Assistant-Lad returns!

A full page of Assistant-Lad sketches!

I've never posted anything here about my early comic concept, Heroman.

It was supposed to be this webcomic. It kinda sprung up and died sophomore year of college without getting very far at all. I recently decided to go back to the idea and see if I could finally wrestle something out of it.

The story generally revolved around the misadventures of a mentally unhinged superhero who calls himself "Heroman," and his sidekick "Assistant-Lad." Generally more of a hindrance than an aid, they set about town causing well-intentioned (but devastating) mischief.

The story I have in mind for them has changed a bit to the point where it actually has plot and a supporting cast and an ending, which were all things I didn't think necessary before jumping into writing the comics back then.

Here's a small sketch of Heroman, too. Just for you guys.

Expect some Heroman stuff coming soon. I'm currently working on the first issue, and if it goes the way it's going, I might have a good bit of it done by the end of break. That would be nice.

Jina Noh did some fan art back some time ago, and you should totally check it out on her blog! You should also follow her blog, and I'm not just sayin' it because she's my girlfriend, but because she's also amaziinnngggg!

http://jayensbook.blogspot.com/2011/06/quick-sketch-3.html

Toby sketches!

Hey guys!

Sorry I haven't updated in a while, but I've been hard at work on my senior film, and it's eating up a lotta time I would spend on other projects.

Which I mean... is totally fine, because it turns out making a senior film is amazing fun! :D

Recently though, I got to sketching out my character Toby, and here's the result: a page of many drawings... mostly of questionable value.

turns out I need to relearn cyclops anatomy

Anyways, if any of you haven't already, check out my production blog for Rock Candy:

http://rockcandyprod.blogspot.com/

It's uh... pretty much where I post stuff now. Because all the stuff is Rock Candy stuff. All the stuffs.

Check it. CHECK IT, YO.

It's my senior film! Now in easily digestible, updatable blog form! Enjoy!

http://rockcandyprod.blogspot.com/

A request.

the needs of the many

Lucy requested an MS Paint Shuckle. As I don't have MS Paint, I used Sketchbook Express.

Sorry I haven't been posting stuff lately. Me and Jina have been hard at work on a small project which we shall be revealing shortly. Stay tuned!

What? Orlando's still doing stuff?

I know, right? I'm surprised too!

But yeah, I'm sorry I haven't posted in a while. Finals happened. And then I got lazy. But hey, now I'll upload a whole mess of stuff!

First off: my dialogue final

The dialogue came from an episode of Psych, and the character is Toby. Which most of you have seen by now, no doubt.

It's a bit rushed, as I had my storyboarding final due the next day and had to just go with the first pass that came out.

Next up is: a WIP 3D piece!

I've been working in Maya with one of the rigs we were given in class: Moom. I figured it was about time I picked up this 3D thing again. This is the last playblast I took of it from a while back.

Finally, here's an Obama caricature I did for a possible job. The guy just said he needed caricatures of politicians and whatnot for his small newspaper he's trying to get off the ground. Okay.

Redos and weights

It's been a busy couple of weeks. I recently finished up some more work, so now I'm gonna show them on what is now quickly becoming solely my animation production blog. I'm going to be starting to post work for my upcoming senior film, so I'm thinking of starting up a separate blog for that.

But first, here's a dinosaur! ROAR!

I love drawing that thing...

Anyways, for the recent weight lift assignment in 2D character animation, I ran my idea of animating Toby ( a character I made back in my character design class) for the assignment by my professor, and he said it'd be fine. The idea was to get more practice animating Toby, as I intend to use him in my senior film.

Here's the finished Weight Lift...

There's still a few holds and other things I have to redo in the resubmission, but for the most part, I'm pleased with it.

And As an extra treat, here's my resubmissions for both previous assignments: the Mushu head turn, and the Norm Reaction Take:

I think especially on the Norm one, it's a definite improvement. I'm pleased as punch.

Norm Completed!

It took me til 5:30 am to finish, but I'm really pleased with what I have.
I might like to clean it up a lot more and maybe alter some things towards the end in the redo... but for now, this works fine.

Lemme know what y'all think!

Norm Progress 5

Yeah, I'm still not done.

Norm Progress 4

Norm's shaping up now. I went back and added in his body so that he's actually all there for most of the animation. He's got some slide-y feet problems, and most of the end is still placeholders, but hey, it's looking okay.

Norm Progress 3

It's coming along... sorta

Norm Progress 2

I need to get this done by tonight, so all you lucky bloggers get to see my progress.

The end still needs some better timing, but I think his head's working pretty well.
Watchu guys think?

Norm progress

Our next assignment for 2D Character animation is a reaction take from this character: Norm.

Here's what I got so far.

Obviously not finished, but thought y'all might like to see some work-in-progress!

Mushu!

Our first assignment for 2D Character animation was a Mushu head turn! What fun!

This is my first time actually animating someone else's design from a model sheet, so I was a little nervous that I wouldn't get the design right. I drew him a lot in my sketchbook, and I think that definitely got me a little more prepared. There are still a few things bugging me, but I think I managed to draw him pretty convincingly.

I have two versions of my head turn.

The first is the version I turned in.

My Professor liked it, it seems. There are still a few things to fix, which I'll get onto soon.

My second version is an unfinished one. At one point, I had Mushu stop at a 3/4 pose, as if he's listening, before progressing to the final extreme.

Prof. Webber said it wasn't bad, but that to keep in aims with the assignment, I should focus more on the two extremes. Also, the middle pose breaks the pacing a bit. Nevertheless, I think I could still work with it so that it's paced better, but time will tell if it'll get finished.

I'll be posting again with more stuff soon!

Psych Character Designs be stylin'

Ehem...

