Cartoon Jump

Having learnt from my Bouncing Ball Posts I have looped this a few times before uploading ;-)

It took me a few weekends to get it this far but I would still like to work on the arms more, there's to much twinning going on!

Crysis 2!

It was announced a while ago but I want to add a cool link to the Crysis 2 nanosuit.

This is the offical website: http://www.crynetsystems.com/


Working on this project is amazing and I cant wait to play it already!
I cant say anymore but i can say that its gonna be a kick ass game!

Bouncing Balls

Ok so like I said I am going to start at the beginning...the bouncing ball!

This is my first attempt at this as I seemed to have skipped this stage when I started learning about animation a few years ago, anyway I made a few:

I still consider them WIP as I would like to change a few things but I learnt alot about mass when making these. I want to make a ball rig for future anims so I can rotate and scale the ball over time using separate controllers which should make it a little easier to work with.

Games!

Working in the games industry is great, and since I love playing games aswell then I'm very happy indeed!

A while ago we all got given an awesome plaque and a copy of Crysis Maximum Edition from Crytek:

Then we got given a gift from our publishers EA! (so I chose Brutal Legend)

Plus I've also just bought Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 and Batman Arkham Asylum and will be ordering Assassins Creed 2 soon. The last game I bought was Bioshock about 4 months ago so this is a big week for me! Im really looking forward to doing some serious gaming and checking out the competition!

Reading list

I haven't posted anything on this blog for nearly 6 months! Oops!

Im still going ahead with my animation plan and will post up my work asap but in the mean time I want to let you know what ive been up to.

I recently bought loads of books after reading Carlos Baena's animation resources page: http://www.carlosbaena.com/resource/resource_books.html

I ended up getting these plus a few more:

"Timing for Animation" - Harold Whitaker & John Halas

"Peoplewatching" - Desmond Morris

"Cartoon animation" - Preston Blair

"Impro: Improvisation and the Theater" - Keith Johnstone

"A Practical handbook For the Actor" - Bruder et al

"Body Language: How to read other's thoughts by their gestures" - Allan Pease

"The Visual Story (Second Edition): Creating the Visual Structure of Film, TV and Digital Media" - Bruce Block

So that's what I have been doing and will be doing until xmas! (along with the weekly checking of tons of bookmarked animation pages and working etc...)

First Post

Hey there!

Thanks for checking out this blog :-)

I have recently started working for Crytek in Germany as a junior animator on Crysis 2. I have learnt so much in such a short time working with an amazing team of animators but I still want to practice different styles of animation in my spare time.

I want to use this blog to show the development of my animation skills, talk about animation and to offer cool links and information to whomever may be interested in animation, be it games/films/television.

I haven't started working on anything new yet so to start with here's my first demo reel:



My plan is to take my knowledge of the past 18months and start at the beginning again to see how much I have improved (fingers crossed) so I will be starting with bouncing balls and walk cycles then moving on to some Body mechanics and then in a few months...acting!

Watch this space!