Showing posts with label experimental animation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label experimental animation. Show all posts

Sunday, February 26, 2017

Reese Witherspoon animation!




In my ever-more-demonic attempts to make things move, I took this picture of Reese Witherspoon from Legally Blonde - that DOES have an "e" on it, doesn't it? - and made her talk. Well, sort of. It's hard to mess with facial features and have them come out looking more-or-less natural. They don't here, but that's all part of the fun, isn't it? The idea to make her eyes move was an afterthought. I'd have her filing her nails, tossing her hair back, giving herself a mani-pedi, etc., but hell, I don't want to push my luck.

This was taken from an image I put together for the thumbnail of my YouTube video, Whatever Happened to the Popular Girl? Everyone says a good thumbnail attracts more views. Ha. YOUR thumbnail, maybe. I make personalized thumbnails because they're fun to make. And it's even more fun to make them talk.


Friday, February 17, 2017

That Buick Girl




Since my discovery/rediscovery of the ravishing Buick ad with the girl leaning on the even-more-ravishing 1946 Buick, I've been tinkering and retooling this post. Naturally, when you see an image this tasty, you're going to want to animate it (or, at least, I am). About the only thing that looked animate-able was her arm. My first few attempts were so stiff that they looked laughable - but then I got onto bending her arm at the elbow. Really, it doesn't look too bad.




Here I alternated the basic wave with a wider gesture which looked a little silly by itself, but seems to fit here. Naturally, these actions aren't going to be smooth. When I get a little better at this, I might find a way to make the actions more natural.




This is the fist-pump, which took quite a long time to do, because I had to mess with the hand to make it look more fist-like.




The free-style. I incorporated several different waves into this one. One of them is a kind of modified fist-pump, or "rah-rah" gesture.

I am SO sick of looking at this now that maybe it was a mistake to work on it. This is one of my all-time-favorite vintage car images. It's just so frickin' perfect. Maybe I need to put it away for a while.


Sunday, February 5, 2017

Two pussies in love




My latest animation. Disney it ain't - I don't know how to do 24 frames per second. This is more like stop-motion. But it took me long enough!


Sunday, January 8, 2017

Animated cats!




Monty Python it ain't, but these crude animations of mine, my very first attempt, are perhaps inspired by the Edwardian cutouts of Terry Gilliam. A dear friend of mine gave me a book called A Catland Companion, years and years ago, and it sat on the shelf for ages. THEN came the power blackout on New Years Day that killed our internet connection for over a week (which, by the way, is the sole reason I haven't been posting).

So.

No TV.

No internet.

No nothing.

I started looking for something to do, and rediscovered Catland. Hmmmm.

Could I - maybe - make something out of this?




I've been using a gif program to make little slide shows to post here (maybe you've noticed) - and I noticed they kept using the word "animated". Animated!  Animation is what I've wanted to do all my life! But having absolutely no talent in visual art - drawing or painting or anything else - I was sort of stuck.

But not TOO stuck, because I rediscovered Catland and its oddball denizens. I discovered they could be moved around and photoshopped in all sorts of interesting ways. I could not put them through the gif program, of course, so I was going on faith that they would look like anything. But these cats just jump off the page, don't they? And I hardly had to do anything with this little row of dancers, just bounce them up and down and reverse the image. In fact, it's the best one I did, and I did practically nothing.




Is it the Gilliam effect, I wonder, that caused me to make these cats do such violence to each other? Cartoon violence, of course, with no bloodshed, just a few mashed heads. These guys kind of jump around a lot. I was experimenting here, and ended up with considerable jerkiness. Gilliam's stuff doesn't move smoothly at all (does it?), yet he makes it work. Damn.





These two adorable kittens started out so promising, but ended up looking so strange, as if they're weightless or something. To compensate for the floatiness, I made the animation go a bit too fast, so they jump around each other. I wanted a hopping effect - almost a leapfrogging, and got two highly caffeinated kittens. I think this was the first serious one I did. I learned from this that I cannot do the required 24 frames per second that Disney required when animating Snow White. The main technical problem with these is that when I was making the frames, I had no way at all of knowing whether the animation was working or would look right or convey motion without jarring jerkiness. 

I did try.




This is a Louis Wain cat, and it shows. I suppose he'd turn over in his grave if he knew about this, but if people can animate Hieronymus Bosch, then I can make a Wain cat leer like a fiend from hell. It's a short step. Actually, this is one of my favorites, along with the kick-line of kittens. I may play with this one some more and make more expressions, repetitions or whatever. It seems too short.




I held out the most hope for this one, and was partially successful. It took me the longest. The original drawing looked like this, and it was all I had to work with:




This is a nice example of anthro - anthropo - whatever, making the cat look human, but not TOO human. Those ain't ballerina legs and feet, folks - they're animal, but in a weirdly human position. So what can I do here? I had to detach arms and legs and twist them around and try to get them back on again. It was hard. It was also necessary to remove the shadows on the floor so I wouldn't have to keep reproducing them consistently. I just don't have the equipment to do that. But it sort of came out all right. I kept tweaking the frames, and I guess I could tweak them some more.

But I'm waiting for the next blackout.