Videogame creatures animated with puppet tool

UPDATE: check the post from April 03, 2013 for the latest animations!

This is one of the latest projects I have been involved in. Due to this agreement I am not able to give away any details but I am allowed to show what I have done so far. These creatures were completely animated in After Effects using the puppet tool. This process is known as "cut-out" animation, this is not my first time doing it so that is why I am involved in this videogame.

Hopefully I will be able to show you some other stuff in the near future. I hope you enjoy these few animations. The illustrations are not mine, I repeat, illustrations were done by another artist, I only take credit for the animation. All artwork, animations are the property of Escapism Entertainment.

Life Drawing Workshop

Here is a few drawings from this workshop I have been attending in Studio City. Most of them were done with pencils, a few with charcoals. I know there is some nudity, hope I'm not breaking any rules, just want to show you what I've done over the last few weeks.

2D artwork - Informative for Democracy

This is a compilation of the 2D artwork from the "Informative for Democracy" project I was involved in until January 2011.

For one year I illustrated and animated these backgrounds and cartoons. The animation is really simple, cut-out style for the characters and a few lip-sync here and there. Everything creation is mine, in some cases I had photographic references.

In every infomercial you could tell there were different plants, trees, people, clothes, food and so on. The pictures you are going to see are just a small compilation of all the work I did for a year. We did 20+ infomercials and the number of new illustrations (single objects) was between 80 and 100 for each new infomercial. All are hi-res images!

As you can see there is a lot of ethnic races. Well, the idea was to depict most of the Ecuadorian culture we could.

Next, this video collects a few backgrounds with some animation. I take credit for all the illustrations you see there except for the traffic signs, the trees silhouettes, and water texture you see before the last scene. Those came from a vector library. 

I hope you enjoy all of these and expect some comments. I will be gone for a while, it is time to work on some new challenges!

Stop Motion - Puppets, Scenery

And now we are going to see pictures of a stop-motion project I did while studying. Here I did a lot of things, character designs (which were not chosen), scenery design (outside look of a mansion), puppet fabrication (2 characters), scenery building (front view of the mansion), and also a couple of Condor for the mansion. Because we wanted the project to have a "local feeling" we had the 2 huge birds as statues. The mansion was partially based on some architecture from Quito's civic center.

Sketches

All mine.

Condor birds

All mine. For the skeleton I used, wire and flex foam. For the body sculpting: air hardening modelling clay and plasticine. In the final stage I mixed regular white glue with blue acrylic paint. After putting it over the sculpted body with a flat brush, I got a nice stone-look with cracks. You can see it helped a lot.

Characters

I worked on the skeletons and bodies of the 2 characters (an old man and his servant), costumes were made by a classmate. Partial animation of the servant was done by me. Below: the servant. The guy in the third picture is a painter, done by a classmate.

Scenery

These interiors are not mine, just wanted to show what we achieved in this class. I will add a few pictures of the mansion soon.

More pictures and animation tests coming soon.

Graphics - TV commercials, corporate events...

This post is just about graphics. I think I should show some of the work I have done besides illustration, animation, 3D and compositing.

Here you are going to see mostly intros, outros, animated logos, maps, that kind of stuff. I remember having worked on a bunch of pilots as cameraman and/or animator. The following video is a compilation of the most relevant work from the years 2008 - 2010. It includes material from TV commercials, corporate events and TV shows.

Footage from policemen, firefighters, etc., is not mine. My job in this one was to create an intro for a show about cops: their everyday duty, how difficult it is to fight crime, and so on. So I took the main cut, added some filters, text and did a few masks.

I used the usual stuff for these graphics: Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects.

All logos and trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Music from danosongs.com is licensed under Creative Commons "Attribution 3.0"

The Patriots - Compositing, 2D & 3D artwork

This compilation depicts my compositing job in "The Patriots". The project was developed during the Ecuadorian Bicentennial in July - August 2009. I take credit for most of the 3D renders. Some models were donde by an intern. Texturing, lighting and rendering was my task. 2D artwork was done by former mentor & friend Gustavo Idrovo.

The Patriots ("Los Patriotas" in spanish) aired in ECTV, an Ecuadorian TV station. The show a time-period interview-like show. Important figures from the Ecuadorian revolution and further independence were portrayed by actors. Our artwork came in whenever they would recall important moments before, during and after the revolution. As you will see, there are still images and a few scenes that look like a motion-comic. If you would like to know more about this project please take a look at my previous post from July 2011: "The Patriots".

Rotoscoping - 2D illustrations (Reina de Quito 2010-2011)

Here are some scenes from the 12 spots that I worked on in 2010. By the end of every year, Quito (Ecuador's capital city) celebrates its foundation anniversary. And so, a new Queen is elected for a one-year-term. This event is known as Queen of Quito ("Reina de Quito" in spanish).

A few months ago I got the chance to work on 12 spots, each one for each candidate. My job was to put some 2D artwork, clean up the streets or the sky and so on. It was kind of easy but like any rotoscoping gig, it takes a lot of time and patience to work with masks. I worked in After Effets, Toon Boom Studio and Photoshop. I only take credit for the illustrations. The spots were developed to introduce the candidates to the city of Quito and Ecuador of course.

Rotoscoping, object replacement - Rainbow TV commercial

This was my first rotoscoping gig. It was late 2007 or early 2008. My friend Santiago Celi from Productores Render told me he needed to insert a 3D vacuum in a commecial. The idea was to replace the old model with the new one. Original footage was 35mm and I had to match the camera movement.

