I just came back from Nepal and well, I see things differently.

Here I am, back from my month in Kathmandu. I'll write longer about it soon but in a nutshell, that was one of the most inspiring trip I ever did. I came back totally boosted and motivated for the future + I'm glad to present you here the paintings I did for the International Buddhist Academy. :)

The life of Buddha

The Three Precious Jewels

Butterlamps

Mala

Ngor Monastery in Tibet

End-Year Exam

A year has passed at the Animation Workshop and to finish it we had a week of exam. One of assignments was to do five seconds of animation from the storyboard below. The Sultan wakes up suddenly after a fly introduced itself in his mouth. He panics and looks around, searching for the culprit. Lots of fun again to go through all the animation process. I really feel at ease with it and more inspired to push my limits and look for doing new animated performances.  

Thumbnailing

Rough Animation

Finished Animation

Interaction Animation

Lately I had the chance to be taught by Sydney Padua, another great figure in the animation world. She helped us to learn interaction in animation: we had to make two characters hug each other after a expression changing. Our characters were Hoghart from The Iron Giant and the Sultan from Aladdin.

 First of all here are some sheets where I practiced the characters in order to get use to their construction.

Then in order to have an idea of their relation, I posed them next to each other also to check the size relationship. 

Finally came the idea of an interaction. So I thumbnailed my animation in few key poses.

...and here is the animation I came up with. One more time it was a big challenge but I am very glad about the result.

Mister Stan

Two weeks ago at the Animation Workshop, we had the chance to collaborate with 4 directors/students from the french school La Poudrière. They needed our help to do animation tests for their projects which consisted in adapting children books into TV series. I worked under Jeremie's direction with my four classmates Ben, Sofia, Will and Agnete. 

For this animation above I worked with Agnete. I animated, cleant up and colored the dog, Mister Stan, while Agnete did the great animation of the neighbor. It was a real challenge to work with limited animation but also to apply the style of the book to animation. Moreover it was the first time we were working on a project we did not come up with so again, a nice challenge for adaptation. 

Thanks to La Poudrière's students for this great collaboration*

Charlotte, Jérémie, Clémence & Alix

GIF

LIGHTS OUT

Mesdames et Messieurs,

I am happy to present the result of a long journey me and my amazing 7 co-workers just ends :

here is our first animated short short film dedicated to 4 to 6 years old children (and older of course) made in 4 weeks. It was an amazing challenge and great adventure to go through. We all learnt a lot from each other and became stronger in terms of organisation, planning and production. I hope you will like it.

Coming Soon - Short Short Film "Lights Out" *

Dialogue Animation

"Mid Year Test" med Pink Panther

Half way through my first year at the Animation Workshop we had to pass a mid year exam as well as writing a reflexion about our experience in the school until now. This reflexion and the test went pretty well for me even though I got a little stressed by the short time we had to achieve it. We had to produce a small animation starring our dear Pink Panther catching a baseball and falling straight on the ground. I am joining to my animation the few preparation sketches I made before animating. 

Dance Animation with Mike Nguyen

Lately at the Animation Workshop, I have been taught by a grand man : Mike Nguyen. Mike was, among others, lead animator for the famous movie The Iron Giant. He also achieves lots of wonderful work as an animator in the industry since he graduated from CalARTS. I never had a teacher has good as him and not only thanks to his exciting career. Mike breaths happiness and his words carry harmony, emotions, life, peace, quietness... All of these reminders made me much closer to my true self. He taught me how to follow my emotions in my animation and across this new approach I reached another level of expression I've never attained before. Here is the dance animation I came with during the last week with Mike. It is still rough but I am extremely happy about the result. Something organic, almost real to my eyes, appeared to me. I was very productive during this last week so I post here some pages from my sketchbook.

Thank you Mike*

MID YEAR SHOWREEL

TADAAAAA! After long hours of editing, here is my mid year showreel. 

TV PAINT - suite

Here is our final assignment of the year at the Animation Workshop. We worked on TV Paint again with a frog and a fly as characters. We had 6 sec to make them interact ;).

TV PAINT

2012 is almost finished and for this last week before going back home (hellyeah) we have been introduced to this very cool program TV Paint! Thanks to our new teacher Rune Ryberg ( AWESOME ARTWORK THERE !) getting used to it was not such a big deal. Here is the result of 2 days of work : a little flying cycle starring "the owl" in Sleeping Beauty.

Conducting*

explanations soonish*

Walk cycle

This week we have been introduced to the walk cycle by our new teacher Alberto Campos. We get to work on the famous Pink Panther. After studying its modelsheet during the week-end, here is what came from our 3 days of animation. Our assignment was to make a normal walk cycle without any attitude.

Aisling / Mickey

Week 45 - week 46

After we worked on planning our last animation starring Mickey Mouse casting a spell, our next task was to in-between our scene. To achieve this, our teacher Rebecca Bang Sørensen gave us the key-poses of a scene from the movie "The Secret of Kells" which we had to in-between in order to train ourselves before focusing on Mickey's scene. 

Back to Mickey with this new dimension of drawing these very clean in-between frames I realized how important touched-up key-drawings are in the view of the character design and of a good reading of the movement. I noticed a lot of incoherences in my animation but the aim was for me to understand what were my mistakes. So, more than filling the blanks I let between my key-poses, I spent most of the week to clean these keys in order to check and keep the feeling of a fluent action. I will not say I succeeded entirely but I am very happy to have been able to keep the design of Mickey while making him move how I wanted. I think I reached some of the fluidity I expected in his actions but I know I have still a lot to do. Animation is a long process and the more I travel inside of it, the clearer I see its keys.

Drawing for Animation 2/2

 These two last weeks we were taught Drawing for Animation by Frederik Villumsen and Rebecca Bang Sorensen. We have finally been really introduced into the animation workflow and our assignment was the following : we had to create a 6-seconds-footage  with the character of Mickey in the Sorcercer's Apprentice in which we had to tell this story : 

“Mickey has put on the Sorcerer’s magical hat and is conjuring his most powerful spell! The result is not what Micket expected.”

The result looks still a little clumsy and unfinished but what I got from this module was more that I expected : for the first time with our animation basics in mind we were able to depict precisely a personal idea in animation. I went from this crazy picture of Mickey casting his spell through a silly ritual dance to this final result. What a joy when you realise that this is possible. We are about to begin another step in the animation process which is the inbetweening. It will fill in all the blanks and static frames you can see and we will I hope get a fluent and smooth final picture. I'll conclude by : IT HAS BEEN THE FIRST REAL SELF TRANSCENDENCE. 

Moreover I posted some of my notebook pages in which I doodled teachers, classmates, illustrations... and also was writing my everyday expectations and reflexions about our organisation and workflow.

Drawing for Animation 1/2

Animation Basics

3 weeks ago we had two intensive weeks about animation basics. We learnt the basis of it and had different assignments to practice. We went through different basic principles such as the bouncing ball, the seaweed, the headturn... and we also got used to anticipate movement thanks to the exercice of TV-croquis which consists of sketching from an animation or a movie. Here are some TV-croquis, and two of our main assigments : the attitude ball with a tail and the flour sack. For this last one, we had to follow an imposed storyboard and the flour sack but we were free concerning the acting. Even if my final animation struggles a lot yet, I am very happy to have been able to surpass myself and to finally tell a story in motion :)

Have a look at our weekly teachers' blogs : Jody Ghani and Laura B. Schjødt