Life on Mars

This is the last project I worked on last semester.  It has some noticeable quality issues, mainly dealing with the focus, and with the camera moving.

Here is how I made it.  I borrowed some lego guys and pieces set them up on a table in my living room, and used my Nikon D40 DSLR camera to take pictures.  Just to get some perspective.  There are approximately 570 pictures for this 19 second animation.


It is a fun little story so I hope it makes you smile.

Website

Here is my website I did for this class.
http://fs.finearts.utah.edu/~pchristison/ChristisonpProject1/

Abbey Road - Final

As promised here is the finished product of my Abbey Road animation.  This is the part that took the longest.  I took the original paper and traced it onto cels.  Which are basically clear plastic sheets and then applied paint to them.  I was actually able to keep a pretty low number at 89 cels.  This was possible because I would shoot them walking in cycles just moving the cel over a bit each cycle, which makes it look like they are walking across the road.  When in reality I only drew them walking about 1 step.

It was both fun and frustrating to make.

A New Claymation

I have been working on a new animation. It is called The Opening. It documents the story of an old man who needs to setup an art show. Now I don't want to go into any detail at this point because it isn't quite done yet but I have some documentation for you.

As the title suggests this is going to be a claymation.  And inside the figures that get covered in clay is a skeleton called an armature.  Now this one is built out of twisted wire masking tape, and zip ties.  This makes him very strong while maintaining his flexibility.

He stands about 8 inches tall and when he has clothes and clay on him he ends up looking like this

Today I actually started the animation process.  I built him a living room to sit in (you can see the chair in this shot) out of foam and cardboard, and was able to shoot the first 5 seconds.  This animation will end up being about 2 minutes and 30 seconds long.  

Anyway that is just a quick introduction to it.  Next week I'll let you see the third part of Abbey Road.

Abbey - Road Part 2

So here is part 2 of the Abbey Road Animation where the bus get introduced. This is what is called a Pencil Test. Where elements are added to see how the animation will look. So it's not the finished product but now all of the elements are there.

To add the bus. I drew it one time, then scanned it into aftereffects. Which I used to make it smaller as it disappears into the background. I printed out each frame and traced them.

Abbey Road - The beginning of a Journey

This animation is practically titled Abbey Road. It is the first part in a three part series of animation that took me most of the semester last year. The total project has over 80 hours invested into it.

The premise is that it is the Beatles walking across abbey road only to be hit by a bus.  I came up with this concept by bouncing ideas off my father when he gave me a ride home from work one day.

Part one is what is called a line animation.  It is just black lines on a white piece of paper.  It is colored in with colored pencil but it is still far from the finished project. Not even all the elements exist yet.  So for now we have the Beatles walking across the road, and then they disappear.  In the next segment we will introduce the bus.

Mr. Fox

Just a short blurb today.

My next adventure took a step away form the traditional. This is lovingly titles Mr. Fox, it was the project I did for my 2D computer animation class. It is about a Fox who has a hard day, and all he wants to do is get home to his wife. However, he is finding the unreliable bus system difficult.

My wife drew all the images for this because she is amazing, and I put it together with After Effects, and composed the music in garage band. So here is Mr. Fox