We had just a couple of days I think, so I asked how different is the new model from the old one. Once I saw the new model I noticed the only new things were the printed designs and the logo. My suggestion was to match-move the printed designs and changed the color of the vacuum. Well, we ended up replacing them with photographic reference from the new model. As you can see, the model remains the same, I just changed the color with a mask and moved the lateral designs in a 3D perspective in After Effects. Some light and shadows were painted over the printed designs in Photoshop.

Oh, and the camera movement had to be matched almost frame by frame because the original movement was not as smooth and straight as I would liked it to be.

This video is uploaded for the sole purpose of showing my work. I don't own this footage nor the logos. The rainbow name and logos are the property of their respective owners. 

Wire removal & rotoscoping

In this post I'm going to write a brief explanation about this job I had in the year 2009. I assisted my friend and former-teacher Alfredo Velasquez with a couple of scenes that required some "clean up". The scenes are from an Ecuadorian feature film. Unfortunately we never knew the official title.

So here is the first scene. I used After Effects and Photoshop for all the process. In After Effects I used the "simple wire removal" tool, and clone stamp wherever it was needed. Photoshop came in when I needed to build a new hat for the character. As you will see, the character is coming down from the sky but spinning thanks to the rope. Yes, that rope was just any kind of rope and the knot behind the head is HUUUGE!! Now for the last part of the scene I had to do a lot, I mean a lot of frame-by-frame painting because the rope was waving in front of the balloons.

Now the second scene was much more easy but still needed some time to get done. Prior the shooting of this scene, the mirror was fine, no dust, it was clean. Later when they shot this scene they realized somebody had out it face down. Here is where I came in. My task was to replace the mirror. It had to be flawless. I started with Photoshop, got a still frame from the clean mirror and cleaned it up with some brushes (digital brushes of course). Once the back of this mirror was ready, I jumped into After Effects. This was going to be much easier to work with because I just had to match the movement of 1 layer. Well, the match didn't work out as I expected so I took the long way. I set the layer in 3D perspective and moved it, rotated it every 5 frames, sometimes 2 or even even 1 frame. You have to be very careful when you do something like this. Just like animating a character or anything else, you need a layout or a preliminary animation path. Once you get the whole sequence, then you work with the in-between. Well, after I matched the movement I did some levels correction and some brightness/contrast tweaking. You can see that sometimes the wood piece is facing upwards so it becomes a bight brighter.

Feel free to ask any questions!! Thank you.

Scenes from Corporate Video - AVIS rent a car

Back to 2009, working with "Primal Producciones" again. This video I believe was something like 5 minutes long. The funny thing was that it was being worked on in Quito, Ecuador but was meant to be sent to Colombia! This time we were 4 animators working with After Effects. All material was provided by a creative agency, they even gave us a photo-storyboard made with the pictures that we used in the final product.

Scenes contained here are just a small selection of what I did with After Effects in a 3D camera setup. The Avis logo is property of their respective owner(s). Please be aware, this video is not intended for any commercial purposes, just meant to show what I have done in terms of animation.

Digital Painted Backgrounds

In this post I will present 3 digital backgrounds. They were not commercial, I just painted them for fun.

The first picture is what I called "Lava Volcanoes" and you can see why is that. I remember that I got my digital tablet in June 2006, once it was in my hands I started painting whatever I could. So it came to my mind the idea of mountains, orange color, purple, a sad sky, I didn't want to paint a happy place or just  a nice environment. Most people thought my inspiration was the Ecuadorian Andes mountains but the truth is, it was one of my favorite movie-art-books: The Art Of Star Wars: Episode III.

Now this image is basically a photo with a few spaceships painted over it. I remember I took this picture from my room. I lived in the valley of Cumbaya, just 15 minutes from the Ecuadorian capital city: Quito. Behind those mountains is the city, so you can tell in Ecuador we are mostly surrounded by mountains (in the highlands I mean).

The last one is a fully illustrated sky. Last year (2010) I got a call from a friend and she told me some guys were looking for a team of artists to develop an iPhone game. Our proposition seemed to be the best but unfortunately the game never came to be. It all stuck in after we presented our character designs, a background and an animation test. The story was something about samurais but the gameplay was supposed to allow you to go back and forward through the different levels. Enough said, take a look!!

The Recyclables - Episode 3 scenes

Final episode of "The Recyclables". Simone and Bottle are looking for Cardboard in the sanitary landfill. Flex and Battery think they have everything under control, but they don't. Lucas, a new friend of Simone's gets there just in time to save the good guys.

The Recyclables - Episode 2 scenes

Scenes from episode 2 of "The Recyclables". The characters are now in planet Earth, the Recyclables have become friends with a girl called Simone. Meanwhile the Toxics are on their way to kidnap Cardboard.

The Recyclables - Episode 1 scenes

Going back to the 2008-thesis-project known as "The Recyclables". I posted a detailed description of this project weeks ago, so feel free to go back through my older posts. Below, you are going to see a few completed scenes including audio tracks and subtitles!!

Outlet Viajes - Illustration & Design

By the end of 2009, Outlet Viajes was almost ready to start operations in Ecuador. The logo was already designed but the catalog not. So it was my job to take all text and pictures they gave me and develop an A4-paper-size horizontal catalog, which was a bit unusual. Anyway before I started I must say I landed this job because my "seal illustrations" where chosen among others. They were looking for a local animal that could represent their tourism agency, there were 3 options: a frigatebird, a hummingbird, and a seal (not a sea lion).

The seal was chosen but I had to redesign it. Here is the final version and also a few pics from the catalog which had both english and spanish printed versions.