Assorted Aye-Aye (10 years on)

Hey,

In 2007 I was studying hand drawn animation at Freelance Animation School. 

For my final year project I was developing a 2 minute cartoon short called "An eye for an Aye-Aye".

I never finished the cartoon but I did work on it on-and-off for a few years, experimenting with different software.

Well 10 years on, here is some various production art from over the years.

Model Sheets & Style guides:

Hand drawn then cleaned up, scanned and coloured in Photoshop.

Early concepts and designs:

At this stage I knew I wanted an adversarial relationship with a man getting tormented by a small, adorable animal.

The animal was a non-specific Cat/ Racoon type creature which had made itself at home in the mans apartment.

These early style concepts were based on Looney Tunes cartoons.

You can see some of the mans poses are from Wile. E Coyote and Sylvester the Cat while one of the animals poses is from the Chuck Jones cartoon "Feed the kitty". 

Then the title came to me and the settings and characters came into focus.

Fun fact: "An eye for an Aye-Aye" is also the name of an episode of 'The Sylvester and Tweety mysteries'.

"A beard and racoon cartoon" was an early concept for Aye-Aye.

Development:

 False advertising:
I would love to work the characters of the Aye-Aye and Tim Portans into a cartoon one day but as it currently stands I will simply say...

Rest in peace "An eye for an Aye-Aye" 2007 - 2017.

Cheerio!

Superhero Shots

 In 2009, I created some brief animated shots of Superhero animation, this was to be used in the background of a scene in a live action short film by Midnight Kingdom Films.

The shots were animated traditionally with Pencil on Paper.

The animation was digitally cleaned up, painted and composited with open source software.

Software used included Monkey Jam for linetesting, Pencil for clean up, Gimp for ink and paint and Wax for compositing.

 

Superhero Linetests from Jeff Cook on Vimeo.

Other Links:
View 'Michael John Shadbolt' on YouTube.
My previous post on the Open Source Software used.

"Tend to my Creations"

Ah It's so good to finally have a weekend where I can just tend to my creations, if only ever so slightly.

I've had time to sketch up some designs for a new character today and over this Easter weekend I have been Cleaning Up some more of my short film. Above is a Clean Up colour render and the original pencil sketch which it was Cleaned Up from. This is just a quick render though, the colours and background will be different in the final form.

Happy Easter!

"An Eye for an Aye-Aye" Shot Progression

The cartoon I am making is called "An Eye for an Aye-Aye", I started it a few years back when I was studying animation. Recently I have started working on it again in my spare time and using as much freeware as I can to get it completed.

This sequence shows the development of one shot from the cartoon. It has an early pencil test, a more detailed pencil test, the digitally cleaned up line, the digitally coloured cel and the final composite. The linetests are actually from late 2007, whereas the clean up and colouring is from up to a few days ago. I hope you will excuse the lineboil and other little nitpicks and enjoy this little sequence.

This was cleaned up with a program called Pencil, All the colouring was done in GIMP and composited in WAX.


Thanks for dropping by.

Regurgitate Key Frames

Some coloured key frames from a little animation I did a few months back.

After a day of creating a piece of background art and compositing a scene of animation, I needed to quickly throw something else together to feel that much more productive.

Happy Easter Weekend guys.