I've got a dolly zoom test!

I'm including a dolly zoom, in my ident.

Dolly zooms were invented by a dude called Irmin Roberts and was made famous by Alfred Hitchcock's movie Vertigo.

It starts off with an image of someone's face fairly close up, then instead of zooming into the face the background gets bigger behind the subject which stays the same size.

This is done by moving the camera foreward but adjusting the zoom accordingly, so the person stays the same size but thew background distorts.

This technique is apparently overused in cinema but I like the effect and wanted to incorporate it into my ident, a test is below, I'll have my lady on a street with a proper background for the final scene, I also changed the "squash-ee" to a lady because I like drawing them more as I like girls. :)

I've got a bunch of silly adverrrrts!

My city is going to have a bunch of daft adverts in the background, I like putting little details into everything I do, it just makes things so much more interesting!

Also it means the ident will need several views before you see it all, something else I like about films and animation, The more attention you need for the visual aspect the more I enjoy watching it to try and find all the hidden goodies!

Uncle GrandpaaaaaAAAAAaaaa!

I love uncle Grandpa, It's all lovely traditional animation and It's funnier than seven squrrels fighting over a barrel of mussels!

I like the crazy designs of the monster crew and the awesome fight scene, as well as uncle Grandpa's amazing rotating greeting fart!

It's been ages since I've seen such a funny animation and I likes it a lot!

I plan my time sire!

Arr! This here be me timeplan scurvy dogs!

I have a whole bunch of objectives to complete this here lil' week!

• I need to gather images of high-rise buildings, add filters to them in photoshop, export them into cinema 4D and then assemble my crazy city!
• I need to finish off my 6 adverts, (got 4 done so far,) then live trace them in Illustrator and colour them right the way up.
• Decide how I will do the "skin peeling" scene, do i do it pose-to-pose given my terrible walk cycle or do I just cut up the dinosaur and make the different parts shrink to reveal the bones? hmmmmm...
• Put it all together like a lovely pie sir!

I'm a mirror todayyyy!

Monday, a time to reflect on a week past, (see what I did with the title there, yeeeah, I went there!)

So last week I tried 2 different approaches to creating a walk cycle for my marauding dinosaur, I first tried pose-to-pose in photoshop, having all the moveable elements on the same plane and altering each limb to create movement, before saving it as a jpeg with an alpha channel, After 48 of these, (not including alphas, so nearly one-blinkin' hundred) I loaded them into cinema 4D and keyframed the sequence on the timeline.

After all that work the walk turned out to be a load of blithering oaf cables, which saddened me deeply, oh so deeply sir!

(The terrible cycle is on the previous post to this for your amusement!)

So after that I tried sticking with what I knew, not that I was defeated or anything, I just couldn't get the movement right in pose to pose, but the night after I created the crude cycle I was on my laptop, and, being me, I've set the "waiting" icon of the curser to a blue dinosaur, as I watched it walk, I realised I'd totally gone without adding any weight or kinetic movement to my Dino, instead just making his feet flick up awkwardly, I needed to make his feet move in a circular fashion, which is what I did in cinema 4D in cut-out style, and you can see by the previous post's second video it's well awesome, I just need to add a bit of a bob to his body!

I also began work on the background of my piece, at first I was going to draw the whole city, but I thought it would be more stylistic to have black and white grainy images of towers with the odd colourful billboard to add a bit of humour, (one of which I want to be "Celine Dion's world of wallpaper paste"!)

So that's what I did last week, aside from putting on a delicious Valentine's day extraveganza for my awesomely fit girlfriend, oh yeah, I rock, there was a giant cornflake cake and EVERYTHINGGGG!

My walky cycles of doom!

This is my attempt at doing a pose-to-pose Walk cycle for my dino!

As you can see it's absolutely, vomit-inducingly, pant messingly terrible!

I then dragged my sorry ass into Cinema 4D and made a much betterer one, check the hizzle out of this bizzle!

Much better ayeee?

Research research research!

Gosh darn it research is boring, though I've found a pretty early ident from CBBC, 1995 I think, though I can't find the actual date anywhere on the internet's huge cache of useless information, maybe I should stop writing on here and do more typingup of research, maybe I should figure out how to animate my dinosaur pose-to-pose, maybe I should stop asking questons, no one likes being bombarded yeah?

Here's an image from that crazy metal doggy ident, if you remember it then join me in an old-age toast, though I recently decided that my mental state hadn't done much actual progression since those hazy Crash Bandicoot playing - Booby obsessed days of year 6!

