Tigers' Dance Animations

There are many 'emotes' in the game. If you feel like screaming there is a scream animation. If you feel like practicing Kung-Fu, there is a kung fu animation. If you feel happy, there is a happy animation. And if you feel like dancing....

Gorilla boss

More Loadbar Animations

A couple more loadbar animations from the kfpw. Viper was the most challenging to break apart into pieces to re-use. She changes shape so often and her body is always tapering in or out. But I will say, Viper was the most fun to animate.

Loadbar Animations

To keep players entertained while waiting for kfpw to load, we created a series of loadbar animations with the 'furious five' characters. We had a unique challenge of making these animations fairly long, but keeping the file size very, very small. So, we roughed these out to get the performance right with the brush tool. Then made 5 or 6 shapes to describe the monkey's main body parts (head, tail, chest, leg/arm, foot) and then re-used, overlapped and skewed the same body parts over and over again until the whole body was filled in. Since Flash allows you to instance the same symbol (movie clip or graphic)as many times as you want without adding to the file size, we were able to keep the files small, allowing them to load quickly.

Here is monkey

Croc Boss

One of the many cool villains in kfpw is the Croc.  Here is one of the croc boss entrances I animated in one of the mini-games, followed by the rough animations I did before filling in the the character shapes. The red lines are tracking my arcs on the sword and a few other parts of the character. 

More to come...

Busy

Thank you for the great comments everyone has been leaving lately.  There have been some questions about my materials I use to draw or software to animate.  So, I'd like to answer some of them.  I animate in Flash for 2D and Maya for 3D, with the exception of the occasional animation in After Effects or Nuke.  I almost always draw quick, people, observational sketches with a pen. I have a nice Faber Castell 'S' PITT pen.  If I'm drawing from my imagination, then I almost always use a medium-hard pencil  H's or F's.  If I like the drawing, I will sometimes refine it with a soft 4-6B pencil.  If I add color, I usually scan in my drawing, set the drawing layer (in Photoshop or Illustrator) to 'multiply' blend mode and add color on layers below that.

This is an illustration I made for an insurance company a few years ago.  I was going through some old files and stumbled on it. It seems to give the sense of busy, which is what I am right now.  It's an animated gif that I created in photoshop.  Basically you feed 5 or 6 versions of a drawing into photoshop and it loops them.

straight ahead animation on the DS

I just started drawing mike wazowski and 500 or 600 frames later, this is what I came up with. fun excersize with a simple character, i guess. i don't know if i'll ever get around to finishing it but it was fun to animate. it could use some in-betweens and music...

The Quest Goes On!

Sorry for the lack of posts. moving, working, acquainting, etc..has kept me very busy, but I've managed to do a couple quick animations on the DS to keep the mind limber.

I've been taking the bus to work a few days a week, which has given me time to draw. So stay tuned for some bus drawings. Things are going well out here and the future is definitely looking bright for the quest.

Jump, Clap, Hell yeah on the DS!

I thought I'd try some straight-ahead style animation, working on turning people around in 2D. Used Animanatee, again on the DS. Don't know where the premise came from, perhaps influenced by the upcoming Olympics and the fact that it's Friday. Enjoy the weekend!

more Nintendo DS animation

Joseph slams the tennis ball once again and...rejoice for video game sports.

Nintendo DS + Colors! + Animanatee = portable brilliance

I just got a Flash cart for my DS which allows homebrew programs, such as a painting program, colors!, and a flipbook program, animanatee. Love it. Here are some quick tests I did getting used to the programs. You can adjust framerate, pressure sensitivity, etc... Sorry for the bad compression, still trying to find a good one that works for youtube/google video.

Some work stuff... Perficency, Barking up a dead horse

Here's a preview of what I was working on about a month ago, probably one of the most fun projects to animate that I've done here at Mediasauce.

www.barkingupadeadhorse.com

In Progress Animation for Mediasauce

This guy is trying to get across the room with all of these space heaters in his way. He then sees this woman frozen in a block of ice (hard to see) and jumps back.

....another pass

Trash Throw in Flash

Here is a clip from a current flash animation for work. I'm trying some new techniques and I've found this one to be very helpful in the world of flash/cutout animation. I first started by quickly roughing in the keys and a few breakdowns with the brush tool, focusing on poses and timing...

...then I quickly placed the vector work over top of the roughs and manipulated where necessary,

I mention this because......When doing cut-out animation, it's easy to get stiff and lifeless animation. There's a tendency to rely on one pose and milk that for all it's worth. Adding that step of quick roughs in the beginning helps loosen it up a bit and allows me to think outside the pose. Although this is still rough, it is a much better performance than if I'd just rotated vector art from illustrator, and it really didn't take much more time.
Since I work in a commercial/ad business, these animations have to be turned over quickly, but I think we can still get a good performance, just maybe not so much polish. I would rather see this than a super smooth "Flash tween" rotation. very mechanical=no life

four legged animals=lots of keyframes

This is a flash animation I did for work yesterday. Head and body were animated cut-out style and the legs and tail were redrawn just about every frame. My first shot at a walking four-legged animal, which is quite intimidating at first. But it seems that really it's just like 2 people walking together, only the back legs are staggered a bit earlier than the front.
This was supposed to just be a still illustration on a website of the raccoon holding a sign, but we kicked it up a notch for one of our good clients. Lucky for me, cuz I lovez me some raccoons.