[Casting] Finding the voice

An important part in my animations is strong voice acting, without it my characters would be lacking in... character! Over the years I've made a few connections across the internet to voice actors and animators, these connections come in handy when I'm auditioning for voices. In this post are some videos I've put together for each characters auditions.

[Influence] Blast from the past

When taking some time off working, I decided to revisit one of my old childhood favourite shows, Sonic the Hedgehog SatAM. When watching it, I realised that my animation practice is looking similar to these older styles of shows, with the characters being animated frame by frame over a painted background. In my case the characters are animated in Flash with basic cel shading (similar to the shows) whereas the backgrounds are drawn with a mix of Flash and Photoshop, and then animated in After Effects, leaving a clear difference in detail between the two. This seems to be a huge difference to more modern shows, as the backgrounds seem to fit in a lot better with the overall art style (thanks to the wonders of digital animation over traditional cel animation) I just find it interesting that my practices seem to be heading in the opposite direction to mainstream television animation. These pictures should illustrate my point:

Sonic SatAM (1993)

Phinneas and Ferb (2007)

Oddball (2012)

[Animation practice] Various breakdowns

Mental? No... Not fully, anyway!
I'm talking of course, about animation breakdowns!
With the improvements I'm trying to make in Flash, there are obviously some bits I was putting a lot more thought into, and decided to show the process of making them.
Here's a selection of animation breakdowns!
Redi head turn
Antique run 180 spin
Pikachu

[Fan project] Timekeeper Contest

With the official beginning of the Oddball series, I decided to have some fan interaction in the form of a competition. Oddball features a race of mechanical clock beings called Timekeepers, the aim of the comptetition was to design one of these for a background role.
To judge the competition I got the help of two classmates, Jack and Emma. The results of the competition can be found here

The entries and ideas in this competition really showed that through my streams and limited information, the fans have gained a very strong understanding of the Oddball world, even before the actual story unfolds. All in all I really enjoyed this chance to interact more with people and get a better understanding of how well I establish my ideas through limited information!

After the contest I then had a go at creating a different style of Timekeeper. The canon ones will be more steampunk influenced and use traditional grim reaper scythes, but to test out my drawing skills, I created a futuristic, gun wielding character, shown below:

[Personal project] Oddball: Chapter 1 and 2

In my time as an animator (5 years this year on the internet) I've started to get some attention and even amassed a small fanbase. While I'm at University I want to make sure that I keep up with my personal work so that I don't lose this following. For the past 2 years I've had a series on the shelf called Oddball. I've been waiting for the point when I feel my animation is good enough to throw at an ongoing series, and it's finally begun. The 4 episodes from the past (each radically different from the last) have all gone down well, and a lot of people were already sending in fan art and feedback.
Around my 20th birthday, I finally decided it was time to give it my all.
Starting with a series of Livestream videos that my Deviant Art fans could attend, I revealed the official "origins" of Oddball would be explained. This was received well as people were generally excited and full of questions in the streams.
Here is some sped up footage of the actual live animation process, hopefully the dedication to my own work as well as class work will show, as these streams often went for 10 hours or more, well into the morning:


As the episode went along and got more complex, Flash was having trouble coping with the file size of a 7 minute video, so I came to the decision to split it into chapters, and to my luck, fans agreed.
After two months of balancing with my University work, I managed to release Oddball chapter 1 on April 27th:


Due to the episode being split, I was worried that the 56 second prologue may be too short and disinteresting, however the viewers responded extremely well and I've yet to receive negative feedback.

I also managed to complete the second chapter relatively quickly, shown above. Below is the teaser "poster" I used to promote it on my Deviant Art page. The third chapter is currently undergoing some re-writing, but should be out in the holidays.

I can only hope now that this summer break brings a great start to Oddball!