This was an exercise in design I chose to do outside of class. The prompt was to create a fairy-tale character, and I decided to go with Coyote from Native American lore. My aim was to imitate the Tlingit art style and try to define a 3-dimensional form with it.

Hello, it's been a while since my last post. A few things have happened since then. School has started back up again, and I was accepted into the Brigham Young University's animation program. I have a couple classes with projects that I'll be able to post up this semester, and I want to get into the habit of posting some of my sketchbook stuff more often.

I've also been trying to find work, though I don't think it helps that most of my past job locations don't even exist any more. Putting phone numbers on the application doesn't help when their disconnected or go to a different place now. I think one of them goes to some guy's house. It also doesn't help that I'm competing with actual computer-science majors for a lot of them. If anyone wants to commission artwork from me, just send me an email with a few details of what you want and I'll get back to you with a price to negotiate with.

I've also done a little re-organization on this site. A few pointless pages have been removed, the Content page has been removed in favor of just having it's categories moved to the main menu on the side. I've also fixed a few broken links. And by "a few," I mean the entire "Links" page was creating dud links.

The final for the Animation class I took during the spring semester required us to animate a character acting through a short voice clip. This was my project, with an additional inbetween pass that I did since the end of the class.

The sound byte is from a segment of a clip provided at the 11-Second Club website.

This is a scene from my latest solo animation project, titled "A Viking's Quest."

All effects are done in Adobe Flash. The fog effects are the easiest, as they comprise of a Movie Clip symbol of a shape tween and given alpha transparency and a thick blur. Layer a few of these on top of each other, and you have a blur effect similar to the one seen here.

Of course, using Movie Clip symbols has a long history of being difficult to convert to video. However, since Flash CS3 was released Quick Time export has been capable of rendering Movie Clip symbols as they would play in a normal Flash file. Unfortunately, the way it works causes complex scenes to render poorly, resulting in choppy scenes as the program drops frames to keep up with the recording process.

My current plan to work around this is to export a version through this method as is, so that I have an accurate audio track. The next step will be to render the movie at around 4 frames per second so that I have a video containing all frames in their proper position. Then it's just a matter of bringing them both into a video editing program and finishing things up there.

The application deadline for the BYU Animation program is finally passed, so now I can go back to do other things, like writing an 8-page group paper for History of Animation, getting ready for finals which start at the end of next week, reading things for class, and drawing goofy-looking weasels who live in holes while people talk at me, apparently.

I've also added a Google Friend Connect widget to the main blog page, so people can follow my blog through that thing. I'll move it to the right side bar thing later, as I don't have time to mess with the templates right now.

A rendering of the communist space pirate from a previous sketch done in Flash.

A short animated skip cycle to get used to using a tablet again.

This is a random walk cycle I made a while ago.

This is the explosion sample from when I was working on the graphics for Shattered Colony: The Survivors.

Those Soviet scientists are at it again!

Another piece from Drawing for Animation. For the midterm, we were to take the vinyl toy design we created, and add another element to it. Our class chose "soviet."

We had a "vinyl toy" project for the Drawing for Animation class that I took last semester. We were to pick a theme for a vinyl toy and design one over the week. The theme we chose was "disturbed circus."

So here is my disturbed circus vinyl toy design (right to left), Ursaw Major and Ursaw Minor.

This was the final project for the Drawing for Animation class had taken. We were supposed to use the character derived from a fashion photograph from the previous project, give them a non-human sidekick, pit them in a fight with an ice-monster, and tune it for an audience of 12-to-14-year-olds. Therefore, the result is the Happy Scooter Guy and his hyrax-sidekick are fleeing from the villainous Ice Cream Man, who requires a bio-suit made out of a refrigerator to survive in his current environment.