Zlogspot - animationandvideo

Mr Bowlsacc by Francesco Tammaccaro As promised in my post showcasing my own entry into Reallusion's Animation@Work Competition for 2018, this is my post letting you know the winners have been announced . This time my entry didn't even manage a special mention, unlike my entry from four years ago that won a Best Animation award in its category despite being shorter, taking less time to make, and featuring far less technical skill and actual animation, than my current entry. The fact is, in four years, awareness of CrazyTalk Animator, and the number of people who've become proficient with it has grown to a more competitive field. Demonstrated by the overall winner from 2014's competition , Garry Pye, coming in at third place with an animation that is easily streets ahead of his work with CTA from four years ago. Overall that's a good thing for Reallusion, CTA, and the CTA community. Especially CTA content creators interested in building a viable business in the Re...

Partial Image from 'Character' by Nigel Ng. Nigel Ng's animation, Character, is different to the animation I usually feature in this blog in that it is a more conceptual style of animation and story telling. Designed to elicit an emotional response, it uses music to set the tone, and juxtaposes short animations to create a narrative. Animators tend to move towards this kind of sophisticated, conceptual storytelling later in their careers, so I was surprised to learn that Nigel has only been animating around 4 months. Watch the animation, Character, below, and then read on for more information about Nigel and the inspiration behind this work. Nigel is based in Ontario, Canada, and is currently studying biomedical sciences at university. He animates on the side and hopes to eventually be animating and making videos for a living. Although he's only been animating for about 4 months, Nigel says he's always loved art and drawing since he was a child, and thought he would...

I recently purchased two online drawing courses created by former Disney Animator, Aaron Blaise , including How to Draw Human Anatomy , and Character Design . Both courses were included in Aaron's Figure Drawing and Character Design Bundle , pack deal. My own drawing style is heavily influenced by early Disney animated classics (think pre digital animation), which you can see in the more rounded lines of my characters - as opposed to the more angular character design lines you find in Marvel and DC comics etc. I wasn't sure how much I'd learn from either of these courses, baring in mind I've already studied both topics in detail in Art School, and have been designing my own characters since I was in primary school, but Aaron's a veteran and easily out classes my animation skills. Both courses are entirely presented as video tutorials with Aaron, at his desk, speaking to camera, cut with video captures of his drawing (all in real time). Aaron speaks very clearly and ...

My latest animation is the third installment of my Cool Froyd the cat series titled, Gardening. In this episode Froyd explains how cats garden and recounts a story of some fairly odd gardening practices from TET (i.e. me). Watch the video below then continue on for background information about what inspired the video and detailed highlights from how it was made. Character Background How Froyd looks in 3D view. Cool Froyd is taken from an artwork I painted back in 2009 for my first solo art exhibition. You can see me paint the original artwork in my vlog series,  E13: TETs S.A.L.A. Exhibition Journal . When I first discovered CrazyTalk Animator Pro, Cool Froyd is the first of my own characters I created with it. There's a detailed look at how he was made in this post,  Cool Froyd the Cat and Crazy Talk Animator Pro . You can also read about how he is animated in CrazyTalk Animator 2 in this post,  Cool Froyd the Cat and Crazy Talk Animator 2 (Pipeline) . Inspiration The sc...

Police forces in many places around the world perform roadside, random breath tests to catch out drink drivers. More recently, in some parts of Australia at least, Police conduct random drug tests in response to growing concerns of people driving under the influences of other illicit substances. In a spark of silliness, I got to thinking what else could Police forces start randomly testing for on the roadside? That's how my short animation, Random Testing Unit , began to form. Before reading any further you should watch my animation below as the humour is generated through the initial premise. Once you know it, you can't un-know it. When you've seen it, read on to find out my process of creating the animation. Should Take About a Week with Muvizu... After I had my initial idea, it only took me about three days to write my full script. At the time I was learning Muvizu , the low cost, 3D animation software that claims it's the easiest and fastest way to tell stories with...

Jump Fail Animation The only way to get better at animation is to actually do some. I figure I can't keep sitting around waiting for time to complete full projects. So the other day I fired up iClone6, after having watched an iClone tutorial on creating action scenes, to try and create a short action sequence of my own. The result is this short sequence of a character attempting to jump between two roof tops but failing to make the distance. The character features on of Gary Pye's recently released Comic Faces which you can read more about under the next heading. Watch the finished scene in the animation below, that is also a comparison between my first render of just creating the basic action, and my second render, done a few days later, that includes some facial expression and a little more arm movement once the character realises he's falling. I wouldn't say it's perfect animation by any means. I had issues key framing the arms and legs. If you look a little too ...

