Continue reading »]]> Week 1 of Cartoon Boot Camp is coming to a close today.

links to 2011 FINAL ANIMATION FROM THIS CLASS: “Alien Attack”, “I’m not going to Mars”, Cut-Out Animation, Action Figure Animation, “Danger Alley” and “Box Head’s new friend”

First off we have some of our group exercises… note: they are all silent since we did not have time to add sound.

Cut Out Stop-Motion and other stuff – Cartoon Boot Camp 2011 from Cartoon Art Museum on Vimeo.

Action-Figure Stop-Motion tests – Cartoon Boot Camp 2011 from Cartoon Art Museum on Vimeo.

“Danger Alley” stop-motion – Cartoon Boot Camp 2011 from Cartoon Art Museum on Vimeo.

And then the final projects from our three groups…

“Alien Attack: the Moon” stop-motion animation – Cartoon Boot Camp 2011 from Cartoon Art Museum on Vimeo.

“I’m not going to Mars” stop-motion animation – Cartoon Boot Camp 2011 from Cartoon Art Museum on Vimeo.

“Box Heads new friend” Stop-Motion – Cartoon Boot Camp 2011 from Cartoon Art Museum on Vimeo.

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Animation director Jamie Caliri has produced some stunning animation using 2D art, in 3D. But not in CGI 3D, but in stop motion. And since I am always interested in re-purposing 2D art into animation I thought I would share some oh his work.

The first piece of animation I saw from Mr. Caliri was ‘Dragon’ one of the unique commercials produced for United Airlines. Here a fathers trip becomes a flight of fancy for his young son. It’s made of 2D art, used with stop-motion animation in 3D. Beautiful and magical animation.

Interestingly, the software used to film the commercial is also called Dragon.

Another commercial for United Airlines is ‘Heart’ with a simple love story.

Mr. Caliri also has posted on-line a proof of concept test ‘The Escapist v.s. The Iron Gauntlet’ for a filmed version of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. This film might not be using stop-motion, but is has some unique ways to add motion to the superhero comic being drawn by the character.

I hope you enjoyed these fantastic animation pieces. Feel free to also check out his title segment for United States of Tara Titles, the titles for the movie version of an A Series of Unfortunate Events and the short The Sun and the Seed.

Continue reading »]]> Last week I had the treat to teach Lego Animation at the Schulz Museum as part of their summer program for kids. We had 7 groups of kids who all produced over 1 min of animation each.

I was impressed how the young students experimented to achieve different effects and work hard to do the best they could using the limitations of the Lego’s.

The videos of the final work will be on-line in the next week or two.

CONGRATULATIONS to all the students!

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updated 7-4-10

Well, my students this past week were really doing some amazing things, and they wanted me to let them know of the tools and software that was used in class and I want to share with all of you in webland what they achieved.

First off we did some Pixalation and Stop Motion. Those are both the same thing, the moving of objects filmed one frame at a time. For Stop Motion we were using and older version of iStopmotion (version 1). It’s Macintosh based and very simple to use which is why I like it. I have not really had a chance to work with version 2 yet, but would like to try in the future. www.boinx.com/istopmotion.

The program was used with just a DV camcorder on a tripod pointing down at a table surface and connected to the computer with a firewire cable. We animated clip art from Dover: http://store.doverpublications.com/0486995666.html which I printed out from the files that came with the book. There was also a battle of Fish vs. Birds with the students drawing their own art.

iStopmotion was also used to film some classic style drawn animation pencil tests of a ball bouncing. The students also went off and drew some new stuff on their own which made me really pleased.

Next off we enter the digital realm with a demonstration of Adobe After Effects CS4. http://www.adobe.com/products/aftereffects/ The program is used for special effects, animation and motion graphics. One strength of the computer is that it can manipulate and re-purpose artwork. Below is a video sample of some Dancing Bears done with one drawing that was first scanned in and  had it’s background removed in Photoshop (http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/family/)and then using the puppet tool in After Effects. Then there is a Mysterious Man walking and Spaceships done with the digital version of cut-out animation.

