Planet Cosmo takes off!

The TV show I worked on last year whilst in Dublin is now out in the world for all to see. If you’re in Ireland, you can watch it on RTE Jr. If elsewhere, follow @PlanetCosmoTV for updates on when its coming to your country.

I’m very proud to have worked on the show, especially due to the compact crew meaning even more chances to get something special in there!

The studio I worked for (Geronimo Productions formerly called Monster Animation) have just released a sneak peak for the first episode, based around a family outing to planet Mercury! Sounds fun? It really is! Wait until you here the catchy songs…

Anywho, I’m rather pleased as all the character animation in this clip is work I produced. I’ll be adding more clips when I get the nod I can put bits on my showreel, probably in a few weeks when I’m back in the UK.

And as a sign off, a tip of the hat to a very talented Ciaran Lucas who did a sterling job on the layouts & backgrounds for the WHOLE SERIES (super human effort). His work can be found here: www.ciaranlucas.com

Ghost towns

Here’s another sketch from a trip we took further North in Nevada. We visited Goldfield (with it’s derilict, haunted Goldfield hotel and weird locals) and stayed over in Tonopah at the Mizpah hotel (also haunted, but very nice!) The hotel was renovated back to it’s 1920′s mining boom charm and the 5th floor supposedly has a lady in red wandering the corridors at night.

Either way, it was very cold the day of leaving, with a snow storm moving in over night and a low of -16 celcius ahead of us. So we drove down from the higher altitude to warm Vegas, glad to have the cold behind us.

This guy was selling his precious wares from a roadside wooden shack on the way out of Goldfield. He told us to tell our friends and bring them on a road trip out just so we can buy his stuff. ‘I don’t want them to stay!’ he said, as though we couldn’t wait to move to a ghost town with a handful of occupants and not a full set of teeth between them.

Anyway, he was a bit of a character and when he tried to get us to enter his SAW building I knew I had to add him to the sketchbook (it was a gallery of sorts with more of his precious junk on display, built from corrugated iron and rusty salvage).

This guy was like something from a horror story

Nice and simple 3D

I’ve just cut together a few pieces of character acting I did in 3D. They were kept nice and simple, allowing for focus on the principles and learning how to animate in new software. I also didn’t want to get bogged down with facial expressions at an early stage, so they were left out all together.

These were completed a while back, but it gives an example of 3D animation (as it’s not my specialism). I’d like to work on a more complex, layered piece but I’m still working heavily within digital 2D, so it may be a while.

Juggler in colour

From another shot in the film, here’s a juggler and his apparent lack of dental care. I’m animating loosely in flash then blocking the main shapes in with the paintbrush, as the outlines are an afterthought and only to accent certain areas. I find it easier to animate this was in Flash as it makes you less focused on the perfect line and is a bit more of a natural feeling (just as it feels natural to draw in line on paper).

I also added some nifty widget to allow easy social networking access (for all you books of faces and twits out there).

It’s just below each post…

Characters!

Whilst playing with the colour and character drawing technique, I got carried away and kept adding. They fit well on the textured background, and the white looks a bit flat now, lifeless. So I may do some selective colour choosing instead. Need to make my performance man on the bin stand out somehow though.

I’ll think about it.

Character work

A coloured sketch for one of the interacting characters. At this stage, the animation line is going to be quite loose, as part of an experiment with colouring digitally and blending the aesthetic (BG and FG).