Animation test for Jeff Raglus
Here is a looped piece that I animated in flash for Jeff Raglus, a Victorian based artist and musician. Jeff has exhibited his art all over Australia for many years, and he was one of the original kooky artists that helped bring the popular surf brand “Mambo” to fame.
This animated piece has been achieved using flash’s “tweening” morph-like animation techniques. I’m afraid to say that I found these methods very unintuitive to use, often difficult to edit and results can be unpredictable. I’m still getting used to how flash works so maybe I’ll get used to these techniques more and find it easier next time!
I have been a fan of Jeff Raglus’s art for sometime now. We have talked about the idea of animating his work quite a few times, often in the surf, where our high powered meetings take place. He showed me a couple of his paintings from a recent exhibition he had at Qdos Art Gallery in Lorne. Here are Jeff’s paintings that this piece is based off:
Jeff and I are potentially developing his character “Schnorky the Wave Puncher” into a small animated series. We are still discussing which techniques of animation are preferable, and will continue various tests. It’s still very early days, so we’ll just have to see what transpires!
The Sneaky Rafter returns in “Nelson-land”
A while back I did a little test piece of animation of the “Sneaky Rafter” of Nelson Beer for The Taboo Group. They asked me to do another conceptual piece incorporating the 4 different iconic designs of the beer labels. The main icon being the “Sneaky Rafter” spider-monkey type creature (designed by Sonny Day and Biddy Maroney), as well as the “Rinzen Eye”, the “Trimapee” fashion label design, and “The Temper Trap” (band) head icon.
The characterization and animation of these 4 designs was created in 2 weeks. It’s not as well presented as I would have liked, but I’m glad I managed to output the concept of ‘Nelson-land’. I hope you can appreciate it for a piece completed in such tight time constraints.
Nelson Land from shredFest on Vimeo.
skipping girl -2d animation in photoshop
Back to the world of drawing and 2d animation. I started animating this one in flash, and also tried pencil which is a free open source 2d animation program. I had intended to then paint each frame afterwards in photoshop, but i remembered that photoshop can do video layers, basically allowing you to load in image sequences, or animated frame by frame. So i did the final animation outline and then colour layers in photoshop. The result isn’t vector like flash produces, but you get access to all of the photoshop tools. Most of the time i would never need to work vector anyway. The playback was great, because its only 10 frames at 300 x 300 pixels, but I can’t see photoshop being able to handle stuff that was too higher resolution, or playing back long sequences. So, photoshop is great for doing small 2d animation tests, and shading stuff mapped out in other programs. I will definitely use it again for colouring / shading other 2d animation pieces.
Oh and I also figured out how to display pieces like this as a looping swf flash file, with transparent alpha! …check the edges. More stuff like this to come I think!
She skips all day, and never gets tired…