Posing Exercise #1

I wanted to practice conveying weight in this pose because I hate seeing poses that lack any sense of gravity and balance and I want to make damn sure that they aren't creeping into my work. This is the Sergio character from Strut Your Reel, I just made some small adjustments somewhere along the way but all copyrights to their respective owners.

I hadn't touched this character in some time but a friend of mine was asking me some questions about the rig which forced me to open it up and poke around. I think I'm going to animate something with this character because I remember really enjoying the rig in the past. But that's going to have to come at another time as I have some other, more pressing fish to fry at the present moment. I have some action analysis notes to post, as well as the current Work In Progress that the aforementioned action analysis has spawned. Not to mention the ongoing search for work. Hoo-ray.

~Chris

LONG DISTANCE RELATIONSHIPS

My fiance has been in Japan sice last April. I was there for six weeks which really helped to break up her away time into a couple more managable chunks. This last stretch has been about two months so far, with one month still to go. I don't know how people managed in long distance relationships before there was all this crazy communication technology. Emails, video chat, you name it. It's like she's just in another room until the chat ends and I'm forced to face the bitter reality of a lonely existence with no one to share all of life's little pleasures with. Only one more month to go. I can do this.

~Chris

GETTING CAUGHT UP

I've got lots of new drawings in my sketchbook to post so I'm slowly going to get caught up.

~Chris

ILLUSTRATION GIG

When I was working in India I started illustrating this children's book. I moved back to Canada in the middle of the book's production and continued illustrating it from my Mom's kitchen table and then from my buddy's place in Vancouver while I looked for my own apartment. Once I had my apartment the illustrations were finished there. So this was really a multi-continental experience. It took up most of my waking hours for several, several months and I'm pleased to see that it's now on its way to bookshelves around the World.

~Chris

NINJAS ARE WAY COOL

There's a really awesome rig floating around in different animation circles affectionately known as Norman. For my money, Norman is the shizznit.

I've retro-fitted Norman a few times for some 11 Second Club submissions in the past but none of those retro-fittings even come close to this latest one. I put a lot of work into it and I learned a heck of a lot of technical stuff that I wasn't aware of before.

I also got to model a Katana which turned out great! Well, to be honest it's not a true Katana. It's kind of a mix between a Katana and a Ninja-to. Oh man , I've been geeking out over this retro-fitting for like two weeks.

Now that he's all finished I'm going to animate some scenarios because I seriously want to see this guy in action!

~Chris

OBSERVATION TIME: SEA WALL

Who recognizes this spot?

~Chris

Facebook Doodling

I just realized that you can embed the saved brush strokes in the form of a movie when you draw something with Facebook's Graffiti application. I drew this little Godzilla-like thing when I was in Japan. Kind of fitting.

~Chris

Dog Walk All Finished

So that Dog walk is more or less finished. There are still some things that could be tightened up but since it was my project for last week I had to upload it in the state it was in. You can check it out here.

The camera angle is the reverse of what I had in the blocking but it shouldn't make a whole lot of difference.

~Chris

How my brain works for animation

I'm working on a canine walk cycle right now and a quadruped is something that I haven't animated much of for a while now. There was a dog character in each of the last two shows that I worked on but the shots that I got with the little fuzzballs were few and far between.

I've always been really attracted to quadruped locomotion because it just looks so cool. The perfect balance of movement in the front and hind quarters is so smooth and elegant. More so with some animals, less so with others.

Anyway, I cracked open my Muybridge books to study the phases of the walk and I noticed that if you can understand where the strides come into play and how the energy radiates down the spine from the hips to the head, it gets you a long way towards animating a successful walk. I've seen people animate these things in a really automated, computationally heavy way but that really doesn't work for me. I like to figure out what's happening on each extreme and really push and explore the possibilities in the pose before I start getting into the Graph Editor because it's a completely different part of the brain that goes into that initial building of the performance.

The Graph Editor, awesome though it may be, requires a large amount of resources from your Left Brain and if my Left Brain is working hard my Right Brain tends to not add much to the situation. That's why I have to work in a very systematic way. First this, then this. Okay, now that this is done, move on to this, and so on.

Anyway, I'm just rambling now. Check out the playblast of my blocking for the canine walk and draw your own conclusions.



