I’ve just submitted my film ‘Short and Sweet’ to my various online channels! The original plan wasn’t to create this for Valentines Day, but with the themes, we decided to hold off and put it out on the day. Admittedly, this has been sitting on my hard drive for a long time, so I’m happy to finally have it out. You’ll probably recognise the style of the characters from 24 in 24. They’re from a series we have on the backburner called ‘Wods’ and we’ve got a whole universe of these characters planned out. Hania did a great job on the music, as always. Eric Gusky (who also did voices for Tarboy and Make Snacks not War) took care of all the characters’ little noises.

You can also view the Flash version of  Short and Sweet on my Newgrounds page here: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/590038

The video has been viewed on Mike’s personal Vimeo account nearly 200 000 times in the last day or so, and shot strait to the front page of Reddit. People are really interested in the personal story behind the piece. Congrats to Mike and Christie and all the best on their Wedding preparations!

It’s been a pretty draining couple of weeks. We only got to our 20th animation on the day before we completely burnt out and couldn’t go on any longer. Over the next few days I was determined to finish off the remaining 4, but it was so draining even trying to completely a minimal amount of animation. I’m noly just recovering from a pain in the upp shoulder that I developed over the day from using the mouse for such a long period.

It’s a bummer that we couldn’t get them all finished in the allocated time, but we’re overall happy with the quality this year, even if some of them turned out rather cringe-worthy. Josiah Brooks did the male voices for the Toast and Cloud series, and he did a fantastic job. We used some of the left over audio to create other animations such as Gross Nyan Cat. Hania Lee did the voice for Toast’s daughter, Katie. We’ll probably do an extended version of Fez Guy at some point.

Doing this project was a reminder how much I need to start getting out a few smaller projects in between my larger films. Getting one film out per year lets me really focus on quality, but it’s not exactly sustainable in the long run unless I’m continuously growing my fan base by periodically releasing content.

I’ve separated out some of the videos from 24in24 and made them into their own submissions on youtube. One video contains only the episodes from Toast and Cloud, and another is just Gross Nyan Cat. They aren’t really substantial enough for my to post them as individual submissions on Newgrounds I don’t think. It’ll be interesting to see if it’s beneficial in the end.

Thanks to everyone who tuned into the live broadcast to contribute their ideas!

Live from 8am, Saturday the 3rd of December, Brisbane Australia time.

Watch it on Ustream here http://www.ustream.tv/channel/james-lee-animation

Hania and I are once again doing our 24in24 challenge. For those who missed out last year, the idea is simple; we aim to create 24 individual animated pieces in the space of 24 hours. The idea was inspired by the 24 Hour Comic Day; an event started by comic guru Scott McCloud. All art, animation and music must be created within the day. Our viewers are able to communicate with us via chat, and give ideas on what they’d like to see animated. The interactivity aspect between us and the viewers played a major role and was a lot of fun last year.

For everyone around the world, your local start time will be different. Here’s a few different times depending on where you are.

8:00 a.m. Saturday December 3, 2011 in Australia/Brisbane
9:00 a.m. Saturday December 3, 2011 in Australia/Sydney/Melbourne
5:00 p.m. Friday December 2, 2011 in America/New_York
2:00 p.m. Friday December 2, 2011 in America/Los_Angeles
10:00 p.m. Friday December 2, 2011 in Europe/London

You can work out your own local time here http://www.timezoneconverter.com/cgi-b in/tzc.tzc

The format the same this year, but hoping to improve on the overall quality compared to last year. We’re aiming to do more voice work and reduce the number of ‘filler’ pieces that we did last year. We’ll be trying our best to end it with something great, as opposed to last year’s lackluster 24th animation.

We’ll be keeping names of people who contribute as we go, so that we can place the in the credits at the end once it’s all compiled. While we’ll make every effort to note down everyone’s name, due to the time constraints, it’s very easy to have someone slip through the radar. As such, we can’t guarantee that everyone who contributes will end up in the credits, but we’ll do everything we can.

Last year we broke our promised to have the final piece compiled and up on Newgrounds and Youtube within 2 hours of completion and got it in late. We aren’t making that promise this year, as we’ll be so fatigued at the end that it will be too easy to mess up the final release due to a stupid tired mistake. We’ll try and get it out the next day, but allow up to a week if there are any technical difficulties during compositing.

