Lots of new animation

Sorry I haven't posted for a few days, but I have been hard at it. Here's 3 new animations. I think I will be done with all the 2-d animation by the end of the month! I still need to re-shoot the stop-motioned toys, but it's nice to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Last night, Mark and I went to a friend's house for dinner and a tutorial lesson. My friend is an editor, so I am helping her learn DVD studio pro so she can get her reel out. I also had the chance to show my film to her kids. They range in ages 6-12, so it was nice to see and gage their reactions. They all seemed to really like it. But I could tell there were a few slow and confusing places. I am working on ironing those spots out.

My favorite!

I would love to make kid's films that are this funny! This is a series of podcasts done in Flash called "Making Fiends". They are all about a sickly sweet little girl named Charlotte who starts at a new school that is being controlled by an evil little girl named Vendetta. She makes "fiends" to control her teacher and other students. But the new girl in school, Charlotte just loves Vendetta and her fiends. And this of course drives Vendetta crazy, so she makes more fiends to dispose of Charlotte. There are about 20 episodes. I would suggest starting with the first one. Go to: http://makingfiends.com/

Here's is one of the last episodes. It's the only one I was able to find that I could embed. The woman who created these recently sold the series to Nickelodeon. The new episodes are supposed to air on Nickelodeon this year, but not sure when.
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Meet my dog

Well I finally got his eyes and ears moving independently. That was driving me crazy yesterday!

Zebra chase and another surge

Well we had another huge surge this weekend. Luckily, I unplugged the computers right before the big one hit. It fried the cable box. I have never seen so much smoke come out of plastic. Two TV's down, none left to go.

We hired an electrician to make an emergency house call Saturday. He put some kind of surge protector on the outside of the house so if anything weird starts to happen, the breaker will blow and cut power to the house. He said that somehow a 220 volt current came through the outlet to fry the interior surge protector, TV, cable box, DVD, and VHS. He is still not sure what is causing all this. I think we will have to hire him to do a full day investigation.

In the meantime, we bought some heavy duty battery back-up surge protectors for the computers. They weren't cheap, but hopefully they will do a better job than the surge protectors we had.

Well here's what I managed to get done this weekend. I still need to animate the dog to turn his head toward the caveman.

Learning to manipulate keyframes within keyframes

I have mostly worked on tutorials this week. The minutia involved in animating expressions and mouth positions can be tedious. But they are also extremely finicky. You have to double click holding down shift, touch your nose and count backwards for it to work sometimes. Last night I tried to do a simple test animation of the zebra having a few facial expressions. I couldn't get it to work. So I finally went to bed. I don't know what I did different tonight, but it worked. Here's my zebra walking and moving some facial features.

Mark, the singing caveman

I spent the rest of the day watching more Flash tutorials. Here's my first attempt syncing cartoon mouthes to audio files. Mark makes a great caveman!

Caveman sits on a log and waits

Here's an animation for my elephant scene. Going to take a break then do a "how to animate" faces tutorial. I had to stumble through making this animation. I wanted his mouth to be closed but his eyebrows to move. I think the tutorial will help.