Started Animating "Painting The Unpaintable"

Hey everyone! I completed production on "The Fridge," and on Monday I began animating my fourth and final "Fox & Calf" short, "Painting The Unpaintable." You can catch up on all the juicy gossip at my Tertiary Animation Blog. Don't Worry, We won't bite.

It's A Wrap!

After almost three whole months, “Critter Song” is finished! I finished the long-necked characters last night at about 3am, I think they may be the tallest characters I’ve ever done. I shot them today, the shot took much longer than I anticipated to shoot, but it looks super cool. It was so nice to sit and watch the complete film tonight (Which is about 2 minutes), what a wonderful feeling. I’ll be doing a tiny bit of post tomorrow, but there’s not much to do. Now I have to move all my stuff out of the studio. Normally, I hate packing and moving out of a place, it’s such a hassle. But I’m in such a great mood with the film being done, I’ll probably end up having a great time anyway.

Finally, I Animated The Bugs

I built these guys really early on in the production, but I didn't animate them until yesterday. And it turned out to be a great shot. It really stands out among the rest. Now, unfortunately, I get to spend a crap-load of time removing sticks from all the character's butts. That's never fun. Anyway, I only have one shot left and then the film is complete! As much as I've loved working on this film, I can't wait to wrap it up.

Tree Top Characters

Today I set up the scene for my bluish “lemur” characters, as you can see I shortened their arms quite a bit. I was having a really hard time attaching them to the tree trunks because the bark is very fragile, and sheds when touched, not a great surface to stick clay against. So I had to create theses elaborate clay rigs to hold them up, as you can see, the berry eating dragon from Happiness, along with the Spidercat, contributed a great deal of their bodies to help make this happen. My hope is that the two characters will really be able to keep form throughout the shooting tomorrow. We’ll see.

Way Up High

Here are some stills from the shot I did on Thursday, the closing shot of the music video. This ended up being not only the hardest shot to set up, but also the hardest to animate. And I thought it would be one of the easiest.



Building the set took quite a lot of hard work and ingenuity. My mom spent the day down at the studio helping me, I couldn’t have done it without her. I stole some giant stones from some people in the neighborhood to create this cliff-side view, overlooking the forest beneath (can you tell by the foggy atmosphere that I was inspired by my trips to the Marin Headlands as a kid?). When you only have a little bit of space, it is very hard to create such a forced depth of field, especially without casting shadows on the “sky.” Most of the trees in the very background are chunks of clay on a table edge and paint strokes on the construction paper sky, and there are some fake plants coming a little closer to the camera.



Because the whole set is elevated, I didn’t have lots of “elevation tables” to fit heavy rocks on, so I made a couple fake rocks. I just crumpled up some gray construction paper and painted them a little. I think they look great, and I don’t think you can tell in the shot.



The biggest issue with this setup was the big line running down the middle of the shot where the two pieces of paper that make the sky meet, so we threw a tree right up front in the middle and you don’t even know it’s there. It’s interesting that a decision like that is made from necessity, but it ended up making the shot look even better. I love when that happens.
The other problem with the shot was figuring out how to get the standing character to stay standing on the giant stone, since it’s not a very good support for a clay character. Then my mom came to the rescue and made a little contraption out of clay and shish kabob sticks that go up the characters butt and allow him to stand. The sticks are actually in the shot but I painted them black to blend with the background and you can't see them. Perfect.



Overall this ended up being a beautiful shot that I’m really proud of. Due to the lay out of the set, I did not have the easiest access to the characters, which made animating them difficult. I had to walk all around the set every frame to move each figure. But in the end, it all worked out and now I can’t wait for the next one.

My New Character Is Super Cool

I made a new character today. He seems to be the same species as the character I made yesterday. He started getting soft when I was sculpting him, so I had to throw him into the refridgerator to cool off and harden up. I also stole a giant stone from my neighbor's yard for the next set. I hope they don't realize it before I return it to them next week!

