Trolling Animated Wedding Invite Illustrations

This was meant to be a Konami code easter egg for Adam and Cerys’s wedding website. We got busted. But I thought I’d finish it off anyway. Adam found the blood splat, so that’s not mine, but no-one is ever going to see this so I edited it slightly and used it anyway. I would probably have gone the whole hog with blood and chunky bits spattering against the camera if it was me, but, y’know.

For the icing on the cake I added some simple sound FX and an atmos track from Freesound.com

Happy trolling! :D

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year and Welcome to 2015

Welcome to 2015. Year of… doing stuff.

Last year I did a little animated .gif for Simpleweb. We were giving away free websites to our clients. Yep, websites. For free. To our clients. Because Simpleweb are ace.

All I needed was the seed of an idea to pick up and run with… I got: “something to do with gifts maybe?”

But that was enough to kick off the train of thought: Gifts, presents, opening… whoOOosh – sparkles! This particular little animation was nice. I just shut my eyes in the kitchen (it was important the idea came in the kitchen. They usually happen in the shower or on the loo. Ideas, funny little buggers.) and I could see the animation play through.

So I drew a quick version of what I saw in my head:

I can’t remember what the numbers were in the top right. Must be important. Really important.

It only took a couple of hours to artwork, build and animate in Flash. Dead quick. Then it took another two hours to work out why the FLA corrupted so badly that it entirely locked me out of my computer. Once I’d gone in through a different user account and somehow re-activated my login, I re-built a new FLA from scratch and rendered the gif through Photoshop. The nerdy animator in me wanted to do a nice ribbon falling down into shot and settling, but I’d spent too much time fighting with Win7 and it was better off keeping it simple anyway. Job done.

Finally, life drawing starts again next week so its business as usual in blog town. I’m going to approach this year with 97% more experimentation. I want to do some quicker poses again in different media. Maybe some Big Sumi-e ink sketches on A2 paper, perhaps some outline work with ink pens or brush pens (thanks Mike) and colour them in later. Not really sure. Definitely want to try new things though. 2014 was the year of painting. I want more fun in 2015. Yes. Maybe I’ll go back to drawing more “spooky” twisted stuff as Imogen described it as. Yeah. More weird = more better. Push the boundaries of taste and acceptability a bit.

Animating Jill the Peg

I’ve been kicking round the idea of animating my life drawing for some time. This week I decided to bite the bullet and give it a try. The step that had been missing was inking up my sketchbook work. Once I had a properly cleaned up image, I could scan and process it in Photoshop, vectorise it in Illustrator then pull it into Flash to be chopped up, rigged and animated (I’ll then be using After Effects to cut a “how-to” video in the following blog post). This is the result:

Static 32 frame walk cycle

Left to Right walk across screen

Close up of hips

Here’s the original image. I made a point of trying to stay as faithful as possible to the original by not re-drawing any of the parts to make it easier to animate – like adding a third buttock for the extra leg for instance. It took 2 full days work to complete the cycle but I’m really pleased with the way it turned out. It’s got a weird spider-like feeling to the cycle as it moves across screen. Its an odd image in the first place which wrong foots you with its extra leg (no pun intended…) and the animation supports and enhances that vibe. Good times. I built the piece in such a way to allow me cut a step-by-step walk through video which I’m working on at the moment. I’ll post this up soon.

 

Mouks

Completed in 2007 this film was made over the course of a few years in my spare time whilst working as a 2D animator. Having been brought up on Tom & Jerry and Tex Avery films throughout my childhood, it’s blacker than black humour reflected my frustration at working in the overly sanitized world of kids tv.

4Mations Skull Kittens

Heh heh, I was just digging through some old files to update the Evansfinch blog and I came across these animated shorts I created in 2008 for 4Mations.tv through Team Rubber and Aardman Digital. Thought I’d pop them up for your viewing pleasure :D Also found out that it was @JamFactory that designed the kittehs… the things you learn on the interpipes! Good times.

Driving Lesson

Deep Philosophy

You can play the Suicide Kittens game here

Dave Cropley Animation Showreel 2008

I’ve just recently updated all of my films to Hi-res versions on the youtubes so I thought I’d post up my last showreel from when I was a freelance flash animator as fishboyfilms in early 2008. I wanted to do something a little different so I edited AC/DC’s ‘back in black’ down to a minute and a half and cut a rock video! Still raises a smile every time I watch it – good times :D

Animation Classic No.6 ‘The Old Lady and the Pigeons’ by Sylvain Chomet

I just love this film. Its so deliciously twisted. Watch it, watch it, watch it! (It’s in 3 parts because of the youtubes, but good quality…

I first saw this at college learning animation at The Arts Institute, Bournemouth last millenium. Its so well observed, the pigeons are great as they flop and roll around. Its also completely bat-shit crazy. Sounds like they’ve done another pass on the score, I remember the old Beta tape copies that I watched had a much more raw feel to the soundtrack, more hand made, not so well produced. Still ace though. It’s been really interesting watching the progression through the Belleville Rendezvous and The Illusionist. Apparently it took 10 years to finish this film IIRC. Wonder what he’s up to next?

Animation Classic No.5 ‘Father and Daughter’ by Michael Dudok De Vit

I remember seeing this film at the Watershed in Bristol ( @wshed ) getting on for 10 years ago now, IIRC I think the Director was there for a show and tell (Bless you Watershed, fine purveyor of art house noodlings). Its probably that long since I’ve actually watched the film, I knew it was good, but I’d forgotten how good…

The youtubes dosn’t really do this film justice, it really is a lovely looking thing. I watched a very low quality version of it yesterday before posting here and that still brought a tear to my eye! The score is also worthy of a mention, I love the way the instruments change as the girl gets older. Anyways, put aside 8 minutes and watch this beautiful piece of animated film, you won’t regret it.

Animation Classic No.4 ‘The Big Snit’ by Richard Condie

Awww… A story of love, scrabble, sawing, electrocuted cats and Nuclear Armageddon! Its the Big Snit by Richard Condie produced by the National Film Board of Canada

I really enjoyed watching this again after so many years, its a lovely poignant thing – makes a nice change to all the whiz-bang that I’m used to nowadays. Enjoy!

 

Animation Classic No.2

Tom and Jerry, ‘Cat Concerto’ by Hanna Barbera at MGM. What can I say about this 1946 Oscar winning short. I’ve managed to track down a really good HD copy of the original uncut version from the youtubes – watch it, watch it!

I grew up on Tom and Jerry. It wasn’t until I was at university and writing my final dissertation (…on Tom & Jerry no less!) that I twigged its the same Hanna Barbera that I’d known from the Flintsones, Yogi Bear, The Jetsons etc etc before TV killed the cinema star…

I can trace back my fascination with synching action to sound with these cartoons, especially this one (…and Tom & Jerry at the Hollywood Bowl) It feels a bit weird putting Mouks_REMIXED next to this classic, but you can see the influence