Cool Morphing Animation Short

I recently found this strange cartoon online and was impressed by how fluid its animation was, especially for such bizarre movements.  Definitely worth checking out.

Prep for my Title Project

With lest than 2 months to the release of The Good Dinosaur, I want to make my Title sequence for this film. There's plenty of information avalible about the film online, but I wanted to try my hand at making a short Title sequence for the film. I wanted to share some of my ideas and give an Idea of the style I'm going for:

Firstly, the Two Trailers:

The Trailers give the most amount of information out there, specifically the story. As I blogged about last week, this pixar piece has alot of work put into the terrain and landscape. With all the focus on the Water especially, I wanted to use a mixture of fluid dynamics and 2D shapes to move around the names of the title sequence.

Basing alot of the style on the title sequence from Monsters, Inc.,

my plan is to use basic shapes of ovals and circles to show the characters, and keep the piece almost flat.
I also Want to try making some Text flow away as if it's in a stream:
and I'm pretty sure I found a Tutorial for how to make it work in Maya Here:

Below is a list of all the references I'd like to include in my Title Sequence:

• Fireflies
• Comet
• Arlo the Dinosaur
• Spot the Boy
• Raging Water
• Crystals
• rushing past Vast amounts of land and sky.

I'll keep you up to date on the rest of the project as I go.

Animating to Music

After using sound in collaboration with visuals on Wednesday, I was reminded of one of my favourite animated sequences from my childhood. The opening to Pixar's 2001 animated comedy, Monsters, Inc.

The opening cleverly features several animated doors (which play a prominent role in the film) dancing around, revealing title credits. All to one of Randy Newman's chirpy tunes from the soundtrack. The upbeat jazz instrumental provides a fun way of opening the film.

I really like how there's a nice balance between doors that move to the music, and ones that move independently. It can be dangerously easy to create a null which holds audio information, then go ahead and parent the hell out of every on screen object to the null. Sure, you'll have lots of moving pieces, but things can start to feel to mechanical and automated. The Monsters, Inc. opening has fluidity, while maintaining chirpiness and overall feeling in time with the music.

Check it out here, I think it's really fun.