Superhero Storyboard Work in Progress

Posted by on Feb 11, 2012 in DePaul University CDM | 0 comments

Here’s how a storyboard in progress might look when you see it in preliminary, critique phase. I have the basic elements in place and we had in class critiques about a week ago. My professor was impressed with my first swipe at it and my classmates like what they see so far. All gave suggestions on edits to a few boards and ideas on what to add to finish it out. It’s due this coming Monday so you’ll see credits etc by then. If you get to take a look-see in the next couple of days before I complete my revisions though leave a comment and tell me what you think of it so far.

 

Martin Lindsey Storyboarding Project #4 Rough from Martin Lindsey on Vimeo.

Revision B of my second animatic. I went superhero since that’s a genre I’m interested in.

The song is “Streetwave” from the Brothers Johnson’s 1978 album Blam!

Music clip used for educational purposes only. This song does not belong to me, Martin Lindsey, and I am making no attempt to profit from the work of the original musical artists.

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My Path the Rest of the Way

Posted by on Jan 3, 2012 in DePaul University CDM | 0 comments

The new year brings me to the home stretch of my animation program. I have six courses left in the new MA Animation curriculum spread over the next four quarters. This winter quarter the two new classes are ANI 425 Visual Storytelling which is basically a storyboarding class and ANI 466 Animation Styles and Techniques which is an animation history class where we’ll put historic styles into motion with animated projects.

Spring quarter 2012 which begins in late March will bring the next two, ANI 440 Collaborative Short Animated Film and the new ANI 466 Cinema, Animation & Art in Contemporary Practice Course. Fall 2012 and winter 2013 are Animated Short Film I and II respectively. Looking at this final push it seems that there are only three “real” classes and three short films although there may be some degree of instruction involved in the collaborative movie class.

And with only one or two classed per quarter I’m hoping to better be able to mix in some personal work for my company. I’d like to add some animation jobs to the web and social media mix. I’m finally feeling like I’m on the downhill towards the finish line. here’s to 2012-13 and finishing strong.

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My Animation Graduate Seminar in Review

Posted by on Dec 29, 2011 in DePaul University CDM | 0 comments

At the beginning of the past Fall Quarter I shared my expectations of grad seminar as laid out by our professor Lisa Barcy. I wasn’t able to keep you updated over the quarter so I’m catching you up at the end. With our reading assignments and short film viewing in class each week I learned a lot of animation history and along with the background of different types of animation.
Such history makers as Winsor McCay turned out to be inspiration for my exploration of animating water during the term. He was masterful with his realistic representation of the element in The Sinking of the Lusitania. I also enjoyed Daniel Sousa’s Minotaur for it’s creative aquatic animation and the effective metaphorical use of it.

 
Here are my two papers on each of those films in flip book form.
 


 


 
Since I got so much practice using Flash in my Animation Mechanics course I decided to use it for my graduate seminar final as well. Lisa makes sure that we are ultimately producing some work even in her lecture classes and this one was no different. Check out my final project below as I get into my head and look towards the future.
 


 

The highlight of the term was our almost weekly guest lecturer. We had great visits from guest animators like Wayne Brechja the owner of Calabash Animation. This is a legendary Chicago based animation company so it was a real treat having Wayne share his insights on how they do their thing.

Some of our professors talked to us as well. Had a roaring time from Devin Bell who told us about his start in school. He showed his old student project Crank Balls that landed him into a career at JibJab. Meghann Artes shared some of her work with us including student film from her days at U.C.L.A. She’s worked at a bunch of places including Sesame Street. Jo Derry not only shared her unconventional, don’t-plan-it-all-out-before-you-start approach to animating her work, she answered the all important “How much do animators charge for a project?” question (thank you Jo, I’m revising my pricing structure as I type).

We gave presentations to each other as well. It’s always interesting to see classmates talents and learn what inspires and motivates them to do their art the way they do it. I’m pretty sure some great future collaborations will come of it. I have some REALLY talented classmates.

We did lots of reading and wrote a paper a week. One of the more interesting pieces of reading was Colourful Claims: towards a theory of animated documentary. It’s a philosophical take on animation as documentary tool, whether animation can be considered legit documentary since the characters portraying the action aren’t actual living beings.

 
We had a variety of animation related events that we could write about as well. One that was particularly interesting to me was the CartoonInk!: Emerging Comics In Context exhibit at one the the Art Institute of Chicago’s galleries in the Loop. It was an exhibit of alternative comics with a variety of subject matter, artistic styles and methods of print publishing. I have never seen such a wide variety of book styles.

