"Tend to my Creations"

Ah It's so good to finally have a weekend where I can just tend to my creations, if only ever so slightly.

I've had time to sketch up some designs for a new character today and over this Easter weekend I have been Cleaning Up some more of my short film. Above is a Clean Up colour render and the original pencil sketch which it was Cleaned Up from. This is just a quick render though, the colours and background will be different in the final form.

Happy Easter!

The Deal Shrimp

Hi all,

Introducing The Deal Shrimp. He's a character mascot I designed for a new 'Deal Site' aggregator.

http://www.dealshrimp.co.nz

Please visit the site for more information. 

Also, I have tidied up the design of the page a little bit as well as added pages for my Biography / Contact and Portfolio.

See you next time...

And now the formalities...
'Deal Shrimp'   Copyright © 2010 BenEBoy IT LTD   all rights reserved.

Tim Portans - A bit more about him & his mouth.

Welcome regular readers and those of you just passing through.

Today I give you an image showing some of the mouth shapes used in a speaking scene from my cartoon. I think it's been a while since I've had a post about Tim Portans, he's the main character which the storys point of view is mainly told from. He's a pilot who is stuck in a tree (a very tall Baobab tree mind you) and soon comes face to face with that pesky critter, The Aye-Aye.

 Tim Portans was designed and refined in 2007, He had some major facial reconstruction (a last minute Chin Change) before a "final" design was settled upon. I say "final" because I'm trying to keep his model fairly loose. You can see some of his earlier designs and model sheets in two of my early posts from 2007, Here and Here. 

I just want to mention somebody who has played a huge part in creating Tim Portans as a character. He is Joe Poole, one of the third year tutors I had at Freelance Animation School. Joe really helped work my concepts into the final model designs and then provided a voice which ultimately became the voice for Tim Portans. These are some of the things which cemented the character into place in my mind at a time when I didn't quite know what he was going to sound like. Unfortunately I won't be sharing the voice of Tim Portans anytime soon, that will have to wait until the project is near its completion.



Feel  free to visit my Profile on The Big Idea, a great New Zealand site for the creative industry where I have found work before. Also if you have any questions or enquiries for me, leave a message or post a comment. I will get back to you as soon as possible. 


Cheers Folks.

"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.

A Creative Suite ...

... It's Free, but not without it's limitations.

Yes it's a 'Double-Post' day. I thought I would just quickly put together a little list of some free and/or open-source software that is being developed out there. Remember though, these are just tools. They won't make magic for you. It's up to you to use the software in a way that will showcase your creative vision.

A tip, this software IS NOT always easier to use or more user friendly than the industry standard software. If you are willing to buy what the professionals are using, then please go ahead.
For example, Toonboom or Flash individually could probably do what several of these programs can achieve collectively.

Gimp Image Manipulation Software.
A one stop photo shop with thousands of add-on's and paintbrushes available for it. It also has an animation shop plugin, although I've never used it. There is a lot of help and tutorials on the web for GIMP and it is highly regarded Freeware.

Inkscape Vector Art Software.
For creating Vector Art of course... although I only use it for fast and efficient colouring of my digital animation cel's.

Monkey Jam Pencil Test Software.
I say Line Test, you say Pencil Test. Time out your animation sequences with this. A must have for Stop-Motion animation.

Pencil Vector Based 2D Animation Software.
I use this for my Digital Clean-Up, with the Polyline tool and a $75 (New Zealand) tablet. I also use it for animation timing, but I don't use it for Cel colouring. You could in fact make entire 2D digital animations with this, from rough to cleaned-up and coloured. Remember to save often!

Wax Effects and Compositing Software.
Works well with compositing the different levels of your shot together. Not so good as a video editor due to the number of video levels it creates. Also it's not the best for trimming and splitting video clips.

Also an honourable mention goes to FastStone Photo Resizer.
A very handy tool for your batch image resizing and watermarking (among other things...) needs. Good for those pesky image sequences.

I don't know how to code or write programs by the way. These are programs which I have found to work well for what I want to do... at this stage anyway. These programs usually have tutorials and help to get you started and making those masterpieces.

I've used a combination of these programs over the last year and a bit and I want to really give them a work out this year. Also it should be noted that I am not working on a high end computer, just a standard laptop running Windows XP. Sorry if I'm now not the man you once took me for.

EDIT// Thanks to a daily deal on a daily deal site I have managed to get Pinnacle Studio Ultimate 12 for a VERY decent price. It's missing a few features that I really, really wanted but it will serve me well (hopefully) in the near future when it comes to stringing a bunch of shots together.

Thanks.

2010!

Happy New Year, Seasons Greetings and Merry Christmas.

Welcome to the year 2010.

In a follow-up to the poster design in the last post, here is a comparison between my original sketches and their cleaned up and coloured counter-parts.
For this I did my pencil and paper drawings (as usual) and then cleaned them up traditionally...
Thats tracing on top of the sketches with a fresh, new piece of paper.
Then it was digitized on the dusty old flatbed scanner and coloured up in Gimp. These days I usually do the clean up in a software program called Pencil, but I'm not fast enough with that so I did the old school way to meet the deadline.

