April 28th Walk This Way...

Howdy friends. Today I give you three more characters strutting their stuff. We have Mort Felinestien, Hank Tembo, and Mrs. Topeka. I trimmed the sections that you have already seen, so that it doesn't get monotonous. As I have stated in previous posts the first section contains the rough pencil animation I have used as the basis for all the other walk cycles. When I drop these characters into scenes in the final animation I'll stagger their walk cycles. In English that means they won't all walk in unison in the final. ; )

As you can see to the left here, Mrs. Topeka doesn't have much up and down in her walk cycle. I tried to match the suggestion of girth/weight (no offense Mrs. Topeka!) that I had in Mr. Topeka's walk a few weeks back. I have a feeling that as they approach you on the sidewalk you can feel these two characters before you see them. The concrete would tremble.

Speaking of trembling concrete, Hank Tembo (Swahili for elephant, according to Google) is sporting a stylish plaid Irish cap (which can be purchased in the gift shop on your way out). His toy/gift bag originally had the name Finnegan's on it, but it was too hard to read so I took that out.

And then of course there is Mort Felinestien looking oh so sharp in a grey suit which matches his bowler, the band of which matches his tie and socks! Mort is carrying a rolled up newspaper, which he plans to attack and shred once he gets back to the office.

One again that's the Marine Corps belting out "Up In The Morning". It seems very fitting with all the exercising going on around here. It's also one of my favorite cadences, and one I loved to run and ride to back in the day.

Next time I will try and drop a city sidewalk scene scrolling by in the background for next time. Something that loops, like the old Flintstone's backgrounds did. Something simple though. I want it to be interesting, but I don't want it to detract from the main purpose which is just showing off the walk cycles.

Walking Characters from ryanloghry on Vimeo.

As I have stated before my work flow is pretty basic. I draw the characters in my sketchbook. I scan the drawings and "cut them out" in PhotoShop so I can move the pieces. Then I pose them on each frame of the walk cycle (still in PhotoShop). Then I render it out as a Quicktime movie. I use After Effects and Premiere to composite everything together. As always I hope you have enjoyed my drawings and this animation. Thank you for stopping by, God bless, and have a great day.

More Walk Cycles

Hello everyone! I've added two more animated characters to the mix this week. an alligator, and a buffalo. I also added some Miles Davis for them to walk to. Five points if you can name the song and album(that's what we called a collection of songs before cds came along, for all you kiddos out there).

More Walking Animals from ryanloghry on Vimeo.

Walk walk walk...

Good morning everyone! Today I'm am sharing some work in progress. All year long I will be adding to the Christmas animation I posted in December. I will be adding more animated characters walking, and interacting in every scene.

In this animation I am showing on the left side the walk cycle I drew (thank you Preston Blair for your amazing work). In the middle of the frame is the black and white pencil drawn character I created, and matched pose for pose to my template. And then finally the full color character walking on the right, which I will drop into one of my scenes. My goal is to make last years animation look fuller, more lived in. I try to produce a card and animation each year, but since I usually start in August or September that only leaves me about 3 months to produce everything needed, which for a one man show is not very long. Last year I hit on this idea of creating an animation, and then filling it in, and improving it all year long. Please click "Play" on the video below to watch the animation.

If you would like to view the animation on my Vimeo page then please go here.

I sure love to draw, and I love to make those drawings move. I again thank my wife Angela for getting me Adobe CS6 three years ago, it is an amazing tool that allows me to fulfill my dreams, and to work at a level higher than I've ever been able to achieve before.

A full list of the tools I used for this: Pentel .7mm mechanical pencil; a Pentalic hardbound sketchbook with 70 lbs. paper; an Epson 3200 scanner (thank you David Schrotzberger for giving me yours when my old one died unexpectedly); Adobe Photoshope for edge clean up and colorization of the pencil drawings, as well as creating the frame by frame animation; Adobe Premiere for comping each animation together.

As always I hope you have enjoyed watching this animation and learning how I work. Thank you for stopping by, and I'll keep posting updates as I finish more characters. Have a terrific day, and God bless! -- Ryan

Snowy City Scene Animation

Good morning everyone!

Today I am sharing a rough animation I have created. I created this scene for my annual Christmas card and animation.

First I drew all the buildings and the train in pencil, scanned them, and colorized & knocked them out in PhotoShop. Next I rendered an animation(quicktime movie) of each one, then I took all those quicktime movies into After Effects and rendered each one with snow falling. On each piece of my "set", as they go further back into my scene I added a little camera lens blur, I did all of this to add to the depth of the scene.

I'm really disappointed with the compression on this. It looks SO much better on my computer here at home. Maybe some day I will find the right settings, that will make a clean and clear video that is small enough to upload from my connection here at home. I will try to replace this video at some point with a version that has better compression settings. Also, I'm not sure why but the animation is cropped. I created a 16x9 animation and this is not as wide as it should be. If you want to see it un-cropped go to my Vimeo page and view it there.

