Professional Work - Doctorhome TV Commercial by Black Ink Productions (May 2014)

This is my third professional work on animation! A short commercial.

This time the client was DoctorHome, a medicinal platform. The production company was once again Black Ink Productions!

Now this was my first professional project since I finished Animation Mentor, and it was exciting to really feel as a professional at work. But this was a very short gig I must say, only 4 days of work, working around 10 hours a day. And I animated every character (and the helicopter sort).

It was a fun project, there was a main character, but there was to be a lot of background characters, and it was really fun creating them! Just thinking of very short animations to be reproduced and fill up the backgrounds! I think I'm more proud of some of those background character animations than the main characters at some points, but you can hardly see them! Valuable lesson though, I think everything should be well done, even if it won't be seen much.

Again I thank Manuel Santiago and Black Ink Prods for calling me to help in this project!

Here's the final video!



One more, hoping for many others!

Professional Work - JP Inspiring Knowledge by Trix Productions (January 2014)

Another professional work! This one was made a few months ago, but only now have I noticed it's online so I can share!

The client was JP Sá Couto, a portuguese technology and education company that is best known for its lap-top computers designed for young students. The production company was Trix, a well based portuguese company that have been in the market since 1996.

I was in the middle of my most stressful time in Animation Mentor Course when I was invited to work on the project, so in the beginning I was really thinking that I wasn't going to be able to be a part of this. My only option was to try to work from home as a part-time animator. I was very glad Trix allowed me to do this! The animation production in this short took a little bit more than a month, but I was only able to work on it for 4 weeks, around 25 hours a week. It was a real pleasure to work with the crew (that I met once a week at their studio) and this well organized production. I think it was their biggest CG production!

Although I couldn't spend as much time on this as I wanted, since I was animating my own shots for school, I surely did learn a lot through this project, mostly in tools and organized production pipelines, which for me was a first experience! I thank João Sacadura, Manel Sacadura and Rita Amado for calling me in for this project!

We were three people animating the characters and I animated 6 shots, so it was a small contribution =) Here's the final video.




Hope many more to come!

Script writing process by awesome Dustin Lance Black

This is amazing.

Time Out list of the 100 best feature animated filmes

Hey! Cool list from Time Out!

I've watched 62 of them! Many more to watch hey! Cool stuff.

Here it is.

http://www.timeout.com/newyork/film/the-100-best-animated-movies

Sharing Animation - Balance (Wolfgang and Christoph Lauenstein, 1989)

After a long while without sharing a short animation, I thought I could come back heavy. And heavy it shall be.

With a heavy subject and a heavy mood. The short is Balance, by the german twins brothers Wolfgang and Christoph Lauenstein.

For me it's interesting because most often than not I like short films that not only have a good story but also have something technical that is very well done. But in this short, the whole merit goes to the script and the idea. It's so simple that I think not many technical things could be achieved, although maybe its simplicity and enough to tell the story is the brilliant technical part.

Anyway, even though the animation isn't brilliant, the puppets aren't perfect and the very simple background isn't very appealing by it's own, this short is simply brilliant. So much is told with its simplicity, and that's brilliant.

This short won the oscar that year, and yes you must watch to know why. It was their school project! Awesome right?
The Lauenstein brothers have done some other stuff, like commercials in their own style, HERE in their website you can see some of their other work.

Enjoy! Balance by the Lauenstein brothers.

Check out the other short movies from the Sharing Collection HERE!!

See you soon hopefully with another great short!

No copyright and related rights infringements are intended with these sharings, all these animations are properties from their respective authors or studios always credited in the post.

My Animations - Final Show Reel: the end of Animation Mentor Character Curse!

I've been skipping this for a LONG time now, my progress from Animation Mentor doubled since the last time I posted something in here, but this is it! I finished the Character Animation Course! After the last year and a half I've been animating my heart out and learning all sort of cool stuff from this amazing mentors, whom I'm gonna list in a little bit, and tried my best to develop my skill to get into the animation industry out there!