We hope to see the same faces from last year, as well as some new ones this year. It’ll be fun for all, so tune in and help us out!

Here’s our 24in24 from last year.

Flash is very capable traditional animation software, so why use a rig in the first place? The number one reason for me is time. While symbol animation compromises on finer detailed movement, it makes up for it in economy. To make a film like Tarboy, symbol animation is much more practical to my workflow.

For the characters in Tarboy 2, I wanted a higher degree of flexible movement, such as movable shoulders and a bendable torso. I also wanted each of the joints in the arms and legs to be able to rotate a full 360 degrees, so this needed to be factored into the design of the character. This meant that each of these joints needed to be a perfect circle, so no angled joints in the elbows, shoulders or knees. The benefit of using this method, is that if I wanted to really lift the arm, I wouldn’t need to swap out a new arm symbol once the joint reaches it’s limits. Because the arm has a 360 degree range of motion, I’ve removed all shadows from the arms and legs. Otherwise, once the symbol rotates 180 degrees, a shadow that exists on the under side of the arm would now be on top. If I wanted to, I could make several variations of this symbol with varied shadows, and swap them out depending on the angle of the arm. In the end, I decided it would be too messy for a detail that would be barely noticed.

The torso is broken in to three segments; the hips, the waist and the chest. At the ends of each symbol are more ball joints, that allow me to create rotating arcs in the body. For Nash’s character, I wanted him to have a strong hunch, but wanted the rig to be expressive enough that it could bend in the opposite direction if his mood was to dramatically change. The shoulder area is another place I wanted some control, so that when Nash raises his arm, it can flow properly into the torso. I can also raise or lower the shoulders to make him seem tense or relaxed.

In the end, it takes a bit more time to move all of these parts around in Flash, but the degree of control I have makes up for it. I’d like to use more hybrid techniques, using more traditional animation for some of the features. I’m trying to bring something new to each shot to keep the drawings fresh, as symbol animation can look a bit repetitive after a while.

Tarboy 2 is nearly 50 percent complete, and so far we’re on schedule to getting it released this year.

We just released our film ‘Purged’ on youtube. The film was completed before I started work on Tarboy, and I figured it was about time I packaged and released it. It was my third year animation project in college and the first larger scale short film I completed. It was also the first project completed that Hania and I collaborated on.

My overall pipeline for animation looked something like this:

1.Draw images on paper.

2. Scan into Photoshop for digital paint.

3. Bring into morphing software for head turns

4. Export into Flash for character animation.

5. Export into After Effects for compositing.

6. Export into Premier for Editing.
I’m thinking this will receive a mixed response, but at this stage I’m glad it’s finally out.

Hope you enjoy it, check out the ‘making of’ videos below if you want to learn more about my messy pre-production process.

You can also view Purged in Flash format on Here on Newgrounds and Here and DeviantArt.

A couple of people have asked me if I have a twitter. I do have links around the place pointing to my page, but I’ve never made a formal post about where to find me. You can find me on twitter here twitter.com/jameslee03

I often post small updates about my work and everyday stuff. Animators may find it useful.

It’s been a very long weekend. 32 hours ago we started animation and music, and finished all 24 shorts 24 hours later. During production, members of Newgrounds, Deviantart and the general web were watching us on live chat, helping out with ideas as we went along. It was amazing to see the project evolve, as ideas from different people would move around so quickly.

It was very physically exhausting. I hit a wall very early on in the project and was finding it really difficult to keep up the pace. The clock was chasing us from the moment we started and didn’t stop until the final animation. I think I had about 45 minutes worth of break time for the entire day.

We learnt a heap over this weekend, and while each segment is a bit rough around the edges, we’re really pleased with how it all turned out. We thought that by the end everything would have turned to garbage, but it was surprising to see that the quality actually improved much later.

The interesting thing about working under these conditions is that it’s so easy to just follow any creative whim. You’re actually kind of forced to. You have so little time to actually stop and think, and you look back afterwards kind of surprised how you never thought such a seemingly stupid idea would actually work.

Anyway, here it is. Quality varies dramatically between each piece.

You can download the music from 24 in 24 from Hania’s website here: http://www.hanialee.com/?page_id=200

Thanks to all who stayed to watch, contributed ideas or showed support this weekend!

I’ll write a more detailed post about it shortly.