Been a while since I've updated, here are a couple items of interest. Firstly, my good friend Cody asked me if I'd do a portrait of his girlfriend's three naughty cats for her Christmas present. I can't say no to cats, so I whipped them up in a 'see no evil/hear no evil/say no evil' type of pose. CLICK TO WATCH Secondly, I had the privilege of directing a short we made at PUNY for College Humor. It's called "Charlie and the Apple Factory" and it makes fun of Apple products. Let it be known I only use Apple products. Written by Ben Joseph, hilarious character design by Mike Owens.
As reported by Jeaux Janovsky and Julia Vickerman, the trailer we produced at PUNY for Whit Hertford's cartoon LIFE AFTER MYTH is available to watch online. I painted the backgrounds for the trailer, Jeaux provided the character designs, and Julia produced and animated on it. Whit created and wrote it. Animated by my fellow animators at PUNY. From the LIFE AFTER MYTH Tumblr... I think it turned out really nice, and I wish Whit luck with it!
We do a lot of the animation for Yo Gabba Gabba at PUNY, and we also did the animation for the Yo Gabba Gaba Live! tour. The show came through Minneapolis and it was a really crazy week! Here's a shot of my favorite thing I got to animate for the show, The Name Game.
WATCH THIS BADBOY IN 720p YoutubeHD!! The first cartoon that I worked on at Puny, "Phillip the Safety Egg" went live today! Phillip was created by the great Mike Owens and co-written/voiced by the great folks of Splendid Things! Developed by Shad Petosky and Will Shepard! Designed by the fantabulous Mitch Loidolt and Mike! Animated by Victor Courtright, Eyo Peters, and myself!
Here's a finished shot from my Pokémon Kid Animation that I'm putting together in my free time. This shot takes place right after the kid wakes up to find himself in Pokéland. Is that real? I don't remember it being called Pokéland. Well it is now.
Finally "done" with this thing. My brother Sam did the sound design on the piece, I think he did a really great job. There are still things I'd change, and some great suggestions that were made that I unfortunately didn't have time to revise (sorry Mike). I should probably put music in there....but I haven't written any yet. Let me know if the video plays alright. Ed said it was playing choppy and laggy on his computer, and I don't want that to be the case.
If anyone's interested in seeing my graduating class's Commencement Exhibition (Senior Show), you should come to MCAD and check them out. The shows will be up until the 17th, and there's some really cool stuff in there, beyond just animations. But if you are interested in checking out some cartoons, head to Gallery 148 in MCAD, where all of the animators have a group show. Everything said, I'm pretty ready to move onto a different project... O__O
Click the button (I might..) to watch it. Sound required. It's just something small (tiny, really) I made since my Senior Project is preventing me from making anything bigger or cooler at the moment. I think it's funny.
Good news, everyone! You're eyes do not deceive you! That handsome devil is indeed yours truly. I submitted my Chocolate and Mices stop motion to Channel Frederator and it got accepted for this weeks episode! I made the animation a couple semesters ago, and had intended on going back into the piece and erasing out all the visible wires and fingers from each frame they entered. Of course that never happened, so about a week ago I put it on Youtube and submitted it into Channel Frederator for shits. I'm very grateful for getting onto the show; it was one of my goals to get on there, and I didn't think it'd be this piece that would do it.
Be sure to watch the whole thing too, there are some really cool animations in there!
And if you have a piece of your finished animation collecting dust on a harddrive somewhere because it's not absolutley perfect, SUBMIT IT. ...Owen Dennis....
Here's some art to look at, since this was a lot of words.
Here's my final from my Stop Motion class a couple semesters ago. I realized that I never was going to go back in and do things like erase out the wires or fingertips from every frame..or even add credits..so I decided to just put it up online as is. Others from the class should do the same, lest they want their work to rot on a harddrive for the rest of eternity...Owen... Anyway, the class was taught by Will Vinton alum, Schell Hickel, who was great to learn from and a really funny, nice guy as well.
Some screen caps of a project I've been working on for a while, and now have been awarded the privilege of having local celebrity and animation ne'er do well, Ben Bury working on it with me. (I'm only kidding. About the local celebrity bit.) I can't really say anything about it, other than that it's Flash animation. It's a lot of fun to do, and it's been fun working with Ben.
I'm going to start documenting my progress on my Senior Project animation for college. The meat of my animation can be seen in this storyboard, with some more story added before the boards to show that the owl is hungry and wants to eat the squirrel, and give insight as to why the owl's so nervous.
As of right now, I have the animatic done (for the most part) and one shot finished. Working in Flash makes going from pencil tests to finished animation really quick and painless.
I had used the owl design seen in the storyboard as a placeholder, to be redesigned later to look good. I tried a couple of different designs before arriving at the one I've chosen. Actually I didn't try that many, three tops. Here's the first concept:
I didn't feel it was true enough to the chubby, easily-flustered character in my storyboards, but I liked the graphic style of it, that was something I wanted to carry over into the final design. Sooo, I tried adding design elements I liked from the first concept to the original owl design in this quick, sloppy sketch:
That was kind of ugly. But there was something in this design that led me to the next and final design, but first, a color change to something a bit more easy on the eyes:
Mmm, that was better. I then tried another design, blending aspects of the original design with things I liked from the redesigns:
Success! I didn't expect to arrive at a conclusion that I actually liked for a long time, I had devoted that entire day to redesigning the owl and suddenly found my schedule open for the rest of the day. Hello Dragonball Z: Boudakai Tenkaichi 3 for the PS2! The cocaine of video games for the DBZ fan, a game I cannot step away from for long. Anyway, I slapped that owl on a quick background and then I have a rough idea of what my final animation is going to look like:
Yes. I liked it. Time to go forth with the project. I animated one of my new scenes I added to the beginning of the film, a close up shot of the owl's reaction to seeing the delicious squirrel ripe for the eatin':
Haven't been so proud of something in a while, this thing makes me laugh quite a bit. So that's where I am, I will update when I've accomplished something significant, hopefully someone sticks around to see how it's going. Thanks for reading!
