Images after jump===>

A few color concepts for costume 01 in the Meteor spot.

Possible style treatment for “Punching Bag”

Scratch animatic and storyboard frames after the jump (HUGE post!).
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And here is a way for the kicks to happen on the surface of the meteor.

The mass of the meteor is slowed down by a series of rapid kicks like this,

before the jump back to the huge, mega kick to stop the meteor in it’s tracks.

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These kicks would play EXTREMELY quickly, as we don’t have much time in the :15.

So no matter how slowly they play on your machine (.gif files are processor dependent)

in the edit they would take no more than a second and change.

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And here are the still frames of the ‘boards. We tried an idea were the meteor is stopped in

it’s tracks and left suspended in the earth’s gravitational field. The cracks left on it’s smolten

surface just might look like a certain logo too.

30 sec spot for Brighthouse.

A new(er) episode of Joe is Japanese that now has Japanese & English subtitles and a little more sound design. A new version is coming with some fixes to the animation mistakes.

Regardless, we’re hoping you like this one as much as we do. In real life the Island Masta is almost as much of an idiot as he appears in this episode. Almost.

This short film is the result of a great team that worked to create the entire piece from concept to completed edit in less than six weeks. Monkey Punch was a treat to meet, and when he toured the studio he seemed very interested in the marriage of new technology that, at the time, we had only just begun to integrate into the workflow. This was one of the last projects at Fates done on paper with pencils, every frame drawn first in red, then in HB, scanned and processed for coloring, and handled digitally from that point forward, but initially as rough and tumble as the process ever gets. Today we draw our frames entirely in-system on the Cintiq platforms and RETAS software, but we’re still using the same skills… we just have the advantage of being able to Undo mistakes rather scrubbing at them with an eraser.

This one I rather liked, partly because we were able to design the animation with a grand total of about five drawings, not including the way the text itself is being “written”, which isn’t a series of frames so much as it is one drawing (the text line) which is gradually revealed frame by frame to create the illusion of being produced by the hand and pencil. The whole text block then shifts upward and the cycle begins anew.

The hand and the pencil are randomized and pushed from left to right… the end result doesn’t look like a randomized cycle (at least not unless you look closely), but it allows us to create a longer sequence with a minimal amount of drawings, and that’s usually a good thing. The final sequence as it appears in the software has several subtle differences from this one, but I’ll be danged if I can remember ‘em all.

I think part of it involved not leaving the hand disembodied, which we were told is one of those subtle Asian cultural taboos that makes people slightly uncomfortable. I don’t know how prevalent that really is, but it came down from the Japanese clients, so I gotta take it at face value. You learn something new every day, huh?

I enjoy animating silhouettes ’cause they’re a lot easier than full character work… you can hide murder in that negative space. Ultimately it becomes a matter of just following the lines, but in fact the initial rough animation for this contained a full (if incredibly scribbly) character. It wasn’t until the cleanup phase that it became a complete silhouette.

The sequence of moves is pulled directly from one of the many books we have on the shelf for reference of such things. It is, in fact, meant to evoke the style of many instructional books, hence the diagrammatic elements (which may or may not appear in the final sequence).

Personally, I don’t know much in the way of kung-fu… I can barely see my toes, much less kick ‘em over my head. If I can, though, I’ll come back and edit the comments with more detail on the specifics of the style seen (briefly) here.

46 frames, 25fps, drawn digitally. No trees are harmed in the making of this production.

©2007 HTF Studios Inc.

-EDIT-

Found the book. It’s “Chinese Kung-Fu Series 14: Five Ganzhi Meihuazhuang Techniques”, distributed by Hai Feng Publishing.

These particular frames represent (poorly, I’m sure) figures 52-61.

And of course, none of this should be taken to reflect anything in particular about the character here, I just liked the movements.