Redesigned bg

After working on bg #1 a couple of weeks (way to long!), I still had the feeling something was wrong with it.... So I send an email to Anne Bush, who paints HB-style bg's herself.

She gave me such great advise, tips and feedback! I started to aply some of the feedback, but the more I changed the bg, the more I realised I'd better redraw it haha.

Call me nuts, call me insane, but I did it! And... I'm SO HAPPY! It's not finished yet, but it's not going to take me weeks again ;) just a couple of hours and I'm finished with bg #1, hooray!

1st animation test

ToonBoom Animate and I will become friends I think :)
The animation could use a couple of frames extra, but it's just a test.

background 01

Background idea

I had this style and color idea for the first scene of my cartoon... what do you think? There are gonna be a lot more trees and other stuff, so don't worry about that ;) just the style :)

The many faces of Jellystone Park

I've noticed myself, but Yowp wrote about it: Click!

Grin and Bear it

The words that changed my life

You can go to animation school, spend a $100,000 and not learn a damn thing about the basics of good animation drawing- OR you can buy a Preston Blair book for $8 and learn it all in a couple months. You pick.

If you learn the principles correctly, you will be able to draw in any style today. You’ll be miserable having to dumb down your abilities- but you will be in demand.

John Kricfalusi

Spumco production process

John did a post about the Spumco production process
Very interesting :)

Animating Art

A documentary about Art Babbit

Nick Cross

Some nice links to information on Nick Cross' blog:
inking in flash
animation process

while you're waiting

new panels

3 new panels i like to share with you.

i'm not quite sure about the last pose... he's suposed to be listening to a sound coming from the hole. is that clear with this pose?

Playing with colors

another storyboard sneakpeak

Storyboard

Just to let you know I'm not dead ;)

I'm working on my storyboard :)

Angles

John Kricfalusi:
A good rule of thumb for animation staging: if it's hard to draw one drawing from a certain angle - it will be at least 12 times as hard to animate it.


Read the whole blogpost here

What's the point of copying?

John Kricfalusi:
Some people might wonder what the point is in copying the drawings of others. I'll tell you. It's so you can apply what you learned from the copies to your own drawings. It's not just so you can be good at copying.


Read the whole post here

another idea

Maybe Toby want to eat Skip?

Work in progress:

drew Toby's pose:

Story drawing II

Miss Squirrel's Launderette

The Illusion of Life: Story

Mitch and I have this book for already 2,5 or so, but I only read several chapters of it. Last week I saw that there's a chapter about Story in it, so I started reading and wrote a summary of it. Here we go!

It all starts with a simple idea you can tell to someone in 1 or 2 sentences. A too complex story/idea will is confusing for the audience and looks and feels like a mess. The idea has to be clear.


Be sure the audience understands what your characters are doing and why they are doing that. Show their way of thinking, but don't make their behaviour predictable (you don't want your story to be boring).


Parts with action and parts with emotions need to be in balance. Action is for creating excitement/thrill, emotion is for understanding.


Don't be affraid to make changes in your story! Every (animated) movie has parts that have never been published and/or changed a lot of times. Keep in mind that every part of the story has to support your idea. 


To judge your scenes before you start animating you can use these tips:

1. Is this scene only there to connect one scene to the other? If it is, change it to make it interesting. Make it part of the story, not just some filler.
2. Is this scene only to explanain something? If it is, change it or even delete it and make changes in other scenes so this scene will become useless. Nothing is more boring than an explaining conversation -_-. If the character has a reason/motivation for his behaviour, no explanation is needed.
3. Is the situation in this scene interesting/entertaining? If not, make it interesting or delete it. Not only the characters make a situation interesting/entertaining, the situation itself needs to be interesting/entertaining too. It's a combination of both that makes a scene totally awesome.
4. Are the characters coming to life in this scene? If not, make them act like living creatures with real personallities and motivations for their behaviour. What does character A when he ends up in this situation? The character is real and has influence on the situation. Show how a character thinks/feels about the situation. This can change through the movie because the character grows, but make that also understandable for the audience.
5. Can this scene be caricatured? If you want realism, please go film your story instead of animating it. It's a waist of your time and a waist of the medium. Animation is ment to be exaggerated, not realistic, but believable.
6. How is your story told? Let your story be told by broad cartoon characters instead of the generic charaters. In Snow White the story is told through the dwarfs and the animals, not through Snow White herself, she's too generic to be entertaining.