End Times

For the benefit of all of you who've been eagerly awaiting the continued adventures of the Fantasy Office team and their doomhole dilemma, rub your wanting eyes over this:

As it essentially served as an extension of the previous short, there wasn't a lot of new design work for this one. But who doesn't enjoy a nice, old-fashioned pile of dead clowns?

Also, in a hastily-conceived limited-animation run cycle I wound up with a boob bounce that would make both Richard Williams and whoever directed those old Confused Dot Com ads blush:

If I ever bump into the chap who designed this woman I really should ask what the hell happened to her head.
I'm not sure at this point but the writing on the wall appears to indicate that this is the last outing for Fantasy Office. Shame, as we never met the Doris from the end credits theme. I guess she was kinda like Diane from Twin Peaks. Ta-ra, gang - it's been fun!

Crustaceans and Cephalopods

It's been a little while since the last Channel Flip round-up, so why not treat yourself to some animated frivolity to break up the drudgery of your day, drudgeypants? The latest Wobble Box features some anxious octopi of mine in a skit that comes in around 1:26. Why, that's just enough time for a...

Elsewhere in the HuHa-niverse, a thoughtful tale of office diplomacy, doom holes and crab people. As best I'm aware the red button reveal at the end isn't a Bobby Yeah reference, but I like to pretend it is.

This one largely dealt with pre-existing character designs I didn't come up with, so aside from cobbling it together I'd say my proudest contributions are the mutated, chitinous crab legs. I wanted them to be unsettling in an understated way so elected to have the characters performs squats when standing. Watch, forever:

As with most of my recent HuHa commissions these ones were mainly put together in Toon Boom with a soupçon of After Effects. For the doom hole at the end I revisited an estranged-though-not-forgotten friend, Cinema 4D.

If you're lucky there may even be a sequel. Man alive, what a tease I am.

Roundup

With this year barreling by at a scrotum-tighteningly terrifying speed, I keep falling behind with the whole blogging thang. Currently my existence is an impenetrable soup of what's happened/what hasn't, what's online/what's not, what's public/what's private etc, so it can all get away from me a bit. I'm gonna be 30 in a few seconds so give me a break.
There've been a few HuHa! updates in the last couple months worth rounding up. Firstly the plucky Assassinen Babies (as they're known in Germany) make an appearance on their own in a standalone version of their debut skit. Those who speak the language will gather from the comments that its whimsical subtlety didn't play quite as well to the German YouTube crowd.

There's also the French version, Bébés Assassins. Good god, it's like Muzzy up in here.

To an altogether more positive reception here on their home turf, the English Assassin Babies made their thrilling return to Wobble Box in episode 6. Who knows what peril and adventure they'll face this time around? Find out below (around 2:13 in)!

Here are a few yummy mummies I sketched for it. These are all loosely based on some real-life new mothers I know. From what little time I've spend with their respective young'uns I expect they're just as effective in a combat situation.

 Two more skits I did the visuals for show up in episode 8 which went up today. Starting with High Seas which is a fun, concentrated 15 seconds of swashbuckling that was a joy to design.

I liked how this one came out so much I took the assets and made an illustration piece out of it. What an onanistic delight I am:

Secondly is High Winds. That's wordplay humour, son, let it wash over you. Like the pirate one, this was quite simplistically animated with some special sauce courtesy of After Effects.
The skits show up at 0:36 and 1:53 respectively, but why not go ahead and watch the whole ep? It's only wee, sure it is.

There's also a more recent episode of Fantasy Office, which saw me charged with designing some 'Salesman D-bags'. The main antagonist was loosely modeled on Michael Douglas in Wall Street.

Check out the full episode here:


Also, as I don't want to leave what I'm certain is a monstrously high percentage of this blog's readers who live in France hanging, you can watch the French translation L'Office de la Fantaisie episodes 2 and 3 below:




Hourra!!

"Coffee please, Doris..."

At the end of last week the fine folks at HuHa discreetly put up "Fantasy Office" episode 3, following on from episode 2 back in May. While I did the animation for both, this one features a few characters from episode 1 which was designed by another chap, so I've attempted to bring the two styles together.

This one was written by Joel Jessup (apparently the credits at the end are wrong) and got some nice feedback over the weekend. Personally I found it quite satisfying as lip-sync on a skeleton is a f***ing breeze. Here are a couple of new character sketches:

As always I was up against it so the backgrounds were a bit rushed, that being said I'm quite happy with the crypt one:

Okay, that'll do for now. Frankly I've spoiled you enough as it is.

One day I'm-a get me one o' them Tumblr things...

Here are some design bits'n'pieces for a recent project, "Fantasy Office Episode 2: Storage Problems", my first non-WobbleBox short for Channel Flip. This one had an insane turnaround time but it was good fun to knock out. I was given carte blanche in terms of style except to use clean lines and keep things basic. I didn't want it to be too much of a departure from episode 1 (which I wasn't involved in) but it's definitely different. Design-wise the characters are sort of in the "Bullies" style:

I also got to knock out some griffins and unicorns, the latter I aimed to make as nauseatingly cutesy as possible.

The personal highlight was one small shot I put some time aside to do some full animation on. Drawing upon my childhood fondness for the Games-era "Ren & Stimpy" years, the shot's of a warehouse worker getting his face torn off by a death bat.

It's amazing how simple Toon Boom makes the whole process. The lightbox and page rotation features make line tests a breeze. Ditto clean-up, between Toon Boom's intuitive controls and my gorgeous li'l Cintiq my line work is so much smoother than them bygone days of using actual pens for inking in.

The full short was written by Sarah Darling and went up today, if you fancy giving it a watch:
I quite like that the boss character talks a bit like Bane.