Mid year exam

So this is Christmas...Actually i wanted to say this is my mid year exam.

Backstory: This monster, my character, lives in the monster city, when a child invades his apartment. Of course, monsters consider children to be a deadly form of life!

Trailer project

At the end of the last school year, we were divided into groups together with the CG line and got a classic film each. Our film was Kwaidan, and we were a team of 4CGs and 3 animators. We had to make a 30 seconds trailer, where we would create a twist of that film. We found the story together and we also helped with the character designs, and since September the CGs were working on storyboarding, creating the models, and texturing them, and the rigs. During that time we were gathering all together in order for us (the animators) to give feedback for each phase of the project. After the rigs were almost ready, we came into play, and were animating for 2 and a half weeks. The CGs then took our animations, and lit and rendered the final product.


I must say that i consider myself very lucky to be a part of such a nice team, and i was BLOWN OUT by the final outcome!!!! Here you can see some of the concepts: http://kwaidanthetrailer.tumblr.com/ The second post from the bottom has some of my designs for the Lucas character.
I was also lucky to be the lead animator!

Be amazed (do yourselves a favour and watch it in HD, full screen):



I animated mostly Lucas, in the first and final shot, and the two shots where he's running up the pillar, doing a back flip and then lands, and lastly, the big ball character, when he turns towards the camera. I will put my shots separately in my mid year showreel, which i will probably upload during the holidays.


Also, don't miss checking out the rest of the projects, they're great as well!!!:

Citizen Kane
Night on Earth
City Lights
Mon Oncle
Psycho

Thursday croquis

At this Thursday's croquis, i realised that lately i've been going too much into details too soon, and i tended to get easily confused. So, i thought that i should start simplifying more.

K.I.S.S. dammit!!

Hope you like them :)

Action animation

Yesterday was the deadline for a 7 day action animation, where our character had to escape from something. So we also had to put some acting in it. I cheated a bit, since my character is not exactly escaping from something, but rather doing a move to find himself having the upper hand towards his opponent.

I chose to do this, because we're making a trailer project together with the CG line, where we have a shot with the same animation, so it was an opportunity for me to test out the style of the animation and this specific movement for the trailer project.

Here you go:



Gotta say that i can find 100 things that need fixing, especially with the run in the beginning, since my main focus was the running up the wall and the backflip.

Finally, before this 7 days of action animation, we had a lift excercise, but i need to fix some stuff before i upload it.

Oh, and one important thing i forgot to mention... Big thumbs up to Nicolai Brus Hansen, a 3rd year fellow student, for giving me the models for the fence and the bar, and letting me use them in my shot!!

Evening croquis

1 min all of them

Croquis/Long study

Children's Songs

There is a creative blog that people from my school can contribute. It's called TAW Monkey and every week there is a different theme to illustrate.

Here's my take on the theme Children's Songs. I like experimenting with styles, so i spent a lot of time trying to get this textury style to work, and the color combination as well. My inspiration is a guy called Wouter Tulp ,and i like the diversity of styles that he can play with.

I'm not completely satisfied the result, but i definitely enjoyed the process!

Character walk

Hi there! What's up? We have holidays for a week here at the school, so i decided to have a small update with a character walk cycle. A woman on high heels in this case.

Here it is:

I also have a run cycle, but it needs small corrections, which will probably happen by the end of the week, and then i'm going to update this post with the video.

Note: I have deleted some older animations from my vimeo account, so some of the videos from older posts have disappeared. I'm sorry for that, but i'm trying to keep my vimeo account as less crammed as possible. So, please bear with me :)

Walk cycle

This hogan kicks butts!

This last week, we started messing around with Hogan, a famous free rig for Maya.
On Monday, we started by doing some poses (I actually think of posting them), next 2 days we did a weight shift, which didn't turn that great (and it's not that interesting to show anyways...), and the last 2 days, we did a swing - kick (something) excercise. So, here it is:

Been doing lately...

This week, we've been experimenting with a flour sack rig. Been fun!

These are what i came up with. First, there is a (kind of) skip, then there is a jump, and last, a soldier, getting pointed with a gun!:

Luxo Jr. is scared

The latest assignment from the school. Jump, stop, take, with the famous lamp:

Summer was nice

So, a new school year has started, and we are practicing 3d animation with Maya. This first week was all about...balls!! Tennis balls, beach balls, balls everywhere!!!
Summer has been pretty intense btw...had a hard time leaving Greece and sun.

So here are some of the projects. Can you guess what kind of balls are there at the second video?

Fairies etc.

A friend of mine asked me to draw a fairy as a decoration for a website. Not my usual, everyday drawing theme. Actually, it's my first time drawing a fairy.

I enjoyed making her, tho:

Caricatures

Returned back to caricatures after a long time. From my old schoolmates:

First year exam

Character design for Escape

As i promised before, this is the character i designed for the Escape short film project. 

He's a split personality, a writer originally, who's closed to a mental institution, after a severe breakdown he experienced. The reason for that was that he was driving drunk with his family, and they had a crash. Everybody died except from him, and he feels responsible for the death of his family members.

Roger says hello

Last week has been fun with the very talented french directors from La Poudrière! I wish we had more time to work with them. Unfortunately, we are not allowed to post the flash animations we did for them.


This week is self-study until tomorrow. This means we have to create our semester showreel and maybe go back to previous assignments to correct them. I've been working on one. There would be still a million things to correct in this one, but i will call it finished here.

