The Conductor

This was last week and it was fun, all capitals. We got to animate Danny from 'Cats Don't Dance' (a wonderful movie, you should see if you haven't already) conducting a piece of classical music. There were three excerpts to choose from - I chose a bit from Verdi's Aida.

It was a fun week, though it went up and down a lot. I got stuck on little things a couple times which was toiugh, but overall, this was a great week. I mean, it was the first time we got to use sound. Oh, and we were encouraged to try out using socalled 'smears' whenever we could. These drawings would only be shown for one frame and could be a severely stretched drawing or several drawings in one. It's basically a broad/quick movement confined to a single drawing - FUN!

Jonas bm

The Hug

The week before last we had two courses in one week. The first was Acting with Robert Bennett, which was about corporeal mime. A lot of fun. The other was Interaction with Fabian Erlinghäuser, where we got to animate two characters hugging, one being Hogarth from 'The Iron Giant' and the other being our choice between Kala (Tarzan's ape-mom) from 'Tarzan' and the Sultan from 'Aladdin'. I chose the Sultan.

The scene in question. Quite happy with how it turned out.

Jonas bm

Design 1 with Lawrence Marvit

So we had a course in design with Lawrence Marvit. It was really about compositon. If I learned one thing, it's the importance of contrast. I actually had a lot of fun during the week (it's a while ago, now), because I like to paint, so it was nice to learn something like this. He stressed the fact, though, that what he was teaching was only paradigms and not rules. A couple assignments from the week:

First one: visualization of milk chocolate. Second one: visualization of the Miles Davis album 'Kind of Blue', jazz.

Jonas bm

Little John, Sad in a Bar

Let's get back to animation assignments, shall we?

This assignment was originally done back during our 'Drawing for Animation' course with Mike Nguyen and Frederik Villumsen. Those two weeks were really awesome. We would start the day with Mike giving a talk on animation and how to approach the medium. He was very passionate about it and quite philosophical. Showed a lot of examples and reference as well. In the afternoons we would start with some drawing exercises and technical advice led by Frederik. After that we worked on assignments.

Speaking of the assignments, we did three the first week, just doing five storytelling keys for each and timing it out. Each assignment was a different scenario, one of which was 'Little John, sad in a bar'.

In the second week, we chose one assignment from the first week and broke down the movement even more. I chose the Little John one, 'cause it amused me the most.


The next course we had, after a holiday break, was 'Inbetweening for Animation' with Meelis Arulepp. The first week, we inbetweened a scene done by a pro, from the movie 'The Secret of Kells'. The second week, we inbetweened our scenes from the previous course.

However, upon reviewing the scene with Meelis, the drawings seemed very flat and unattractive. He suggested I change a few things on the drawings, but they were worked over so much that I decided to do the whole thing over again, this time paying more attention the volume of the character. Plus, I managed to inbetween it as well. Here's the final thing:

Jonas bm

How About This

Now, I don't want this blog to just be linetests. That's not gonna do anyone any good - would be boring too, I think, in the long run. So I'm gonna put a few images here and there that relate to animation somehow, like telling a story or showing characters. Anyway, digital painting:

Title is 'Curiosity Takes Flight'.

Jonas bm

Fall is Here

Something diferent to break up the monotony of this blog.

Jonas bm