KING NUMMY Motion Graphics

Im working on some DVD credits for this guy, Steve, whos in a band called 5Head. They are putting together a video and need some title credits. A friend of his contacted me and asked if i could do it. Im Ok with After Effects but im no motion Graphics designer. I just follow the tutorials when i need to learn something new, which is what i did with this little number. After Effects is an amazing program and right about now, i wish i went to school just for After Effects. I mean, animation is cool and all, but nothing beats colors and text flying all over the place, in HD, i might add. I am always pleased when i complete something in After Effects, since i know just enough of the software to get by, its always an adventure. What can i say, im a Computer Geek who loves to learn.
Next i should take some video of myself falling, then composite some blood splatter and make the sidewalk crumble or something crazy like that.

Mothers Day E-Card

Yep, another one. This time its for Mothers Day so i know its gonna have to be sentimental, which is something I'm not used to being nor incorporating into my animations. Once Brad sent me the music track, it took me forever to think up something to do. He wants it to be feminine and colorful, suggested trees, flowers, butterflies and all that noise. I listened to the track a few times and sat for about an hour (watching Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) and still came up with nothing. I finally had to transport myself to the wonderful world of Google Image to get some ideas going. I started by looking up flowers and within a matter milliseconds i had an idea.
Brad sent me A write up with a few sentences that he would like to be in the piece. Without dialogue in the actual music track, i had to figure out the timing of these phrases/scenes blind without any foundation to dictate my timing.
Theres together an animatic to work all that business out and this is where i am.

Arvind and the ChipMonks

Im working on a project with this guy, Sid, from NY. He produced a song and needs an animated music video. He wants me to animate the ChipMonks trampling the injustice of the world and taking down their governments and freeing the people. So i thought id turn the chipmunks into stylized Monks with their own powers. This is a first draft but i think its gonna be a good one.

MISSION COMPLETE

Just got dome those cards and sent em off to brad. Here are the final renders with the final audio mixes.

4:28 am... rasta bunny animatic...

Just threw together some really really really REALLY! rough keys for the reggae bunny card. Its always easy for me to do an animation when i have something laid down first. It never works out for me when i go into something blind. I could have just made the symbols and rocked on but i find it waaaay easier in the long run to do some sort of rough animatic before starting anything. So this is as rough as it gets but i was able to get in a a few shots so i wouldnt just have the 2 bunnies onscreen the entire time. Seeing them bounce might get pretty boring after a while. Even in 20 seconds.

ONE DOWN!

Just finished up the spring sprung card today. I put a nice couple of hours into it, sipping coffee and eating those fascinating "Hint of Lime" tostitos. I guess my body couldn't take it because i crashed for like 5 hours while the card was rendering from AE. I thought i was going to take a 5 minute power nap, laid on the couch, turned on some Trailer Park Boys and BAAM! its midnight, and my 5 minute nap should have been over at 6:40 pm something. I feel pretty good tho, might just move onto the next card and watch some more Trailer Park Boys.

Spring_Scene 01

I spent the weeeeeee hours of the night trying to chop out flowers and grass and composite them together to make a background. Once it was about 3am, i finally realized that this would take too long so i aborted the mission. Since this is due on monday, i have to prioritize. So i roto'd the flower background and came up with a flash version of the background. Now i wont have to chop up still for the 4 other scenes, ill just whip em up and color them quickly. I thikn its still going to look pretty cool once i get it all together in After Effects and put things in 3d space. Dont mind the blue box in there, i needed to export the layers from flash, giving myself a guide to put em back together in AE easily.

Really really rough poses

Here's the Easter blues track with some rough poses on top. I just needed to figure out if i was going to animate this egg with just a mouth symbol and some bouncing, or if i wanted a little more. I thought it be cool to change the shape of the egg as he speaks these lines. I don't have much time to get to deep into that but ill try to change his shape at least a few times so he;s not just sitting there rocking back and forth on that stool like a crazy person.

FLASHED!

Just did some quick clean up, Nothing special, just needed to see them with vector lines so i can start making a library. Ill worry about color later. I'm always the last to find things out but there's this website that has a cool color picker interface, Kuler.com, i think. That place is going to be my new best friend, opening me up to a whole new world of muted colors.

Reggae Bunnies

I finally heard the track and theres 2 bunnies, the rapper and the hype man. I thought it be cool to make the hype man tiny and give hima "Flavor Flav" look to offset him from his counterpart, MC Fluffy Fingaz. Dont mind the pissed off robot, didnt want to waste the paper. Paper is expensive now-a-days.

Spring Sprung Animatic

Just finished putting together this animatic. Threw in some of those transition elements, helps the piece just flow without any cuts. I'm thinking that i may use live action photos for all of the backgrounds and just animate that butterfly in flash. I was planning on doing it in after effects but the hand drawn look might work better but id have more control, maybe throw in some overlapping action on his tentacles or something. Vary the cycles of his wings and all that noise!
This also has the music track created by Brad over at Jamgrams.

Card tHREE: Reggae Bunny

He didn't have the audio track yet, or any details, but he told me that it would be about an Reggae Easter Bunny, so i drew this up.

Card tWO: Spring Sprung

This next card is a springtime card, pretty flowers, sunshine, butterflies and all that nice stuff that i don't get to see much. He threw out the idea of a butterfly, flying around nice scenery and at the end, opening up to reveal a city scape. He felt as though we should get some sort of urban element in this piece. I took that and drew up some storyboards laying out a sequence of panned background shots. The butterfly will move from right to left, flying by flowers and trees, then the backgrounds turn "urban" and we get buildings and sidewalks. Im thinking that ill make the transition from once scene to the next with some element doing a wipe across the cameras view, revealing the next scene. I have a few ideas of what the elements are but they may only make sense in the animatic phase.
When Brad initially mentioned the butterfly and the flowers. For some reason i thought back to a line in a rap song. The rapper uses the idea of a flower growing from a crack in the concrete and compares that to kids growing up in the hood. So i thought that could be my ending and turn this series of images into a nice little story. This butterfly flys around, away from park and the flowers and trees, only to seek out a beautiful flower growing from the concrete.

Card oNE: Easter Egg Blues

Brad said that he'd like a blue Easter Egg, sitting on a stool, singing the blues. He also threw some other details that i played around with. So i threw together a few rough drawings and cleaned up the ones that i liked in Flash. The colors are all over the place right now but ill make some adjustments later.

Easter E-cards

Brad, over at Jamgrams.com, contacted me about doing some Easter Mini E-cards. Usually the cards would be 1 minute, but now i have to produce 3x20sec cards. I have about 4 days to do all this so should probably be drawing instead of blogging. BUT! I just drew up a bunch of designs and its time to take 5!