Free SFX?

It was hard finding all the needed soundtracks for the short my group was working on early in my course. Suggestions were made to obtain for sources which are usually at the end of the spectrum : it's either (a) free SFX but in poor quality or (b) awesome tracks with pricing charged.

Good and free are hard to come by. Not trying to come across as cheapskate in using SFX, but as a student, financially it's difficult. Not to mention, royalty payment. I'm aware there's royalty-free materials online, but here's hoping that a student's burden is lifted.

                            

And little did I know something about Adobe's own sound-editing tool came with a package...as the source quotes. it comes with thousands of sound effects for use in your own production.

Not sure if there are terms and conditions applied to it, but feel free to go to this link and get it. And you'll probably need to own a legal copy of adobe software itself to be entitled, at least that's what I think.
http://offers.adobe.com/en/na/audition/offers/audition_dlc.html


Cites: thank you Mr. Bruno Degazio of SheridanCollege 4th year blog!

Greg Hates Cop WIPs

Another personal work from two months back as I juggle between school assignments.

Learned quite a bit from animating the cloth to having to avoid jump cuts and stuff. Here's hoping I learned a lot.

It's a simple animation about an old man (called him Greg) who really hates cop, like even the sight of it. Poor rookie gets picked on by him. Oh yeah, dialogue's really famous, try guessing. (hint: apes)

First, I started with an idea, which is drafted into a storyboard. Thanks to my mentor for giving me advice on the ideas.

Defined and refined the character to better understand and get used to drawing them. Prep for animation.

Keys to breakdowns to in-betweens....and refinement plus compositing after.

And here's the final outcome.

Had some frust animating this but overall it was satisfying. Greg really hates cop. He does, by the looks of it.

-Zach

(Sunday)

11 Second Club WIPs

Hey, I haven't touched this blog in a really long while. Although I have the LZ blog and deviantart, I decided to give some more juice to my blog so that artists and animators alike can see behind on how I work out on my animations.

Here are my WIPs (Work-in-Progress) for my submission of 11 Second Club back in August.

Turnaround - character

Storyboard before proceeding to animation.

I had to refine the animation for another extra week since I did not finish nicely on the submission day. So here's the refined one.

It's really fun (& important) to always go through planning and conceptualizing your ideas, characters and performance before diving straight into animation. I find it fun to draw and fleshing out the character, deciding how he looks and his personality, background, etc.

I would spend a lot of my time referencing on the net and checking my performance on all that as well. It is all that comes within the package of being an animator.

There's still a lot to learn but nevertheless I will take the animation journey joyously.

- Zach out.
(Monday)

Amazing Pencil Tests to check out!

Some really good stuff on 2D animations that I'd like to share, it's pretty cool even 3D animation doesn't have this traditional-esque and charm. Credit goes to the dedicated animators who work on their respective animation! 

Ogre Oh Ogre by  Bruno Celegão Monteiro,

The two above are done by the really awsome BJ Crawford!

The Egg Thief by Jon McClenahan

I really admire the essence in their traditional animation :)

-Zach out

(Tuesday)

Expand Your Visuals

As a wannabe professional artist, my brother and I have always thought of the outcome of creating awesome visuals, but not much on the process of it. For many years in childhood and our teen years, we've just kept trying and drawing, but improvements were not seen in huge leaps. We sought little guides and how-to-dos' but they seem to never effectively did the trick for us. Was it something we lack?

Maybe a lot of ignorance on our part.

Ever since heading into college, I only realized the importance of BUILDING an artist's visual vocabulary or visual library. You could put it that our brain is a library where it stores all of the information we need, in this case, visual & arts. Lecturer taught this to us once and I thought it was really great. It has never much been mentioned on the net(or maybe I haven't paid enough attention), but many great artist & sites would tell you that practice makes perfect. Didn't I talk about this in the last post... why yes I did.

Trinity College Dublin Library, source: www.thezooom.com.

Practice not only improve your familiarity with that drawing but also its an addition to your visual memory. Take it this way, by really studying hard & learning to draw or even memorizing, say on figure and anatomy, you actually build that structure or foundation in your head, and you can always pull it out whenever you need it. Just like getting a book in the library.

So let me sum things up , short but simple conclusion to this post: build own visual library and have fun practicing art.

Here are a few sites to get started with

http://www.theartofanatomy.com/

http://drawsketch.about.com/od/learntodrawanimals/ss/zoo-animal-sketching_3.htm

http://www.conceptart.org/showthread.php?t=14739

and don't forget about these good books!
Dynamic Anatomy by Burne Hogarth
Dynamic Figure Drawing by Burne Hogarth
Figure Drawing For All It's Worth by Andrew Loomis (http://www.alexhays.com/loomis/)

-Zach

21/4/2013 (Sunday)

More self-references!

I got my hands on these from my brother's figure class, as his class were focused on the subject of head. Hence, the neck and head references.

Scanning and stitching together was well worth it, considering I don't have to worry about the notes being so huge and taking up my desk space (It's A3 size), now that I can see easily on my comp :)

Note: References here all belongs to its rightful owners, I do not own these. 

Facial muscles

Expression in animation is just as important as actions found in characters. So, here's some notes I've drawn from what I've picked up last semester in college.

Facial muscles and its visual descriptions

Characteristics of skull structures

Well, the muscle part might be a little confusing with all the scientific names for every single group of face muscles...but it's for good sake just to grasp a few. An artist got to learn whatever the masters have done :)