Many of the same effects can be done in other programs like Adobe Flash, but After Effects handles the bitmaps better and is a lot more powerful even with a bit more of a learning curve. I also love the manipulation of flat layers in 3D space to get a ‘multiplane’ effect.

This is the same way they do the Motion Comics, which was one of my inspirations for this class. Artwork being re-purposed for animation.

AFX character animation tests from Brian Kolm on Vimeo.

Last we needed to come up with a simple idea for a short piece of animation in which the students would draw the art which would be brought into the computer and manipulated creating a whole story. After the class agreed to some story elements, everyone sat down to work on some drawings of what characters would look like. The drawings were placed up on the board and assistant artist Chris Conroy and I combined ideas into final designs.

The final result was always planned to be more of a motion comic, but with the art being created specifically for animating. To speed things up I roughed out a simple storyboard and the students worked on making the art which was scanned after class and prepared to be structured into an animation. A big thank to Graham Wong for his help on Friday working in After Effects to animate the drawings and having some of the students assist him.

The voice of the Nanny Ninja is Heather Plunkett and the lip assignments were done in JLipSync, and older java script based program. It’s a bummer since it only uses 8bit mono .WAV files which are very outdated by today’s standards, but it did still get the job done.

The student really did an amazing  job of creating some fantastic art that helped tell our story. GOOD WORK GUYS!

Sadly time and technical difficulties have prevented the finished video to appear yet, but it will be finished up in the early part of July with the missing art and missing music, but a close to finished version is presented here as a Work in Progress.

Note: I also found a few drawings did not get scanned in the last rush to finish on Friday and so they will have to be replaced with something else. No art was left out except for that reason. A final version will be on-line in the next week or two with a few missing drawings, music and sound effects — but will look close to the video below.

STAY TOONED FOR THE FINAL VIDEO!

Continue reading »]]> Check out this wonderful stop motion music video for the Iggy Pop song “King of Dogs” done by Patrick Boivin. Well, it’s actually 3 videos. Give it a try below. Patrick uses some great computer effects to make his animated puppets look so realistic. Check out more of his work HERE. This is web 2.0 marketing at it’s best with really high quality work.

Continue reading »]]> OK folks, I had a sneak peek at the “art of Coraline” exhibit at the Cartoon Art Museum and it’s……fantastic. Most of the main characters are represented in full size puppets and Maquettes. There are prints of digital concept art. There is a case of Coraline’s inner workings and and tiny hands spelling out a message in sign language. All so cool, all so amazing.

The show opens Saturday and runs for 3 weeks. Spread the word. These are tough times for non-profits and by supporting the museum it will make sure we get to see more work of the medium I know we all love.

“The Cartoon Art Museum proudly presents original works of art from the feature film CORALINE, produced by LAIKA, the Portland-based animation studio owned by Nike co-founder and Chairman Philip H. Knight, and released by Focus Features on February 6, 2009. The exhibition features drawings, storyboards, puppets, sets, costumes and more from this groundbreaking movie, the first ever stop-motion animated film to be shot in 3D. In stop-motion animation, everything seen on screen actually exists in the real world, as opposed to computer-generated animation. This exhibit includes almost 80 pieces from the extraordinary world of Coraline, created by a team of over 300 artists bringing to life the vision of the world’s foremost stop-motion animation director, Henry Selick.”

Find our more at: Live Journal http://cartoonart.livejournal.com/20758.html or the official site http://www.cartoonart.org. They also have a facebook group you can join.

Continue reading »]]> I taught an animation class July 7-11, 2008 at the Charles Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa CA. The class was a lot of fun and the kids worked really hard.

First off is an animatic (a filmed storyboard) for our own action packed cartoon “Super Surf Knight.” I came up with the concept and characters and the kids helped storyboard and design the characters and settings. The kids also did the audio.

We also had fun doing some stopmotion animation too….

Continue reading »]]> The Draw! blog has a short clip of the upcoming stop motion animated film from the book by Neil Gaiman Coraline and is directed by Henry (Nightmear Before Christmas) Selick. The voices included Dekota Fanning, John Hodgman, and Teri Hatcher and will have music/songs from They Might Be Giants. Wow! The stop motion film is also being shot to be shown in 3D IMAX.

CHECK IT OUT HERE!