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.
7 comments:
Nice!
yayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!
Whoa, there's something about that Goddess of Spring dance which is very unsettling
Apparently they used Eric Larson as reference for this scene which just makes it all the more humorous to me, the idea of a middle aged lummox lumbering around the studio pretending to be a graceful waif.
Good stuff!
Im very inspired by your work, made a short movie in a similar technique, check it out!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weNATohqRtk
"the idea of a middle aged lummox lumbering around the studio pretending to be a graceful waif."
Yeah, except at the time Eric Larson would have been a skinny twenty-something kid. (we have this mythology of "the Nine OLD Men" so deeply entrenched ... we forget that they all started off in the business as 19 - 24 year old guys in the 1930's.) Still it's no less funny to imagine that skinny guy pretending to prance about gracefully as Ham Luske filmed him with his 16mm Bell & Howell camera to study his movements as an aid to animating the goddess.
@ Dave: Good point...it's hard not to think of any animator at Disney not being middle-aged...
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