Saturday, October 24, 2009

Stabmixer. Handblender.

Sweet and ever so patient hopefuls,

Today would make a great day for yet another post,
and today's post will be more or less in harmony with last post.
Isn't that wonderful? Coherence is an admirable goal right?

This post is dedicated to a leader I made for a children's tv show
together with Conchita Mulder and Marlyn Spaaij, called Raaf Mixer.
We got this job through a previous one I did with Marlyn and
Sandra Verkaart.
The latter whom's great film C'est le ton qui fait la musique screens
on HAFF's student program the 6th and 8th of november.

Conchita was on fire with her ink, designing amongst other things
those great trees and I believe the entire background if my
memory doesn't fail me. It's been a while.
I do remember me using crayons to create moving holds
to use as textures for all the character's torso's. And the parrot.

The stream coming from the didgeridoo was done on paper,
as well as in TVPaint, using the TVP renders as masks
in After Effects for the stuff done on paper.
All character animation was done in TVPaint,
colors were rendered separate for masking purposes.
Then in After Effects we placed the photos of the actors' faces
on top op the headless characters.
The heads were given moving hold textures as well,
which were mere round shapes roughly drawn with pencils.
I mostly make my textures somewhat round,
for it tends to give the character's look literally more depth.

Working for directors Alieke en Sia was a pleasure,
we also met quite some people involved in the series.
We didn't meet the people doing the music and sound though,
who did a great job with the happy-go-lucky sing-song soundtrack.
Typography was done by De Jonge Hazen, a social design initiative.
This job later on proved to be popular enough to attract another job,
but that's another post. (I suspect more coherence.)

Animation credits:
Conchita: Olga / The Didge-Stream
Me: Raaf
Marlyn: Everything else

This project was quite intense:
With Marlyn living in with Conchita and me for nearly a week,
designing/animating/compositing against the clock.
But all in all it was great fun doing it.

Oh. And before I forget: Raaf Mixer was derived from the word
staafmixer, which is a blender.
Conchita and I have one whom's package says in German:
stabmixer and in English: handblender.
I think both are quite funny.


Monday, October 19, 2009

This title unimaginatively refers to both recent life and old work.

Hopefuls,

I should be terribly sorry,
yet somehow I'm not.
The sweetest girl in the world is in Tanzania right now,
so I've been keeping myself busy lately as to not be reminded.
“Reminded of what?” you might ask —and rightfully so—
and on this very topic —an emotionally strong one at that—
I will enlighten you this awfully late blog.

Today's topic is loneliness. Yes.
Cooking for myself is a far cry from cooking for her
and our bed has morphed into a boring place.
Now, I'm not sure about the morphing part,
nonetheless: it's become a boring place.
As has our home.

Luckily work provides some distraction,
of which I got plenty, yet is as you might imagine:
Just. Not. The same.

It's fun as well, the work.
But I cannot provide you with any recent developments.
At least, not yet.
But of course I've got this big, big pile of animations
from which I'd be delighted to pick you some goodies.

Now only to make this theme work...
So I mentioned
loneliness, animation has this romantic
image of the animator working day and night
(emphasis on the 'night'-part) on films in the attic.
But this one I made together with a classmate,
Marlyn Spaaij, who has no website whatsoever.
But we made this for a Dutch tv-show
touching the subject of melanism,
animating to a pre-existing soundtrack.

My contributions list as follows:

• Paper texture
• Bambi's birth (not the mother though)
• The jaguar (including texture - animated to follow it's stretch)
• The 2D animated 3D'ish building
• The butterfly
• The sound design