I have finally tended to some animation housekeeping and uploaded several animation studies and projects to YouTube.

For more about I Wake Up Dreaming, see an earlier post

Bagman was initially just a simple character I designed for use when learning how to create walk cycles and other human activities. In my imagination, I see the interior of Bagman as the location where The New T-Shirt story happens. Some day in the future, Bagman will be developed to include adventures and a sidekick who will be the T-Shirt wearing mouse that lives inside Bagman. That mouse will in turn be able to call on his sidekick in extreme emergencies… The Cute Little Mouse on his T-Shirt will come alive when needed and called upon to save the day.

It Came to Me… started out as a simple study of a head turn and a walk cycle focused on the head of a figure. Then I decided to have some fun with it.

The Soundtracks

As always happens, creating the soundtracks for my animations is the most exciting phase of the whole production. As soon as appropriate sounds begin to accompany the action, it is as if magic dust has been sprinkled on the digital files and they simply come alive! I love being able to combine my love of drawing and sound play in a single form. It is creativity heaven.

Software

I Wake Up Dreaming… was created using Toon Boom Animate Pro2. Then I treated myself to Toon Boom Harmony 10.1, which I absolutely love and which is now the heart of my animation toolkit. It makes frame-by-frame animation easy and fun to do. I am still on the long learning curve, but it is made easy by the great documentation, tutorials, and forums Toon Boom provides.

I did the compositing for all of my animations in After Effects CS6. Most of my sound work is done in Ableton Live Suite 9 with Max4Live. I am hoping to use backgrounds created in Photoshop and Painter in future animations, but nothing is in the works at this time.