another new year, another old rat

Here's another old rat of mine. This one is from my short animated film "to bear onself" (the complete film is featured on the DVD compilation of my shorts). The technique used is underlit plasticine on cel, animated under the camera.

DVD is available

It's true! This is the link to the DVD store on Create Space. It will take about 2 weeks to appear on Amazon.com.

Here is a promotional clip I made for the DVD:

Raccoon and Moose in Smoking Hearts

Here's what I've been up to for the past week! A new short clip for AnimWatch challenge 005 :





I entered rather late in the process so I didn't get any feedback, but that's ok. I like the way it turned out, even if it is a little bittersweet.

Update: My friend Jean Theberge gave me a bit of feedback on the camera positions, so I've made a few revisions on the character closeup shots and have updated the video on YouTube. Thanks to Jean for the feedback.

Strange New Preview Teaser for My Smoking Moose Film

At the time I thought of it, it seemed like a good idea. Now when I look at the final result I find it a bit odd for a teaser for the film. I used XSI's Shape Manager for the pizza dough and for the first time it worked without errors. Another first was that I took advantage of Animation Layers in XSI 6.02 - this too worked -- I had one case of a crash, but once I knew what was causing it, I could work around it, and I can say that Animation Layers saved me a bunch of time ;o)

Anyway, here is the new teaser.

A new preview for my smoking moose film!

Finally! It seems like I've been working on this one forever ;o)

AnimWatch and Demo Reel

I'm working on my demo reel. I didn't have any lip sync on it and wanted to add some. Serendipitously I fell upon www.animwatch.com which has a animation contest that requires lip sync. Here is the QuickTime movie (starring Raccoon and Moose, of course ;o) but check it out -- they're not smoking !!!!)

You can see the other entries here.

For the demo reel, this only half cuts it for me ... it would be better to have an example of secondary shape animation for lip sync and so that is what I am working on now. I'm not totally convinced that I'll be able to achieve this with the current raccoon and moose geometry .. I'm working on it. Also, in animating this clip I had a lot of difficulty with rotations on the arm bones -- I don't remember having the problems when I was making the film (I was using XSI 4.2 and now I'm using XSI 6.01) -- I don't know if it's a bug in the software or if a setting has changed somewhere, but I'm going to have to figure out what is going on, 'cause it's really frustrating.

Just a Little Bug

Here's something I did for the AniBOOM's Eyedoll contest. If you like it, head on over to AniBOOM to vote for it!

Strutyourreel.com 10 second contest

Here's my entry to January's Strut your reel animation contest.



The animation was the easy part! The sync is a bit off on YouTube which I am blaming on the conversion process. The first version I uploaded was completely out-of-sync, I believe because I had animated it at 24 fps. I switched to 29.97 and then to 30 fps and it is better, but after uploading many different versions of 30 fps I realized that I could upload the same clip but the sync would be a bit different after the conversion. That said, the best results seemed to be with: 30fps source, converting the sound to mp3, exporting a .mp4 file using the MPEG-4 Codec (although uploading the same clip twice still resulted in slightly different audio synchronisation).

You can see all the entries at strutyourreel