I'll just finish by saying that this is the work flow that I follow about 99.9% of the time:

Heavy, in-depth blocking of Keys, Extremes, Breakdowns, and sometimes more detailed bits depending on the scenario. Then I switch gears to work in the Graph Editor, which is a pretty painless process due to the extensive blocking. Then I tackle the face with a similar approach and... BAM!... done.

I'll post more videos of this walk cycle as it becomes more complete. It's my project for this week so hopefully you should be able to see it fully animated by Friday or Saturday... schedules permitting.

~Chris

Jibber Jabber: First two episodes

The first two episodes of Jibber Jabber have been made available online in their entirety!

Check them out here!

~Chris

OFFICE NINJA

I was telling a buddy of mine about the AWESOME POWER of hand dryers in the washrooms in Japan. These things must be nuclear powered or something because they are so powerful that they dry your hands in about five seconds. The gust, no, the surge of air that comes out of these things actually pushes your hands down with its gale force wind.

Anyway, one thing led to another and the drawing of the hand dryer turned into a chubby office ninja with a cheesy Karate Kid head band, naturally.

~Chris

Jibber Jabber in French

I just thought I'd take a second to post this. It's the first episode of Jibber Jabber, a cartoon that I worked on a couple years ago except this version is all in French! Now that may seem random, but this is the website for Canal J, a popular cartoon station in France.

Enjoy!

Homemade Birthday Cheer

So I went into a reputable bookstore that shall remain anonymous to buy a birthday card for my Mom. I had previously intended to make her one, but got lazy/busy. After perusing the card section I settled on one with a creepy little dog straddling a gift in colourful wrapping paper.

The perfect card to profess my sentiments.

I took the card up to the counter to pay for it and the clerk rang it up and said,

"That'll be $10.42 please!"

Ex-squeeze me? Baking Powder? That's not the kind of money I like to throw down for one little card. So my frugal (cheap) nature carried me home to where I made this charming little keepsake.

On the inside it says something like "But I settled on something simple instead". Not very clever, but I feel that all the creative energy that went into the picture should be balanced by an equally unimaginative sentence.

On the back of the card I wrote

"Because I don't want to pay $10.00 for a card"

Happy Birthday Mom!

~Chris

Killing Time

I was teaching at Vanarts today and, inevitably, there are always some bits of downtime when the students don't need a whole lot in the way of feedback. I like to doodle during said downtime because if there's one thing that annoying ads before movies has taught me it's that downtime is BAAAAAD!

Everything was coloured at home.

~Chris

Walking around Kawagoe

As I may have mentioned before, Kawagoe is the city in Japan where my Fiance grew up so we took to the streets after I arrived to get a look at her old stomping grounds. I should take a moment right now to mention that I'll probably be updating this blog totally out of order, we did this walking tour of Kawagoe before the trip to Okinawa. So please just... bear with me.

There's a section of the city that's been maintained in the Edo-style which is a period in Japan's history that I seem to be rather enraptured with. I just love the architectural style and all the stuff about Samurai is something I totally geek out over. Check out some of these old shops:

Pretty cool huh? There are also no cables running over the streets in this area because they wanted to try, as much as possible, to recreate a "feel". It's strange, but until I saw the streets with no cables running back and forth over them, I didn't realize how lame they really look. Ah well, whaddayagonnado?

Continuing our travels we came across an old Bell Tower which still rings four times a day although I haven't been in the vicinity during any of the ringings to actually hear it, so I'm just going on hearsay for this one.

Then something really strange happened.

From this point on it was a lot faster getting around town. We walked through some markets and saw lots of shops selling all sorts of different things. In Japan there's a really popular sweet called Anko which is made from red Azuki beans. It has a really subtle sweetness to it that takes some time to get accustomed to after becoming conditioned to North America's rather ham-handed approach of things being so obviously sweet that you can do nothing but notice it. At any rate, I really like it.

Eventually we found our way to a museum and took in some of the history of the area, there was also a section with a set of rather humbling children's toys.

There was more walking and checking out temples and shrines and taking in all the cool sites. The day before we had found a shrine that had a foot path leading to it which presented an array of reflexology goodness and we thought we'd go and hit it a second time.

>

Now, I don't mean to brag or anything, but when it comes to reflexology... I hold a black belt:

Check back soon!

