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.

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.

The Recyclables

A few shots from the 2D/3D animation project written by Fatima Viteri. I was in charge of 3D animation, compositing and audio post-production. This project was developed by a group of Ecuadorian artists on Fatima's request. She presented this 3-episode cartoon as part of her thesis project for the Catholic University of Leuven, in Belgium.

This was the very first shot from Episode 1, the bottle-shaped spaceship was modeled and animated in Maya by myself. The space background was painted by a former mentor and good friend of mine, Ecuadorian animator Gustavo Idrovo.

In this second shot, you will see another spaceship that I modeled. I did all the animation in both scenes (including the falling liquid) except for the characters and the spaceship's interior.

Now the spaceship is about to land in our planet. The smoke and compositing where done in After Effects.

Here you will see a compilation of some of the 3D vehicles that I animated. Please keep in mind that they were provided to me, I am not the author nor the owner. My job was to animate them and do the final compositing.

Mini Marathon Ciudad de Quito TV Spots

With my friends at Productores Render I got the chance to do my first TV commercial on my own, at least a part of it. For two consecutive years I was involved with the Mini Marathon TV commercials. First year I only did one, cut-out animation technique was used for both characters that were already designed by the time I came in.

Take a look at the "third edition" of the Mini Marathon commercial (May 2008), the first 15 seconds were done by myself overnight. Funny thing, I thought that working overnight was already over once I was done with studying... I was wrong. In the animation industry you have to be ready for this sort of things.

Now here is the TV commercial I work on for the "fourth edition" (May 2009). I did a couple that were very similar. Here is one of them. First 11 seconds were animated by myself, backgrounds are also mine. That year I designed two new characters because we were asked to show the wide etnicity that Ecuador has. The rest of the commercial will show you a few illustrated backgrounds I did with photographic reference. Too bad the lip-sync was not accurate; it was requested when the commercial was already done.