Bearscak Character Pages

Templeton/Jones Mega-Master Credit Card (Commercial)

This animation, out of all of the others that I’ve made so far, is my pride and joy. I put the most time and effort into this one. You know when you get an idea, and you just don’t want to stop until you’ve made it come to life? I was really, really passionate about this project, not only because I got the chance to showcase one of my characters (Bearscak), but I also got to play about with  a little bit of dark humor and make something amusing. When we were originally given the two starting points for adverts, I had real trouble with coming up with something for this concept. Then, suddenly: BAM! Inspiration hit, and I worked like an absolute machine until I had finished it to my liking. I think when I get some free time I’ll try to do an exerpt of it in colour for a show reel.

The snowball sequence actually took about 80+ individual drawings to make it happen. Speeding it up, and having it only last a few seconds, was initially a bit heart breaking…but nontheless, it came out looking pretty good. As for the voice over, that was all done by me. I know, it was atrocious, and the synching didn’t quite work, but at least I got the childrens personalities across in each scene. I’m thinking of making the first little child a recurring character in future animated short films featuring Bearscak.

This project has definitely been fun and stressful throughout production. There were moments I had drawn up about ten frames and had only then come to realise that I had made vital continuity errors…so I had to redraw several of them several times, which was an absolute nightmare. Scanning each individual frame in took about two days. Animating it took a whole day, and an all nighter. I use a really dated program to scan and edit my images in (Paintshop Pro 8), but that’s because its a program that I’m comfortable with. My mum helped me with choosing the background music for this – she is completely nuts about Christmas (Now I know where I get it from!).

I showed this to the man behind the bear-suit himself, and I got his approval on it, so in all: a job well done, I think!

Please enjoy!

Bearscak Meets: Frosty Fred

Here is the completed video for the character interaction project that we were set. I know, that at the moment it looks like more of an animatic than an actual fully produced animation – but then again, this was only really set as a small task at the beginning of the semester. Whilst this finished version doesn’t have certain sections of clips which I had already uploaded to my Vimeo page (http://vimeo.com/user9164228/videos), it is successful as it is. The composition of the clips which I chose to use in the end, add to the humor as well as displaying the basic concept of the assignment we were given. I wish I could’ve used them all – but to be honest, they seriously do look a lot better clipped down.

Overall, I like the finished article very much, aside from a few drawing mistakes noticeable here and there. Creating this video helped me to understand the amount of drawing that I actually need to do, in order to create (X) amount of seconds of animation. It also helped me to think of form and action better when creating future projects. My favorite part of the entire video has to be the close up of the top of Bearscak’s head when he is walking along. It’s really unimportant, but I love it!

Music: The Alabama Song – The Doors.

Enjoy!

Say Hello to the Man Behind the Bear-suit!

Advert Test Reel #01

Seriously, I am so damn happy with this project! I haven’t churned out much so far, but I am so happy with what I have thus far! Look at that moody man-bear! Quite a few frames went into this sequence (around 20, I think?), so the fluency of Bearscak’s eye movement looks rather lovely! I wanted to show the process I went through of layering each sequence, I.E. Bearscak, then the background, then the little child. I wanted to show the animation of the child individually, just so you can get an idea of what it looks like on its own, instead of just being added as another layer straight away. I’ll be updating with the next few segments that I get done soon!

Again: SO DAMN HAPPY!