So I've spent the last twenty minutes or so on trying to upload the pencil tests from my recent film I'm working on. Sadly, there is a "bug" in Blogger that will not allow me to upload videos. So instead of posting them, i"ll tell you how i appraocha scene with an individual character or when there are several characters in a shot.
When it comes to animating the three heroes, I then start to imagine myself as them seperatly and how they would appraoch a situation. Sean is the big, one-tracked minded burly one of the group. So I puff out my chest and act all broadly as i can be. Interms of myself, i would picture that being the "normal" one in the group, i just slightly eaggerate my actions. The most goofy thing about my character is the hair spikes. For Andrew's animation, I think of someone who just doesn't care about really anything.
In the case of the female lead in the film, Sarah is a loose free-flowing body, almost cloth like. You would think she's not even real for how she is animated. I really wanted to get the secondary action perfect in the case of her moving in a scene.
Lee is our dastardly villain in the picture. For when he plans his devious scheme on kidnapping our teacher, I picture all those old-time "Snidely Whiplash" characters from the past and how they use their whole body for specific poses when doing the cliche tying and monolouging.

Here are some of the pencil tests I've been working on for the past couple of weeks. seeing the motion run through so fluidly makes all that time at the light table worth it. Hope you enjoy it.

 So today I began the opening shot in scene #14, where the audience is revealed to our villain, Lee Terwilliger (Dan Backslide). His back is facing us as he is over-exagerrating his actions to play the video game. I kept is nice and simple so that the viewer's wouldn't have a hard time knowing what he's doing. His body is a still image while I animated each arm seperatly. His left arm will be controlling the joy stick while his right arm will be doing two actions: one is shifting back and forth left and right. Two is a slamming action which will bring the "cartoony effect" to the scene.

So week #3-4, our group is still on fire. Lee sent me a message that will send you to his blog and on it is a fully colored shot of his character pulling out Sarah's picture frame and stating his love. After the first time i saw it i was like OMFG!!! Just the sight of how this film will look all colored and cleaned up will be just like watching those old cartoons from the 30s-40s. For my miletsones, im still on the fast linewith about 10 shots ahead of schedule. I'm currently working on the shot where the three of us are shunning the distraction projection in class.

So i dont know why this blogging thing is sometimes a jerk to me, but my first blog was about how mea and my co horts are now making our junior group film. we're parodying Chuck Jones' 1942 classic short "The Dover Boys at Pimento University". When at first released, Jones was almost fired because the studio execs didnt know much about animation techiniques and inventions. The cartoon was famnous for crisp timing with smearing inbetweens. I'm in charge of all the animation and supervising others work on how to move the characters or give them sketches for help. Sean's in charge of all the backgrounds and smearing. Lee is my assistant when it comes to the animation. He'll take my rough animation and trace over them with marker, making it less time when it comes to colring and scanning and that department is in the hands of Andrew.

So week #3 into the new semester and i feel really good about my junior group film. Just yesterday, i finished the main poses in one shot of the villain in out story, Lee Terwilliger (The "Dan Backslide" character) in the cartoon. It's the shot of him pulling out a picture of our main professor Sarah Hanson and then professing his love to her....cirriculeum. Those will be then sent off to my friend Sean, who is in charged of all the smears in the film, to make the timing seem more crisp and energizing. Then they will be sent off to our friend Lee, who will then trace over the drawings with marker on seperate sheets of paper and scan those into the computer will they will be colored and placed into the finalized background when compositing.