There have been a lot of things that have influenced my work and i’ve decided to backtrack and take a closer look at the things that helped me get stronger as an artist.
Every illustrator has that one artist or cartoon that set the stage for them to build upon. For me, Looney Tunes has to be the cornerstone of my entire style. I learned the basics from copying, tracing, and applying new techniques from and to the characters. I was a Warner Bros. kid, so no Disney for me. I learned all the basic cartooning tricks such as stances as well as the animation and Reilly Method of drawing.
so at this point i’m thinkin i proved my point. After Effects can do some pretty interesting 3D tricks to add to my 2D animation, it just takes entirely too long. Now that i know the scope of creating this, i’m gonna switch to Cinema 4D to handle my enviromnents and just import it into AE when i’m done to slide in the various 2D elements. Still deciding on the music. i’m open to suggestions.
So here is a little progress report. The first day was animating the character, the second day was figuring out what should be going on, and the third day was getting the backgrounds made. As you can see, i opted to go full 3D. This is pretty basic and i’ll be adding details such as signage, cars and other people, but i like how this is coming out so far.
Here’s another one from 2007. This was my first tangle with using mask interpolation as animation. The use of textures was inspired by Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo.
As you’ve seen in Rick Black, i’m fond of mask interpolation in Adobe After Effects. It consists of me making my keyframes in Illustrator and pasting each path onto a solid layer as a mask in After Effects. The technique is vastly time consuming and tedious but being able to manipulate the time between keyframes and frames per second, which you can probably do in Flash, is a pretty nice trade-off.
The difference between this and Rick Black as you can see is the use of color. Since i have to make a mask for each moving piece, i ended up with 27 different layers to make the character which is a huge step up from Black’s five (the arms were separate).
The finished video will showcase a few techniques i’ve yet to experiment with so it won’t be anything too fancy or mindblowing. stay tuned.
