Friday, September 25, 2009

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.

9 comments:

David Fedan said...

These are lovely, Jeff!

Jeff Harter said...
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Jeff Harter said...

Thank you Dave!

John T Quinn III said...

very nice Jeff.

Dorota said...

I love it!!!

The Butcher said...

Acorn boy makes his debut. The film is very Al Gore. I bet you a big fan of Al Gore and his little "green" initiative.

What happens when the new tree get's chopped down?

Jeff Harter said...
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Jeff Harter said...

Always good to hear from you Ben. Is your beard any longer?

Al Gore, self proclaimed inventor of the internets? Ha ha! Can't say I'm a huge fan, he always reminded me of an animatronic character. But what can I say, I do love nature.

Hey, maybe you can sleep under the tree with your Rip Van Winkle beard and scare off any would be tree-chopper -downers.

Jeff Harter said...

All right, I confess, the person who chopped down that tree was me. Do you know how much paper it takes to animate 1 minute and 30 seconds of animation???