Not that i play on Crash Bandicoot and Love boobies nowadays, and by saying this I am lying through my tightly bared, chocolate milkshake-coated teeth!

Anywayyy, check out the ident and think of me as I bumble down to work to be whipped for several hours as I shove Bottles of german coke into hideously decrepid fridges and try to figure out what old people would like Lottery-wise, because they have absolutley no clue what they are doing most of the time!

And listen to Strapping Young Lad, they are without a doubt the best band ever and measure 100,000,000 on a scale of 1-10!

The metal doggy has a D in his sights!

You there! Leave that logo alone!

WEW! Children's BBC! is teh shizz!

My Dinosaur is already a schwicked ghetto tag!

Finished dino guy!

I've re-done the line worrrrk!

No longer is my dino guy outlined in black, but thanks to Illustrator's (baffling) colour palette I've made him look 100,000,000,000,000,000 times cooler!

BeeeeeeEEEEeeeeee!

Awh check the hecklebert out of this bit bee!

He's well cool!

If you see the end of this video comment and tell me how it ends 'cos it won't show me because it's an absolute biblewart!

My favourite Esting (I think...)

I love the 8-bit style of this one and the retro-ness, but I have one main bripe, and that's how the E4 logo is implemented, It's just slapped on at the end with no real thought whatsoever, A better reveal would have made it epically amazingtron!

My second favourite Esting!

I really think this Esting, the style and colours are well cool,

as well as the idea of sucking crazy dudes into a pipe

and turning them into E4 logos is inSAnE!

Pac man Likes to be poorly rendered!

I like the idea of this Esting, but can't get over the fact that 7

seconds in he just rolls about!

I think the reveal of the logo is pretty cool but I'd have started from

a different angle so it wasn't as obvious that the maze was the E4 logo!

I most certainly have chosen my fave colour sir!

Check him out! He's well cool isn't he?!

I thought orange and purple weren't seen together very often (they may clash, I dunno about that kind of thing, better off asking that ridiculous moron Victoria B for fashion tips...) So here he is in all his Jurassic glory!

Bless.

Check out my awesome storyboards!!!

These are the stroyboards for my E4 ident, The first thing you see is a crazy dinosaur stomping through a city, people flee in terror from his destruction, the camera cuts to a close up zoom of a guy's face with the dino reflected in his eyes, before getting stomped on!

Then a giant E4 logo pops out of a buliding and quickly sets about burning off the dino's skin, to which the city folk all jump around and celebrate E4's amazing vaporisation powers!

Oh my giddy aunt!? I can't choose a colour!!!1

First animation!

These are stills from the first ever animation I've created!

I used Cinema 4D and final cut to manipulate my hand-drawn elements into

this crazy bird race!

At the beginning of the project I was given a brief that just said "make an ani

matic about the title X Y Z."

After lots of thought, I was drawn to the idea that being the last letters in the alphabet, they could be a bit silly, so I thought up 3 names,

Yussi, Xemnas and

Zelda, and gave them to some birds. These birds have decided that they want a big race to determine who is leader of their little tribe, so they bumble round the entire tropical island they call home getting in lots of silly shenanigans, and the twist at the end is of epic proportions!

After the initial storyboards and animatic, I created this after 3 solid weeks of toiling away on a computer in the basement, resulting in me seeing lasso tools and transform controls whenever I closed my eyes!

There are several errors, most notably the giant black shapes that appear behind

the penguin in the sharky river scene, and the fact that the brown bird furthest o

n the left's leg disappears right at the very end, but in time I will go back and sort these out,

there was a

tight deadline so I couldn't spend ages on one thing, getting a finished animation was of most importance!

Due to sizing pains my actual video will be uploaded at a later date!

The first scene, sets the story by telling you there's a RACE!

The race is underway!

The birds meet a hungry shark! Note the crazy black

background I didn't have time to get rid of!

The race takes the birdies to a treacherous lake of lava!

OH MY PIE! WHAT IS THAT GIANT

PURPLE GUY ALL ABOUT LIKE?!

Oh, he's simply zapping the guys to a new dimension, duh!

..A dimension containing an assortment of

animals and brightly-coloured angry fish!

The birdies escape the crazy land!

OMIGOD THE PENGUIN WONN!

He evaded the hand of doom and pegged it to the finish line!

And so begins Zelda's iron gloved rule!

Now get me some dinner my loyal subjects!

The missing leg makes me angrier than angry angryson on national angry day!

While drinking a stiff angry lemonade!

Made from angry lemons!