Half Circle News!

4:55PM - Bunnies like to be Counted

This is just a little short I did in a couple of hours. A friend posted this audio clip online and I felt compelled to animate to it. Yay for found audio!

6:15PM - 2006 FCTV Spots

With only a week between Further Confusion and I, I thought I'd better try to get some animation done. With the help of my good friend Jon, we managed _TWO_ thirty second spots. The first, which I did solo is a rather simple 3D project created in Maya 5. The Archery Spot,250K Quicktime 7

The second piece done in a scant four days is hand drawn, with ink and paint in ToonBoom. Jon did the keys, I did inbetweens,cleanup, ink and paint, and the sound composition and mixing. King Artillo

7:47AM - Dailies

Pencil test of opening shot for the 'Give your child half a chance' short. 320x240 15FPS silent, 225K Requires Quicktime 7 codec.

7:43AM - Ramping up Production

I've hit a slow time in my 'day job' which means I'll be ramping up animation production for a bit until I find more work.

On a related note the white 'light machine grease' is not the best stuff for the gears on an animation stand. Go with the black heavy-weight stuff that is rated for higher temperatures. I just had to strip, clean, and regrease the Neilson Hordell because the grease had turned into varnish. The upshot is that I realized this before the DeAnza animation stand project and used the correct grease on that stand.

11:19AM - Changes at Half Circle

Finished a major website redesign. A 'games' section will be added soon to cover some of the Flash and Java games I've put together. There should also be new animation up soon. I took some time off posting 'finished' works to study motion. Lots of fflour sacks and stick figures. Stuff I'm enjoying and happy with but it's not worth posting. I've also been busy in the still-arts. These get posted under the art section but generally don't feel significant enough to update the main page.

Finally, I should announce The 1.3 version of my BVH exporter is now available at this link. This version fixes a couple of calculation problems for a small set of values and adds an option to change the rotate order of the joints for the root joint and child joints.

Along with the BVH exporter, you can click here to download a fully rigged model which is compatible with Second Life, an interactive social environment available for free on Mac and PC, where you can model, animate, and interact with other people in real time.

That's all for now. New animations, art, and games coming soon!

3:06PM - Free BVH importer and exporter for Maya 5

BVH or Biovision Hierarchy is one of the standards for motion capture. It's a straight-forward text-based file format which defines a system of bones. Curiously, while this format is available for many 3D packages, it wasn't included in Maya. I needed it for a project so I searched the web and found an importer and a spec, and proceeded to spend the next few weeks learning smart-sounding words like Euler Angles, Matrix Rotations, and Quaternions. Now it's complete! An improved and debugged BVH importer and a glossy BVH exporter Both are written in MEL and have been tested with Maya 5.0.1 on the Macintosh. Any questions, comments, complaints, feature requests, bug observations, etc should be directed to e-mail.

1:49AM - FCTV 2005 Commercials are Up!

Faux News	Dancing Hieroglyphs	Decisions Decisions
For 2005, I decided it was time to make FCTV commercials that weren't all tags for FCTV, and were, instead, wear little vinettes of their own. The dancing hieroglyphs, however, is in keeping with the year's theme of Further Confusion and is a list of the major people working on the channel. I think I gave myself the shortest of all the entries because that wall scene was a royal pain. :) Anyhow, it was great year with lots of good people!

10:15AM - DeAnza Animation Stand Restoration

Restoration of the DeAnza animation stand (an old 16MM stand from the former Colossal Films studio) is now well underway.

• The stand is fully re-assembled and all of the wiring has been checked.
• Manual composite motion controls are currently very loose but appear to just need adjustment.
• Counter-balance weight needs to be reduced, but camera head motor is operational and responds to control.
• All lights function well and mounts are solid.
• Platten glass cylinoid is not operating, suspect damaged connector is at fault.

Further repairs and photographs in a few days.

-DV

1:13AM - The November 10-Second Club

This month's 10-second club seemed like a bit of a challenge, a very rapidfire dense monologue by Jim Carey excerpted from Liar Liar So I gave it a try.

Watch it here!

12:06PM - Free As a Bird complete

After a lot of delays and a lot of work, Free As a Bird is now complete. At almost two years in the making, this project blends tradition and computer 2D animation techniques. Everything was drawn, inked, and painstakingly hand-colored with charcoal, then photographed on an old Nelson Hordell animation stand with a digital camera. From there, work was 'cut out' with Photoshop and composited together with After Effects. Runtime for this film is approximately 4 minutes. File is a 5.5Meg Quicktime Movie.

10:48AM - Recent Events at Half Circle

Just because the news hasn't been updated doesn't mean there's been no animation.

Recently completed, a 20-second title for a youth program for the West Bloomfield Township Public Library of Michigan

Also, completed, a cute little chase scene, sort of testing out the basic screen-planning mode features of ToonBoom.

Coming up for October, Free as a Bird should finish post production and finally be complete.

12:38PM - Art Exchange Animation

At Further Confusion 2004 I had the pleasure of meeting Flare Starfire, a costumer and musician. Since I'm always on the lookout for contacts with musical talent (getting a score for an animated piece can be very trying) this was a great opportunity to do some trading. So I've been working on a mixable set of animated loops of his character in exchange for use of some of his music in some of my future animation. This is the first sequence, actually composed itself of 3 shorter loops and 4 interconnecting pieces. Future updates will be posted when available.

250K Flash animation

1:20PM - June 10-second Club

June was my first entry in the 10-second club. (If you're not familiar with it, check out The 10 Second Club" at this link! Great fun, great people, and great animation! June was an audio clip from Joe Murray's fantastic series, Rocko's Modern Life My entry also connected back to another classic of american animation. See if you can guess what it is. :)

June entry, 1.5M MPeg 1

3:38AM - MiniQuest

Created a very short adventure game in Flash Actionscript as an experiment and proof of concept. While this game only has about five minutes of playtime it does outline some important abilities in Flash. Most notably, the console screen which holds the inventory and window frame also has a program layer in it. This layer is active in all the rooms but is only programmed one time on the console object. Rather handy.

11:39PM - Production Proofs Online!

Model sheets, pencil tests, and other goodies from the new Persimmon animation are now available online! Click on the model sheet and take a look around! More shots will be coming off the drawing board ASAP!

12:22AM - Project Updates

Charcoal shading of Free as a Bird continues as planned, expected completion date is around the end of May.

The first Persimmon the Squirrel animation, Sonic Boom has been storyboarded and is now on the drawing board. The opening sequence has completed pencil-test and is animated at a full 24 frames per second. http://circle.twu.net/animate/pencil/persimmon_web.mov

7:25PM - Website Redesign

Core coding for website is now complete though not all sub-menus have been enabled yet.

Wrote a program to allow grabs of either the desktop or from webcam for periodic posting to the web. The Anima-Cam page displays status including mini-display on approximately once per 5 minute intervals.

Additional features and functionality should be completed within a week.

1:56PM - Animation Stand Upgrade

The old Neilson Hordell has never looked better! I got ahold of a fantastic Bessler M3 copy stand and merged it with the Neilson, now it's more stable and has an awsome 7 foot camera track with smooth movement! The bessler also came with a full set of lights including a backlight which perfectly fits inside the Neilson base. All that's left now is putting new handles on a few of the cranks, but stand is operational as-is.

Current photo

8:00PM - Website Testing

Testing our news page. Right now it's powered by LiveJournal because I'm cheap and lazy! :)