~Chris

OKINAWA: Day 1

It was a few days in to my time in Japan that we took our scheduled trip to Okinawa, a fascinating place that's borrowed an aesthetic touch from both Chinese and Japanese cultures. We spent four days there learning some of the history of the place, and I'll get to that but first I'm going to talk about snorkeling and tropical beaches.

We left from Tokyo's Haneda Airport which I'm told is the busiest in the World (followed closely by London's Heathrow Airport) with flights landing and taking off every fifteen minutes. During the drive to the airport I realized that in some situations having a GPS system is absolutely essential. Driving in Tokyo is one such situation. Thankfully I wasn't driving though, that task was left to my Father-in-law. Anyhow, one thing led to another and eventually we were on our plane to Okinawa. The view was as you would expect it to be from 30,000 feet but I never get tired of looking down from my ovular window and daydreaming that I am the Grand Puppeteer!

When we arrived in Okinawa it was already getting rather late into the evening so we did our whole check-in routine and then headed out to try and catch the Sunset. We were too late, however, but I really enjoyed the solitary feeling that came with being one of the only people on the white, sandy beach.

The next day was dedicated to a place affectionately known as Croissant Island, Aptly named as you can see.

This was to be my first real experience of a picturesque, tropical beach and it was the perfect place to set the hypothetical ball rolling. This beach was home to about 40 people, and the nature of its shape makes it an attractive spot to Snorkle about because of the wrap-around coral reef which attracts all kinds of colourful creatures. We got ourselves outfitted with the oh-so-necessary floatation devices and then it was off to discover the Wild Blue Yonder.

Due to Legal reason for the tour company we weren't allowed to dive or anything like that so we basically just skimmed about on the surface and played with whatver strange creatures our guide brought up from the ocean floor. I know that Sea Cucumbers are a delicacy and all, but when you wrap your digits around one that's been freshly removed from its natural habitat and it's just sitting there in your hand being all slimy and gross, I don't really see the appeal.

After we were done snorkeling out around the coral reef we spent some time at the beach and did some more snorkeling in shallower waters. We had some bread with us that we had pilfered from our Hotel's continental breakfast buffet that morning which we used to feed the fish. I tried my damndest to at least touch one of them but they're not all that willing to be touched in the first place. We were able to dive and rummage about this time because the only people we were liable to were ourselves. I had a lot of fun singling out certain fish and just following them around, but for some reason I got tired a lot faster than they did. It's almost like they're built for living in the water.

Once we were tired of that we walked around to check out the island a little bit. Getting away from the tropical forefront you get to see that the island is a really modest little place with quirks all its own.

Everywhere you go in Okinawa you'll see two "Shisaa" , Lion-like creatures guarding the front entrances of buildings from evil forces. One has its mouth open wide to ward off evil spirits and the other has its mouth closed to keep good spirits in. It's also believed that one is male and one is female. Most of the Shisaa look relatively the same but there are some alternating styles and interpretations which I came across.

Anyway, that was day one in Okinawa. I also just realized that I forgot to post anything about Kawagoe, where I'm staying. It's my fiance's hometown and it's been a fun place to check out so I'm going to jump backwards in time with the next post perhaps.

~Chris

Japan #1

Well, I'm in Japan now.

Two aeroplanes and 15 hours of travel time puts me on the other side of the planet. It's funny that just two days ago I spent almost the same amount of time on a bus and managed to cross one province. I guess you had to be there.

In the Vancouver airport I sat and watched all kinds of people coming and going, I bought a new sketchbook for the trip (which is made out of recycled paper and the cover simply has a blank, brownish canvas) and found a great opportunity to draw an image for the cover. There was this one slightly awkward looking girl that walked past and the image of her kind of lasted. I drew her several minutes after she passed, so the sketch is drawing upon my memory for the most part. Pun absolutely intended.

I had quite a lot of time to kill so I just kept my eyes open for more sketching opportunities but I didn't really find anything until I sat down to wait for my boarding call. Looking out across the runway I saw a nice opportunity to practice a Landscape.

Now that I'm actually in Japan I'll be keeping my eyes open and looking for opportunities to commit some images to paper. Failing that, I'll see what I can do in the realm of photography. One more day in Kawagoe, my Fiance's city of birth, and then we head to Okinawa for four days.

Stay tuned!