Thinking Christmas

I just finished this years card for the Hippo-lot-ofus, a club for hippo lovers. They bought my bathing beauty hippo sculpture so I always try and remember them.

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The End of Little Foxes

This is the end design choice.

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More Little Foxes

I'm throwing everything at this for the moment.

Fleet Foxes

These little foxes won't steal your grapes. I'm playing with different constructions.

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11Second Club

Well, I did it. I joined Animation Mentors' 11 Sec. Club. Every month, a new contest begins with a clip of dialogue running 11 seconds that you can download and animate to. You can do any style of animation and they even provide free rigged characters for c.g. artists. Then all the entries are judged.

I did it as a way to perhaps add more acting to my demo reel other than commercial acting which is generally manic and happy. Here's my first entry.

Happy Day After Halloween Re-post, "The Mad Doctor"

This had been removed from YouTube but it's back up again for our enjoyment.

A Mickey from 1933 when he was at the heights of stardom, this cartoon does what animation is supposed to. Beautifully done in every way, it’s just as entertaining today as it was back then. A perfect cartoon.

Pencil Test Depot

Wow, I found a new favorite blog called "Pencil Test Depot" with some crazy good, guess what?... Yes, pencil tests, from all over the place. It's very inspirational and shows that magic quality not found in other styles of animation. For me the moving drawing is still amazingly effective and much more satisfying than stop-motion or computer animation. The draftsmanship and acting are sometimes more worthy than the script but you can see how dedicated these animators are to capture something entertaining.

Here's just a taste of the wonders to be found! Click the title above to go here.

Thief from bj crawford on Vimeo.

Ruby Rocket Again...

I found some old files while cleaning my computer. Here are some scenes from Sam Niemanns' "Ruby Rocket" adventures.

The slates at the beginning show I did the inbetweening and clean-up on a scene animated by Sam and one by B. Larsen. We were using Flash and drawing everything, animating on fours. Later we did tonal passes for highlights and shadows.

The finished look was quite impressive and nothing like what you would expect from Flash as you can see from the still image of Ruby.

Hopefully Aniboom will show all the episodes someday. Click on the title to go to Sam's blog all about the making of Ruby.

Mounties

Here are some expression studies I did for Hive FX pitch material for their tv series proposal called, "Mounties".

Although I didn't design the characters, I was asked to do facial studies and turn-arounds for all the cast. It was pretty fun and the style is kind of like what I do anyway.

I also built and animated the lead characters in Flash for a trailer that you can watch by clicking on the title or going here and clicking on the trailer: http://www.mounties.tv/




All art work is property of Hive FX

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Character Designs

Thought I would post some of my design work for a few personal projects. More to come.



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