If you look closely, you can see what changed and what stayed the same.

Fun!

The original title I drew up for the poster was too bland and I didn't want to spend a lot of time on the title, so I picked out a font and dubbed the poster into Spanish.

Ok guys, work off the Yuletide Pud* and I'll catch you next time.


*Pudding.

"El Terror De La Calamidad Abismo"

My poster entry for the MGM channels 'Tarantino video shop' competition.
View the winning entries here.
If you like Grindhouse posters and cheesy, sleazy VHS covers, then check out the winning entries (Several of them by one talented guy). They perfectly capture the essence of the genre.

While my design wasn't in the winning Top 10, I still managed to get a prize pack. Yay!
Also a free typo on the Winners page too :p

Translated as "The Terror of Calamity Chasm"
Unbelievable, Uncivilized, Undead!

Special thanks to my dad for telling me to add a scantily clad lovely to the design.


Next time I'll post some of the W.I.Ps and roughs from the development of the poster.

Cheers.

'86 Series Disintegrator Ray'

Hi guys,

Here is my Ray Gun design. The '86 Series Disintegrator Ray'.It's features include a Pump-Action oscillation mechanism, a Handy Belt ring, a Nifty Tail Fin and blast settings ranging from a Mild stun to a Full Bodied Disintegration.

"Just point, pump and shoot."

Hopefully I'll work this puppy into an animation one day.

I left the ray gun pretty late and only just got it submitted on time, even then it was missing a few extra bells and whistles that I wanted to add to it.
 

Having a working scanner again really worked well for these designs as I'm still faster at hand drawn clean up over digital clean up.


Happy December days.

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 update here and an update there.

A few months ago I posted some drawings and a digital clean up of my 'Kiwi Kong' character. Here is my paper layout and digital line art for a poster I plan to get printed sometime. So I drew this up with coloured pencils, darkened the lines and then traced over it in the computer. I use Gimp as my photo shop and Pencil as my vector based tracing software. When I get around to colouring this it will either be done in Inkscape or Gimp. More on Software here.

Anyhoo,

I 'm working on a few projects at the moment, Two of which are short animations for friends who are making their own short films. Also I need to colour this poster and another image which close friend's of mine have been waiting for. As for my short film, further work is on hiatus until the end of September, once I get some of these other pieces of work completed.

♠

'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...

High School daze: 'Infectious Happiness' Logos.

School Day logos. from Jeff Cook on Vimeo.


Heres some stuff from my high school days (2004), I was part of a passionate group of student film makers and during our final year in high school we managed to make 3 short films in our spare time. Those were crazy, brilliant times! We were an excited bunch led by a terrific, enthusiastic film teacher.
After high school we managed to meet up annually for the following 2 years to compete in 48hours Furious Filmmaking... Now THOSE were even crazier experiences, I think I still have the psychological scars from those.
Heres to the 'Infectious Happiness' team and the 5 films we made together!!

Anyhow these are the logos I made for the team.

Two of them were made in flash... flash 5 I believe.
Actually the bright orange logo was never used on any of our films... computer problems, format problems or stress? Ah well it never got used.
The other one was replacement animation made with construction paper cut-outs, it was a lot of fun to make this one and though its simple it is my favourite of the bunch.

Then lastly I included a shot from the title card of my work-in-progress film. Not much too it except it's meant to be a throwback to retro animation where the cartoon character is introduced on a title card filling the screen.

Ah memories...

Side by Side shot comparison

Rough Animation / Final Composite from Jeff Cook on Vimeo.

Yay! Double post day!!
Why not?

Here is a comparison shot between a rough animation pencil test and the final coloured composite.

The pencil animation was filmed on a webcam and captured in Monkey Jam (and had some compression issues), traced digitally in vector program Pencil and coloured in Inkscape. The Background was created in The Gimp and everything was composited together in Wax.
If that all sounds like gibberish then maybe you would like to know that those are all Open Source freeware software.

This is a shot of self proclaimed "Flying Ace!" Tim Portans in search of that pesky and elusive Aye-Aye.

Enjoy...

Development from Concept to Final Composite

The concept art was done in February 2007 and the rough animation was done late May in 2007. But coloured composite was just done last week.

While I was looking through some concept art I found this piece, which was an early piece that was used in my (first?...) project pitch to the tutors. Unlike other concept art in my pitch, this actually became a scene.

My character Tim Portans' outfit was almost refined enough for the model pack but his face, particularly his chin and hair style, still had a lot of tinkering to go.

Also the background design for this shot only changed slightly from concept through animation.

Cheers.

Regurgitate Key Frames

Some coloured key frames from a little animation I did a few months back.

After a day of creating a piece of background art and compositing a scene of animation, I needed to quickly throw something else together to feel that much more productive.

Happy Easter Weekend guys.