The Final Showreel!

Here it be! The final showreel.

Walk Cycles

In a bid to tick a few executive boxes, I've created two new walk cycles, to demonstrate as concisely as possible my animation ability.

As well as a brand new attempt at a standard walk cycle, I decided to test myself and see if I could create a convincing 'fat waddle' walk cycle, to demonstrate my ability to consider the displacement of weight and volume on a walking character.

Basil: The Return

Hello!
Basil's coming along nicely - albeit slowly. I don't want him to dominate the project, so I might put his development on hold and work on some other things until I'm sure I can spare the time to work on him, as he's the most time-consuming project I've assigned myself for this showreel.

Fortunately, his face is animated, and his poses are keyed out. His clothes are even drawn out in a few frames. There's enough there for people to see the animation, if he ends up staying as he is.

Besides, I kinda like the idea of construction lines and test animations appearing in showreels. It shows the inner workings, demonstrating your craft a little more in-depth than a final product.

Here's Basil so far.

Music!

Continuing the slight retro vibe I wanted my showreel to have, the music will be jazzy. I have an idea for the music:

It's jazzy, it's lively, and because it's from a soundtrack to a movie, there are brief moments of quietness to allow other audio to be heard over the music. I can use these moments to play the corresponding sound clips to animations such as Basil Fawlty and Cave Johnson's 'lemons' speech.

The King

Okay! Muscle man's scrapped. There was something I just didn't like about his character. I may revisit him in a later project, but I'd rather this project kept chugging along, instead of stalling at anything needlessly complicated.

Good news, though! I finished animating a little piece of test animation for 'The Wall'. I wanted to see how the King would behave and how I could visualise my vision of his character - a large, but childlike, King, who means well but is a burden to his people.

Also, I've been figuring a few things out regarding Adobe Premiere. It turns out I can import raw SWF files straight into Premiere without having to export them as a video first. It cuts down on rendering time, and minimises loss of image quality due to compression. The downside of this is that you only get to see the King as an animated GIF for now.

Sorry!

A change of pace

Taking a break from all the Basil Fawlty work before I turn into the man and start shouting at people for disturbing me - "Can't you see I'm trying to inbetween an arc here! No! You're too busy poking your noses into other people's Flash documents, looking for something to complain about, aren't you?" - I've done a bit more work on another character I'm going to animate, a generic muscle man.

His design's developed over time. His face is much more geometric and exaggerated - weirdly resembling Vladimir Putin! - and his pectoral muscles have become more... breeze-block-ey. I like him.

I'm not sure how he'll animate. It might be an exercise in restraint. Very limited facial expressions, but powerful poses. A good exercise in anatomy, too. Should be fun.

So yes. All's good. Nothing... Fawlty... to report this time. OH MERCY

Basil Update

I've fleshed out some more of the movement, and gotten to grips with some of the facial animation. Looks pretty nice so far.

Here's a GIF of the best bit, as the video quality's a bit poor: