Alittle Concept Art

As I promised, here is some concept art from one of the pitches were working on at work. I don't want to talk about the story of it at all, but you can get alittle idea of it from the art work. The last few months I've been helping my buddy Carl with the environments for the pitch. It was a lot of fun! I forgot how much I like designing environments. It was a real nice change from the character work I do during the day. Hopefully I'll keep running with this and designing some more stuff for some of my own projects.
Working on this show was a real big change then what I usually work on. Anyone that has seen my work knows I'm more into comedy and family animation, like Pixar, Blue Sky, or some of the stuff Ive been animating on like the Wonder Pets. This is completely different. the show is still funny material, but different audience age range. Haha the first environment I did, I ran it by Carl for the final say and he said "Sweet man, make it more destroyed."The environments always started off so innocent and by the end there was complete death and destruction. I've posted two versions of the Navy Pier to show what I mean. Either way it was a lot of fun to switch up what I'm use to working on and trying something new! The Characters are done and ready to rig. Then the next step is to animate a short to send along with the pitch.

The process on these environments I would do is first thumbnail sketch a few different versions of the environment before I started building it in Photo Shop. After I decided on the composition, I found the resources I needed on the Internet, and some of my own pictures as well. The Photo Shop part of it, actually went by really quick actually, probably since I missed working on environments and it was something different than animation.

-Tim

Attack of the Grey Monster!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Once again I haven't been up dating my blog as much as I should, BUT here's an animation for ya to make up for it! :) I started this back in February I believe and then it got put on the back burner for awhile. I guess that's what happens when you have a job, plus trying to do concept art for pitch ideas. Who would of thunk it. I found some time this past week to tweak somethings I wanted on the animation and now its ready to destroy creates, lots and lots of grey creates.

I'm hoping to do a few posting this month of things I've been meaning to post, but haven't had the time to. Thumbnails, concept art, etc. Also now that more of my animation of the Wonder Pets and 3rd & Bird have aired, I can finish cutting that new reel of mine! Plus I figure out the converting of 24 fr to 30 fr or 3:2 pull down as they call it.

Hope you'll like it!
-Tim

A Sort of New Reel

Last month I cut a new Demo Reel up for a few reasons. Ill be cutting a new one again soon enough towards the beginning of next months (hopefully). The 3D animation I start the reel with, I'm still actually working on. I still need to do a little more over lapping with the monster head, show more pushing with the feet, as well as break up the timing of his feet more. Plus I can finally add some of my Wonder Pets work to my reel :)! Which is kind of tricky, since my reel is cut to 24 frames a second and WP is 29.97? maybe 30 frames a second. Got to double check that. So once I wrap up that Monster shot in the beginning of my reel, and find a way to have the WP play back at the correct speed, ill be posting a new reel once again. Stay Tune.

-Tim

What's going to work? TEAM WORK!

Some of my animation I worked on for the Wonder Pets finally aired on TV. This might not be my best work on the show, but its the shots I started on and I'm really excited I can finally show some of my work that I have done. Currently were working on Season 3 of the show, but Season 2 is whats being aired on TV right now. For some strange reason Nick Jr. air two of the episodes of Season 3 that I worked on (Save the Raccoon and Save the Lock Ness Monster) a whole season early. Only reason I can come up with is because Save the Raccoon was about recycling, and they aired it on Earth Day :). Either way, it was awesome to see my work on TV. They kept the animation pretty much the same besides the third shot in the quick time. They had Linny cape come over her shoulder instead of staying behind her, and had her push with her arms instead of her shoulders. The way the pipeline works is, we work on a episodes for 2 weeks, then we get 1 week of notes. Once we ship it back to New York, they still do minor tweaks on some shots for another week I believe.

Looking back at this episode is funny. It was my first or second episode with the Kinetic Post and I was so worried about messing up the shots haha. One of the issues I had is they wanted the recycling bin to move while the Wonder Pets were trying to knock it over. When I went to go animate it, all the background elements including the bin were on one layer. We had to get some new elements from Little Airplane (The studio in New York) so I could get the fix done. Now that I look back at this, that must be the smallest thing to worry about. Were constantly getting new elements from LAP or switching out a hat for a shoe.

Over all, the deadlines are tight and at times can be stressful, but working with the team I have, and animating for a living is amazing!

-Tim

Year Of The OX

Year of the OX! Ive been meaning to do this post for awhile now, just haven't got around to it. This year in the Chinese Astrology is the Ox, my zodiac symbol. Hopefully this means that even bigger opportunities will come along at some point this year :) To go even further, the element for this year is Earth, so I did the colors in Earth tones.

On another note, Ive wrapped up the tone mattes for the apple iPhone game. Now I need to scan all the animation into Photoshop and color it. One thing off my list of do. Now I can focus more on my personal projects, who knows maybe even post more ;)

The Will

Oh man! Is this another post with in a week???? Hopefully I'll be able to keep this pace up. This is one of the side projects I've been working on lately. For those of you that know about the 11 second club will notice the audio is from the December competition, yes I said it, the DECEMBER competition. Have I've been working on this piece since December?? Yes and No, between work and the iPhone game, this piece may have seen 9-12 hrs of work a week. Besides the week I got off of work for Christmas Break, I put some decent hours into the piece then. This was the first time I try to "block" out my animation in 3D, usually I do 'straight ahead" animation in 3d, but if your looking to do this professionally and want to make your director happy, you got to learn how to block out your shots first. It allows to directer to see whats going on in the shot pass the storyboard and lets them make changes on the shot before you wasted weeks on a shot. It was definitely different doing it this way, but I think it worked out better for me in the end. I read about how to block out animation at Keith Lango web site. He breaks it down pretty good, still somethings he mentions that I need to work on, but theres always the next animation test for that. The reason why I called it "The Will" is because the whole concept behind this test is the man is laying on his death bed and it is the girls job to write up his will, but as you see things didn't go to smoothly with that.

11 Second Club is a monthly competition for ANYONE who wants to and can find the time to animate to a 11 second audio clip from a movie that the website choices from. You dl the audio clip from the web site and if you want you can dl free rigs form the site as well. If you win, you get a critique from a industry professional that usually works at some big studio such as Pixar or Dreamworks. Definitely something to do if you have some free time and looking to push your skills even further like I am. Only way to get better is to put the time in.........or pay someone to do it for you, but that doesn't feel as good in the end now does it.

-Tim

It's been a long time, I shouldn't have left you...

It has been quite awhile since my last post. I've been busy busy busy!!!! Yes I'm using that as an excuse. Besides freelancing at Kinetic Post, one of my friends Jodie Hudson offer me some freelance, work on a iPhone game. Its being done in Traditional Animation (or Classical Animation what ever you wish to call it). After each character is done being animated, were taking every frame into Photoshop to be color and output for the programmers to create the game. I'm not looking forward to scanning in every individual frame one by one, its like you can feel the minutes being taken off your life with every slow scan. After that stage though it should go quickly. Right now I'm working on tone mattes for one of the characters I'm responsible for. On top of the iPhone game I'm also doing some CG animations on (one which I hope to post next week) to build up my reel a little more.

Any who, I saw that I was called out by Jodie in my last post ha ha. So that kick started me to draw a quick picture and post it. So here is Fyllo, everyone one favorite jungle boy again. I thought it would be sweet for Fyllo to slide down and around the jungle on a giant banana leaf when he can. Its been awhile since I spent more than a few mintues on a sketch, so with this drawing it felt great to complete it!

-Tim