Andrew Crotty Animation Mentor Showreel

Well it’s taken me years to finally post my Animation Mentor showreel but here it is. All shots were completed while I was studying on the Animation Mentor Character Animation program in 2010/2011. I’ve been meaning to polish off shots and add fancy sets and lighting but I’ll never get round to it at this stage so best to post it up. I loved doing Animation Mentor and looking back at these shots makes me appreciate the time and effort required to really push on at the craft of animation. 

'Pan' Photo Real Creature Design

Over the last couple of years I have developed a process using Photoshop to create 'Photo Real' work based on initial 2D sketches and artwork. I used this approach while working on a pre-school animation project called 'Treasure Tree' that I created with Cat Little. Since that project is still in development I cannot show any of the artwork here which is very frustrating considering the amount of work completed since 2012. 

However, I recently found an artist named Aaron Blaise who has samples of artwork and tutorials that showed a similar process to mine. Using his process as inspiration I went about creating a test piece, Pan, seen above. The process involves roughly 16 steps from sketch through to painting, texturing and faux lighting.

I've created a progression video so that you can see the process step by step. I've not followed it exactly, going back and reworking certain sections or adjusting mistakes but the below list is the basic pipeline I used as a guide.

Photo Real Process

1. Sketch
2. Refined Sketch
3. Local Colour
4. Shadow
5. Main Light
6. Deep Shadows
7. Reflected Light
8. Secondary Light
9. Highlights
10. Texture
11. Eye
12. Background Layer
13. Blurring (Depth of Field)
14. Atmosphere
15. Burned Light
16. Overlay Texture

I'll continue to work and test this process with future pieces. My main criticism with the 'Pan' piece is the lack of contrast and strong modelling on the face early on that left the face feeling to flat by the end of the artwork.

From the Archives: Animation Showcase 2005 - 2012

This showreel or showcase, as I’m calling of it, consists of animation work I created during by time working for Brown Bag Films and Monster Entertainment between 2005 and 2012. This is only a highlights reel of the TV series, commercials and short films I worked on during that time but it does give a healthy overview of the type of work done during that period.

I've been meaning to put this together for a very long time but the process of finding and editing even a fraction of the work was often daunting. For example, the TV series ‘I’m a Creepy Crawly’ which I designed and directed for Monster Entertainment in 2012 consists of 52 individual episodes which meant going through and editing material from a stack of DVDs.

Similarly, the preschool TV series ‘Wobblyland’ is represented here as an edit of the opening titles, which I animated along with animation director Matthew Darragh. In reality, I was a lead animator on the series and contributed to 26 episodes over the course of 9 months, yet here it gets a minuscule 6 seconds of screen time. When you only have 6 seconds to showcase 9 months work, it’s best in my opinion to pick a segment that is rich and complex, so thankfully, I could use the title sequence for that purpose.

The showreel is broken down into 5 sections - Television Animation, Commercial Animation, Production Process, Short film Animation and finally Animation Direction. I could write a chapter on each section explaining the roles, workflow, production experience and so on but i’ll try and be brief and outline what I actually did in each section.

Television Animation - The first section is television animation starting with the pilot for ‘I’m a Dino’. I storyboarded, art directed and animated this episode myself after completing the first session of ‘I’m an Animal’. The pilot eventually went into production many years later with a Canadian company but this was my first opportunity to really design something for animation. 
The resulting pilot is still available on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGdlZEIuH0M - and has racked up over a million views.

Also in the Television Animation section is a selection of shots from the ‘I’m an Animal’ series. As animators on this show, we created all the character, background and animation assets, essentially building the entire episode in Flash ourselves. It was a very simple but effective pipeline with each episode taking about 2 - 3 weeks to complete.

Next, we have Cat Little’s ‘Wobblyland’ for Brown Bag Films and Nick Jr. As I mentioned above, I was a lead animator on the series and worked on the production for about 9 months. It was one of the first shows made in Toon Boom’s Harmony software. Amidst the ‘I’m a’ series and ‘Wobblyland’ is the TV special for ‘Crap Rap - Tidy Towns and Tangerines’, directed by Nicky Phelan. Myself and Erica Lack shared Animation Director duties on the ‘Crap Rap’ special, which again was completed using Toon Boom Harmony. Nicky later went on to receive an Oscar nomination for Granny O’Grimm’s Sleepy Beauty. I also had the privilege of being 2D Lead Animator on the short, so that’s the Short Film section covered.

Commercial Animation - This section is for, you guest it, commercials or TV advertisements. I worked on a lot of ads with Nicky Phelan or Bronagh O'Hanlon directing. Bronagh went on to design the characters for Doc McStuffins which won a Peabody Award last week. God, the more I look at the success these two had, the more I regret leaving Brown Bag... Anyway, I learnt a great deal from these two very talented people and we tried a lot of different styles as you can see in this section. I was the animator on all these ads and also helped with the look development and production processes.