This quarter, I'm taking a Character Design and Storyboarding class.
One of the first projects was to take an existing television show and convert the characters into caricatures. Now, allow me to say that my professor often refers to our caricatures as either "animatable" or "non-animatable".  At this point, he's completely ignoring basic shape breakdowns and turn-arounds (which, no doubt, will become needed for later projects).

In any case, this means the designs I have here are far from "animatable" yet. Nevertheless, he seemed to like them, and that's good. I'm pretty proud of them.

Here they are:

Gus

Shawn

Juliet

Lassiter

Lassiter was by far my favorite to draw. He's already so darned cartoony!

Tweet! Tweet! Twitter!

So my dad says I should look into this "twitter" thing that's been going around sometime, and I go like "what?" and he goes like "yah".

So I did. Now I have a twitter.

Here it is: http://twitter.com/#!/odditystew

FINALS! They are over!

They are so over it's amazing!
I got pretty good grades in my classes this quarter... and A in 2D Production, an A in Intro to Sequential, and (not 100% sure yet, but..) a B in Action Analysis!
BEHOLD! My two animation finals!

First, my Action Analysis final!

doggiedoggiedoggie!

There quite a few things I would love to change, one of which is the entire human. His movement is too controlled and too non-human. Very robot, and I am not happy with that ball throw. That being said, I'm very happy with the way the dog came out. Definitely a bunch better and smoother than I had him before. All those slow ins and slow outs are helping a ton.

And now, my fully colored, cleaned up, and finalized 2D Production final!

  

Roomie Rumbles!

I'm very happy with this... almost 100%!
A bit of the clean-up I wish I could redo... it was my first time on a Cintiq, and it's not the best linework sometimes, but time was short. I'm pleased with the colors. ToonBoom made them extremely easy to apply.
I like the sound: it really helps add a different dimension to the piece. All credit for that (minus the title card) goes to my friend Charlie Hafer, who was taking an Intro to Sound Design course at the time and needed an animation for his final.

My friend Josh also posted up his final on his blog, and it's awesome! Go check it out!
http://joshuapilch.blogspot.com/2011/03/its-here.html

All in all, good quarter. My Intro to Sequential final (along with some other sequential pieces) will be up soon, too. Stay tuned!

Updated Animations: Cleaned up wizards and walks on hot sand

This is a doggie

For my latest assignment, the quadruped walk,  I chose a schnauzer. This was one of my early tests:

As you can see, it looks more like a Giant Schnauzer or Great Dane than your Standard Schnauzer. The legs are too long, and the head is too held too high. Apart from that, the walk was too fast, and the body had pretty bad up and down movement to none at all.  Which is bad. I  tried to rectify these problems in my next tests. This is the one I turned in:

I think movement is much better here, despite the gratuitous head bobbing. My professor pointed out that the legs do not grow with the rest of the body and that adds problems to the walk. Also, he's still kinda fast, so it looks like he's walking on hot sand. However, it's much more of a schnauzer than last time. Which is good.

Also, for your viewing pleasure, here's my 2D Production work completely cleaned up:

Now we're working on adding color! Which I should add, feels like cheating on ToonBoom. It's WAY too easy. It's almost literally [select + Paintbucket].

I present to you... Osamu Tezuka's Star Wars?

Recently, for my sequential class, we all had to choose an artist and a movie. The point was to make you draw a scene in that movie using the artist's style.

Osamu Tezuka and Star Wars:

Tarkin has never looked so fly

Status Report: working hard

Howdy everyone!

Just here to show some of the awesome stuff I've been working on, recently.

Lately I've been rather busy. Due to schedules being mucked around, deadlines have gotten pushed forward, while some stay the same, making it less time to work on some. Less than I'd like. Currently, I have one quadruped walk I have to work on, along with a redo on the action line biped assignment I worked on last week, along with clean-up animation on all the animation for my 2D Animation final. This is all due this Tuesday.

That's three, Mr. Disgusting Orlando Drawing. Learn to count.

First off, let's see that Action Line assignment I'm redoing. I mean, it can't be that bad, can--?

AAAAAGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!

But yeah, I'm redoing it. There were many problems with it, the most notable of which is the crazy walk at the end.

CRAZY.

Meanwhile, for my 2D Production class, I've got all my animation pretty much done. Just a couple of holds I need to move. I'm entering clean-up, and it seems to be coming along. Furthermore, my friend Charlie is providing some music for the project, which is sure to be spiffy!

Can't wait to see it finished. It'll be my most finished animation ever.

Also, I'm doing a doggie for my quadruped animation assignment!

So yeah...

I said I'd be updating this blog pretty often, but it turns out that didn't happen. School did, though.

This quarter's pretty heavy. I'm taking three studio courses, and that's tough I guess. Really, the funny thing is that the extra studio I got has been the least troublesome of my classes, and the two animation courses I was gonna take anyway have been time consuming to the max.

Anywho, one of the classes is Action Analysis, which is a class for analyzing/animating realistic human bodies. We also get to animate a dog or cat. I figured I owed as much to post something from that, so here's my completed hand animation.

Obviously, it's in rough animation mode (no clean up) and it's less than perfect. I got a really good grade for it though. Still, I am currently working on the redo for the assignment to refine it. No more jiggly thumbs and shrinky palms.

The other is 2D Production, in which we get to pre-produce, produce, and post produce a short 15 second animation. I'm excited, because this means it's the first time I get to go into clean up and color in my animations for class. It should make for another neat portfolio piece.

Here is the visual development I pitched to the class.

One diligent, exam-studying-for, magician-in-training. One annoying ass of a roommate. Let the wackiness ensue.

In any case, I hope to update with other stuff soon. These are but tidbits of things to come.