Beginning of a new test

This is a test I'm doing on the side of my professional work. Its only the begining of it, hopefully the rest will be block out and animated soon.

-Tim

Fun Faces

Ive been doing allot of work with my Wacom Tablet in Adobe Flash lately. It felt great putting pencil to paper again. I don't think Ill ever prefer digital drawing/painting over the real thing.

On another note, drawing these faces showed me I usually like drawing people looking screen left. Ill work on that in the future ha.


-Tim

ARMSmaster Bar Enviroment Animated

Here is the Bar scene slightly animated for the ARMSmaster extended trailer. When I designed the image I broke it up into 3 layers to create more depth. I also played around with doing a rack focus in the shot for fun, but the video so small I'm not sure it's noticeable. I really need to sign up for that Vimeo account soon. Now we just need to get some characters in the scenes and it should bring it to life.

-Tim

ARMSmasters

ARMSmasters Second Edit - Complete from Michael Winn on Vimeo.

This is a piece a few of us Alpha Omega/ CCS Alumni are working on together. The Bar Environment I designed is for a extended version of this trailer. What we want to do for this is eventually pitch this as a TV show, fun stuff :)

ARMSmaster Bar Enviroment

I never did a environment and rendered it out like this. I always wanted to but never gotten around to doing it. It was a great experience, and I'm happy with how it turned out. Big shout out to my buddy Jon Bowling for helping me out and showing me how to rendered like this.

This is for a animation project called "The ARMSmater Project." Its for a second extended trailer were working on. At the moment we have a 45 sec Trailer that you can view here. Were in the process of storyboarding, character designs, and basically just brain storming on how to introduce more of this world. At the end it will be a nice little piece with a pitch bible that we can try to sell :)

-Tim

Fyllo Expressions

I had some free time of late, which has been great to develop these characters more. Also to expand my art portfolio, since I really don't have any "finish" pieces, more just sketches. Allot of times when I'm drawing Fyllo, I draw him with out the flower on his head, then go back over the body with a new sheet of paper on my light table and draw the flower, vines, and leaves afterwards.

-Tim

Pefko

Pefko (PH-F-KO) is the latest additional to the characters of Fyllo's world. (Still don't have a name for that :/) He's base off a pine tree and a Native American, so I have him able to use his pine needles as weapons and his pine cones as part of his armor.

I'm not sure if this is the final design of the character, but its pretty close. I have a few more characters in mind, I just have to design them.

-Tim

Remember this guy?

Yea the kid that just needs a hug. Seems Fyllo still on a angry rampage ha. There is a nice side to this character, I'm sure I'll get around to drawing it at some point along with some facial expressions. I'm trying to figure out a style that I like for the characters and enviroments in this world. I do like how this came out but I dont think this is the style I'm looking for.

Also this picture shows a extra part that I havnt shown in the previous drawings of him, the flower on the back of his big old head. Fyllo has a flower growing out of the back of his head. The main vine leads to his forhead to form the little swirl on it, while it also branches out to his left arm and right leg. It was fun drawing this out, I've been lacking a creative output lately and this just flowed right out :) I have a few other characters I'm going to try to develope soon and post. Hope you guys enjoy it!

-Tim

Motor City Comic Con

Hey everyone! Alpha Omega Animation Design will be at the Motor City Comic Con all weekend. Table 544, stop by and say hello :). Were debuting the ARMSmasters finish trailer there!

-Tim

Landscape Image

I forgot to upload just the regular old jpeg image of the landscape. Whoops

-Tim

Landscape In Motion

This was a little experiment I've been working on when I had some free time. I been wanting to do some environments since I did the realistic photo compilations for the project I was working on with my buddy Carl. Having a landscape broken up into layers really help build depth in a image. In animation it can really help build the illusion of the z space when you pan scenes and have each moving at different speeds. I'm pretty happy with this at the moment. I think the next one I work on will be more realistic rendering, I really want to try to get into more realistic rendering illustrations.

