BFA Thesis Sem2 Week 1: Starting Production!

We've started production on the radish film! I started a week before, during break, so it's far along now. I think I've got the process for animation down in Photoshop, and it's been pretty fun working with this shot. On to the next one!

BFA Thesis Week 12

Lot's of stuff done before Thanksgiving. I've been put in charge of putting together an animation style guide. I needed to figure out how exactly we were going to animate. For the previous tests I had animated Flash, and then I did the cleanup and color in Photoshop. I wanted to test out how I could do it completely in Photoshop. Olivia had found this tutorial by an animator named Alex Grigg, whose influenced my work in my Conceptual Animation class.


Photoshop Animation Techniques (Redux, Creative Cloud) from Alex Grigg on Vimeo.

After re-watching the video I did a rough test of one of the other radishes

I was apprehensive about animating in Photoshop, but had a lot of fun animating this scene. I kept it simple and limited, mostly because this was a test of the program, but we are going for a more limited style.

The cleanup was a little trickier. I used a video layer which was a bit confusing at first, but it was fine after I got the hang of it. 

After this I made the animation guide! 

It was fun! I was thinking I might be able to do a SHMinar on this...

BFA Thesis Week 11

I've worked out a few brushes I like for the film and have been testing them out. We're going for a rough sketchy look, but it can't be rough enough that there are holes in the shape. We need to be able to fill the character with the bucket tool during the color process.

Here's the test. I picked out 10 brushes and did the same 2 drawing in the 10 different brushes.

I sent these to the director and she picked out 04, 07, 09, and 10. I did a few more drawings and decided on 04. 

BFA Portfolio Week 11

Blizzard came to visit this week, and they looked over some of the senior portfolios. I submitted this reel to them after fixing some things from the alumni critique. I also rendered out the last shot I worked on.


David Johnson 3D Reel 2016 from David Johnson on Vimeo.

BFA Portfolio Week 10

Got a lot of good crits from the alumni who visited last week. They basically said to keep it simple and work on the poses more. I cut out the jumping over the box, and a lot of camera moves and worked on the final pose. I'm going to have to change it again, because he's way off balance obviously.

BFA Portfolio Week 9

Brought the animation into spline and tried to get some better poses.

Also showed my reel to some alumni who visited class this week. The 3D stuff is from last semester, so I got a few tips on polishing those. There's a lot of 2D in there too, and I was told to make 2 separate reels (depends on where I'm applying as well).

BFA Thesis Week 9

Working on brushes for the cleanup part of the film, mostly trying to make my own. We're going for a sort of rough look, similar to the xerox process from 101 Dalmatians.