Robitcon 2012

A Merry belated Christmas and a Happy early New Year! A friend of mine was sending his brother to Otakon as a Christmas present and asked me to draw something to commemorate this event (and further surprise his brother). He wanted something crazy. We have a running joke in which I refer to his brother as a robit (robot) so we decided on a picture of his brother as a robit (robot) at Otakon. I went for a caricature style by combining a realistic head and a cartoon body, and paired it up with a Japanese advertisement-type style for the background. (He wanted something crazy so I gave him crazy!) Sooo happy to use my facial drawing skills for something outside of the classroom! Below you can see the steps I took to complete the finished piece:

Step 1: Draw out the Robit!

Step 2: Bring into Flash and fancy it up digitally!

Step 3: Awesome final image! The top reads "Robo Alex is here!" and the bottom reads "Large random kanji!" (Yes I know they aren't all kanji, there's a bunch of kana there too, but really, it's not supposed to make sense lol)

This project was a lot of fun to do. I'll have to do more in the future!

Hot Dogs

"I just want to lie on the beach and eat hot dogs. That's all I ever wanted."

Okay, maybe not me personally, but if you've ever seen the beach episode of The Office, Kevin admits tp this very fact. The last assignment for Naturalistic Animation was to do a lip sync. Something subtle based off live action (basically you can use anything as long as your clip didn't come from a cartoon.) As I was looking for a rig to use, I knew I needed something that would look natural with Kevin's deep voice. As soon as I saw this one (a custom Norman rig you can find on the resource page of the 11 Second Club's website) I said "YES. LUCHADOR." And so while other people used normal rigs in normal situations, I decided to make my animation about a down-and-out luchador who just wants to eat hot dogs. I'm special like that. I build the ring myself, and Mike showed me how to make blendshapes to deform/animate the ring so I could give it that something extra. Success! The youtube version loses some picture quality, but this is my favorite assignment to date. Enjoy!

Past and Future, Shot 5

You'll notice that my videos have switched from Vimeo over to Youtube. One day as I was looking at some of my past work, I realized that Vimeo had decided to cut the endings off of all of my animations. ALL OF THEM. It wasn't like that before, I swear! And so I am now posting my videos on Youtube. It takes a little longer for me to upload them, but you get to see the whole video so I think it's worth it. I'll start transferring my older stuff over at some point, but for right now please enjoy seeing my newest works in their entirety.




This quarter, along with taking my usual 3 classes, I also helped out on an undergraduate senior film.  Directed by Joy Hua, "Past and Future" is the story of a little girl who is torn between, well, the past and the future, but she eventually learns to enjoy living in the present.  I'm not sure if Joy ever posted her full video anywhere; if I find it I'll certainly link to it here.  In any case, this is the scene I worked on. (Note that I only did character animation.)