New trailer for Black Sunrise

Happy New Year!

As it has been almost a year since I produced the first trailer for Black Sunrise, I decided to make up a second one to give everyone another peek at the progress.

I'm hoping this year to try to finish off a large chunk of the film.  Presently, I have about 10 minutes fully completed.  However, I'm still polishing a few sections of the storyboard.  Writing for a feature-length film can be quite challenging, I've discovered - especially when you are dealing with no dialogue!

Also this year, I'm going to try to make up some tutorial videos since I get a lot of requests for them.  I imagine I will be doing one on background painting, and animation process but if there is any particular thing you'd like to see, just let me know in the comments.

Anyway, here's the trailer.  Hope you like it!

Motel Monstre opening credit sequence

Recently, Dave Cooper and I created this opening title sequence for a TFO kids show called "Motel Monstre".  Dave designed the characters and backgrounds, and I did the animation. 

The rest of the show is live-action, so it was really great that the producers allowed us pretty much free reign to create a cartoony opening for the show. 

 Enjoy!

Another background

Another simple background I just finished for Black Sunrise.  A poster on a subway wall.

Animation festival poster and film

Back in 2003, I was commissioned by the Ottawa International Animation Festival to create their poster and signal film for the student version of the festival, which at that time happened every other year from the main festival.  Above is the poster I created and down below is the signal film - which is the film they play at the start of all of the screenings.



The film is a continuation of the oddball style of animation that I was experimenting with in the early 2000's.  The crazy run/dance at the beginning was influenced by two of my favorite pieces of animation: Disney's Silly Symphony, The Goddess of Spring...in particular, this part: a piece of animation that I always get a laugh out of...

And the opening run/dance from Ub Iwerk's, Fiddlesticks...one of my all-time favorite cartoons:



The animation was all drawn on paper and then scanned in and coloured in Photoshop.  It was a very tedious and time-consuming process.  After I coloured all of the individual drawings for the animation, I exported them as tif files and assembled them one-by-one in Adobe Premiere, making each one 2 frames long...this was how I made all of my first few films until the Waif of Persephone, which was where I started using Flash as a compositing tool.
The music was from a stock library that I sped up to match the beat of the animation.
I love doing these short little pieces of animation, it gives me a chance to be more bold and experimental than I would be in a longer form film.

Mr. Floaf

A brief comedic interlude...Here is a film I made back in 2002.  It was my attempt to learn how to use Flash.  I drew all of the animation on paper and then scanned it in and coloured it in Flash.  My theory at the time was to just do key animation without inbetweens - sort of like early Hanna-Barbara TV cartoons.  I was also experimenting with loose crazy animation, having been introduced to Jim Tyer's work which blew my mind apart...trying to see how far I could push things...I refined this somewhat in Waif of Persephone which I finished in 2006.  I have a couple other films that I have to get transferred from tape...one day I'll put those up online as well.

Work continues

After a couple of crazy months of commercial jobs, I'm back to work on my film.  Here's a BG I just finished up today.  I should have a few more done that I'll upload sometime this week...

November!

Crap! I went a whole month without posting...that breaks one of my 'blogging' rules...oh well. Sorry about that, I've been super busy this past month working on stuff that I'm not allowed to talk about...hopefully I will soon though.
As usual, this busy time means I have to put aside my own work on Black Sunrise. But, here's a couple more images of what I was doing right before my life went into overdrive. There's light at the end of the tunnel though, so I should be back to work on getting this film done soon...