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

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.

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.

Fox Run

I animated this run cycle based on a set of water colour sketches of a fox character I did a few years ago. I animated the cycle in Adobe Flash CC on my Wacom Companion which is a really great piece of tech. My plan for this cycle is to try and paint it up in Photoshop to see if I can achieve the same water colour style as the original sketches below.

From The Archives: Gore Ball

Another blast from the past here with Gore Ball!!! I designed these Icons/Posters for an indy iPhone game called Gore Ball. It was one of my first freelance design jobs after leaving one the major animation studios in Ireland and I had just begun to study full time on Animation Mentor. I was chuffed to be doing some design work as I felt I didn't get to do enough when working in the industry. 

Anyway I think these are interesting little pieces to show. I have a bunch of other Gore Ball material like Logos and a proper poster design that I need to dig out from some old laptop or hard drive. Not sure what became of Gore Ball the game in the end but I like the style of these icons.

       

From The Archives: I'm A Creepy Crawly

I'm going to start posting some older character design work that I've completed over the last few years. A lot of the design work I do is tied up in development and NDA's and I don't have a huge amount of time to pursue personal projects with teaching and development work. Its a good complaint to have though as I've seen some of my work through to final animation for TV. 
Creepy Crawly is one such example, it's a series I designed and directed for Monster Entertainment based in Ireland and has been shown in a bunch of countries on Discovery Asia, ABC Australia, DR Denmark, TVO Canada, RTE Ireland, YLE Finland and the last I heard its on Tiny Pop in the UK. 
The following, in my opinion, are some of the stronger designs completed. I had about 52 insect characters to design for the series and insects are not exactly the cutest or easiest creatures to design but I tried my best to make them appealing and still a little bit creepy.