My Little CrockPot of News and Thoughts

As promised yesterday, here are a few little test cycles that I did for the robots from the DVD series. They were a lot of fun to do and really drove home to me the fact that I like animating in Flash. Click on the images below to see the corresponding cycle. Also, since these are SWFs, you may want to resize your browser window smaller if you find that they are really moving slow.

Here are a few character designs I did a few months back from a DVD series I was working on at work called Squibs. The series was nine discs long and these guys were broken up through out the nine... well, all except Squibs... he's the one standing above and to the right of the truck in the bottom right hand corner... he was the logo/host of the series... These bots were all created and animated in Flash. At some point, I'll try to post some animation cycles for you to view.

So, because of the current freelance job I have been working on, I've had to learn Adobe Illustrator. Usually, in the past, when it comes to vector work, I have always used Macromedia Flash... which is kind of strange since it really isn't an illustration tool. Needless to say, Illustrator was hard to "get" coming from Flash. I basically had to throw out everything I have known to be true throughout my whole life... "The sky isn't blue!", "Elephants fly in the air and have webbed feet!", and “You people say you are my parents, but I don't believe you!"... those are basically the conversations I had while going through my crash coarse in Illustrator. This is my first illustration that I've done in AI for myself. It was fun to do... but flickr has messed with the colors... why flickr, why?!

The speediest draw in the West.

It's GO TIME! Here's an Illustration that me and my pal Brandon Reese worked on together. This one came out of a chat we had... we decided that He-Man, from the 80's animated series Masters of the Universe, and Lion-O, from the 80's animated series Thundercats, should square off in a Battle Royal. We're not nerds. I promise. Brandon did the He-Man illustration and I did the Lion-O half.

Last summer, I was asked by a former college professor and mentor of mine, Larry Lauria, to contribute a short segment to the film he was working on called "Our World". The film was to be a collaborative effort with each artist/group of artists using their segment to make a statement about the world. Larry had been chipping away at this film for several years and had since (in the months leading up to me coming on board) started working with a group of talented animation students from IFS in Germany on this project as well. The film was eventually finished after several months of hard work (all on their part... my segment took a lot less time than everyone else’s) and was recently posted online for streaming. You'll need Windows Media Player to see it... and it's a bit fuzzy in detail. My segment is called "Apples and Oranges"... it's pretty self explanatory. It was done 100% in Flash. I'll try to post a higher res version of it at some point. Here are a couple more stills:

Here's a quick sketch of Paul from this morning. And speaking on the morning, it came early this morning... earlier than usual. To the person who stole my extra hour this past weekend, if you return it now, I promise not to press charges... I will only beat you in a civil and just manor.