-Tim

Reed Gunther Motion Comic

This is a motion comic that I got a chance to work on recently. The comic/art work belongs to a friend of mine, Chris Houghton. Through Protonic Reversal, my friend Carl's company that I'm a partner in, we did this motion comic teaser trailer. It was a blast to work on it. The story and characters were fun to work with and translated well into animation. If you get a chance you should check out Chris's comics and other work, along with swinging by the Protonic Reversal website :)

This is the second motion comic job I worked on. The other one I cant show much of the work or talk about what company I did it for. Its fun working on these projects though. Its a mixer of working in Photoshop and then bringing it into After Effects, a program I know all to well. Carl and I split the work down the middle, and then he did the audio for the trailer. You should check out the Protonic Reversal youtube page to see some of the other projects that the company is working on.

-Tim

Alice Opening Weekend

I just had a chance to see Tim Burton's Alice In Wonderland in Imax 3D. I thought it was a good movie. The story flowed well and I really like the characters/acting. What I really enjoyed about it is that they took a lot of lines from the book and scatter them through out the movie, especially "Why is a raven like a writing desk?" I felt it brought a nice touch to the film. They really played on Alice growing and shrinking a lot too, which I really enjoy because so much of the film is CG and there needs to be a reason for it I feel.

It was great finally seeing the shots I work on with all the CG elements and audio tracks :) When I was working on the film, I was working on a lot of green screen shots of the White Queen, Alice, and a few Mad Hatter shots as well. I'm glad to see how the 3D stereoscopic turned out over all as well. I had no clue how this would look on the big screen since it was my first time doing stereoscopic on a job, let alone a feature film. There was so many things we had to do and rules to follow to make sure it was going to look correct, and it did. It funny to see a shot that would take anywhere from 3 days to a full week just fly by in a matter of a second, I gave up trying to show my family the shots I work on about 15 minutes into the film.

Congrats to With A Twist Studios and all the people there that help make Alice 3D stereoscopic!

-Tim

Here's a link to a interview that Channel 7 did at the studio about Alice and 3D stereo work in Michigan. http://www.wxyz.com/news/local/story/Local-Studio-Helps-Create-Wonderland/ydPnZDksgUq__quxuq6m-w.cspx

UPDATE:
I just found out Alice in Wonderland beat the premier of Avatar and set the record for biggest winter opening. Crazy stuff! http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-boxoffice8-2010mar08,0,2858446.story

The Fox, The Weasel, and The TP

1st entry of the year, and I'm giving it to the 11 second club competition. A group of friends and I always say were all going to do the competition for that month, and by the end of it no one found time to haha. Well I'm happy to say this month I pulled it off finally...barely. It was definitely tough finding the time and energy to come home from work just to work on another project. Not to mention I don't have a down shooter to keep testing the work as much as I want.

The test isn't were I want it to be at the moment. I don't mind the weasel animation as much as the Fox's. I did the Fox first and figure out a few things while animating him that made the Weasel easier to animate, especially the face. The main thing that bothers me about the Fox is where he places his left hand on his leg, I want it to be kept there a little longer. I like the funny gag in the story but since its not compete well the video doesn't show it. When the Fox tells the Weasel "So I borrowed it...." he throws a empty toilet paper roll back to the Weasel. I think seeing that and having the outhouse in the background would help sell it really well. Oh well, I'm thinking instead of trying to go back and tweak this test to make it what I want, I may treat it as a "welcome back to hand drawn animation" and move on to the next one.

-Tim

UPDATE: I got 57th place out of 142th. Not bad, not good, it is what it is :). A lot of people seemed to like it and thought the TP joke was funny. There was one or two comments about acting on the fox which I agree with but I didn't have time to really change any animation after the first pass I did. I think I'm going to compete in the March competition and hopefully by then ill have a downshooter set up so I can test the animation as much as I would like to.