So I finished the bear animation and it was pretty well recieved. I was trying to see if I could take a cute thing and make it not quite so cute. I’m not sure wether or not I succeeded in that. It turned out to be pretty amusing, but still within the realm of “cute” according to the feedback I got.

One interesting piece of feedback I got was that I should perhaps have made the girl masturbate with the bear. That’s not really the route I wanted to take, but it would have been pretty provocative. In the end, I’m pretty happy with the piece, though the side view of the girl needs more work in my opinion. I think I like working with these flat (2D) characters. At least for pieces like this.

I really had fun with these projects. It was fun figuring out how to get the right point of view and present things in a way that got everything across. These are supposed to be 2 seperate pieces giving two viewpoints of the same story. It kind of worked and didn’t at the same time. A couple people who saw it got it, but they said that the pieces were two distinct and didn’t seem like they went together.

I got a few good suggestions for the two pieces.

• Add flicker lines to the subject animation to give it a more old time movie feel. (I’m going to incorporate that technique into a different animation now.)
• Slow down the words in the object animation. Which is a good point. Especially on a bigger screen where your eyes don’t read as fast.
• The gunshot transition in the object animation. Flash a red screen and make it more violent. Funny story, I had the same thought about making it more violent, but I didnt shake the camera enough I guess. It looked too smooth.

The character I chose for this assignment was an opossum I dubbed Mordume. He was shot and presumably left for dead outside an apartment building. Guarded by children, he was soon picked up by a cop with a penchant for saving wild animals. Taken to a vet who also specialized in saving wild folk, he was given surgery that would have cost $9000 and an estimated $700 more would be needed in terms of food and supplies before he was ready to be released.
Read the original article here.


Ah Mordume. Such a life.

From the beginning I enjoyed doing this spirit animal assignment. Thinking up a spirit animal and developing it was a good exercise in character development.

Initial idea.

Character sheet.

By the end of it, I had a strong sense of who the character was, its desires and the environment it lived in. The only thing I failed at was finding its name. Perhaps its destined not to have one.

The interconnected world assignment was a bit rough though.
Drawing and Story here.

All of the animals in the world came in with strong identities, and making them work together was quite a stretch. In the end, we managed to put together a story to describe how they interacted, but no sort of taxonomy diagram we could think of would have worked without being awkward or requiring our characters to change.

Had we started this series of work with the last assignment in mind it may have made a difference. Perhaps the most interesting thing that came out of this was me figuring out that drawing something by hand and then tracing the path gives me a result that I really kind of like.

My spirit animal. The toughest thing about him so far is his name. He has a very elusive name. Perhaps it will come to me one day. I feel like it’s close.

About him.



The first thing you must understand is that he doesn’t do it will ill intent. Ever so rarely things go wrong but that’s just an unfortunate eventuality. It’s the risk of it, the thrill of the chase, the satisfied feeling of a plan well laid that really drives him. He is a trickster at heart and it’s what he does best.
Yea, when things go bad he hides. But it isn’t without trouble. Taking the shape of a spider (and the reverse transform as well) is no laughing matter. If he must, he always hides first. No one has ever seen the complete change.

traits

He is calm most of the time, though he may smile slightly if planning a spectacular piece of trickery.

Few things can make him angry, but when he does… watch out!

He sometimes plays human and put on clothes. Sometimes he gets caught, but mostly not. He wraps up his tail and wears custom made shoes to cover his long feet.

So how to go about doing that? The spirit animal is thought by some to be a piece of your soul. A person’s soul can also be represented by their shadow. Someone without a shadow could be considered souless. So I’ve represented my spirit animal through my shadow.

I chose a spider… or a monkey… or a spider-monkey. Really, a trickster animal. Kind of like Anansi, who can be a man, a spider or a monkey. Sometimes all 3.