PappyWorld
I just updated my personal website PappyWorld.com to include a link to my university blog (here) so that fans can keep up to date with my uni work.
I also added a button for “LinkedIn” as another contact option for animation work / clients or alternatively an ‘online CV’ of sorts. Listing my skills and such.
My Digital Animation Showreel [University Year 2 / Part 2]
This is a big compilation of just a few of the exciting animations and animatics I’ve worked hard on in my second year of University on Digital Animation. Enjoy!
Projects Included:
- Red Or Dead
- PokeCop (Personal)
- Mr Wall (Funny in 15)
- Come Game With Me (Personal)
- DEEP Animatics
- Project Deep
- The Mobile World (Funny in 15)
- Dear Nana (Blue Lines)
- Set In Stone Gaming Intro (Client)
Red Or Dead Complete Film
The Red or Dead project has been a lengthy and decent learning experience for me as a part of a group of six. I was partnered with Yasmin Down, Connor McKee, Patrick Høiseth, Stu Whitten and Joshua Smyth a well balanced team with Josh and me working on the 2D animation / Pre-production elements, Yasmin, Connor and Patrick working with CGI, and finally Stu working on all the VFX.
I personally think we could have done much more to the project to make it relate to Red Or Dead and their style, but as time ran out the team didn’t have as much time to implement the nice style.
Anyway, here’s the whole film! Enjoy.
Red Or Dead - Finished!
The Red Or Dead project is finished. (Or at least most of it is) All the parts I’ve been involved in and helping in have been completely finished now. I’ll post a video of all the things I contributed to the project soon. I felt as though it was an amazing learning process for me and I feel that I have not only improved in frame by frame animation slightly but also learned new techniques in Adobe Flash such as ‘multi-frame edit’ and a bunch of neat effects in Photoshop and Premier Pro.
To Sum up it’s been a good experience in terms of new knowledge. I feel that we certainly cut it close on timing and that it could have been better if we had more, but I think that the feeling occurs in every project.
Red Or Dead - Baby Emerging Animation Complete
Giant Baby Behind Buildings (2D behind 3D)
In the final thing the baby will obviously be appropriately place behind the buildings using a technique Connor is using. But here’s the basic baby animations demonstration.
Red Or Dead - ‘Animating live action’ (Progress)
Please read my previous post to fill you in on this oddity.
So here’s an animated test of Patrick running from a giant fish with my own custom animations which add stretch and squash to the live action characters. It’s still very rough and once I’ve added all the live action in we’ll be putting various vfx to make it look more aesthetically pleasing. :)
But for now, there’s that. ^
Red Or Dead - ‘Animating live action’?
Seeing as I mentioned earlier in a post that the green screen footage may look dull in an animated world or even cheesy, I thought “why not make try it good cheesy?”
Using the method above of carefully selecting which frames look best from the greenscreen footage I have animated ‘Patrick’ running with added stretch and squash.
Hopefully this will give the live action scenes a more humorous and fun aspect.
YouTube video demonstrating the effect will be posted shortly.
Red Or Dead - “Action Woosh” - Animation Test
You see these fast action packed blurs in animation all the time, and we need one for a certain scene so here’s one I made in Photoshop and Flash.
In this test I’m hoping to achieve a nicer effect than the 3 frames the made a woosh effect in the animatic.
Adobe Flash Crashes.
What do you get when you combine a £300 Wacom tablet and an even more expensive Adobe Flash CS6?
Crashes! - And lots of them. But that’s okay because there are ways to fix it, (but it’s not ideal when working mid-project.)
So I am being gradually slowed down by Adobe Flash crashing frequently. I find that this occurs more often when working in HD resolutions with a wacom. Many others report the same online and even make animations (ironically) about how it occurs.
Red Or Dead - Bottle Strike.
This is the same shot as the previous blog post showed but now finished (The 2D aspects) Once Connor has finished the 3D this should be a really nice shot. I enjoyed animating the baby’s expressions in this one although it was difficult to retain a “babyish” look to him.
The little soldier also has his own squirming animations.
Red Or Dead - Little Details.
I’m working on a scene involving a really tiny person in the foreground being attacked by the Space Baby. I just wanted to show a zoomed in shot to show some of the little details I’ve been adding in to the project.
Red Or Dead - 2D Meteor Testing (Work In Progress)
Well we were originally planning to use a 2D meteor but I think we’ll be using a CG/VFX compiled one instead as I personally feel my 2D meteor just doesn’t do this opening scene justice. (And I’m okay with this.)
I say I’m okay with this because I know that it rules out the idea of using 2D. It was an experiment, and I think it’d be a shame to use something so flat for something so powerful. Particle effects from a VFX point of view could look great on a meteor falling.
Red Or Dead - More 2D/3D scenes.
As I’ve mentioned before the 3D in this scene is just an image provides by Connor which I have split into 2 layers, (front and back of baby).
Even if Connor does update the CG (textures and lighting, etc) it doesn’t matter as I have been sending him scenes in PNG sequences with transparent backgrounds.
So in a way it’s like an advanced form of cel animation. All he gets is the frames of the baby on a virtual 1920x1080 piece of paper. Then he works around it as he pleases. :) Although any tracking that needed doing for moving shots I have been doing myself in Flash.
In this scene the Space Baby shoots down the helicopter with its laser vision. Currently I used the effects I made in the animatic stage. But they will be all VFX made by STU in after effects and nuke soon enough.
Red Or Dead - Skybox
Me and Joshua Smyth developed a large ‘skybox’ for the post students to use in their CG scenes. Josh developed the original concept (highest image) and then I tweaked it to work like a skybox by making it over 8000 pixels in size and adding clouds and a sky like atmosphere. (Lower Image)
It works like a globe / sphere shape and surrounds the world in a 2D blanket.
Red Or Dead - Getting shots animated.
Here is one of the many shots that I’ve finished animating featuring the ‘Space Baby’.
I’m currently working hard on animating the baby into all the 3D scenes. But seeing as this is just 2D I thought I’d post this scene to show.
In this shot, a plunger (previously dropped from a helicopter) yanks the Space baby’s helmet off.
Meanwhile my team is working hard on animating the animals, 3D scenes, and models from the animatic.