One paper was an out our comfort zone paper focusing on an artistic style that we didn’t work with. I chose a recent mosaic Reaching Back; Moving Forward, Lest We Forget the Song of 47th St. Its a bricolage mural dedicated to the African American history of the neighborhood. Here are a few pics of the piece. Listen to the lead artist, Carolyn Elaine, tell you more about it.

 


 

 
This was a great seminar and I have a lot of conceptual take-aways that I use for future projects. The Winter Quarter lies ahead. I’m ready to rock and roll with the next of the two new classes in the cohort.

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My Animation Mechanics Class In Review

Posted by on Dec 26, 2011 in DePaul University CDM | 0 comments

I posted on being part of the first cohort of this first course back in October in the middle of the fall quarter. I learned lots more since then and wanted to share it here. We continued using The Animator’s Survival Kit(this is the link to the more recent Expanded Edition) and Timing for Animation as our main texts There were three projects since that last post and I’ll give you some background on each.

This short was a study in vibration. We used a leaf at the end of a long stem blowing in the wind as the example to animate in class. It involved alternating a series of frames and repeating some of them to mimic a back and forth motion. I extended the principle to show the roaring dragon’s head moving back and forth. I felt like I was really beginning to get comfortable with Flash by the time we got to this project at week seven of the term.

 

 

This next film was more practice with the vibration principle. I used an alternating sequence of two sets of lips to create the effect of fluttering lips. One set of lips was a series of frames that extended away from the mouth. The other set of puckered lips were in-betweened with the first set of lips to create the exaggerated cartooned effect of snoring.
The original project was a few seconds shorter than this due to the turn-in deadline so I went back into the file and duplicated the lip sequences a few extra times to make my snoozing character more lifelike.

 

 

The final project though, is the work I’m most proud of so far. Our professor, Scott Roberts, introduced us to a new book, Elemental Magic, The Art of Special Effects Animation, by Joseph Gilland. He’s known for his expertise in drawing and animating natural phenomena like fire, smoke and water. I’ve always wanted to study how to represent water so this book was a golden find for me. I recommend it for every animator in addition to his most recent Elemental Magic, Volume II: The Technique of Special Effects Animation which is the one I used the most.
Needless to say I made it a point to include it in my final project below. The objective was to incorporate four of the principles we learned along with a narwhal. I think Scott was just challenging our story telling talents with that last detail. I included A) winged flight, B) vibration (the tent), C) fire, D) water…and the narwhal.

 

 

My animation skills definitely went up a notch this fall. Can’t wait to continue on the development of my during the winter quarter in January.

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My Illustrator Workshop Class In Review

Posted by on Dec 22, 2011 in DePaul University CDM | 6 comments

Just before the beginning of the Fall 2011 quarter the School of Cinema and Interactive Media in DePaul’s College of Computing and Digital Media acquired the graphic design department from the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences. This development has provided a slew of new courses for us. I’ve always wanted to take Adobe Illustrator and learn more about vector graphics to accompany pixel based Photoshop. It’s a freshman level course but it’s one I can imagine using in a variety of ways in my future animation projects.

Our lecturer for this course was Chris Kalis. Although one of his specialties is graphic design this wasn’t a graphic design course, just a basic “how to class”. We learned some important basics such as masking, creating our own character fonts and learning how to create abstract shapes with the line and circle tools. We got a lot of good work in with the color tools too.

Chris didn’t let us off the hook just because it was a beginner class though. We applied design and composition principles to our projects with the layouts he assigned using a variety of techniques. On our first major project he took our head shots, we turned them into silhouettes and then got creative blending it with our initials in a variety of ways. Here’s one of mine.

 
This is the reason I took the class. To learn how to draw in Illustrator. For this exercise we found a picture of an interesting object and traced it. After Placing (sometimes preferable to Importing an image) the picture on the art board you lower the opacity to make it more opaque but not completely transparent. Then the line tool is used to draw the contours of the object. In the end the closed spaces can be filled with color. The file below was my boat project which included a labeled diagram.
 

 
This is my final project, my re-imagining of a Donald Byrd album cover. It is a process book layout of one of his jazz album covers. The objective for the final was to pick an album cover, create a few stylized versions of it, including the logo, and then picking a color pallet to use as inspiration for something unique in the end. This exercise gave us more practice on learning about fonts and duplicating them as closely as possible. The PDF flip book will let you leaf through the pages of my final.


 
I learned more than expected from this class, especially creating custom fonts that I can use in any animated situation. Christ is a great instructor. This is Chris’s personal site. If you’re a student of animation or graphic design I definitely recommend that you take a course from him. And if you need a vector based alternative to the pixel based PhotoShop you should definitely fire up Illustrator and start playing around with it.

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