Progression Reel

It's always fun to look back on old projects. For this progression reel, I went back through all of my first year work, and added it all together. It's interesting to see how my work has developed. And it makes me so thankful that we stepped it up a notch with the change of software in year two!

Le Vélo

Let it not be said that I animated nothing this summer! For the past few day or two I've been playing around with this little guy. It's short and sweet, so I drew out each frame of the cyclist in Photoshop, then imported the PNGs into Flash. I sketched the background (if you can call it that) in Photoshop too, but tweened it in Flash. It was largely inspired by a sketch by Karl Kwasny a few years back. :)

Animation Reel

Over the past few weeks I've worked on a whole bunch of short animations, as part of my college course. They've been a whole lot of fun! Things started simple, with a basic bouncing ball sequence, and building up as I learned more about squash and stretch, weight, anticipation and reaction, and various other elements of animation. I made a short reel just to show you a little selection of what I've been up to; from bouncing balls, to Kerplunk, to a pinball machine, and a study of light vs heavy. Hope you like it!

Charlie | Status Update 03

Today, I am happy to announce that my Interactive Programming project for this semester is finished! The last of the programming is complete, and all the glitches have been dealt with. Charlie is now capable of walking left and right depending on which buttons the user presses, and he can jump when the user presses the up directional button. The character is now unable to walk outside of the movement zone and can no longer walk beyond the edges of the forest. He interacts with two objects - a bunch of cables, which causes a bird to appear, and a colour-changing mushroom - and he breathes and tilts his head when he’s idle.

The main issues I faced in the past two weeks have been to do with program failures, absurdly large files, and extreme lag. These were largely the result of importing illustrator files into Flash CC, which created thousands of movieclip layers. The best solution I found to this problem was sacrificing vector graphics, and replacing them with flattened PNGs.

This project has certainly been challenging, but nonetheless I had a lot of fun with it. I learned a lot from the process of completing it, and I’d like to create something similar with a new character in a new environment.

Click here to download the program and use the directional buttons on your keyboard to try it out for yourself.

If the link above doesn't work, try this: http://www.penandpixel.ie/#submissions[portfolio]/17/

Kerplunk!

I've spent the past few days finishing off this little animation project. The brief called for a person in a boat to rise with a wave, then crash back into the sea, with optional arm flailing and hat loss. It's quite short - one hundred frames, which just about hits the four-second mark - and I decided to keep it really very simple. I wanted it to look as if it were animated by hand, despite creating it in Adobe Flash (CS6 this time!), so there isn't any colour in it. I ended up drawing almost everything in every frame individually anyway, using Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V wherever I could, so it made sense to keep it looking that way. I've named my little sailor Captain Tangerine (because I used an orange circle in his stead while I was working out the timing and spacing), and I took the liberty of naming his mighty ship 'Kerplunk.' Just because I could.