animation

Hippopotamus

animation, Jukejoint Handmedowns, personal

In addition to the animated ‘Craig Emcee’ segments that I created for the Wheatland Kids Hill video (see previous post), I also created this partially animated children’s song featuring my band mate Nate and his song “Hippopotamus”. I had a lot of fun with this, especially the challenges that it presented (building a four legged character and figuring out the walk sequences), not to mention the fact that it involved a deadline, which has not been an issue with my previous animation projects.

Meanwhile, I’m still working on my self promo piece from yesterday. Did a little more work into Maggie’s dress, and blocking in some more color. Need to work on the hands, the ‘noodle bucket’ and the background a bit more. I’m also thinking I’m going to set this in a rainstorm, so will need to work that and some Hong Kong back alley scenery into the left side.

Wheatland Kids Hill Animation

animation, Jukejoint Handmedowns

Since Wheatland Music Festival was cancelled for this year due to the pandemic, the board of directors decided they needed a ‘performance video’ to offer to their many fans and supporters. Kids Hill, of which we’ve been involved with building musical instrument projects for several years, was allotted an hour of video for this compilation. I provided several short animated ‘links’ featuring a cartoon version of my friend Craig to help spice up the presentation. Here’s the entire collection of ‘intros’. (I’m also working on a partially animated children’s song video about a hippopotamus which I’ll be sharing very soon)

Animation Pro Bono Work

animation, Jukejoint Handmedowns

I’m currently waiting the go-ahead on a couple of book projects, and so I’m filling my time with some more animation projects, as well as sending out some email marketing and promotional postcards.

Usually the week after labor day I attend a music festival up north called ‘Wheatland’, and like a lot of events this year, they had to cancel for the first time in their forty year history. I’m part of a team that provides a musical craft project for children at a part of the event called ‘Kids Hill’, and this year, the committee decided to produce a ‘virtual video festival’ to release around the time of the usual festival date, and they allotted an hour of the video to ‘Kids Hill’. I’m going to be building a series of short video ‘introductions’ starring a character based on my friend and bandmate Craig, who will be introducing each of the segments (screen shot pictured below), and I’m also working on some short bits for a music video for a song that my other bandmate wrote about a hippopotamus (test animation pictured above). The Hippopotamus video will be a half and half animation/live performance, so mostly I have been working on trying to perfect a ‘jaunty little walk’ for our main character. The Emcee videos will involve a bit of lip-syncing once I’ve gotten the audio tracks from Craig.

Heaven’s Gate

animation, Jukejoint Handmedowns, personal, Uncategorized

It’s been five years since I’ve completed an animated film. The reasons why have a convoluted history. Going back around 15 or 20 years, I first discovered a hidden feature on the illustration program I was using at the time for my work. Corel Painter, along with its many fine realistic brush features, had, in an earlier version, a primitive ‘animation feature’. The feature wasn’t much more than the ability to use multiple onion skin overlays to see the progress of your animated drawing over several frames, and then to play back the animation instantly to check your progress. I did several test projects, and, from 2010-2015 was able to complete 3 animated music videos for my band, the “Jukejoint Handmedowns”, also using Apples ‘iMovie’ for combining animated clips.

A computer upgrade (and subsequent upgrading of my system software), meant that I had to also upgrade Corel Painter, who had, in the meantime, dropped their ‘animation feature’ from the latest version of the software. I have been playing around with various alternative animation software platforms in the past five years, but nothing had really clicked with me, the way that the original Painter tools had.

During the recent pandemic slowdown, I spent some time learning how to use Adobe After Effects and Adobe Character Animator, and put together the above film for our upcoming album release. I had a lot of fun learning new techniques, and stretching my horizons. Each scene was a new challenge, and led to new skills, and have learned even more since its completion. So stay tuned for more.