Yam Handed

You look down in the dumps, old friend. As well you should, if things are so dreary that you've come here of all places for distraction. How about a heapin' helpin' o' HuHa to perk you up, misery-tits?
Episode 9 of Wobble Box went up earlier this week, my wee contributions to which being the deoderant (1:01 in) and escalator (2:09 in) skits.

The former was an entirely Toon Boom affair, including the backgrounds which I kept loose'n'colourful'n'simple.

As per there was a lot of fun design work coupled with minimal animation. Get some sketches down ya:

That last one is for the escalator bit, the assets for which were also done in Toon Boom. I wanted to do something less identifiable as my style and so went with something more cartoon-modern.

The colour approach was thought up on the fly - rather than solid colours I scribbled them in on their own layers on a boil, exporting them separately from the character animation before compositing both with textures in After Effects.

Over in Skwigly land we have a new podcast after yet another unexpected hiatus. There was one scheduled for September but we hit our first genuine snafu when our lead guest inexplicably rescinded permission to be included. First time for everything, I suppose.
Far better sports are Chris Landreth - the Oscar-winning NFB director known for Ryan, The Spine and now Subconscious Password, a wonderfully-relatable tale of a man's inner turmoil as he struggles to recall the name of an old acquaintance he's bumped into at a party - and Chris Shepherd, the chap behind the much-loved shorts Dad's Dead and Who I Am and What I Want among others. Shepherd has recently been involved with 12foot6, Random Acts and Autour de Minuit, the latter for his new live-action/rotoscoped short The Ringer, a genuinely touching father-son tale and one of my favourites from this year's Encounters.

Thrown in the mix are musings on shows like The Simpsons outstaying their welcome, general Encounters chitchat and my usual sanctimonious pontifications on filmmaking. You can do the streaming/subscribing/downloading thang at your leisure and discretion. Whichever option suits you best. There are no judgements here.

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.

Buon'anima

First off, respect where it's due. RIP Mr. James Gandolfini. I've been in the midst of a massive Sopranos DVD rewatch, boring everyone with how amazingly it still holds up, and truth be told I'm a little shellshocked with this whole business. I'm not an actor but his performances taught me a lot about the power of how to carry oneself, that it's possible to be suave and overweight at the same time; What little game I had in secondary school I owe to my blatant imitations of his onscreen persona. Not only that, he was fucking hilarious. To pick one Sopranos scene that epitomised what he brought to the table would frankly be daft, so instead here's a clip from my favourite of his feature roles opposite Peter Capaldi in Armando Ianucci's In The Loop:
In the spirit of sentiments voiced during the show's multitudinous funeral scenes: "Waddayagonnado?"
On the HuHa! front, here are some sketches for a quick skit that I managed to crowbar in before I left for Annecy:

There really was hardly any time to knock this one out, so the animation's possibly even more limited than usual. That being said, the script gave me a chance to have some fun with the designs and I'm pretty happy with the end result. The only thing I'd maybe have done differently had there been time would be making the 'imagination' backgrounds a little more crazy/detailed.
The full Wobble Box episode it's featured in (second-to-last skit, around 3'35" in) went up this afternoon. Overall I'd say it's one of my favourites:

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.

Riders on the Storm

Yesterday saw episode 4 of "Wobble Box", the Flip/HuHa animated sketch show I do some bits and pieces for go live. Here it is:

I did the animation for the final skit, "Discharge", which was a lot of fun to design. It's a little unfortunate that there wasn't a budget for some proper full animation as I would've loved to go proper Kricfalusian on it.

I'd planned to animate the 'money shot', so to speak, but was urged not to for whatever reason, possibly some YouTube content rule. Maybe by actually showing it it would've been overkill and taken some of the impact away from it, but here's what I'd had in mind:

The other segment I worked on was "23 Hour News", which was good timing as I've been watching a lot of "Powerpuff Girls" of late (as men do) so I was in the right headspace for some city-destroying monsters:

The highlight of this was getting to do the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Again, the budget was small but I came up with a pretty effective cheat, drawing on Eadweard Muybridge's photos of horses in motion:

Muybridge photography: The CliffsNotes of the animation world

Using these for reference I rigged up a rough horse drawing using the After Effects puppet tool. This works a little differently than boning in CG programs or other 2D applications, essentially placing joints on each still drawing of the horse's legs (which occupy their own layer). If placed correctly they can be moved and animated with some approximation to real life. This motion test shows what I came up with - you can tell there were some cartooney liberties taken but it has more or less the desired effect:

Then, using the rough sketch for reference I came to the really fun bit, coming up with detailed drawings of each demonic horse to match their respective horsemen. Then it's just a matter of applying the rigged animation to each design:

Fully composited with separate motion paths and timeline placement, it makes for a nice little payoff visual:

 Something tells me this won't win me much by way of appreciation from the Brony community.

Throatscratch

For reasons that are probably pretty easy to discern but I don’t want to jinx by outright stating on here, I’ve been leafing through some old sketchbook for any early development scribbles and doodles for “Throat”. These go back to early 2010 when the idea was barely formed (it was originally going to be more of an illustrated non-fictional journal that would’ve bored and depressed literally everyone who glanced at it before I made what I suspect was the wiser move of of making it a more comedic, graphic novel project).

Original cover sketch got itself a tad smudgey over time

Unfortunately some of the really early stuff is smudged, torn or crinkled to the point of illegibility but I did find a few survivors, chief among them some very early Lyman sketches. Some of these were for specific, non-“Throat” purposes, like birthday cards or thank-you notes, but they show a fair bit of how the character developed visually before I started the book proper.

I sure do like to draw this guy naked a lot. Should probably look into that...

Here are a few more randomly sketched-out ideas, some of them found their way into the story, others didn’t quite fit:

On a not-entirely-unrelated note, here are spreads for an entire chapter that was part of a substory I removed completely about Lyman’s job as an app developer:

Hopefully this time next week I’ll be able to announce what all this rummaging is for, so stick around as it will be holly and jolly news indeed!

Getting The Lead Out

Assuming you've been able to pick yourselves up off the floor (doubtless struck down by the staggering originality of today's blog heading) here are some more examples of my strides taken with the ol' life drawing. And by 'strides' I really mean 'trembling, baby deer steps':




I'm gradually working through my issues with faces, using a less-is-more approach with women especially. I've also been taking some cues from the class organiser and attempting some more abstract approaches. These are from a few body-in-motion exercises, having the model's movements inform the curvature of the line work. They came out sort of caricature-ish, not the kind of thing I'd usually come up with so it was quite interesting in that respect:Here are some more with a male model, creating shapes using the joint positioning and weight distribution as a springboard:
While the scanner's on and the sketchbook's open, I may as well bung up a few more scribblings from going out with the Bristol Sketchers. Some standard stuff:

And some sketches from a recent Arnolfini exhibition to end on: