'Dinner Time' Stills

Please check out this animation on Youtube, as the file is too large to upload on this blog. The channel is JennytheNomad.
Instead, I have included some stills for you to see the details of each frame. All of these images are in-betweens that you cannot fully perceive in the animation so here they are in all their glory :)

Unleash Hell

A short lip-synch exercise. The soundtrack is from the opening scene of Gladiator!

Quelle Bonne Surprise!

An exercise in facial acting. This lady is feeling bored and fed up when a bouquet of roses bursts into the scene from an extended arm. She does a flirtatious flick of the head and flutters her eyelashes. Then a mime pops up from behind the flowers. Needless to say, she is disappointed.

As the resolution is rather low, I have posted some stills below so that you can see more detail and the inner workings of the animation!

Alternatively, for a good quality video, please visit my YouTube channel, JennytheNomad.

Minotaur

Unfortunately, there are errors in uploading this video onto the blog, so please go to my YouTube channel, JennytheNomad, where you can view this clip and others in good quality.

An exercise in acting and reacting with emotion. It was a little challenging because his emo hair covers the eyes so I relied on the body language and mouth to convey the emotion. I actually based his head on a highland cow! This minotaur is a true softy at heart.

The Kindness of Strangers

Our first lip-sync exercise. Steve recorded his children reciting popular movie lines and assigned a phrase to each of us for lip-syncing.
I sneakily chose a slovenly character so that I would only have to animate the wave of his hand and the tilt of his head to go with the dialogue! This stasis meant I could make a more decorative background :)
Can you guess the story behind this scene? Please comment with your interpretations!

Cougar

An exercise in four-legged gallops.
I chose to do a fleeing cougar using footage of a cheetah running as reference material because I wanted to exaggerate the squashing and stretching in order to make the movement expressive.
As it happens, the cheetah's torso fluxuates so much in real life that I actually had to tone it down!!
I drew the images on paper and scanned them into photoshop, where I cut out each image and deleted the background. I adore that organic texture of drawing on paper and much prefer the aesthetic appearance of this animation to those drawn straight into flash. I feel that if you combine digital imagery with material imagery, the papery texture looks intentional rather than sloppy.

Enjoy!

Toy Dog clip

This is part of a larger project I have begun working on over the holidays, involving a man's struggle to feed his two dogs.