deep into this now and I would really appreciate any feedback you could give me. Be it on Style, character design, animation timing, anything really. I just need to know that people are actually going to want to watch my cartoon when it's finished. Please leave a comment here or on the video page and share this preview with your friends too. All help is welcome.

Show notes and technical bits:

3 of the shots in the segment were made in 2007 while the 4 other shots were all made 2010.

The way each of the shots was put together varies greatly.

In 2007 I was in my final year at Freelance Animation School. Those shots were Cleaned Up traditionally with pencil and paper, then Scanned one frame at a time. The animation frames were coloured in Toonboom and the backgrounds were coloured in Photoshop. Toonboom would trace over my Clean Up drawings and Vector them. 

The quality of the vector depended on my pencil clean up along with the size and quality of the original drawings. Doing it this way, any dirt or registration marks left on the paper during scanning would need to be erased later in Toonboom. It wasn't always possible to find all the bits of dirt on the frames.

 From 2008 onwards I have been working with some Open Source software to achieve the same results as with Toonboom and Photoshop. These days my animation shot pipeline goes a little something like this...

• Traditional Hand Drawn animation - Pencil and Paper on an animation desk.
• Line test the animation using a webcam mounted to an old photographic enlarger - See Here
• If I'm happy with the timing of the shot then I start Digitally cleaning up the captured frames. I do my clean up in a program called 'Pencil'. Digital CU can take the same amount of time as Traditional CU.
• Although pencil has colouring capabilities, I like to do all my colouring and background art in Gimp.
• Then when the shot is cleaned up and coloured I use a program called Wax for the compositing.
• Audio is done with Audacity and then my final edit is made in Pinnacle Studio 12 (which isn't Open Source).

I will go into these steps in more detail one day but that probably won't be until things wrap on "Aye-aye".

 Cheers.

Showreel June 2010

Here is my updated Showreel of traditional hand drawn animation. It includes full colour shots and rough pencil tests.

Music: 'Sweet Georgia Brown' by Latché Swing.
All the content in this video is hand drawn, with paper and pencil (the traditional way) and then Cleaned Up, Coloured in the computer and composited together into a final shot. This was all done by me and mostly with Open Source software.

Here is a list of clips I have used:

• Several colour shots from "An Eye for an Aye-Aye" bookend the Showreel. This includes 2 shots where we hear my character, Tim Portans speak for the first time.
• The Superhero segments are animation made for background use in the short film 'Michael John Shadbolt'
• The Line (pencil) tests include a clip from "An Eye for an Aye-Aye" and 2 early animation clips I made at Freelance Animation School.
• All 4 of the 'One Shots' to date are also include throughout the video.

Let me know what you liked or disliked or maybe tell me about something you want to see more of.

YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXA-6iNVbiY
Vimeo     - http://vimeo.com/12969907

Cheers.

Preview Clip

Here is a shot from my short cartoon "An Eye for an Aye-Aye". You can see the original pencil test, followed by the final composite. This was a slightly more complicated shot to put together as I ended up with the following layers:

1. Tim Portans
2. The Branch
3. Gun Smoke 
4. Prop Shotgun (briefly)
5. Background

I'm very happy with the way it's turned out.

This was created mostly with open source software, The sound effects are from http://www.freesound.org

Thank you to gcmax, nthompson and Alienxxx for the sounds.

"An Eye for an Aye-Aye" Shot Progression

The cartoon I am making is called "An Eye for an Aye-Aye", I started it a few years back when I was studying animation. Recently I have started working on it again in my spare time and using as much freeware as I can to get it completed.

This sequence shows the development of one shot from the cartoon. It has an early pencil test, a more detailed pencil test, the digitally cleaned up line, the digitally coloured cel and the final composite. The linetests are actually from late 2007, whereas the clean up and colouring is from up to a few days ago. I hope you will excuse the lineboil and other little nitpicks and enjoy this little sequence.

This was cleaned up with a program called Pencil, All the colouring was done in GIMP and composited in WAX.


Thanks for dropping by.

Showreel 2006 - 2009

Here is my showreel of hand drawn animation from the past 3 years. Full colour shots and rough pencil tests. From studying at 'Freelance Animation School' to working with a home setup.

The clips include some animation tests from school, shots from my student film and work I was doing for friends.

Music: 'Sweet Georgia Brown' by Latché Swing

Here's a link for those of you who prefer to use Vimeo.
http://vimeo.com/7749548

And here's a link to the YouTube page.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DB82GMsHbRE

Now I can check Showreel off my list of things to do in the end of year wind up. If you know anyone who might like this, please share the video and point them in this direction.


Thanks guys.

'An Eye for an Aye-Aye' 3d Test shot

'An Eye for an Aye-Aye' 3d test shot from Jeff Cook on Vimeo.

Just a test of a 2d animated scene converted into anaglyph 3d. It is slightly enhanced if you wear 3D anaglyph glasses but at the same time it's not too hard on the eyes without glasses at this resolution.

Background elements were made in The Gimp, camera moves were done in Wax. I use Faststone Photo Resizer for all my batch needs, in this case it was to get the colour values correct. Then I put the image sequences back into Wax (which thankfully has a layer multiply tool) and slightly offset them until I saw some 3d.

This IS a scene from the opening of my student film. It's the establishing shot of the location and my main man, Tim Portans.

Guess I should stop playing around now...

'Regurgitate' bumper

 

An unused bumper submission for ISTV.