Animation

I finally had two of my early pencil test animations/animatics transferred from 3/4" tape to digital. I'm doing a little chat about animation and thought it would be educational to show these early attempts.

The top animation, titled "Umbrella Tree," was my CalArts freshman year film. For anyone not familiar with CalArts...each year the college selects a handful of student films to run in the Producer's Show. It's a year end event held at the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences in North Hollywood and all of the major studios attend. Fortunately my student film was selected to run in the producer's show of that year. The music is Erik Satie's gymnopedie #1. It's pretty quiet film and has basic animation based on what I learned as freshmen (walk cycle, jumping, some limited acting) but I like the mood of this piece.

The Bottom story reel/pencil test was just something I was messing around with while at Disney Feature Animation. I wanted to do a simple situation of a snowman shoveling heavy snow to experiment with weight. It turned into a story of a snowman wanting to trade his shovel up for a snow blower, then thinking his shovel wasn't so bad, until he encounters some heavy wet snow (something everyone in snow belt areas can relate to.) The music is from one of my favorite Christmas tunes, Christmas Dreaming , by Harry Connick.