4Mations Contest Runner Up

A month or so ago I submitted my short film "Furnick" to a online competition at www.4mations.tv. I just got back from my time off to discover that I was a runner up in said competition. Woo!

Starfish Ninja is coming

Just want to get the word out to the small handful of you who read my blog. My good friend Joe Daniels has been working on a trailer for a personal project called Starfish Ninja. He started this project a couple years ago and has been working on it in what little spare time he has had.

I've been giving him a hand with some of the rigs in my free time and I can't wait to see the progress he makes. Keep an eye on that blog for more news on the project.

Some of me...

I doodled something like this on my two week vacation. I think I'm going to use it when I eventually design my real website. Being home was nice. I was sooooo relaxed. It is a lot easier to come back to work after having that time to wind down. I got to see lots of family (although there is too many to squeeze them all in), I got to camp out at a bonfire (and get rained on), take a 30 mile bike ride, go swimming at the lake, eat Smith's hot dogs (best hot dogs EVER), and do a couple days of manual labor. Although I'm not as driven to do work around the house as my brother might be, I do love working outdoors. It is something I hated doing as a kid, but now that I don't have to do it I miss it. What's great is that you can look back at the end of the day and see what you have accomplished. Some times I can sit in front of my computer working for days and it feels like nothing is getting done even though it is.

Anmation!

About a year ago I was working on a different kind of face rig based off of these tutorials. With this set up using nurbs curves to deform the mesh, I created this animation to an audio clip from "What About Bob?"



The model was done by Josh Piejko. So about a year later The Face Machine is released which is an face auto rigging tool that was developed by my good friend Jed Mitchell. This rig uses very similar concepts as my nurbs curve face rig, but it takes it several steps further in the way it deforms the face. The automation is easy as pie too. It takes me about 10-20 minutes to rig a character's face using this tool. So what I decided to do was to revamp this monkey model and rig it using the Face and Setup Machine and try to polish the animation as best as I could. Here is what I ended up with.

if you can't see the videos you can check them out at http://www.mytoons.com/evadceivorus

MyToons Finalist!!

**UPDATE**

Sorry for the delay, but if you haven't heard yet, Furnick won!!! Big thanks to the judges, to mytoons, and the loads of people who have watched Furnick and left me all the nice comments. On mytoons.com it has recieved over 2000 views so far! Woo!www.mytoons.com has a contest to make a short animated bumper with their logo. Well I entered Furnick and found out today that I am a finalist! Out of the ten finalists only three of them win the prize. I believe there might also be a grand prize, but don't quote me on that. Check it out, check out the other good finalists and cross your fingers

Illustration Friday: Tales and Legends

Here are the Tales and legends you never hear of:

The Legend of the Loch Ness Fish and The Tales of Steve the Librarian Who Never Did Anything All that Exciting.

The Legend of Robin Hoods Lesser Known Brother Rodger Hood, who robs from baby's and gives nothing in return.

An old sketch

This was in my sketchbook. I never got around to posting it for Illustration Friday and it just got forgotten.

"I don't like the looks of this. Let's just go to the next house"

Animation!

Blocking out the timing and poses. It feels good to be animating something that is more....me. My last clip I animated was too forced. I forced the characters into a situation and the animation came out flat. This, although it may not be profound is much more natural to me. I'll post more work in progress as it comes.