Next I will add riders on the train, and people in some of the windows in the apartments. Some of them will be animated, just a little. I'm only one person and I only have until the end of November. This animation was a huge first step though, proving I could create the look I wanted.

One thing that I needed to learn how to do again (because it had been two years since I did it last) was how to create a snow effect in After Effects. I watched this tutorial by Carlo (sorry if I spelled that wrong) on YouTube. The best thing about the internet is people sharing knowledge, helping each other out. His turorial was quick, concise, and he showed and described everything he did. Very helpful. Thank you to Carlo.

I hope you enjoyed this project, I hope to post a couple updates as I work on this over the next couple months. As always feel free to leave a comment, and to share this post with others. I hope you all have a terrific day, and thank you for stopping by.

Looping Seaside Animation

Hi everyone!

I spent the last few days creating this animation for the About/Contact page on my website. I asked a pal of mine(David Walters) how to avoid collecting spam through my contact page and he suggested CAPTCHA, which is great, but it would have taken me at least a couple weeks to dope it out and get it running right. I never have that kind of time. So instead I decided that it would be really hard for bots to scan and scrape an email address from a moving image, and since I love to draw and animate I went to work.

Ryan's Boats from ryanloghry.

I used muted colors, and pencil texture (in the pier, and the gull on the piling) to help this piece blend with my illustration style. I should have some artsy-fartsy, fancy pants reason, but I don't. I just really like the look of washed out color, translucent, so you can see the pencil work through it.

I was kind of bummed that the tops of all the buildings on the pier got cropped, but in order to get them close enough to see them, they were too tall for the frame. So Here is a small version of that drawing.

I also sketched some gulls sitting on top of the buildings, but they would have been so small, they would have been confusing. I might go back and add a couple 3D ones in though, so I can move them a little. We'll see.

Here is my original pencil sketch, all I had at first was the idea about the boats. When I put that scene together it looked so sparse, I knew I needed to add some more elements. So I drew the pier, and then built the clouds and the seagulls in 3D. The gulls were fun to animate. I still might add something in the foreground on the right hand side, to give the scene more depth.

I hope you enjoyed this peak behind the scenes. I sure enjoyed creating it. --Ryan

Pitching Sequence Third Pass

So here is the last pencil test version of this animation. I've roughed out all the frames I need to create a compelling and convincing animation. It will take me a couple weeks at least to produce the 34 final drawings of the main character, and then I still have to put a little action in the crowd in the background.

I hope you've enjoyed reading about and watching this process, and the end result when I get it posted. Have fun and God bless. -- Ryan

Secondary Pass

As promised here is the second pass of the pitching sequence animation. With my schedule the way it is anymore it took me a few days.

When I was finally able to view what I have here I realized that his back leg lands right next to his front leg, and if he were really throwing a pitch the follow through would carry his back foot way out in front of his front foot. Also, I need to speed up the second half of his motion, to give his pitch some ZIP. SO... I'll need to re-animate the last few frames, and add some more. Then I can get back to the crowd in the background. Once I get that doped out I can start on the final drawings. Easy Peazy.

Pitching Sequence

Here is a pencil test for a new project I'm working on. I threw the background in to make it a bit more interesting for you the viewer. I'll do finished drawings for the pitcher next, maybe add a little more exaggeration, and then I'll draw the crowd a couple times over, to give them a little movement, not much but just enough so that they aren't frozen. That crowd part will probably be take the longest.

I'm going to add a few in between frames to this, but I like the flow of his pitching action, so I don't think I'll make any big changes.

This is a small part of a bigger project I'm working on, a children's book and animation. With digital books/apps being what they are these days I'm excited about adding little clips of animation that the reader/viewer can activate within the story. I'm hoping it will add to the experience.

Speaking of children's books, remember you can still get "The Little Leaf" (written by Jairo Penaranda Illustrated by yours truly) at Amazon or Barnes and Noble. If you have an iPad you can get an interactive version of my book "The Searcher" (written and illustrated by yours truly) via iBooks. As always thank you for stopping by, and have a terrific day.

New Animation Tools = New Animation!

Ice Skating Test Animation from ryanloghry

Hi everyone! Merry Christmas! I've been saving up for almost a year now, and last week for my birthday/early Christmas present I got the rest of the funds needed to get the Production Premium Adobe package I've been needing for a few years. Adobe has finally added inverse kinematics, and what they are calling 3D options, and I'm am very excited about the special effects possible in After Effects(like the snow you see in this animation). So I sat down over the weekend and put this little loop together. I only had a couple of hours to devote to it, but I learned SO MUCH. My hope is to continue to add to this piece, to make it more interesting. Here is the original Christmas card from last year, so you can see the starting point for this animation:

I just had to share the fun and excitement I feel. Enjoy! (P.S. I set the animation up to loop, so don't wait for it to end, cause it won't.

