I'm about to head out to teach a class introducing animation for videogames at the Yarborough Branch Library here in Austin! If you're reading this and you came over from there, howdy and I hope it was interesting :)
If you'd like to learn more, follow this link to a Google doc I put together for additional reading! While it's written of the perspective of a sprite-animator (especially the links), most of the info is general enough to apply to almost any technique you choose to work in.
This is a project that I had the pleasure to work on a couple'a weeks ago! The Austin Motion Artists Group, wanting to showcase and celebrate the local animation scene, organized an event in which a bunch of talent was corraled, each one given a beginning-frame and end-frame, who then had 48 hours to animate ~12 seconds of animation. The final product came out pretty amazingly:
It's passed 100,000 views and now been labeled a Staff Pick on Vimeo, which I really kinda can't believe. Watch and enjoy!
I was part of the crew that produced the segment with the 2d-animated cyclops and octopus. We all came up with the direction together and then Ryan Cullen animated the cyclops, Louie Granda animated the octopus, I made animate'able assets for the environments and the explosion, and Willis Bulliner did the compositing. Awesome job, guys!
The thought struck me last night that even though I spend at least 8 hours a day at Powerhouse Animation, I rarely really get to talk about what I do there on my blog. Mostly that's because of NDA's but also it's because I rarely get to show and tell, since a project might not come out for months after completion or might not ever even see a public audience. Well, here's my chance!
We've done a couple of projects for TED-Ed, but this was the first to post. PHA collaborated with FermiLab scientist Don Lincoln (who provides the narration) to produce an introduction to the Higgs Field theory, which outlines how mass may be assigned to particles. The trick was that we only had a brief window in our work-schedule to produce it -- so it was decided to make it in a retro-1950's UPA'esque design style (which the character-designer Kellan Stover kinda knows his way around) which can be drawn, animated, and re-used very easily. I painted most of the backgrounds and much of the incidental artwork (the trophies, the projecter, etc.) Fun stuff! My favorite part though is that the video ends basically saying "this could win somebody the Nobel Prize one day", and in fact only a few days ago it was indeed awarded to Profs. François Englert and Peter Higgs! Congratulations to them!
