Juko 12/19/2011
 
A year ago I did a 2D concept and animation for the Opening Titles of a live action feature directed by Kai Barry, called Juko's Time Machine. The film is finally done, I got the DVD and I'm posting my tiny little bit of animation :)
Thank you Kai!! It was a fantastic experience working with you and I hope to do so again! :)
The HD version here.
And with gracious permission from the director, I'm adding some preproduction sketches, showing the steps to glory...
Lots of steps, the preproduction took in fact longer than the production...
First, some tests and junk, looking for a style.
And some early color tests.
And then some style tests based on a frame from the movie, if I remember it well.
After a while we settled on this simple Chinese ink look, that later turned into chalk on a green board... when stuff changed.
And here are the close-to-final and final character concepts.
M'kay, and if you want to see a storyboard/animatic thing, click here.
And lastly, the DVD cover, which I love very much because, well, because it's yellow... and then because it has my little Rory drawing :D This is the nicest thing possible, thanks again Kai!
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Quoting from Ubitube:

"Pinocchio is a research initiative at Ubisoft Montreal. Its goal is to explore new ways of animating characters with procedural techniques. This includes pose modifications such as Feet-IK and lookats, as well as powered ragdolls. The Pinocchio team is composed of Dominic Duchemin and Simon Clavet, who contribute their expertise and research to various projects developed in the studio."

For more, go here.
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Tintin 11/02/2011
 
Now that both the game and the film are out I can finally post some stuff I've done on Tintin (the game) here at Ubisoft. What can I say... most of the things we've done involved mocap, so it's pretty hard for me to gather keyframe animation to add to a reel. Anyhow, here's some.
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a silly little animation I've done today for a friend :)
it's not exactly spectacular animation, but it's kind'a cute 'n colorful :P so I thought I should put it up :)
the background is found through a Google search and used without permission... :/ pls don't sue me :D
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Tintin trailer 09/28/2011
 
A trailer of our artsy and surreal game :D 

Plus a [p]review
and an interview with the Montpellier producer.
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Quick n junky moviemaking :) All done in a day, from modeling, rigging (with an autorigger that I scripted for my puppetzoids; creates dynamic rigs... basically with dynamic joint chains made with Maya's hair, which is fast and reliable), superfast animation based on layered mouse capture (with a record mouse script called kWORk), with very little tweaking here and there, rendering (real time with Maya's Viewport 2.0) and color tests, sound design (yeah, some decent foley would have been nice), editing, comp. All in a day, thanks to my dynamic rig :) Junky (especially the environment, it shows that it's just some mindless quick junk I've thrown in there), but a lot of fun to play with!

(PS - color palette inspired by a Bruegel painting :P)
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Just finished work on Tintin and the Secret of the Unicorn, the game.
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This is the project I've been working on for the past year at Ubisoft. I'm really excited to see it one of the top E3 games this year! Wooohoooooo!!! Go Tintin!! :)
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Pretty cool site :) Just starting, but hopefully there will be more soon. There's a wiki that goes with it.
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Pixel Animator 01/30/2011
 
Pretty sweet animation tool :) From  Peter Blaškovič | Escape Motions.
Tip: press play and start drawing ;)
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10 min anim 12/18/2010
 
This Santa animation was done extra-fast as a test of using PoseMan as an animation tool for a.. ehm.. different kind of animation... nothing revolutionary, just a different approach to animating, for me, and a different end result too. I want to do more stuff in this style, because it's insane fun. I got the idea while working on a 2D project with rough animation. It was rough because there was a lot of it, but it turned out kind of nice. All the time, while working on this project, I kept feeling like I need to detail the animation more and make it smoother, but there was no time for that, so I did all that I could to make things move nicely and feel alive and look good, with a limited amount of drawings. Same here, in this test. It's been considered, traditionally, that 3D animation has to be in constant movement to be kept "alive", that you can't use holds, you use moving holds... or else the character will look dead like a statue. But at the same time, if you look at a detailed blocking, on stepped, it can feel quite alive and sometimes more graphically interesting, because each pose is carefully shaped, no inbetweens. The old masters were basically saying the same thing about the animation "on twos", that it looks and feels better. OK, this here test is kind of rough and messy, but sort of cute too... I think... :P It's not exactly masterful animation "on twos", but rather a proof, for me, that I can do superfast animation like this. In this case, I had the rig already, I spent probably 20 minutes or so saving a bunch of poses in PoseMan (I only used a few here), and then I used PoseMan to animate pose to pose. In something like 10 minutes I was done with the body animation, and then I detailed a bit of stuff here and there... ehm... yeah, a second pass... let's say 10 more minutes or so. But the body animation was really done superfast. Some of the inbetweens are blends calculated by PoseMan. Basically, it's the same thing I've been doing (and not only me, of course) in 2D: pose A, pose B, one inbetween favoring ether A or B. That would be the simple recipe, but it can be used in very fancy ways (there's probably nothing I dread more in animation that the old pose zzzip pose zzip pose, etc). A cheap, fast, and cheated way of animating that's quite effective. Also, to continue, a cute or interesting model can make or break animation. People love watching the old Disney cartoons not only because there was beautiful and natural movement added to those drawings, but, I think, even more so because the drawings themselves were appealing and the final result was composed of beautiful images. Anyway, bunch of theory here, but I'm curious what other people feel about this... sort of stop-mo-like, stepped, pseudo-blocking animation. I want to animate a short film with this technique and we'll see... I'm sure this choppy thing makes more sense with a good story behind, and in the larger context of a film. Enjoy for now my weird freestyle Santa! :D
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