Production Processes - These are commercials/ads that I either animated some of or managed the production and look development for. All these ads were animated traditionally on paper and then brought into Harmony for Ink and Paint along with digital processing.

For example, my job on the UTV/Progressive campaign was to come up with the colouring process to create a visual look that matched Oliver Jeffers (Lost and Found) illustrations. We would start with a traditional animation test, then come up with a colouring process to match the style needed, which was then used to pitch for the job. Most of these processes we came up with were one offs as they could be very labour intensive such as hand drawing shadows that had a painted look.

Short Film Section - As mentioned earlier, I had a the privilege of being 2D lead animator on Granny O’Grimms Sleeping Beauty. Most of the work I did actually consisted of rough animation, drawn using a Wacom Tablet into Flash. The final animation was then completed using the character rigs by Eoghan Dalton and Dave Chapman. Eoghan went on to be a co-founder of Studio Powwow and Dave is Lead Art Director for HMH.

Animation Direction - Finally we have Animation Direction and a brief highlights section for the TV series ‘I’m a Creepy Crawly’ for Monster Entertainment. Creepy Crawly is part of the same franchise as ‘I’m an Animal’ and ‘I’m a Dinosaur’ so it is in some way fitting that I went onto direct the franchise considering I had animated a bunch of the first series. I also got to design all the characters in the series. That’s about 104 characters if we go on the assumption that each episode had a least two brand new characters. I learnt how to design fast on that show. Again, we’re talking about a whole series ( in fact 2 series, given the number of episodes) that I can only give 30 seconds to but actually took an entire year on and off to complete from pilots through to final episode.

Other work completed during and after this period from 2005 - 2012 includes lots of development work on shows like Gaspard and Lisa and Bing Bunny when they were considered for 2D animation. Myself and Eoghan Dalton animated a lot of 2D fish for the hit series ‘Octonauts’ but fish swim cycles are not exactly exciting showreel material. I’m sure there are a bunch of things I’m forgetting to include or talk about but it’s been nice to have to chance to look back at some of this work again and put together this little reel.

From The Archives: Bird Food Concept Art

While having a root around an old hard drive, I came across some concept art I did when working for Brown Bag Films. Myself and Richard Keane had been bouncing ideas around for a short and Richard came up with the concept and story for a short film about a man who has to defend his lunch from a gang of pigeons. Richard went on write and direct the short film for Brown Bag films but these are some of my early sketches based on our conversations to get the ball rolling on developing the short.

You can see a teaser trailer for the short film here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeLv21oJULY

Sketch Club 10th March 2015

I completed these Caricature sketches of the students and staff in LIT Clonmel during a Sketch Club session in March. I run the session on Tuesday evenings and try to provide different things to draw like life drawing with costumes and props. In this session we used an application on the mac called Photo booth, which allows you to warp peoples faces and projected up on a big screen for everyone to draw. You can see all the sessions drawings on our Sketch Club Facebook page here -https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.843513169043812.1073741830.841008369294292&type=1

Sketch Club Military Poster

For this week's Sketch Club, I asked one of my students to bring in some of their extensive World War II memorabilia such as Gun Props, Gas Masks and Uniforms. To promote the session I decided to design an image using old WWII photographs for reference and then create a comic book style Illustration using a mish mash of styles from Darwyn Cooke, Joe Kubert and Frank Millar.

Sketch Club Poster Design

A couple of weeks back, I started to run a Tuesday night drawing session for students and staff. To help promote it, I decided to create a poster and logo for print and a Facebook presence. I toyed around with lots of ideas but settled on a simple illustration of costumed characters armed with drawing equipment. Most of the drawing sessions consist of a model in costume so this idea seemed like a simple fit. I gathered a bunch of reference for characters and the background and set to work.

After roughing out a bunch of characters in my sketch book, I had a basic line up and set about comping together the poster layout in Photoshop. I scanned in my rough characters, made some adjustments and changed some characters completely before printing them out at a larger scale and cleaning up the rough designs for each character. This is where I refined the designs and poster layout beyond the very rough stage. I also mocked up the background artwork on a separate page and scanned it into Photoshop. 

With the characters cleaned up and the layout scanned in, I set about comping the poster and experimenting with type and logo designs. The initial mock-up above has a Led Zeppelin inspired type face which I ended up abandoning for something simpler and suitable for the box frame limitations of the Face Book page layout.

With the layout working, traditionally inking the characters and background artwork was next. I used the Faber-Castell PITT artist pens which include some brush pens which I had wanted to try out for a while. The inking style was influenced by Skottie Young and Bill Watterson. 

