The Owl and the Squirrel

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

Owl and Squirrel Background

Here's an establishing shot from my Senior Project animation about an owl and a squirrel. If you look closely, you can see the owl perched atop the hero tree in the shot. The camera will be slowly zooming in on him in the animation. I painted the piece in greyscale first, then colorized it, all in Photoshop. I actually like the grey version a lot too, so I'll post that as well. The trees are from a custom brush I made.

Tree Limb Background

This is a pan background for my senior project animation about the owl and squirrel. Boy do I love fat, gnarly trees. Most of this background goes by pretty fast, so I wanted someone to be able to look at the still image, so I don't feel like I spent so long painting up something that's visible for less than a few seconds.

Of Owls and Squirrels

Here are a few images from my senior project. Nothing is quite finalized yet. Gotta make that squirrel a different color too.

Senior Project Journal pt. 1

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!

Owl Stop Motion Puppet

Here's the owl character from the storyboard I posted. This time he's not a drawing, he's clay. But he looks like the drawing, huuuhhh??? Huuuuuhhhhhh???

Owl and Squirrel storyboard

Did this storyboard for my final project in my Stop Motion class.  I cleaned them up for my storyboarding class.  It's still a little vague and a bit short on verbiage.