The Fish King Final Scene

Here is the final scene from the Fish King. It took me about five hours to animate, I think I now need chiropractic treatment from being slouched over the entire time.

Here are some comments on the scene:

• I accidentally bumped the camera from the previous scene. I did my best to put it back in its original position, so there will be a slight difference in camera position between the last two scenes.
• The first half with the squid walking and the king talking is some of the smoothest animation I've ever done! Woot!
• The squid jumping away is WAY too quick! I got too caught up in the king's lip syn and forgot to start the squid jumping sooner. I had to make the jump really quick so that the King's sync still matched his "W-o-a-h!" when he falls. However, I did animate a lot of in-between frames just in case, so I'll see if I can put those back in somehow.
• Originally, I was going to have water splash out of the cart when the King falls out (he is a fish), but by the time it came around to animating that part, it was already past midnight and I just wanted to go to bed.
• I still have a lot of touching up to do on the frames and I have to fix some of the lip sync.

The Fish King is Getting Annoyed

3rd scene comments: - for some reason I can't seem to animate the squid's arms quite right anymore - not going to worry about the speed differences of the cart - two and a half hours for 4 seconds. Phew!

The FISH King Take 2

And here's the second scene! It took nearly 5 hours to animate and really made me wish I had a camera and software that were MADE for STOPMOTION!

In order to see if I was on the right track with the movements, I would have to take some frames, name them individually and save them to a folder, then import them into my video editing software, align them together and then play them back. I pretty much did this for almost every frame!

Anyways, so I'm pretty happy with the result, I will still touch up some of the frames in photoshop where I've noticed some errors.

Also, I've added the Fish King's voice (I went back to my original sketches and turns out that he's not the Sea King, I guess that will be for another animation). I first recorded the voice that I wanted and then figured out which frames should have which mouth movements in them. I used to animate the lip sync first and then record the voices later, to which I would shorten/lengthen frames to fit, but this doesn't work anymore since I've been animating at 30fps.

The Sea King Comes to Shore

I animated the first scene today! Basically, the Sea King is pulled in from the right, he wakes up, yawns and then notices the audience. It took approximately 1.5 hours to animate and although I'm not entirely happy with the smoothness of the rolling cart, I'm going to keep it. I could keep animating this over and over, but I will always notice something that I don't like, so it's a keeper.

Also, here's a pic of the replacement mouths and eyes that I will be using for His Majesty.

The Sea King

Here are some clips from my latest claymation project. It will basically be about the Sea King (a whale) who is carted around on land by a not-so-faithful squid.

The first clip is basically a bunch of tests to get a feel for how the squid will walk. I really wanted to animate his six different legs in some sort of crazy walk-cycle, but I couldn't really get a feel for anything. Finally I just went with the basic drag-and-crawl (clip 2) and it seemed to work out fine.

Terrymation to Start Blogging

Toronto, ON – Stop motion animator Terry Ibele, also known as Mozen and Terrymation decided to start blogging on November 22^nd, 2010. His decision was a result of enjoying many other blogger’s blogs on stop motion animation and also because he’s been thinking about starting one for a really long time.

“I want to start posting progress of my work,” said Ibele in a recent interview of himself.

Ibele will hopefully continue to blog for a while and post pictures and test videos of his upcoming projects.