For me, the traditional inking process is still faster than digital inking partially because of the scale I'm working at and the fact that you can't screw it up and that pressure leads to more focus and less meandering over lines and placement.

The logo design needed to change from the initial mock-up, so I set about coming up with an alternative. I settled on a mixture of hand written script and digital type faces.
I'd seen plenty of similar examples and had not set about to reinvent the wheel for a simple poster. I sat down for about an hour and wrote out the word 'Sketch' as many types in as many variations I could think of, then narrowed down the selection and settled on 10 that I was happy with. These where brought into Photoshop and comped together with digital type faces.

The inked artwork and new logo design were finally brought into Photoshop and painted digitally using some simple brushes to create a flat opaque design with graphic shadows and highlights. The last step was to colour the Logo design in a colour that sat kindly with the illustration.

From the Archives: Zombi

Zombi was a piece created a number of years ago when I was enrolled at Animation Mentor. When I was not working on my animation assignments, I tried to work to improve my illustration work. This illustration was produced off the back of the Goreball design work, which also included zombies but had a more contemporary/apocalyptic theme and aesthetic. He's even wearing Adidas runners!

The first step in the process was to complete a traditional pencil sketch. This was a large drawing on A3 cartridge paper that I scanned in and reworked in a couple of passes to get the pose working. Once I had a very rough working drawing, I brought the image into Photoshop and did a clean up pass while maintaining the scratchiness of the original sketch.  

I then created a Greyscale value pass or painting on a multiply layer working out the lighting and atmosphere before even touching any colour. I struggled a lot with understanding colour for many years and have found the process of separating value from colour (Hue and Saturation) a helpful process.

I kept working the values, pushing the contrast to push the character out from the background. The style is contemporary comicbook blending line art and painting but never moving into pure illustrative painting. The line art was re-introduced at this stage and highlights and details painted in. Without adding any Hue (colour) I knew that the values would work with any colour wash.

With the colour wash, I wanted something vivid and dynamic. Red is not a colour I commonly use in my work. I tend to favour blues, neutral values like browns or oranges and occasionally purples or greens. The colour wash was applied on a blend mode layer on top of the value pass in Photoshop, either set as a Multiply or Overlay layer.

The next step in the process was an eye opener for me. I typically would paint the main character palette on a layer under the main wash so that any colour I applied would blend with the main scene colour ( in this case, red). The problem with this is that the colour is washed out or over powered by the main scene colour but it does give a good starting point anything as an underlay or under painting.

I could then colour pick values from the under painting and paint these on a new layer over the existing colour knowing that the palette will work. I would also use pictures and textures on multiply or overlay layers over the opaque painting and mask them out to fit the different shapes like skin or cloth. 

From the Archives: Encounter

A short animated film about ideas,taking control and enterprise created by Melinko Productions in 2005. Directed by Dave Chapman, Music by Cat Little, Animation by Andrew Crotty (me) and Composited by Aoife Greenham.

This film was completed in one week around October or November 2005. I had just finished work experience with Boulder Media and was looking for work in the animation industry in Dublin. Luckily, I had a few friends who were producing shorts and independent animation work and they asked me to animate this short. At the time, it was great as I really needed something to keep me tied over and the final film was a main part of my portfolio showreel I used when applying to Brown Bag Films.

The process of producing a finished product every one to two weeks would be my bread and butter for the following few years when working freelance on shows like I'm an Animal and Crap Rap for Brown Bag Films. In fact, I think the majority of my working life as an animator has been on short turnaround projects like this one, be it TV episodes or commercials.

It's nice to look back at something like this nearly 10 years later and see some of the gags still stand up.

'Mick' Animation and Colour Tests

Here's the first completed animation test for the character 'Mick'. The design, style and animation has to be simple and quick to do while still showing a lot of character and personality. This was complete using a Cintiq Companion and Toon Boom Animate Pro.

Next I have the fully cleaned up animation with full colour and drop shadow. The final design style of the show will probably be more rough and ready with 'scratchier' line art but this does give an idea of a higher quality finish.

TV Animation Development Work Part 02

Above shows the complete process from character design to finished production still for Angler Fish.

Before a design can be approved, multiple versions need to be created and sent to the shows producers for feedback and approval. 

My workflow is to produce three designs for each character and have the producer/director choose their favourite. 

Any fixes or requested changes are then made to this design and sent again for final approval.

Once the design is fully approved, it goes to clean up. For a vector based show like this, i’ll do my clean up in Adobe Flash, drawing directly into the application using a Wacom Tablet.

Anticipation and Path of Action

Anticipation and path of action animation test based on Jason Ryan's Ramp up tutorials.