The Animator's Eye frames

We interrupt your regularly scheduled blog, The Storyteller's Log: Storyweaving, The New Way to See Your Story Structure, to bring you this important message. In a couple of months, I'll be finishing up storyboarding on Dreamwork's The Dragons of Berk TV series. 

I had a professor of film audio at Pratt and he gave us some very important advice. He told us that if you're not working, your job for 40 hours a week is to look for work. The other thing that he told us is to ALWAYS KEEP YOUR PORTFOLIO UP TO DATE. This is especially true when you still are working. Be prepared.

So following his advice, I'm presenting frames from my animated short. They're from my book, The Animator's Eye: Adding Life to Animation with Timing, Layout, Design, Color and Sound. It's published by Focal Press. It's a silent film in the sense that there's no dialogue. It has a wonderful music score by film composer Hans Karl. J.D. Stewart provided audio production services. Bryan Cox and Chris Siemasko added the special effects for the transformation and the ending shot. My son Ryan did the film editing. 

This film was completed using TVPaint software on a 21inch Wacom Cintiq tablet. Final assembly was completed in Final Cut Pro 7. The storyboards were completed on sticky notes and scanned. ArtRage Studio Pro was used to paint the color scripts based on the storyboard images.

 Need to score? Hans Karl Music

The idea for the film evolved over many versions. The idea was to make a story that was a metaphor of the process of capturing an idea and bringing it to life. This is probably one of the most inventive uses of the classic animation exercises bring a flour sack to life. I used two of my characters that I had already created- Iggy, the impulsive pig and Scared Bunny.

Enjoy (Click to Enlarge)

It's almost time...

The clocks ticking on my new book, The Animator's Eye. Finally, everything is off to the publisher. Over 6000 drawings and 100,000 words. Hmm, let's see, if a drawing is worth a thousand words then that's 700,000 words. Focal Press looks like they're on schedule for an August 2012 publication date. I've seen the proofs and they're doing an awesome job. The flip books along the side of the page look great. You get to see animation in action in a book.

This book was a killer. For my last book, Directing the Story, I created about 1900 drawings but since it was on storyboarding most of them were rough. For The Animator's Eye I completed a three and a half minute animated short to demonstrate the whole process of making an animated film. Scared Bunny, my co-author, keeps asking me why I didn't just make a 15 second film. I guess I'm too impulsive like Iggy. 

Wait till you hear the incredible score by film composer, Hans Karl. You can check out his music on his website- http://www.hanskarlmusic.com/