Over another hurdle

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greetings fellow sentient beings!!

Unit 07 here with an update on what's been going on at Studio Gattai. Keyframe Samurai and I have been refining the human and dinosaur rigs. The characters are pretty much ready to start animating. We'll have some more updates with hair and hat variations in the coming weeks. According to Keyframe Samurai, the dinosaurs just need a bit more tweaking. Once that's done we can start work on our trailer. The tentative release date for a teaser trailer is March 7, 2011. I hope you all look forward to it!! Until then, here are some images of characters in color looking very angry...or constipated....

end of line...

-07-

When Dinosaurs Roamed the Interwebs

Keyframe Samurai here. I haven't posted anything in a little while. But I'm basically finished rigging all the dinosaurs. I just have a few little touch ups to do on everyone, but I just couldn't resist posting them now anyways. Enjoy. I'll be posting some test animations with all the characters soon once I iron out the last few bugs in the characters rigs.

If they mated...

Every once in a while we like to play drawing games. One of these games is a lot like Conan O'Brien's "If they mated" concept. In our game, we take a character and try and draw them in a totally different cartoon style. For example, what would Superman look like in the style of SpongeBob?? Here are some of the offspring that we've created recently:

Take Garfield... in the style of Hellboy...

...and you get:

Let's try another one!

Take Wonderwoman... in the style of the anime series Gurren Lagann...

.....and you get:

(Nice detail with the camel toe Zer07.)

How about Ronald McDonald in the style of comicbook artist Joe Madureira....

To be continued......

More messy drawings

Shiro Ninja sanjou! Hello friends. I'd like to share some more rough animation fighting scenes with you. This is a continuation of the last rough animation clip I posted. (Please pardon the extreme messiness of the drawings!!)


Fight Scene2 (Rough Animation) from Shiro Ninja on Vimeo.

By the way, the previous scene that I posted ended up being over 60 drawings for a mere 4.5 seconds of action! So, for my brother, who asks, "Why does animation take so long???" .....That is why.

Drawing the "cleaned up" version of that scene on paper presented an unexpected challenge: their huge heads and tiny arms made it really hard to punch at each other without their noggins colliding! It all worked out in the end though!

Until next time. Nin, nin!

-Shiro Ninja-

The mystery of L5

Your journey has taken you longer than it should have. When you return to Earth, the only thing waiting for you are the remains of our once prominent and advanced civilization.

What happened?

This is the premise of a new series called L5 being pitched right now by our good friend Stanley Von Medvey. The series follows a band of astronauts who have journeyed to a far off star system and return home later than anticipated. They discover massive empty colonies in space orbiting the planet earth and set off to discover just exactly what happened to humanity.

The project is being funded by a grass roots website called Kickstarter, where you the viewer have the opportunity to be a part of funding the project that you believe in. It is an opportunity to put the creativity back into the hands of the creator and contribute to art as it happens. Please check out the link below and donate!

you can find the info and website below:

SIGGRAPH 2010

Gobusata shimashita!! Shiro Ninja here. My apologies for the long absence! Zer07 and I were on a top secret mission in Los Angeles. Our mission: to infiltrate SIGGRAPH and distribute as many of our demo reels as possible!

For those of you who don't know, SIGGRAPH is an annual conference held for the Computer Graphics industry. There are exhibits on emerging technologies, new software, and most excitingly, a job fair. All the big animation studios set up booths and it's a great opportunity to network! So Zer07 and I went with 200 demo reels and this is what happened:





Nobody seemed very enthusiastic about taking our demo reels or applications... so then we went to the designated "Job Fair" section thinking that everyone there was recruiting...



Before the end of the day, we each had luck with one studio.



Needless to say, our mission was a supreme failure.



We did, however, have fun with some good friends and see some beautiful sights! It was a looooong journey back to Canada. Maybe next time we'll fly!









-Shiro Ninja-

Rough Animation

Today I thought I'd show you what happened to those thumbnail sketches from my previous post. Every Last Cookie clip you've seen so far has been drawn and colored on paper. I give all of those drawings to Zero7 to scan and edit in the computer. For most animators, there's a little trial and error involved in the animation process. To check if the animation is working properly, you do numerous "pencil tests," which are basically video footage of test animation. Because I don't want to waste too much of Zero7's time, I do all of my preliminary animation in Flash first. As you'll see below, it's VERY rough... but it doesn't need to look pretty. At this stage, all I care about is how the action looks. Flash allows me to quickly draw, adjust timing, and playback the animation all at the click of a button. Once I'm happy with the action, I start working on paper, using the Flash animation test as a guide, but this time trying to make each frame look pretty.


Fight scene (Rough Animation) from Shiro Ninja on Vimeo.


Keep an eye out for some final images of this scene!
Saraba!

-Shiro Ninja-