Hangin’ Around

Yesterday I sculpted this possum-like character while visiting my parents in Lucerne (my mom helped me mix the yellow color). Today I built the set and set it up so that I could shoot it tomorrow. But when it was all finished, I figured I might as well animate the shot tonight, so I did, and it turned out really nice. I’ve never animated an upside-down character before, that was interesting. If I made him frown too much it looked like he was smiling. He has a wire attatched to the branch that goes through his whole body to support him. I now officially have a minute and 17 seconds animated, with 40 seconds more to shoot. At this point i need to create the characters for the next shots (I’ve animated 12 characters for this piece so far, and will probably do 12 more). I hope to be completely done with this in less than 2 weeks. Here’s hoping

Papa Frog Makes Cameo Appearance

Here's what I was up to today.

Here's A Cute Character

I spent a good chunk of Sunday digitally fixing up about 100 frames. It was tedious but in the end I have some really cool shots. The birds no longer have anything suspending them in air and the ferret's stretch looks great.
Today I animated a shot of this long-eared squirrel character. After the last three shots, this one was very easy to do, it was nice to do some fun, easy animation. It doesn't always have to be stressful. This character has a sweet, meekness about him, I like him. I used the same set as the ferret to save time. I just put some moss and grass down over the dirt, changed the angle, and you can't tell.

I Am Exhausted

Hello, hello, hello!!! Well it has been a VERY productive three days since I last posted and I am feeling very positive about the progress I’ve made. Sometimes when you go so long in preproduction (over a month for this film) and you haven’t gotten a chance to animate anything, you start to feel like you’re going nowhere. But once you start to push the clay, it makes all the work worth while. I’ve had the chance to animate three separate shots since Wednesday, all of which were very challenging. But when you pull off a challenging shot and it looks good, there is no better feeling. First off on Wednesday, I shot these characters above. I REALLY enjoyed animating the orange fella, he was very cooperative and the final product was very rewarding. The turtles were a blast to animate too, I used the replacement heads for them to pop out of their shells, and their mouth movement is kind of comical.



On Thursday I animated these two birds. My dad came by the studio and built me a great rig out of some old television antenna to help the bird fly. It was great having him help animate. It reminded me of the old days when we would animate in the garage together. He also built a fantastic set out of some crazy branches he found with all this moss stuff on it and he suspended them from wires on the ceiling. It’s super cool. Below you can see the rabbit-ear rig for the bird. On Sunday I get to digitally remove the rod from the bird’s butt in about a hundred frames. FUN!


And finally below are the pictures of yesterday’s shoot. It’s a small weasel character who moves around really fast. I made a replacement body for him that stretches when he moves. This was the most difficult of the three shots, but it’s pretty cool.




It’s good to be moving the characters again.

Finally Ready To Animate

Hello everybody! I’m back from yet another long break of no posts. I actually was in Florida discussing the future of my animated shorts. More on that soon! Anyway, today I set up my first shot for this next piece. Tomorrow will be my first day animating, and it will be a fun, grueling day. If all goes according to plan, I will shoot a single 20 second shot with four characters lip-syncing to music. Keep me in your prayers.

Set Complete

I’ve got the set pretty much ready for shooting. I added some stones I found lying out front of the studio and some more plants. I spent a long time removing all the little strands of hot glue lying around the set because those get really annoying when they move during filming and pick up light.





Here’s Scamper, from Happiness, visiting the set. Yeah, I’m a dork.

Setting The Scene

Hey, again! So I’ve been working on the set a bit. It’s at it’s bare minimum at the moment, probably half complete. To create the ground I spray-painted some styrofoam brown, I find when I’m animating, the camera picks up the texture of the styrofoam really well to give a good illusion of dirt. The brown I used has a little more red in it than the brown I usually use since my main characters are green. I figured this would be a nicer visual contrast.



I’ve started putting some of the plants in the ground, but there definitely needs to be more. I’ll need to add some rocks and paint in a background. Fun. fun. Should be animating in a day or two.