UPA in Flash?

Yeah so in playing with flash recently in my downtime at work I did some quick little exercises in an attempt to mimic that awesome UPA effect with the static textures on moving characters.. I don't know if that inadequately describes what I'm talking about but thats why I'm slapping them on here!


(sorry for the fragmenting... CS3 does weird shit.. Ill try to fix it later.)

It was a lot easier than I thought actually, pretty much just mask the texture with the animation. I'll probably do more of these for the hell of it!

Some Samples

Here are some samples of my flash work! For anyone that might be looking here specifically for samples of my flash work...

^My Metalocalypse Test

^My Animax Test

^Clip from my thesis film "Coffeemug!"

So there you go! Three samples, for you to check out
Woohoo!

Fjorg! Film

So there it is, the film we made in 32 hours at siggraph during the Fjorg! I think it belongs to ACM or something like that throughout the universe but I worked on it so I should be able to show it right?

I know its not the most phenomenal short ever created, there are some story problems but Hey! lets see a short you've made in that little time!! It was a crazy experience, and apparently all the other teams had done and Iron Animator contest before, we had not... All three of us animated on this but we all kinda touched on each scene so I cant say "oh! that scene with the guy, yeah thats mine" They actually did more animation work I think, I created the opening and closing credits/title sequence, and edited the whole thing on top of touching some of the animation. I'm just not so into 3D work anymore... And I was rusty as hell! I've been sticking to flash lately.

Overall it was a great experience looking back on it, while I was there I just wanted to walk out, it was f&#king brutal! But the goodie bags were rad and it was amazing to be in the first Siggraph Fjorg! ever!

Man! I'm just babbling waiting for the video to upload, its taking foooooorrrever!

See what did I tell you!

I would never keep up with the blog! So I'll give you a quick update.. (crickets...) I know I know, a quick update for my vast audience!
So I graduated in May, well sorta.. I still have some math classes to finish up but... good god math kills me..
Im working full time now as a flash animator on Metalocalypse! If you have no idea what that is, look it up.
I think soon I'll post my finished film up here for you to check out, I need to do some work with it to try to get the file size down low enough I can have somewhere host it though... There might be some issues with the sound..
Anyway, thats what Im up to, just animating away!
Oh and last month I was on one of the teams competing in the Fjorg! at Siggraph 2007. It was quite an experience, 32 hours to create a short while dealing with multiple distractions, and no sleep! It was hectic, the worst part? Alllllll night techno Djs, they started at about midnight and played until 10 in the morning, just so we couldnt sleep!
I think I'll post that up here too! There are definitely problems with the short but give us a break it was created in 32 hours with hardly any sleep! I think I got the most out of our team which consisted of lying down for 2 hours with my eyes closed cursing Techno music!
Anyway that was kinda long for a quick update wasn't it?

Abe Lincoln!!?

Alright, so I guess I've kinda been keeping up with this pretty well, so uh... yeah! So I've been working on this little bit of animation recently that is me sneezing and Abe Lincoln coming out of my nose! Its pretty amazing... Well at least I think so. Anyway another interesting bit about this little nugget of animation is that I'm using a method I haven't really tried before, that being a combination of Flash and Traditional. An idea I stole from John K's blog, which I might add is an amazing read and I wish I could keep up with it better, but what I did for this (thus far) is I drew out all of the keys traditionally and then took them into flash and drew the in breakdowns directly with my wacom tablet. I've really been enjoying this method because the animation has the solidness of the traditional technique (something I've found to be very hard drawing straight into flash) but with the convenience of not having to stop and re-shoot pencil test after pencil test to make sure everything is still working, I've found a couple other advantages to it too but I'll talk about them later. So, without further adue here is where I'm at with this animation:

Yeah! I think its lookin pretty f#%kin rad too! Oh that Abraham Lincoln! That's all for now, I'll try to keep you updated on my progress on this little bit of animated love.

Early pencil test!

So I wrote a crazy nonsensical biography of myself today to submit to the platform people and I was going to post it up here, buuuut I left it on my laptop and I don't have it with me at the moment... So that'll have to wait! But in the meantime I thought I post a early pencil test of a bit of my film. I am positive that it wont play at the right speed or consistently but I'm gonna do it anyway! Don't JUDGE ME MOTHERF%@#ER!
That's all I have for you at the moment!

Don't stare too long, you'll go blind... Or grind your teeth down to nubs...

Film Stills

Hey! So I'm new to this blogging nonsense but I thought I'd give it a shot. I'm not so great at keeping up with things like this so this will most likely be out of date... all the time! So here we go!

I've been obsessively working on my most recent film "coffee mug" trying to get it to a "good enough" point that I can submit it as a work in progress to the Platform Intl. festival. But I thought I would slap some stills up here to tease you all. (all none of ya!)


So there ya go! Three stills! One of them even looks different now, but I cant spoil everything!

If Nick Bane writes something in a blog and there's no one around to read it, does it make a sound?