Damn have I missed football

Lock-out drama aside, it's been a quiet off season for the NFL players since the Green Bay Packers won their 13th NFL title last February. After that amazing season, one of the most satisfying of any I may ever see (nicely chronicled at Little Earthquake), I am looking very much forward to seeing something other than double plays lace espn's plays-of-the-week. Go Pack, Go.

Superman's Best Friend

After a few summer vacations I figured it was time to get back to work. I decided to play around with Flash and do some 'hand drawn' animations. Here is Superman and his best friend.

Au Revoir!

I have spent a lot of time behind a desk at the NYU Department of French. Glad to have been a part of the team, but excited for more time to work on my stuff for a little while.

Another test

Here the latest test.  I am achieving the looped, painted texture effect, but I don't know how well it will jive with the angular design of the character - or how messy and noisy I want the texture to be.  I don't want this to be Dr Katz.  I keep going back to the character design and I like the angularity of it, perhaps the noise will be too distracting from the stillness of the piece?

The background is just a plate taken from Samurai Jack, which kind of what I want the background to look like, but there will be some secondary animation of the clouds and the grass blowing in the wind.

Motion test. This is only a test.

The puppet tool.  So obvious.  Now I just need to refine the texture and I should be able to manipulate the character models easily

Speaking of Flash...

...here's a quick test to see how it might look in Flash if I so choose.  Hopefully if I choose to illustrate it in Flash, I will put more care into the actually illustration.  This one is pretty chunky, I am not used to the brush in CS4.

More Concept Art for Thesis project

Here are 2 concept illustrations for my thesis project.  I haven't illustrated in photoshop in a long time, so it took me a while to get reacquainted with the brushes - these could be a lot better, but they are just sketches.

The plan at the moment is to create something kind of painterly, something with a little bit of noise to give it a hand-drawn touch, much like what is featured in these great The Giants animations.  But I also like the simplicity of solid shapes with painted backgrounds such as those in the highly underrated cartoon Samurai Jack (or this wonderful homage to it).  It would be nice to actually do some hand-drawn Flash animation for this project with gouache paintings, rather than all After Effects manipulations, I guess I will have to do some animation tests in the mean time to see how to marry the two styles.