New website

Currently I have a new website up and running over at Weebly.
Check out here, and I wouldn't mind feedback on how to improve the design.

Animation Mentor: Squirrels are fun

Probably old news by now, but Animation Mentor released a free rig simply called 'Squirrels'.
I tried it out, as you can see in the video above, and it's a lot of fun.
It really helps me with my "squash-and-stretch" animation techniques and I actually recommend this rig to anyone who wants to practice more on 'cartoony' character animations.

I started off with just stretching the hell out of the rig off-screen, and then squeeze it all together when it 'lands' on the ground, beginning the sqaush technique. From there I stretched it upwards for 5 frames, then down at 3 frames, and finally the remaining bounces at 2 frames to get the springy look.
For the head turn I keyframed it to look down before each turn to get a smooth turn that doesn't look stiff and robotic, since it's a character that's very bouncy and energetic, so every turn makes it's entire body move, or at least look like it does. From there I did some minor animations, like making it's ears go up and down when it turns it's head, and animating it's mouth to open when it's bounces or turns it's head, and closes it when the body rests.

Check out the rig here, and give it a try yourself.

Friends Are Like Umbrellas - Report 1

To fill in the gaps between the long waits of cinematic progress in the other projects I am working on, I have found myself employed in another bachelor project called Friends Are Like Umbrellas, directed by Elisabeth Haukås. In this short, a girl is in posession of an umbrella, which keeps the friendship of her and a boy very strong, despite hardships along the way. I was put on the project to do rough animations for certain shots, which I am posting below, and I will explain how I went about each of them. I hadn't done any 2D animation since my first year in the course and was really rusty, which can be seen particulary in the last clip, however I did get a lot of advise from Elisabeth on how to approach these problems. I have almost entirely focused on 3D character animation this year, so it was nice to have a chance to develope my 2D animation skills as well.

In this shot we have the girl grabbing a star in a shot that shows how she uses that star to mend her broken umbrella, that was ripped up by thorns. As such I had to animate a human hand going in a upward motion, extend it's digits, close the digits around the star and then move the hand downwards and in opposite direction. The problem I had here was the speed of the motion was too constant all the way through the animation, and it also had last for only one second. So I had to make it look good in terms of animation, but it will be gone in a blink of an eye due to the short duration. So it has to look belivable in a very short timeframe.

This one was a very difficult shot for me, being very rusty when it comes to 2D animation. I had to animate the girl and the boy sitting on a blanket, and then the girl uses her umbrella to give them shade by planting it on the ground, but then a strong wind comes and flies it off. The difficulty of this shot presented that I had to do a 2D character animation, which has different approaches since the benefits of 3D animation is that you don't have to re-draw the characters. This made the characters look wobbly when they move, which I would try to cure by animating by two's, but the integrity of the characters still looks uneasy. I do enoyed having a go at making a 2D character animation, but it is obvious that I do need more practice at it.