First and foremost, I shall thank and bow to my mentors:

Class 1: Anthony Wong

Class 2: Marlon Nowe

Class 3: Drew Adams

Class 4: David Weatherly

Class 5: Nicole Herr

Class 6: Jay Davis

It's funny, ever since I started learning about acting in Class 4, for some reason I stopped posting my progress in here. Maybe it's because the overload of work and new things I was learning!!! And truth be told, it was harsh and I was hard at work the whole time! Acting is tough, and all of a sudden, animation got MUCH harder as well. But man, I had some great mentors to help me out along the way.

Being stuck at home working full time isn't an easy way to do it either. I struggled for quite a bit during this period but fortunately I ended up finding my inspiration, will to work and the thought that I will not ever give up on reaching that dream job kept me going.

So here it is! My final show reel, ready to go out there and hopefully impress recruiters enough so they give me my big chance to prove myself in a production environment. Now don't think that I'm just gonna be sitting around and waiting for the miracle to come to me. I will continue hands on in my work and keep getting better and better. This is my 'just out of school' reel, but many more new things are yet to come!

I'm very proud of what I've accomplished so far, but I'm well aware that my road is still big ahead of me, and I still have so much to learn.

Behold a future character animator first big step.

Many steps still to make. But one closer.

Thanks to my dad for all the support he's been giving me. Without him I would be learning this all by myself and certainly be way behind of where I stand now.

The Simposons Couch Gag by Sylvain Chomet

This is one of the bests! So cool.

Annecy 2014! I'm going!

Yeaaaaaah! Just today I bought my accreditation to the Annecy Animation Festival next June! For the second year in a row I'm so excited that I'll be going! Can't wait, it's an invaluable experience! Here I go again France!!! =)

Glen Keane about Animation

This has all the reasons for one to love all of this. Animation is truly wonderful. I couldn't have chosen anything else better to do with my life.
Truly inspiring.

Seth Godin speach about career and so many things more

I recently found out about Chris Oatley website, and boy is that amazing. There are a TON of great info in there, some stuff apply mainly to Character Designing and painting etc cause that's he's art but some of it applies to all kinds of artists, and some of it actually to your whole life!

HERE's the link to his website.

An example of great stuff that you can find there, is this video, that are one of the most important 20 minutes you need to think about your career and your choices and your way of thinking about your future. Totally totally worth watching!



Amazing!

Professional Work - BES Piggy Pops As Cores da Poupança (December 2013)

Today I come to talk about my first professional work in animation!

It was for a 2 minutes commercial for a Portuguese Bank (BES) produced by Black Ink Prods.
BES website
Black Ink Prods website
Black Ink Prods Facebook

For this commercial I animated almost every single shot (except the one with the bike) and had a very very VERY short period of time to do it. The whole animation production was done in 7 days and one morning. It was crazy but I would be lying if I say that I didn't had a blast!

The style of animation was immediately chosen as for a simple way to do it so the production would be faster. The one big influence and reference was Pocoyo. Not long before I was looking frame by frame at one episode from Pocoyo and I was amazed how those guys used timing and spacing, the fast transitions and huge holds and how it worked perfectly. I said to myself that I would love to try that someday, and the oportunity came much faster than I thought!

The characters were very simple, which was good and bad at the same time. It was good because I had less controls to animate (making it simpler and faster) but it was also not so good because I couldn't do much to their expressiveness, except make them bounce around and use poses that read well enough. Also I had to be extra carefull not to break the geometry or create a (very) strange silhouette.

I animated it all in 3ds Studio Max, which was the first time I ever looked at the software. It was really scary in the beginning, but the guys from Black Ink were absolutely awesome helping me out in everything I needed!