Roger is waiting for his blind date:

In a sketchy mood

Before the storm

This week was an intro to Flash, so not much to show from my experiments with the program. Though, i have some caricature sketches.

It's been so long since i last did caricatures, and i kinda missed it.

First 3 are the same person, a progression from top to bottom. All are from life.

P.S.: The storm refers to next week actually

Escape project

So here is what we've been doing over a period of 5 months (starting from December).

We developed a story around the word "Escape" which is more extended than the clip, together one CG artist and one animator. My CG partner in crime was the wonderful Michelle Kristensen.

We also did the storyboards together. I designed and animated the character, and the CG artist did the background, the 3d layout and the final compositing.
Everybody did such an amazing work, and the thing is that we had only 5 days to animate, cleanup, and color!! I wish i could show all this work. 


Personally, I had to make a choice whether i would have a good cleanup or a good animation. For me it was impossible to have both in such a short time. And because of my initial idea for the character design,  i chose to sacrifice a smoother animation. If it was now, i would have  probably chosen the other way round (or maybe not), 'cause for my taste, it doesn't matter how good visuals you have, if the animation is not there.


I'll be posting the character design later:





Easter eggs: Here's what a team of 3 awesome people did for the animation jam. It is my favourite film from those 2 weeks. Love the pace in this one.
I'll be posting my team's film later, after we've made some adjustments.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3hHcN-jCE4

Shall we dance?

This is what i've been doing the past 2 weeks. I had a blast!! My favourite assignment so far, i think! The character is designed by me, for a collaboration project called "Escape" with the CGA (Computer Graphics Artists) line, here at The Animation Workshop.
By the way, the 5 seconds animation for this Escape project has to be finished this week, together with cleanup and coloring, until Thursday!!

I hope you enjoy it as much as i did by making it!

Glenn Vilppu for a day

I was very fortunate again this year to have Vilppu (only for a day this time), yesterday Saturday. It was fun to spend a whole day, after a long time again, with life drawing!!

Drawings from last time for anybody who's curious to see what i did last year.

The middle image with the hobbit-proportions figures has an excercise where we should draw from a clothed model, but making it 4 heads high, and thinking of the underneath structure and drawing the clothes in a way that helps to convey the gesture. The objective in this one was try not to copy the model. Quite fun!

It was going to be a teaser

I mean, the poster that follows.

Before Easter holidays, we had a 2 week animation jam, in groups of 3 people. This was the poster i made for our film, and i was going to post it before the official screening of our film on Friday before holidays. But i wanted to do some changes, so i post it now.

It can still be a teaser, since i haven't posted our film yet. Here it goes:

Later i'm also going to post our film, after we've made some corrections.

PS: I hope everybody had great holidays! I now i did, but it was very short time.

Thursday afternoon croquis

I was enthusiastic when i was drawing for today's afternoon croquis session, but when i saw the drawings again afterwards, i was mostly like naah.
But anyways, here you go. Both were 2 mins, and each one is A4 size:

Note: On my way back to Greece for Easter vacation, i have to spend almost the whole coming Saturday in Berlin, and i hope the weather helps to sketch alot! Hope i'll have interesting things to show from next week!

Layout week

Last week we had layout, and we were supposed to create layouts for a sequence out of a storyboard that was never in the movie Emperor's New Groove.

I managed to do 2 scenes. Last is a value sketch for the last scene.
It was a fun week, and i would like to try out working as a layout artist for features at some point, as it involves designing elements, and combining cinematography.

Here ye go:

Hair in my soup - film poster

These 2 last weeks before Easter holidays, we're doing an animation jam. This means that we're divided in groups of 3 people, and we have to do a short film from 30-60 seconds.

We had to come up with a movie poster, in our own style preference. Here you go:

Small sketchcrawl + random sketches

Today the weather was nice in Viborg, so we decided to go downtown to sketch a bit. The first three pages are from today.

The last one is a collection of sketches i've been doing during classes. But don't tell anybody. I was paying attention to the class!!

Mermaid

My mind is in a state...

Thursday afternoon croquis.

Care for a little side talk? I've  you've been following me for quite a while, you will notice that the bottom left drawing from the first image, is not my regular style.
It was my last drawing on Thursday's session, and i was so tired, that i felt a bit dizzy. So, that was the result. Pretty interesting, wouldn't you say?

After effects plus bird cycle

Last week was quite relaxing. It was Photoshop + After Effects course. Cool teacher and generally a lot of fun!!

It was my first time trying After Effects, and i was quite surprised how easy is it to do fancy stuff, and in a short time.
One of the projects involved using a bird cycle from some weeks ago, and we did a small animation in AE with this cycle inside. I hope you enjoy it as much as i did by making it!

Non dialogue acting

This week we had to animate 5 seconds of non dialogue acting. We had to choose between 3 characters: Roger from 101 Dalmatians, Bernard from Rescuers, and Alice from Alice in Wonderland.

I chose to do subtle animation, with not so many things happening. And that was the difficult part, keeping the character alive while not so much is happening. I'm not sure if I achieved that. I'm also not happy with the last part...

Well, take a look if you please, and tell me :)

First semester showreel

This is a compilation of most of the animations i did during my first semester at The Animation Workshop. Feel free to commend!

First semester exam

This is the exam we did for the end of the semester. 3 days, 3 seconds of animation of Danny, the main character from the movie Cats Don't Dance, the same one from the Acting week.
I think i did a much better job this time, with him: