Don't Call Me Stupid

I finished my January Animation Focus session with the great Carolina Lopez Dau last week, which produced the following:

It could maybe use another refinement pass, but I think I'm done with it for now.

I've been wanting to animate to a clip from A Fish Called Wanda for years now, and I ended up going with this one because it's short, which allowed me to go deep on it in the time that I had available to work on it.

I used the old, reliable -- and excellent -- Morpheus rig, which allowed me to make it look a little bit like Kevin Kline's Otto.

For shits, here are a couple of the early blocked-out passes to get a sense of where I started.

After my first feedback session with Carolina, I reworked the blocking pass entirely and came up with something much closer to the final piece. I feel like I could have gone in any number of directions with this, and I purposely avoided watching the actual scene from the movie in the interest of keeping the performance fresh and my own.

And besides, who could possibly beat Kevin Kline as Otto? Certainly not me.

The Hero Returns

I got to see Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse last night with a bunch of good old DigiDudes, not to mention an old friend who just happened to be an animator on the movie!

Me with my hero Nick Kondo at Lincoln Square in Bellevue after the show.

Nick Kondo was a year ahead of me at DigiPen. Even back then everyone knew he was gonna do something great. I interned at Nintendo Software Technology for a summer while he worked there, and we worked together at WB Games and Signal Studios. He taught at DigiPen for a while before rocking Animation Mentor and getting an animation job at Sony Imageworks in Vancouver, B.C. His first feature was this crazy good movie! Everyone's rightfully so proud of him.

Loved Spider-Verse. Loved Nick's work in it. Hope to see it (and Nick) again soon.

In honor of the occasion, I present to you the sprites I did for Spider-Man 2: The Hero Returns -- a hardly known mobile game from the dark ages (2004ish) that a small team at Handheld Games made for Sony Pictures Mobile. It was my first job doing art and animation in videogames.

Sized-down Spidey

 

Poor pixelated Mary Jane

Happy birthday Dad!

Actually, it was three days ago. I got way too ambitious with this one and couldn't get it done in time. Anyway, happy birthday, Dad! Love you, and see you soon!

Happy birthday to my little brother

My brother's birthday was yesterday. Because I spent the weekend getting a reel together for a maybe job, I didn't get around to making a little birthday animation til late. So now I'll be late making one for my dad's birthday, which is today.

Anyway, happy birthday Dave. Love you lots.

Also, smoking is bad for you.

Xmas GIFs

I went ahead and bought the full version of ProMotion NG after realizing how much easier animating pixels would be using layers, so I'm experimenting with some fun Christmas animations before getting back to my little Visionaries thing.

Actually based on my house and wife's car.

Knights Of The Magical Light

I like doing pixel art and animation. I've decided to take a short break from animating in Maya to do some new pixel pushing.

I've chosen The Visionaries toy/cartoon from the 1980s as my inspiration since it's pretty obscure and had a ton of unrealized potential. My goal: Pretend I'm working on an officiallly licensed Super NES game adaptation and do animation sets for a few of the characters, along with whatever else I come up with.

Here's what I've got so far:

Leoric. Just standing there to establish the look I want.

Starting with Leoric there, I'd like to do run, jump, attack, transformation and totem spell animations for a couple Spectral Knights and Darkling Lords. Doing a vehicle or environment would be fun, too.

My dream Visionaries game for the Super NES would be a classic, side-scrolling action game in the vein of X-Men: Mutant Apocalypse or Captain America and The Avengers (see images below).

X-Men: Mutant Apocalypse (Super NES)

Captain America and The Avengers (Arcade)