Animation. Pixilation. Frustration.

AnimationVolda has recieved your animation/animations, we would like to thank for your contribution. It will be shown at the festival some time between 13th.-15th. of september.

We’ve got a qualified jury for the picking of the movies wich will be sent to Fredrikstad Animation Festival. The jury consists of:
– Torill Kove: Norwegian Oscarwinner (2007) for The Danish Poet
– Dave Osmand: Lead animator and director of several tv-series for Aardman Animations
– Dave King: Freelancer for Cartoon Network amongst others”

www.animationvolda.com

Animatricks 2007

Published 30 2007f August, 2007 animation 1 Comment

The animation just got selected to be screened at Animatricks 24.-28.10.2007. Be sure to catch yourself watching it there. http://www.animatricks.net/2007/

Fame and Glory

Published 6 2007f August, 2007 animation Leave a Comment

The animation got the 4th place in Assembly ’07 Short-film Compo. Not bad but I guess I misunderstood the whole category since last year it was mainly animation.

You can seek the download file here :

http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=31604

ftp://ftp.scene.org/pub/parties/2007/assembly07/short_film/

It is just the first part, I’ll publish the whole thing online soon.

.. just wait.

Assembly Craze

Published 4 2007f August, 2007 animation 3 Comments

I just got to know that the animation passed through the prejudges in Assembly 07. The winner’s are announced tomorrow.

Due to copyright issues with the music I used, I couldn’t send the whole animation to this festival… doh.. Though I’ll shove it all online as soon as I can for everyone to see, it would’ve been nice to let them see all of it there already. But after considering it for awhile I thought out it would be best to have only 1 original cut in internet instead of multiple ones all with different music.

I feel a bit awkard now with the music choice I made. It was so cool that the band Callisto gave me a permission to use one of their songs in my animation (which I thought out first was a win-win situation for everyone). The finnish artist’s copyright organisation had to be paid first though, which I did. But the permission is limited and so am I…

…just come back later to give a peek and you’ll see the whole thing here, safe and sound.

Nice, fit and all legal.

Summer Camp

Published 10 2007f July, 2007 3d , animation , digital painting , lightwave , matte painting , mattepainting , painting 1 Comment

The animation will be soon released in internet.

Meanwhile I want to show the work-flow of the painting procedure on one of these backgrounds I was doing. Here’s the working log for all you interested people :

Basically the characters are already thought out and shot, the King is lurking behind the tree, watching some guards. There is a camera-pan across the picture from left to right, with only minimum movement of the guards. The purpose is to show that the colony is actually keeping their people as slaves. And show with the kings following actions what his character is really like – how he reacts after seeing this. I did the quick sketch above to visualize my idea of the scene.

To speeden up my paintings, I use some photo reference. For example, the clouds and the mountains in the background were just photos blended in and painted on.

The next step is to check things like eye-movement, composition – will the audience read the picture fast enough etc.
I have to think about also how should I enhance the scene, to get the idea through correctly. Some tools, tents, camp-stuff or similar, fire somewhere (don’t know yet what is that smoking tower in the background), block of stones piled up together maybe? Some fence or ladders?

2nd go

Again back to the painting. After showing the sketch to people, the guards were actually mistaken as the slaves. This was also because there was not movement in the pit. So, I thought the atmosphere would need some more creepy touch to it :

Adding the hanging corpses to the background make it more clear that the place is not a happy summer camp after all. Also the camera pans first from left, showing the corpses thus creating the mood – and then lastly, shows the king hiding behind the tree.

My only concern is now that it might look now as if the king is on enemy’s land. This is made a bit clearer in the end narrator but still I’m thinking how should I enhance the picture that the King is actually spying on his own guards. Maybe a flag or a sign on their cloaks to make it more obvious that they are in the same league (and this must be hard for the viewer, who still thinks the king is a good guy).

Hmm.. I might just be doing that, actually.
3rd Go

Ok… Here’s what I have now :

So I changed some minor things to arrange the set better and make room for the slaves. You can’t see the slaves working from these small pictures – I made a really quick rig from a Lightwave sample of a male body (which I distorted a bit) :

I then animated couple of those slaves as if they were working in the pit.

Done that, been there

Published 30 2007f May, 2007 animation Leave a Comment

The work is done. I presented the animation at school and they absolutely loved it. Now it’s time for tidying up the result, maybe fix couple of things with Tuomas and then publish it online!

I was thinking of attending some festivals – any recommendations would be very welcome.