An Animated Interview with Cyrus

I created this animation in the spring of this year. "An Animated Interview with Cyrus" was done as an audition for a job that I still might get. One of the hazards of working for a group of people is sometimes you have to be patient while they decide what to do.

I really cranked this one out in a short amount of time, 4 weeks. Sounds like a long time, but consider I'm one guy and had to do sound recording, character design, lip synch, character animation(all be it limited animation), backgrounds, editing, and... I guess that's all.

An Animated Interview With Cyrus from ryanloghry.

The sweet banjo riff was provided by my friend Alan Hayes. We recorded in his bathroom(no ticking clocks in that room). Thanks again Alan! Cyrus is voiced by Cyrus Patton a friend of mine from church. I asked him a series of questions and he was a real trooper. (I asked him after he got to see the finished piece and he said he thought it was cool to see himself as an alligator.) I edited out the replies I felt were best, and created my master audio track to animate to, and went to work.

I scanned my pencil drawings and colorized them in Photoshop, creating the finished pieces I needed to animate. I then animated in Photoshop, and exported Quicktime movies which I then pieced together in AVS Video Editor (Unfortunately Adobe video editing suite, and no, I'm not going to rent it for $50 a month via the cloud thank you, I don't rent my skill saw, or a hammer when I want to use those tools).

The entire project was inspired by Aardman Animation's "Creature Comforts", which I highly recommend you check out if you haven't seen it already. I was going for quaint, cute, adorable. I hope I achieved that, I hope you enjoy watching it.

Gospel & Grub

Gospel & Grub from ryanloghry on Vimeo.
I created this animated short to promote a dinner and gospel sing night at Hockinson Community Church, to raise money for one of the missionaries we (and Yacolt E-Free Church) support - Jill Wellman. Jill is taking a team on an outreach trip this summer (2013). The deadline was extremely short, I had a week start to finish. I'm not thrilled with the audio quality, but I did the best I could there with no sound studio or professional equipment. I used the ipad and Wave Pad software to capture the sound.

As for the animation itself I scanned my illustrations and animated in PhotoShop using layers and then exporting frames as QT movies. Then I edited each scene's qt movie together with the sound .wav file. After I knocked off all of the scenes I took each mixed (sound and video) qt movie and edited them together. Easy peasy. The voice over styling of Iris Wellman, myself, and Roy Loghry were used in the piece, and that is Alan Hayes on the banjo in the intro, and exit of the piece. A big thank you to them and my wife Angela for all their help.

The animation is choppy, more so than I usually do, but that is due to the time constraints. There is also very limited secondary motion (arms, legs and other appendages moving about to create the illusion of life), again due to a lack of time. Another big time saver was re-using a background image from a farm illustration used in my children's book The Searcher.

I hope you enjoy the piece, feel free to comment here and share the link. -- Ryan

Exploring China

Exploring China Trailer from ryanloghry.

Hi everyone! From mid August to a week or so before Christmas I was working on this book trailer/book project "Exploring China". The trailer is finished (with a huge praise and thank you to David Walters over at fogpuddle.com for helping me fix a big timing issue). The music was produced by Donevan Karr, GREAT JOB Donevan!

As always let me know what you think, don't be afraid to hit that comment button. Enjoy

First Maya animation

I started studying Maya (3D animation software for those who don't know) last week. I have been working through many tutorial to get a grasp of how things work so I can use it to animate a book trailer for my latest book project (more on that later). Anywho, here is a link to a "Playblast" which is a shaded quick render of the animation I just finished. The first step of many. One of the hiccups, or mistakes is, the rotations of the planets around the Sun have ease as a default, causing the planets to slow down as they finish the animation, I didn't realize that 'til I rendered. (And yes I know there are more moons than I've got in my solar system. Expediency trumps accuracy in this case.) Another thing to know is no matter what I did to the render settings, the file was 100 meg. Giant file I know, sorry bout that. Let me know what you think. Don't be afraid to leave a comment.

Action - Reaction

I just purchased some video converting, and editing software and wanted to try out the mixing abilities. So I took this old animation and added my bicycle horn honk to it. It was very easy, only took me a few minutes. The software is AVS, it's a very affordable alternative to Adobe products, and it's easy to use.

December 14, 2007 Animation

Philneus Blarbin walks and thinks. And thinks and walks. Thinking of inventions to make the world a better place for the humons. He likes to help the humons.

I noodled up this animation yesterday, an off day for me. I have a bazillion things I should have been working on, but did this for fun instead. I hope to do more of this animation, but I've had to take another day job, and doubt I'll have the time for it. As always thank you for stopping by, and be sure to visit my website at ryanloghry.com, and my retail site at ookybizniz.com.