Handycat

Here’s a fun clip from HANDYCAT that features an animated cycle.

The beginning and the end of this scene consist of animation that is only able to be used once. The middle part, however, uses the same cycle of animation several times over - it’s just repositioned. It’s an economical way to get a lot of “mileage” out of a few drawings, yet the scene looks great.

If the controls at the bottom of the video work on your browser, you can step through the animation and see where one cycle ends and the other picks-up.

Click here to see it.

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Currently our studio is working on a pre-school product featuring a character we developed a few years ago called Crawford the Cat.
This production is in its initial stages, and many processes are underway. Some of the track has been recorded, and the background style and other designs are all but finalized. Below is a background/concept piece for a nighttime scene in the show. It was done by G. Brian Reynolds and was rendered on the Flash stage.

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Here’s another short Pencil Test from HANDYCAT by G. Brian Reynolds. This one is of Drillbit jumping out of the truck window. Fellow creator Jeff DeGrandis commented that the drawings retain energy in the rough stage. He’s right. There is a special kind of “life” in these drawings that is unique unto themselves. It’s kind of hard to explain. I always enjoy looking at pencil tests and, of course, the finished animation too. Sometimes they feel the same, sometimes they don’t, but the comparison is always interesting.

Here’s scene 77 Pencil Test & Color
(Be patient - the pencil tests take longer to load.)

The O.S. screaming is once again provided by Rob Paulsen. Great lungs, Rob!

~Russ Harris

I was digging through the archives this week and found the above pencil test from the HANDYCAT short. This was a rough, motion test animated by G. Brian Reynolds. At the studio, we use a software program called FlipBook to test animation. Sometimes the drawings are then cleaned up and then imported into Flash for manipulation. With this particular test, however, the drawings were not cleaned up, and the pencil test was simply imported into Flash to be used as a guide. HANDYCAT head shapes, body shapes, leg shapes, and other shapes were then aligned with the pencil test guide to make the final scene.

FlipBook and Flash Animation are terrific tools, but it takes a skilled animator to get the best out of them. Brian is one such animator.

Click the link below to see Brian’s pencil test and the color version of the scene. Rob Paulsen provides Handycat’s funny coughs.

Handycat [Read more…]