Happy Holidays!

What happens when the bad guys mess with Santa?

 
Happy Holidays! 

Share this link with your friends and family!
https://youtu.be/n8-U_LNmeVY

Walks and Turns

Walks are important for getting a character from point A to point B. It takes some practice to animate a walk properly. Today, TV animation will animate the character taking a step and then cut to a tighter shot of the character from the waist up. The character now can bob up and down as the background pans behind them creating the illusion of walking motion.

Here's a walk with a turn.

Here's a series of walk positions where the character is getting smaller as he is walking away from us. This is a complete 2 step walk which can be repeated and reduced in size to link up to the previous walk series.

 

Animating Holiday Scenes

When I was a kid, I would always plan out and print up Christmas cards for friends, family and relatives. It all started off with linoleum block printing, later it was screen printing, then photoshop and finally animation. Here are a few animated cards I've done in the past.

 Snowman Magic from Toondini on Vimeo.

Making Holiday cards has always been a way for me to get into the Christmas spirit. My cards have become less hand made as the years have gone by, but I still like to send something out. And so, that's one reason why I have been working to finish up this project up.

Here is the rough blocking of animation for the Holiday Watchcat card so far.

Rough_Blocking_xmas2016_01 from WatchCat Films on Vimeo.

Any feedback about this is always welcomed, please let me know and Happy Holidays!

Making an animated Holiday card

My final animation class has ended allowing some free time to animate a Watchcat Holiday episode to send off to friends and family as an animated Holiday card to end 2016 in a fun way. I installed a 21 day trail version of ToonBoom Harmony 14 with a goal of documenting this production and show more about the animation process using Harmony.

To begin with, I made this animatic with final voices and sound effects as a QuickTime file  imported as a movie into Harmony . The bottom layer holds the animatic which I will use to keep my scenes in sync. The layer above holds a white background until I create a final one. The layer above the BG is where I will create my rough poses.

wc03_rough_sc01 from WatchCat Films on Vimeo.

There is only about 6 scenes in this project and I've designed it so that after one shot, the camera will pull away from one setup to reveal something that is happening in the foreground or in the background. You can see the animatic in previous a post entitled "Making Christmas".


By setting up different layers; the animatic, white background card and a rough animation, this will keep everything organized and easier to animated. The rough animation is also made up of several other layers and since we are zooming away from Santa and the Robber,
those drawings are both attached to Pegs.

Harmony allows you to create different layers by clicking on the +  button near the timeline and by holding it down, you will see other layers to choose from. Peg (ctrl + P) allows you to attach a layer and then move the peg, everything on the layer moves with the peg. In this case, Santa and the Robber move away from us on the Z axis. 

By clicking on the peg twice, Harmony opens a control panel showing the Key frames on a graph line. You need to determine which frame you want to set a Key on by clicking on +KF button. The -KP will remove a Key on the timeline. You can add ease ins and outs to each XYZ avis with the Velocity editor which is shown in the video below.
  
Watch this short video to see how it all works and where everything is located.

Tutorial Harmony 12_01 from WatchCat Films on Vimeo.

Each scene is a separate Harmony file that you will export a separate video file. Each file is then imported into an editing software program like Premiere or Final Cut Pro.

Next Posting: Animating Holiday Scenes

Prowling CTN expo Part 2

CTN animation expo was so big this year, it takes two blog posts to describe it all and so, here is part 2.

When I first heard that the exhibit floor would be housed in a tent in the parking lot, I was worried. They had a small tent last year which housed a second part of the exhibit floor, since the main exhibitor floor has packed. The tent became very hot inside due to the warm weather and all the extra people. A lot of exhibitors were sweating and some even had small fans going to fight the heat. 

I am happy to report that this year's CTN's exhibitor floor fit nicely into a hugh air conditioned tent in the parking lot. They even included the parking lot trees into the interior design, added lights to add to the very creative environment inside.

The weather was cool and comfortably, but Sunday there was rain and there were a few leaks overhead inside the tent which caused the lights to be turned off.

But even without interior lighting, the convention went on and the dusk like interior added to the atmosphere of the expo.

While the lights were on, we managed to meet up with old friends and fellow colleagues who we had met before. I got the opportunity to stand between the Twin Towers of Animation, Tom and Tony Bancroft! 

And then, I ran into Lenord Robinson, who I met when working on "Meet the Patels".

We met this new guy, Max Narcisco, who was busy designing characters and had a very interesting booth full of his creations.

And of course, James Lopez, the creator of "Hullabaloo". Next year, you may be seeing the release of the  first Steampunk animated series!

The nice thing about this expo is that it is made to network and a place to meet your favorite animation artists and heroes. It not like Comicon, but rather a place to find new work opportunities and meet new people. 

Hopefully, we will run into you there next year! 

Did I mention Watchcat 02 is done and we are working on something new.