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My New Doodling website

Posted: Mon Aug 08, 2005 1:13 am
by kdiddy13
http://www.galaxy12.com/latenight/

For the past several years I've been working myself up to work on that "one big project." Each time I'd over extend myself, get frustrated and give up. I knew that I can do it and I had it in me to be the next Doug McCracken and create that animated show that everyone wanted to see. I freely commented on other people's animations, confident that I knew what was up.

I was wrong.

I looked back on my education, and while I have gotten to be very proficient in Maya, and know how to tell a good joke and story on film, I realized I was missing something. I realized that somehow I had skated by without doing many of the basic animation exercises (like a bouncing ball). Later I had done some of them using various computer tools that allowed tweening, but I had never drawn it.

And that's where this web page comes in. Instead of biting off more than I can chew, I will be returning to the basics. The idea is simple, on nights that I have time, I'll sit down and doodle out a quick animation in a couple of hours.

This keeps me from going to far with it and aiming for a full series or feature and gets me working on the basics that I'm realizing that I didn't really have down in the first place. In the few days that I've been doing it, I've already noticed an improvement in my animations.

I'm learning where I can cheat the drawings, what works, and more importantly what doesn't. They aren't perfect, but that's the whole point. Quick and dirty. Does it do what I want it to? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Learn my lesson and move on.

Currently, I'm using Flash because I had an old licence of it and the drawing tools aren't too difficult to use. I'm considering trying out Toon Boom as well since it seems a
little more suited for frame by frame stuff.

Eventually, I'll be posting self critiques, descriptions, motivations, problems/solutions, and possibly a guest book to leave critiques. For the moment, it's just a list of the animations I've done so far.

Anyway, thought I'd share. Comments are welcome.

Posted: Mon Aug 08, 2005 2:06 am
by Buckwild
Wow! That's some nice work kdiddy!

Posted: Mon Aug 08, 2005 11:56 am
by cribble
some very nice work there, what method did you use to animate this? it looks like alot of rough sketches just brushed up after alot of hard work.

Posted: Mon Aug 08, 2005 12:13 pm
by kdiddy13
Thanks for the comments.

Mostly it's just onion skinned and one pass through using a Wacom to draw it in. Occasionally I'd use a guide layer to give me an idea of the layout (first and last frame, that sort of thing). But I didn't do much in the way of clean up. I did tweak the timing a bit as I went adding frames and adjusting spacing. I'm trying not to be a perfecitonist with these (it's hard not going back and cleaning things up). Save that for a full on project.

I've since added comments to each animation. Mostly they're just brief self-critiques.

Posted: Mon Aug 08, 2005 5:49 pm
by bupaje
Cool idea and a fun site. I'd like to try something similar -as far as a nightly sketch or animation. Really nice.

Posted: Mon Aug 08, 2005 10:07 pm
by jorgy
Nice work kdiddy, and also nice focus on fundamentals. With all of this technology it's easy to forget what we're trying to do: animate - bring to life! No amount of technology can do that, it takes a person.

Posted: Mon Aug 22, 2005 9:14 pm
by ulrik
Great stuff your doing there, I like it a lot this raw and very much alive animations you do!
Thanks for showing us!

Posted: Tue Aug 23, 2005 11:19 am
by jahnocli
I love the jester hat thing. Simple and fresh.

J

Posted: Tue Aug 23, 2005 11:21 pm
by kdiddy13
Thanks for the positive feedback. It's been alot of fun working on nothing in particular. I've been learning quite a bit doing these.

Posted: Tue Aug 23, 2005 11:31 pm
by F.M.
Inspiring! I'll be checking your doodlings on a regular basis.

Posted: Wed Aug 24, 2005 4:35 am
by kdiddy13
Cool. I'll be trying to add something at least once a week. Hopefully, I can keep up with it.
________
THE CIGAR BOSS

Posted: Mon Aug 29, 2005 3:25 pm
by F.M.
About Jester Hat revisited, There is something in the movement of simple lines in combination the colors, heck I just like it!

Posted: Mon Aug 29, 2005 11:17 pm
by kdiddy13
Yeah, I totally agre. I'm doing a longer animation all on black now (with an actual character! :shock: ). I'm hoping to have a rough of it up by the weekend. The colors really pop out. The Jester Hat was a neat expirement that really paid off!

Posted: Tue Aug 30, 2005 12:32 pm
by genericdave
Nice stuff! Glad to see you're getting back to basics. It really is a bit of a problem when animators try to get too complicated. (especially when working as an individual) Some of my favorite animations are almost pathetically simplistic, yet just as effective as the high budget stuff. I'm reminded of the japanese cartoon "Ebichu." Most of the frame by frame animations consist of maybe four frames, and a lot of the backgrounds look like they were drawn with crayons, but I love it still.

Posted: Wed Aug 31, 2005 1:02 am
by mwtoons
cool stuff! I mentioned before that I teach graphic arts to high school students. I always show them your site Kdiddy13. My students are big fans of the urinal one and the gravity of matters. I have no formal training in animation, but really wanted to expose my students to it. I have a few who are planning on going to school for animation. I started off with flash, I have used Moho a little and discovered a program for the mac called istop motion. I think I may try to use istopmotion with some hand drawn cells and see if I can make some simple pencil drawings come to life. I had a student last year draw her cell on paper, then darken with pen. I then photocopied them onto transparency sheets and we placed the sheets over a background that she drew and took pictures frame by frame with a digital camera. We then assembled in Imovie and added sound. It was a little rough but looked pretty cool. She was very excited about the project. I made a simple peg board out of a block of wood and three pegs the metal shop made for me. I used a standard 3 hole punch for the holes.

We also tried some claymations. The kids had fun with that too. I like the idea of spending 30 minutes doing a simple frame by frame animation. I may have some of my students try that. I have flash on all of my imacs and emacs.

If anyone out there has any other ideas to share that would be great.

I'll have my kids check out your new page kiddy, keep up the work!

mw