Just finished up this walk cycle with Greg Peltz’s awesome Knockout rig from his Ringling short, “Hit N Run.” He was kind enough to let me use it for some tests at home. (Thanks Greg!) Comments and critiques welcome!

I did this over a few free after-work hours when I was on Cats & Dogs 2. I had never animated a quadruped before, so I wanted to try something small to see if I could get a handle on it. It’s not finished by any means, but it was a fun little test!

(PS. If you have trouble getting the video to play, try opening it in a new tab or window. Some browsers are being a bit sassy about the embedded video!)

I was lucky enough to work on this project for eight months as a junior animator. My work there was split between doing my own shots, and working on background characters for other animators.

Here are the shots that I was fully responsible for – except for the slow-mo hamburger eating shot, where I only did the two people in the left foreground, and the mayor on the TV by the amazing Zach Parrish. Don’t watch if you haven’t seen the movie yet! :)

I realized just now I never posted about it, but my team won (well, tied for) 2nd place in FJORG! You can watch our movie here:

The magical Ms. Olivares provided the art direction for our short, so I can’t take credit at all for how awesome it looks. I moved things around in Maya. And provided moral and emotional support.

If you’d like to find out more about FJORG, here’s a documentary created by Mike Shu, affectionately known as The Steadicam Guy. I think it sums up the experience nicely. (AND LOOK WE’RE IN THE THUMBNAIL IMAGE!)

I finally uploaded the “high res” version of my thesis onto my website. Just in case anyone’s interested, click the image to see it in all its 480p glory:

Woo!