Happy happy pinecones!

These are bg characters from the great animation series Gigglebug I'm working on as a Story and Layout artist. I just thought they are great and create happy mooood!

The design and animation you see is by Joonas Utti, the co-creator and Director of the series.

Animation Classics from upper elementary

Now this is a special post. At least for me. As those who know me and those who've been checking my blog, probably know that I'm an animation buff. I've always been.

I practically took posession of the Illusion Of Life -book from my local library.

I was also a fan of The Simpsons which had recently started on tv. So was my friend Tuomo Kokkonen. We especially were fans of that lovable comical duo, Itchy&Scratchy. So we decided to do some animation. Pretty soon we realized the obvious fact that how much labor it is and we had no idea of practical technique (like keeping things in register..).

We had a very original story idea but ended up drawing only fragments of it. We also never saw if me had actually achieved any illusion of life...So with great anticipation after almost 20 years I opened some archives and with the aid of modern tech (if only we'd had Flash&After Effects back then..) I scanned in the drawings. There wasn't much to see and pretty hard to tell what's going on but still I was quite proud what we kids had tried to do :)

I'm not quite sure which "scene" was drawn by me or Tuomo but it was supposed to be seamless story in the end anyway.

There's also, which really must be my first drawn paper animation (flipbook or two maybe before), a test with half-filled flour sack. It was inspired by the Disney-book but the animation looks more like the sack has a fit mid-air...Click the images if they don't play.

Mobile Animations

Went through my hard drive and came upon these GIF -animations exported from my old Nokia mobile phone. They were made with the excellent Animator 3000 -animation program developed at Sulake in 2007 (nowadays the guys of Secret Exit). The program unfortunately never saw the light of day :(

Good thing I exported these since I no longer have neither the phone or the program files...

Doodlecollection again + animated doodles!

The Animatricks Animation Festival is over for this year. Five days of animation screenings and I went to most of them...whew. It did get a bit tough at some point...Anyway it was great to see a lot of good animated shorts from Finland and other Nordic and Baltic countries.
The Master Class held by Paul Driessen was very inspiring and gave tools for thought. I didn't get any actual animation done on that too short of a day but maybe I'll do at least pencil test versions of the ideas I wrote down.
But! Here's at least some animated stuff ;) While I was waiting for the second last screening I doodled some sequential stuff to the festival catalog's note pages! I just couldn't resist testing out..would it actually move. It would use some inbetweening but hey it's just a doodleman!

Oh and the usual collected doodles page here too---