Those wonderful Operative Words

I tutor people in animation part-time. I have a pupil at the moment and this Saturday we'll be delving into the deep, dark depths of dialogue animation.

I was thinking of how to present some of the ideas and I looked back through my plethora of Animation Mentor newsletters to see what I could find to spark my brain. Way back when, Shawn Kelly wrote a Tips And Tricks article on Operative Words and I was so happy to re-read it and see how simply I could present this tricky, yet simple, and all-important idea.

I decided to illustrate some of the points (for clarity for my pupil's sake) about how, by simply changing the Operative Word, you dramatically change the performance. The real key here is to choose one idea to drive a scene (if the scene is really long you might be able to get away with two ideas).

Here's the first idea (Emphasis on "I"):

The second idea(Emphasis on "Love"):

And finally the third idea(Emphasis on "You"):

When you see them side by side like this, it's obvious that a short line like "I love you" can only have one main idea driving it. Imagine how awkward this would feel if all three of those ideas were included in the same performance? The performance would be way over the top, and it wouldn't even work unless the line was delivered the same manic, slobbering, over-reaching sort of way. I can easily imagine that the girl's expression in the third panel would be a look of utter fear if the guy did all three of those gestures!

~Chris

10 Second Gestures And Commuter Sketches

A while ago I posted about a great, resourceful website called posemaniacs.com, and I've been using the site to do 10 second and 30 second gestures every day for the past week. Posted here are a couple pages of 10 second gestures. I like the 10 second gesture drawing because you have to strip away all the superficial details and just focus on the energy of the pose. I read a quote once that said "Don't draw the Nouns, draw the Verbs" and this is really what gesture drawing is all about. It's not important what the individual pieces of the body look like in a 10 second gesture. What matters is how it feels. And it's the same thing in animation. It's all about the feeling.

The third image in this post is a compilation of some of my favourite Commuter Sketches from the past couple weeks. I have tons of these so I'm hoping to post more in the future. I want to sketch in some different areas though. When you're commuting you're limited to only a very specific range of poses and it starts to get a bit monotonous.

~Chris

My 2010 Animation Showreel

This is my latest animation showreel. You can check out more stuff on my website

~Chris

Posemaniacs

I stumbled onto an awesome website over the weekend called posemaniacs.com and it should become a part of every artist's toolkit. The site offers 30 second poses to draw from, along with a plethora of other choices. I just did 25 gestures this morning and I'm gonna do another 25 tomorrow... and the next day... and the next.

But don't take my word for it. Check it out for yourself. You'll be glad you did.

~Chris

Annotate Pro takes care of those pesky dull moments.

isn't that awesome?

I just got a license for this cheap, cheap little annotation program.

It's called Annotate Pro.

If you like drawing and killing time,

you should totally pick it up.

No.

This is not a poem.

OUT WITH THE OLD

After six years my old tablet finally kicked the bucket. Since it was right around Christmas I decided it was high time to get a new one. I had my eye on Wacom's Intuous and now that I own one... man, is it nice!

I painted this green fellow during a "let's try out the new tablet" session. The Intuous has way more levels of Pressure Sensitivity than my old one did which results in more control (Apparently technology moves forward over a span of six years)! I'm really excited to use this new tablet on future projects.

~Chris

SHAPE BOX

One exercise I really enjoy doing is creating a box, filling it with random shapes, and then seeing what they evolve into.

~Chris

LINE ART

11 Second Club, December 2009

Here's a fun piece I've been working on for the 11 Second Club's Dec. 2009 competition. I've been studying up on storyboarding recently and I wanted to put my knowledge to the test.

I would have just embedded the videos here on the page except they get cut off by my blog's layout and I can't figure out how to modify it. I really like this template, too, so I stubbornly don't want to change it.

~Chris

Just For Laughs: Gags

Bumpy Ride

Poor Posture

Reference is useful

I've been trying to visualize a character of mine for a while now. He's a young boy and the setting is the late 1800s. I got a book from the Library called "Children's Clothing of the 1800s" which helped out immensely. The image on the left is drawn from the book, and the image on the right is my treatment of the character.

~Chris

A Morning Stroll

Hey man, remember the 80s?

HE'S GOT A KNIFE!

Old favourites revisted

In my quest to create a new design portfolio I've gone back to some designs I did a few years ago for a game we were working on in India. I really enjoyed drawing the characters back then, but I wanted to see what else I could do with them from a fresh perspective. These are all new drawings. I was watching some great design videos on youtube by a guy named Jason Chan and I really liked how he put three or four characters side by side, all slightly contrasting one another. I still have some rendering work to do on the left-hand side character but I wanted to post this, as I'm pretty happy with it so far.

This is all drawn directly into Photoshop on a Wacom Tablet.

~Chris

Had a less than great day today

Daily Character Design: Office Fish

Okay, I cheated today. I already had this character banked away but I hadn't developed him past a certain point.

~Chris

Daily Character Design: Fat Football Player