Club Med and BAFTA nominee and Art Director/Creative Lead at animation studio 3.81, Matt Oxborrow, have teamed up to answer the question "Is your luggage having more fun than you when you go on a holiday?" Find out in the delightfully unique animation, Sun, Sea and Scanned: A Flip-Flop Family Holiday (below) created using a full-sized airport luggage scanner. Inspired by the 'other worldly' look of luggage when viewed through the screen of a security airport scanner, the colors and shapes you see look nothing like what you remember packing. So Club Med decided to have a little fun with that and created the story of a family of flip flops and their holiday inside your luggage. Their adventure includes: A bottle of Head & Shoulders shampoo as a speedboat. Hairbrush water skis. Chewing gum eyebrows. Flip flops faces with metal bead mouths and coin eyes. Tennis ball sun. Paperclip aeroplane. Hair straighteners and multi-plug adapters as skyscrapers. Watch the video a...

Dan by Gary Pye. Dan the Business man is a creation of Reallusion's Animation@Work competition winner and Australian cartoonist, Gary Pye . Gary's been flat out creating CrazyTalk Animator 2 content featuring his own cartoon art, which you can purchase from his Reallusion Content Market place store . I love Gary's art so much I've pretty much purchased probably a third or more of everything he's created for CTA2 thus far. Whilst I can't take credit for his Dan character I can say it was from my suggestion that Gary created Dan the Business Man and the related office content packs (including the lucky gonk/troll prop). So, having made the suggestion, and bought so much of Gary's content it would be wrong to not actually use it. Eventually I'll offer Dan the Business man as an option for my Animation 4 Business clients but I also wanted to have some fun animating him myself. With that in mind, below is the first, of what I plan to be a five or six part se...

Fellow GoAnimator, TheseStars is a big supporter of Cool Froyd putting aside quite a great deal of time to create a new GoAnimation analyzing Froyd's star charts to determine what his Sun sign might be. As well as Froyd the video features TheseStars (as a whiteboard character), Stick Figure and Hoot the owl - a character that I animated for TheseStars using Koolmoves . Watch the video below and then read on. Don't be put off by the length, those nine minutes will fly by! The video wasn't intended for public viewing, or at least TheseStars was never quite sure about whether I'd want it made but public. However with so much work put into it, combined with an interesting way to present and analyze star charts, letting more people see it was more a question of why not? There's a lot of custom work her including all those chart symbols, and Froyd's eye movements (not to mention that Hoot is a completely custom character too). Personally I like watching how TheseSt...

Jimmy the Superhero by Gary Pye. Reallusion announced the winners of their Animation@Work contest this week. I was fortunate enough to take away one of the three Best Video prizes up for grabs with my promotional video for my new Animation 4 Business Premium Service . I'm now the proud owner of a copy of Magix Movie Edit 2014 Premium Edition software. Whilst I was obviously hoping for the major prize, there are indeed a lot of talented CrazyTalk Animator users out there. Watch the Competition, winner announcement video for a good cross section and preview of all the winning entries. I did pretty well considering I only started learning CTA2 properly last December. Whilst there were many great entries I was very happy to see the winner, Garry Pye, won with a very funny video about Superhero Training. Regular readers and viewers of my work will know that Superheroes is a recurring theme. Gary is also a fellow Aussie and creates content packs for CTA that you can purchase for use in...

EnjoyingLifeInSeoul GoAnimator enjoyinglifeinseoul is the December 2013 winner of my GoAnimate, Get Featured in TET's Blog contest . Enjoyinglifeinseoul has had his account with GoAnimate since March of 2011 and in that time has amassed 3346 followers and published 49 animations. This is his second win of the contest. Read his first winning post here . Enjoyinglifeinseoul chose to feature his animation , saying... Well, it took me some time to decide which of my animations to have featured. I considered some of my older ones like “Prince of Persia” or “Turtle Shell! Turtle Shell!” and the latest ones like “Demon Fire!” and “Witches of Misery!” In the end I went with “Witches of Misery” because most of the challenges and special techniques I had used in the others were covered the last time I was featured here.   Some fresh problems popped up this time and I thought that the solutions I came up with might help some of your readers. The other reason I choose this one, is becau...

TheseStars GoAnimator TheseStars is the November winner of my GoAnimate, Get Featured in TET's Blog contest . TheseStars has had her account with GoAnimate since April of 2010 and in that time has amassed 965 followers and published 21 animations. TheseStars chose to feature her animation Hoot and The Yellow Canary , saying... I choose this video to be featured in this article for several reasons. The first being that I strongly feel it is my best production thus far as an armature animator working within the GoAnimate Studio. The second reason for my choice is that I would like to share this particular spotlight with the other people who contributed to the success of the production. And lastly, I choose this video because I strongly believe in the message the story line serves to tell others. That they too can create a little magic in their own life. This video production tells the story of how I literally found a yellow canary on the same day that I told a canary breeder ...