Here are some doodles for a character based on a guy I used to know at my old work, he would make a great politician.

Here is the main background for the dance-off challenge entry, it is based on the art of Shag which I particularly like.

Found a  bunch of  old UPA cartoons at this link: Bill Paolucci’s Gerald McBoing Boing Page I haven’t seen any of these before, it is quite interesting looking at the styles of these cartoons.

I have been looking around for a good way of inserting video files into my WordPress Blog and I ran into Extreme Video Plugin which is a very nice plugin and does exactly what I was looking for. As a way of saving bandwidth this plugin will show a proxy image of the QuickTime logo and ask the user to click before the video starts loading. That's a nice feature but I really would like to see an image of the animation instead of the QuickTime logo so I had a look at the code for the plugin and found that most of the functionality for adding a user-defined image was there, all I had to do was change the code a little.

Here is the the modified version of the Extreme Video Plugin for WordPress, right click and ’save link as’:
wp-ExtremeVideo.php.zip

The installation is the same as the original plugin.

To use it add the option qt_proxy_image="path_to_your_thumbnail" to your standard Extreme Video tag (look here for examples).

I haven't played around with the Style for this plugin that much, I just disabled the borders and paddings because my site has a white background and that made it look neater, you might have to play around to make it look right for your site.

Here is an example of a QuickTime video inserted into a WordPress blog:

[gv data="http://rumi.studio2pi.com.au/gallery2/d/2286-1/ball.mov" qt_proxy_image="anims/thumbnails/ball_proxy.jpg"][/gv]

Here are my drawings for Lesson 2.

ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive Project Blog: Meta: The $100,000 Animation Drawing Course- Lesson 1

Thanks to John K. and ASIFA for offering this course, I am coming into it a bit late but I will try and catch up. Here are my drawing for Construction of the Head.

The last week has been very hectic with getting a web host, moving my blog, doing a bit of design for the new site and getting Gallery to work with WordPress. But finally things are at a stage where they are usable, there are so many things which can be done with this new setup which I will probably explore a bit later. For now I am back to doing cartooning exercises, here is today’s:

Couple of weeks ago I put my application in for the RMIT, Master of Animation and Interactive Media, course and I received a letter acknowledging that my application has gone in but I havent heard anything more yet.

Here are some of my life drawings from the class yesterday.

I am doing a bit of cartooning in flash everyday and getting used to the tools more and more. Here is another little exercise I did.

Drawing with the tablet is quite tricky and a bit frustrating, I keep wanting to pickup a pencil which responds so much more predictably. I have been doing more cartooning exercises in flash and using the undo button alot because the lines just dont come out looking right and going over them creates some jagged edges which I then have to erase which can be alot of work so I use the undo and try to draw the line again.
I could use the pen tool instead of the brush tool but I find the perfection of the pen tool’s line a bit lifeless.

I am sure after a while I will get used to the new tool, does anyone have any tips for me?

Here is today’s cartooning exercise.

I have been meaning to improve my cartooning ability for a long time now. A couple of months ago my partner and I purchased a Mac, a tablet and the adobe web creative suite package which now includes flash and all the other goodies, so I didnt have any excuses any more. I started following a teach-yourself cartooning book by Christopher Hart who is an ex Disney animator hence the Disney style, eventually I want to develop my own style but for now this will suffice to teach me the basics and get me into regular drawing again.

While doing this I am also thinking ahead to animation, I want to be able to eventually animate the different parts of the characters so I am making a Symbol from each part in Flash and saving it in the library. I have done a little flash example which shows how the symbols are combined together to create the whole.