A visitor from Aardman Animation.

Today was a pretty interesting day. An animator from Aardman came down from Bristol to chat with us about the industry and take a look at our films. He spent a nice bit of time going over the animatic as well as quite a good lecture about his own career, ( an alumni from my own uni ).

He said my animation was beautiful. I don't think anyone has ever said that about my work. I don't think I've ever made anything beautiful, but I do give it a go. I'm still learning from everything.  He had a lot of really interesting and helpful input for the film.  Here's a line test of some rough animation in progress.


rough animation from rory animates on Vimeo.

I'm still workin on it, I dont like the last few drawings, so I'll get around to fixing them before I do clean up.

I think it's amazing that anyone would ever like anything I ever made. Someone from Aardman liked my stuff? I think I could ride this high for years, like Tom Waits when he didn't kill that guy with the plumbing snake whilst he worked at the pizza shop ( listen to Tom Waits : Story Tellers " I can't wait to get off work" here  at 7 minutes into the video to get the full impact of just how hilarious and alternative I really am. ) ...Other wise, uhm,  I'm working damn hard and damn fast to get this film made. Oh by the way I'm going to need a job soon, after I graduate. Preferably in the animation industry. So, who want's me? I work for peanuts. Then, cashews, then Brazil nuts. I'm considering offers.  I just like to eat.

Hand Animation

Finished up the trace on this shot of character animation. It's part of a larger scene, so in the film it will make more sense in context. I have to say hands are really strange things. They are like little characters all in their own right. I've always had trouble, like a lot of artists drawing hands, so I was really excited to approach this particular scene as a challenge.

Hand Trace 02 from rory animates on Vimeo.

Shot Gun Animation Tests

In getting back into animation this week my director had us do some shot gun tests, which basically consists of animating a given scene as quickly as we can. I did the punch in five minutes, it took longer because it had a few layers to work with.
The Dinosaur run was another shot gun test which took about 4 minutes, it had been a while since I'd done a walk cycle, and it's super rough, but the shot gun's are helping me to quickly flesh out what works, what doesn't and why on a basic level without investing too much valuable production time just to find out something doesn't work on a very basic level. for example the tail of the dinosaur dips around too much so that's something I can fix on the next sg test.