TS3 Buzz quick sketchin'

Some quick sketching from Toy Story 3. Buzz is so fun to draw!

HPI racing

First teaser for something.... Stay tuned, I think there is much more to come.

"Wrapped Up" wrapped up!

I just finalized "Wrapped Up", a short film I wrote and directed. The DVD is on its way to Annecy festival. Here goes... :)

"Wrapped Up" is the result of a collaborative effort of CG artists, who liked the premise and agreed to participate for fun. The film was co-produced with Crew972, who generously backed up the film with facilities, pipeline, a place to work in together, moral support and manpower.

Credits:
Written, storyboarded and directed by yours truely.
Design - me, Rafi Ben Aharon and Irena Tsibulka, plus some help from Elin Rozen.
Original Score - Assaf Shlomi.
Sound Design - Nati Zeindenstandt
Modeling - Irean Tsibulka, Jonathan Katzman and Roni Yahel
Shading - Irena Tsibulka and Dana Gussman
Layout - Paul Wolf, Yonni Arroussi and Kobi Levi
Rigging - Menashe Morobuse
Animation - Liron Aluf, Gabi Berger, Shuki Gamliel, Kobi Levi, and myself.
Render - Irena Tsibulka, Yanir Kleiman, Arik Jana
Composite - Yanir Kleiman and Irena Tsibulka
Produced by me and Maria Veskan
Executive producer - Dror Daliot

Special thanks go to Irena, who worked tirelessly and made the film possible; Gabi and Liron, who did a lot of work and also designed a poster and a website for the film; Crew 972, who had been very helpful and cooperative in every way; my girlfriend and fellow animator Elin Rozen, who listened to my ideas and added her own ideas and generally put up with me working on this film on weekends and evenings; and Dror Daliot, who was the first to notice and mention that the stars are aligned to allow a short film to be made.

Thanks you everybody, and see you in June at Annecy!

Merry Christmas!

Some drawings from a sketching session organized by my good friend Rafi Ben Aharon, featuring a hung-over Santa.

David Goreman painting

My 2nd Photoshop painting ever. I’m sure it leaves a lot to be desired, but I’m quite happy with it. As always, comments and suggestions for improvement are very welcome.

Edit: I realized the original painting was way too bland and also slightly green, so I played a bit with the values. The old version is down here:

Man gets in car - animation doodling

Having learned animation through working in the industry, I’m used to focusing on results. I decided to break away from that and try some “animation doodles” - just like I doodle on a piece of paper in meetings, where I don’t care what’s coming out, and just enjoy the ride!

Stepped to Smooth tutorial – Part 5

 

 

Ok THAT took a while… Truth is I actually recorded it quite a while ago, but I got all tangled up with the YouTube 10 minutes limit, and eventually decided to just split it to 2 parts.

This is probably the last part of the Stepped to Smooth tutorial. I was planning another part with some extra info, but the whole thing just got out of hand and became a much bigger project than I had initially expected.

Anyway, hope that helps some people. At least I can now tell my students “hey, I don’t have time to explain this, but you know what? Here’s a link!” :)

Slow-mo cat

Stepped to Smooth tutorial – part 4

In part 4 we finally start looking into the smoothing process. We begin with a short study of the inherent timing cheat involved in stepped animation. Enjoy!

Stepped to Smooth tutorial – part 3

 

Enjoy :)

Stepped to Smooth tutorial – part 2

In the second part of the tutorial, we add some motion info to our raw acting keys. I show how to use the tweenMachine script to introduce inbeweens and breakdowns.

I’m using here a very old version of tweenMachine here (an old dog likes his old tricks). The new version has a far more advanced UI and the numbers work a bit differently, but the essence of its function stays the same.

Stepped to Smooth tutorial – part 1

This took much much more time than I had expected. In the end, the only thing I’m entirely pleased about is the little guitar tune I played :)

Brave Little Tailor - animation exercise

I watched the Disney short "Brave Little Tailor" for the first time the other day, and one sequence clearly stood out with complex animation and great appeal. It was the sequence in which Mickey tells the king his tale of bravery. I later discovered it was animated by Frank Thomas, which explains the outstanding quality.

I was inspired to do a classic animation exercise with it. Here's what I did: I quick-sketched about 20 drawings that seemed to be the major key drawing (they are the ones with the circled frame numbers). Then, I animated the scene according to theses keys, without looking at the original scene again. The idea was to compare my results with the original animation, and see what I might have done better. It was a great exercise and I feel I learned a lot from it. The result also shows, I think, how solidly you can define 4 seconds of animation with just 20 very quick sketches.

Note: YouTube is apparently not so good with short videos like this (it won't play it through. To get a better look at it, try the mp4 file here.

Superhero comics style chick

This is something I did for Hands Up studio a little while back. The semi-realistic, anatomical superhero comics style is not something I have much experience with , so I was glad (and a bit scared) of the opportunity to try it out. In the end, I think I pulled it off reasonably well.

It got canned, by the way. Turns out what the client really really wanted was an owl.  :-D

 

Abstract City: art outside the box

This is beautiful, this is one of my best finds yet. It’s a blog on the “New Yorker” site. It’s too rare to find something which is both “arty” and fun; artists tend to take themselves so seriously! Anyway, have a look, and make sure to check out some older entries. Here’s a good one to get you started:

I Lego NY

Army doodles

Well what do you know, I’m not dead after all... I was just very focused on my secret project, a book I’ve been working on for the past 5 years (!). I’ll write more about it soon; for now, I’m happy to say I finished the first draft, and I hope and believe that re-writing is going to be much easier than writing.

As soon as I finished the thing I was called to the army for a couple of weeks (routine stuff), and while I was there I sketched these (ballpoint pen). The colors are Photoshoped in.

JOUST by Mike Koizumi

Amazing manga-style action storyboard (well…it’s practically animated, really).

Mp3 interviews

Audio interviews are great. You can carry them around on your MP3 player and listen to them while driving, washing dishes or standing in a particularly long line at your favorite government institution.

Here’s a great resource of MP3 interviews with many great artists. They have quite a few prominent animation people on: Brad Bird, Pete Doctor, Chuck Jones, Tim Burton.

Enjoy

http://www.movingimagesource.us/dialogues/

Jungle book quick-sketching #2

To be perfectly honest, the last two were so disappointing in the original quick sketch session, that I just had to re-sketch them this morning. These are the new ones.

Jungle book quick-sketching #1

From a quick-sketching session at Snowball VFX. To be continued – there' are also some Baloo sketches.