In the end I can't say that I am totally proud of the animation, although the lighting and rendering work done in post-production sure added A LOT, but I know I did the best I could do considering the time limit I had (I was doing something like 14 seconds of animation each day... to put things in perspective: in the last semester of my animation school I had around 9 weeks to animate 20 seconds... with quick math that's 1 second for 3 days of work. You can see the difference. Welcome to the real life right?).
And I think the final product is quite good! I think it achieved the goals that were settled and it hits the right audience. And one thing is true, that song won't come out of your head easily!

It was an honour for me to be called for this project and I have to give a special thank you to Manuel Santiago who contacted me and called me into the project, Diogo Barbosa for suggesting me and helping me out in everything I needed, and to Sergio Martins for talking about me to Diogo (I mean, I didn't even apply for this job!).

Behold the final result:



It sure is amazing to work professionally in something that we love so much to do. Here's to the first of many! Hopefully.

Sharing Animation - Fast Film (Virgil Widrich, 2003)

For so long have I waited to find a good version of this animation online so I could share it here. I finally found one, and by the will of the biggest animation god (or goddess) out there, I will share it today!

This short film is absolutely brilliant. It's so complex, so insane and so beautifully done, that I think anyone would 'wow' at it.

This short is called Fast Film, directed by the austrian Virgil Widrich.

So this short uses printouts from films. They would choose a little bit of a film, cut it from the original and print every single frame in different pages so they can fold it and use it as a different object. So yes, for the films to be kind of screening inside the obects, the objects would have been printed, folded, photographed and replaced for the next one for every frame of film, which is 24 for each second. I would say in some parts there's definetely 10 or more films going on in different objects at the same time, so with simple math, they would have printed and folded and photographed around 240 objects for each second of film. Now the short has around 14 minutes! And it was photographed as a normal stop-motion animation, frame by frame, with a camera and a computer.

When you start to understand how this film was made, you start imagining how crazy it's making might have been done. And yes, it is crazy. All sort of fun facts: They watched around 1200 films to compile with around 400 of them every little piece they needed; They used around 65000 printouts and printed around 80000 pages out of one printer. So imagine the toners... they say it was around 12.000,- Euros of toners; There were 12 people working in the short, how hard would it be for them to fold those 65000 paper models. It took them about one year to do so.

I think this is so cool. The level of frame by frame manipulation is gigantic, I imagine the struggle to keep everything together without losing their minds!

HERE is the official website for this short.
Here's the MAKING OF:




The short was screened all over the globe, in 323 international festivals and won 36 awards. So here's Fast Film by Virgil Widrich!

Check out the other short movies from the Sharing Collection HERE!!

See you soon with another awesome short from this incredible art form that is animation!

No copyright and related rights infringements are intended with these sharings, all these animations are properties from their respective authors or studios always credited in the post.

Sharing Animation - Steamboat Willie (Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks - Walt Disney Studios, 1928)

Coming back from a long streak of animated music videos I want to return to, well let's call them normal short movies, but hopefully they don't have anything normal about them!

And of course, I wanted to come back BIG, so what else but a big classic!
One of the biggest in fact, Steamboat Willie, directed by Walt Disney himself and Ub Iwerks.

YES this is the short in which Mickey Mouse has that classic whistling song of his in the ship's wheel! This shirt is actually not the first Mickey appearance, he appeared in two other cartoons prior to this one, Plain Crazy and The Gallopin' Gaucho. But nevertheless, the original release date (November 18, 1928) was later considered Mickey's official birthday!

This was the first cartoon with synchronized sound. It was a parody of a Buster Keaton film, Steamboat Bill Jr. It is quite crude and as you may see, not at all the gentle Mickey we got to know over the years. But it's mad fun to watch how he grew!

I'm sure there's tons and tons of fun facts and other stories about this short, but I don't want to elongate myself here, since this is such a well known short.

So without further ado, here's Steamboat Willie by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks, in the old times of Walt Disney Studios.

Check out the other short movies from the Sharing Collection HERE!!

See you soon with more and more sharings!

No copyright and related rights infringements are intended with these sharings, all these animations are properties from their respective authors or studios always credited in the post.

