WOULD YOU PLEASE TELL THE LADY WITH THE LOG TO SPEAK UP?

Gilbert

This week I got to meet one of my all time favorite comedians, Gilbert Gottfried, at the international premiere of a new documentary film about him. "Gilbert" was directed by the wonderful Neil Berkeley, who also gave us "Beauty is Embarrassing".

The drawing I made for him, scanned prior to dedication

Gilbert also signed the initial sketch

Home: "It's a Secret" scenes

I have to thank my supervisor Ryan MacNeil for his direction on this sequence. Ryan gives a lot of thought and attention to why his favorite cartoons work as well as they do, he establishes very interesting and practical theories based on his inquiries. He said that the reason people laughed at the animatic (attached to the corners of this video) was how abruptly the poses change, and so my in-betweens must very strongly favour the next pose, they should almost pop, so to maintain the element of surprise. Had we put in-betweens in the middle of the arc, they would have made the viewers anticipate the next pose and so they wouldn’t laugh as much. I wouldn’t have thought about that without his direction.

Scene Progression

Progression of a scene from "Team Hot Wheels: Build The Epic Race" available on Netflix.



Tips for animating on twos. I made these notes for a friend, they analyze part of the scene.

Yousguys, I did a Harley Quinn

"Home" scenes from "Party of Slumbers" and "Queen of Thighs"

Scenes I animated on "Oh's Party of Slumbers" from the first season of "Home: Adventures of Tip and Oh" available on Netflix .I did more on the episode but these are my favorites. There are some influences from the Simpsons (Oh's expression after he bumps into Kyle) and TMS animation here (Oh balancing and speeding up when changing the direction of his run).

 

When I get a storyboard as great as the one in the upper left corner to work from, I swear to “first do no harm”. Then I “plus it” where I can. I adapted the storyboard artist’s poses as closely as I could while aspiring to other goals: push them to higher intensity and flexibility while staying “on model”.

The animation is all on twos, I tried to maximize “hang time” by favouring anticipation and extreme poses and spending as little time as possible on the characters going across the screen, also to displace them in a way that doesn’t strobe. Oh is rounder and can slide more than Lucy, so I used him to lead the big actions, he moves first. The first time they go across the screen, Lucy still favours her previous pose, there is no drawing of her smack in the middle that first time. The next few times they go across, there is a breakdown drawing based on the pose by the board artist, the characters bend down, that bending breaks down the action and keeps it from strobing, still there is only one drawing smack in the middle. In the drawings right before the middle position, some parts of the characters lead into the next pose, but the bulk of them still favours the previous pose.

You should watch this episode of “Home” especially for the “Thigh Power” song, the hardest part of the NDA was not being able to hum it next to anyone who didn’t work on the show until it was released, I worked remotely, across the continent from everyone else who worked on it and the song was really catchy.

My scenes from "Home: Booving In"

I saw that DreamWorks posted a GIF from one of my scenes on the show's Facebook page. It's from one of my favorite episodes, and I wanted to post my whole segment here.



The voice of Kyle is none other than Matt Jones, best known as "Badger" from "Breaking Bad"