“Modeler’s Dream” short

This has been receiving some attention lately, so I thought I would share it here. It was done as a final project for an animation art history class, and represents one of my first serious forays into the realm of experimental animation. If you’re in the mood for something a little different, enjoy!

Inspired by the work of experimental animators such as Robert Breer and Jordon Belson, this is an abstract piece exploring geometric shapes, colors and sounds, which are normally logical processes in Maya, on a more visceral and subconscious level. In short, it is an attempt to take a very modern program and use it in the fashion of experimental animators who have come before.

Created using Maya with Mental Ray’s contour shader and fluid deformations and finished in After Effects with audio edited in Audition.

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Finished Animation!

The short team project I have been working on with two other students from DePaul is finished! – well, as “finished” as any animation can ever truly be, anyway. It’s entitled “Treasure Dogs” and if you don’t know anything about it yet, it was conceived to look like a ‘paper cutout’ animation, only it was actually done in Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects with editing work done in Premiere. It’s an interesting little piece that required a lot of adaptation and learning of new skills (especially in AE), but it was a great experience. As such a small team, we all had our hands in pretty much everything, but we gave ourselves credit for a few main tasks. So, without giving anything away, here it is. Take a look!

Treasure Dogs from Lynda Rollins on Vimeo.

Also, I just recently did a stint as a student volunteer at the DePaul booth at SIGGRAPH 2012. While we were there, we did some “guerrilla” stop-motion replacement animations with this crazy character modeled in Maya and then printed out and assembled out of matboard. It was really fun and we got some cool animations to show off (not to mention all of the buzz we created on the floor) to boot! Check them out here:

So, now it’s off to create the next thing! Until next time, animation fans! 😉

The Final

This is my final for the class I’ve been posting work from. The requirements were that it needed to be hand-drawn in Flash (of course), that it needed to be over 15 seconds in length, that it needed to include at least three of the principles we’ve been covering and that it had to include… a narwhal. Yes, you read that right. A narwhal. Bizarre, eh? Well, it did make for some interesting projects. My take is still a WIP that I plan to keep working on in my spare time, but the whole story is there. The animation’s just a bit rough in parts and needs to be punched up in others. Hopefully you’ll enjoy it!

Also, we got some fantastic news last week! Mike is going to be a spring intern at Nickelodeon Animation! I can’t say I’m not at least a little jealous, 😉 but I’m more excited for him. If you haven’t already, check out his blog at Man Bytes Blog. I’m sure he’ll be posting some bits of his experiences starting towards the end of January.

Happy Holidays! ‘Til next time!

2D Effects

Some Flash hand drawn effects animation this go around. Lightning, flame and explosion. Fun to do, especially the lightning. I think I may transfer the vid over to YouTube, as Vimeo’s playback stutters on this stuff are starting to bother me, but you will get the idea. Enjoy!

Here We Go Again!

The exercises keep coming! This time we have takes and flying, but we also have something I’ve never really tried in hand drawn before – vibrations. It was interesting, to say the least. A lot of room for variations there (There are some small hiccups in the playback, but it seems to be on Vimeo’s end as I can’t do much about it. Easy to ignore.)! Check them out!

Still More Basics

This time we got into walks and runs. A LARGE topic, to be sure! The Animator’s Survival Kit book devotes almost half of its pages to the topic. I’ve done walks before, of course, but every time is a little different.

Below we have a standard walk with a little bounce, a scaredy/sneak and a fast run. The run actually looks better on twos (because of the character’s size), so I may repost the slowed-down version.

More Basics

More little hand-drawn animation exercises, this time involving a jump with overlapping action and a hammer slam and weight lift with overlapping action – with a skirt, hair and mustache, respectively. I especially like the weight lift this time around, even though I didn’t get to finish the dumbbell.

I also got some rather exciting news this week, but I’m not quite ready to share just yet. I need to confirm that it is all happening first, but it’s a good thing. 🙂

Back To Basics

I’ve been very busy with the start of the new quarter and my involvement in organizations, but its been worth it! I was recently placed on the Board of The Animation Lodge, DePaul’s official animation student organization. We’ve been working very hard to get it rocking, and I am proud to be an active part of it. I am also taking part in the Sketchbook Project, a traveling exhibition of artwork that will eventually be permanently added to the collection of The Brooklyn Art Library.

As far as class goes, I’ve actually ended up in an odd one for me right now. Due to the new requirements for my Masters, I’m in a course that actually goes back to the “basics” of  animation, i.e. squash and stretch, anticipation, follow through and so on. It’s a bit of a switch since I already have a BA in animation and I got used to more advanced classes. But I do agree that you can never have too much practice in these principles, so I’m getting into it. The weird thing is that we doing everything HAND drawn in Flash, which requires some adjustment. I haven’t quite got a feeling for the line quality yet, but I’m working on it.

The standard bouncing ball you’ve probably seen a million times over. 😉 This was an effort to show two balls made of different materials.

This is a rotating, irregular object, in this case a hammer. The arc could use work, but I think I got the rotation pretty well.

A jump that could use more inbetweens. It’s more of a “long” jump and doesn’t have cartoony squash and stretch, but we weren’t using that just yet. Someone told me that it looked like a Muybridge reference, and I suppose it somewhat does.

This one came out rather nice. It is an exercise in fluid motion/follow through with the squirrel’s tail. I used Preston Blair’s book for reference – and observation of the MANY squirrels hanging out around my apartment.

Lastly we have a whip. Or rather, someone cracking a whip. I played a little bit with the figure on this one, even though the assignment was just to get the action of the whip right. He kind of looks like he’s beating someone with a wet noodle, if I do say so myself. 🙂

Well, that’s it for now. I’m sure I’ll be posting more of these little animations, so I hope you enjoyed them!

Character Animation In Progress Final AND a Bonus Dialogue Piece (!)

So here you have it. My “final” render (HD) of the character animation with dialogue. Shadows and smoothing cleaned up and some minor adjustments to animation curves and such. I put “final” in quotes because these things are NEVER really done. There’s always something that has room for improvement, as some of you well know, and I may go back and tweak it again. But for now, it’s on to the next!

Then there’s this, an amusing little bit of lip sync animation I did slightly before I dove into the Young Frankenstein piece. The audio clip is the multi-talented Alan Rickman as the Sheriff of Nottingham from Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. He’s such a great actor to do lip sync to because he likes to put extra emphasis on and over — anNUNciate — every — SYLlable. 😉 That and he’s just a great actor period. Once again, this piece uses the public Generi rig. Oh and both pieces were done in Maya, BTW. Enjoy!

Animation In Progress Take 2!

Okay, so here we have the latest installment in the animation-in-progress. Lip sync, in-betweening, all that good stuff. My render needs to be cleaned up and it still needs tweaking, but this stuff ALWAYS has room for improvement. Again, constructive criticism welcome. I will be working on this some more in the next few days, as I ultimately aim to be adding this to my portfolio along with another piece (that will show up here soon as well). Not quite there yet!