Sharing Animation - Music Video - Strawberry Swing (Shynola, 2009)

It has been a while since I don't share some more animation even though I have this huge list yet to be shared! =) So I'm back to wrap up the animated music videos, at least for now. And yes, I chose a good one for last.

This music is Strawberry Swing by Coldplay, and the video is from the amazing artists from Shynola.

Shynola are a little less and a little more than the usual animation studio. They are only three (when they started they were four), so I guess that's for the less, but they are all great friends that met in college and got together just to make the stuff they love. And that surely is a lot! In the end they are not a usual animation studio because they don't make just the usual animations, they go further.
They are mostly known for their work with music videos. Coldplay (yes, this one), Radiohead and Queens of the Stone Age (the last one HERE) to name a few. They also animated some parts and bits for filmes, like the title sequence for Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and some animated bits for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
HERE you can see their official website and the music videos they produced.
HERE is a link to their Vimeo channel.

Now I'll take my time talking about how it was made, since it's so good looking and it was in fact a work that required much sweat.

First things first: Yes it is Chris Martin in the video.
One of the main logistics about this video is that the animation had to be very very well planned prior to the recordings. When Chris went to the studio to record (they did it in one week and the whole project took 3 months to be done), the Shynola guys had already a fully planned animation to follow as reference, in which the character played by Chris was an animated CG character.
It WAS all drawn on the floor with chalk. Of course they had only to draw and rub the parts that were going to move, which in big mass parts, like a cloud or something you can even see that the pattern in the middle stays the same. But nevertheless it really is an amazing accomplishment!
Since they had it planned and animated prior to the shooting itself, they could use that as reference, they would carry a portable screen in which they could see the reference video and a live streaming of the actual scene (for the knowledgeable people out there, it works like a normal stop-motion software, where you can see live what you're doing and through "onion-skins " see the frame(s) before or reference videos)
About the hero narrative in the whole thing, the story doesn't really relate to the lyrics, Shynola's team tried to take the mood of the song instead of going directly to the words, they say they would have nothing to add and it would be less interesting for them to produce, which only shows us again how this guys are doing what they like to do!

And what they like to do, we like to see! Strawberry Swing by Shynola.

Check out the other short movies from the Sharing Collection HERE!!

See you soon with another animation treat! Next time won't be a music video (unless I cross with some absolutely amazing one!)

No copyright and related rights infringements are intended with these sharings, all these animations are properties from their respective authors or studios always credited in the post.

Sharing Animation - Music Video - Baby I'm Yours (Irina Dakeva, 2010)

Coming back from a huge hangover of long hours animating (and a few resting) I'm finally back to share more animations with you all!
And I'll continue with the animated music videos today!
This one was one of the firsts in my list to share, but only now did I feel that it was it's time.

This one is called Baby I'm Yours, the video directed by Irina Dakeva, and the music by Breakbot.

About the music composer first. Breakbot is his stage name, his real name is Thibaut Berland and interestingly enough he's also an animation guy! He co-directed an animation short with two other fellow students while in university. His short is called Overtime and can be seen HERE. Awesome right? He must have had some input in his music video as well... I can only guess, of course.

Now about the short. Irina Dakeva is a producer working in WIZZdesign, Paris (link to website). In a interview, she told how sick she was of digital looking animations, and thought of this music video as a fresh way to make it. The short itself was made out of rotoscopy (most of it at least, when you watch it, you can definetly see which parts used a live-action film and which parts didn't), with more than 2000 watercolor drawings made by Dakeva herself. The whole project took about 3 and a half months to be completed. Not that much if you consider conception, production and post production, huh?

It's definetly a very much enjoyable video and a good quality work!
Baby I'm Yours, by Irina Dakeva.

Check out the other short movies from the Sharing Collection HERE!!

See you soon with the last animated music video before going back to them good old animated shorts!

No copyright and related rights infringements are intended with these sharings, all these animations are properties from their respective authors or studios always credited in the post.