"planet me by hodgey"

100 char challenge. 1-5

2011-11-13T19:54:00.001-08:00

I'm going to attempt the "100 character challenge." Basically you make a list of 100 characters and role a dice, then draw them one at a time. This is something I can casually do in my spare time purely for fun. I'll update each post with five drawings.

This pose will contain
1. Character 55 "Guile" from Street Fighter 2.
2. Character 02 "Jigen" from Lupin III
3. Character 94 "Sailor Mercury" from Sailor Moon.
4. Character 21 U2 "Macphisto"
5. Character 80. Original.

lizard anim

2011-11-06T20:13:00.001-08:00

Keys for an anim I am thinking of doing in harm ... again if I can find the time. Basically, a lizard runs in and scoops up my Kir character then runs off screen. The feet positions are a general guide. In harmony I'ld add some of the missing feet from the existing ones.

more monsters.

2011-10-18T18:33:00.000-07:00

I'm going to use this post to dump some tweaks to the remaining two monsters as well as some simple keys based on my kir character

quick monster anim.

2011-10-09T22:20:00.000-07:00

Quick anim based off of monster designs.

Monster Concepts.

2011-10-05T20:50:00.001-07:00

Here are some concept designs for some monsters for a kids show Idea I had. Super simple and ideally suited for Harmony animation.

Sketchies

2011-08-09T22:36:00.001-07:00

Some of my drawings from Trent's new "Sketchy Business" drawing blog.

More quick anims.

2011-06-17T20:14:00.001-07:00

Zeiji_run/jump from Christopher Hodgey on Vimeo.

The run cycle and jump anim i did based on primary keys.

Quick Anims.

2011-04-28T20:45:00.000-07:00

I'm going to start tinkering around more with harmony and try and develop my own builds etc. Some of this might look a bit shakey, but keep in mind these are primarly just to learn more about the program, and fiddle around in my spare time. The first one was done with two primary keys. for the next one Im going to do a break down inbtween to get more of a 3d effect.

Zeiji Animati "the tides of blood." part 1

2010-12-29T21:19:00.000-08:00

Next Zeiji comic.

2010-12-09T07:55:00.000-08:00

Some working panels and a random drawing from the next one. This is broken up into 4 parts, 7 pages each.

Zeiji Animati' "Devil's Flight"

2010-11-11T22:36:00.000-08:00

and more...

2010-10-29T03:45:00.000-07:00

Going to use this post to upload a few more finished drawings as the other posts are getting cluttered. I'd say I'm about 85% done.

even more Zeiji cells

2010-10-22T00:29:00.000-07:00

I'll upload a few of the coloured cells of the "hunter" character. I'm going to use my film character, as it allows me to continue to slowly design this character (after all any char based on yourself is an easy char to design!)

Zeiji animati secondary characters.

2010-10-18T03:00:00.000-07:00

More cells from the comic, I'm going to divide the posts according to which secondary character I'm working on. This post is the vampire hunter from the mid sixties (based on a young Sean Connery and Daneil Craig) I'm keeping the colours extremely simple

Zeiji animati comic.

2010-10-15T23:07:00.001-07:00

Here are some characters, cells from the comic I'm working on. I'll post a few here then start another one when it starts to overflow.

Quick Zeijis!

2010-10-14T11:07:00.000-07:00

three quick colour keys for an animation I am slowly working on. I've set it aside atm in favour of a comic I'm working on.

Vampire run cycle

2010-07-28T23:12:00.001-07:00

Here's a preview of my next run cycle. I'm going to base it off of the illustration below. I'll post it when it's completed. Basically what I'm going to do differently is to create the symbols using the paintbrush tool and stretch out the lines to create symbols which capture the original paint brush lines.

sting a preview. I'm still figuring out how to do the cape in harmony. Atm the idea is to do the entire thing rough on one layer in the program then clean it up on an additional layer. Plus, atm there's no set BG. The legs and arms are pretty much how I want them though. When it's 99% finished I'll post a vimeo version.

Zeiji animati'd!

2010-07-11T01:41:00.000-07:00

Zeiji animati'd run cycle. from Christopher Hodgey on Vimeo.

I've been playing around with my copy of harmony, and bulding my own toons. It's amazing what this program can do. 1 night to do the build. 1 night to do the anim!

Zeiji Animati!

2010-07-06T00:59:00.001-07:00

I'm going through a bit of an anime phase atm and have been designing a manga style vampire sword wielding maid. Just something fun to draw when I get home!

coooool down drawings 02

2010-06-11T01:40:00.000-07:00

A few more "cool" down drawings. The idea is to start and complete a drawing with in a maximum of 4 hours. These would all be for various deviant art contests, which are really just there to get view hits.

Cool down drawings.

2010-05-30T11:58:00.000-07:00

Normally when I get home I like to do some fun drawings to cool down. I'll post the best of what I do. The green one is a new design interpretation of an old character I did ages ago called "Coil" The alice one is for the "Alice in wonderland" contest on diviant art.

PA V is a go!

2010-03-11T23:43:00.000-08:00

Trolls arn't square from Christopher Hodgey on Vimeo.

Editorial 01

2010-01-27T10:25:00.000-08:00

Editorial 01. 3 drawings. Rest in Photoshop.

Lika panels for PA III

2009-11-29T22:27:00.001-08:00

Updated: December 10, added a few scenes. No sound yet. so in Scene 2 imagine a phone is ringing. Added spinning note scene.

Here's some quick Lika panels I'm doing for the reel. No big animation, just some general posing. My philosophy for this film is very simple. Nice posing, very little/limited animation = finished film.

Editorial 5

2009-11-18T10:38:00.000-08:00

Editorial 5 Black and white. I tried a different approach to the line channel.

Project: Awesome III is a go!

2009-09-14T16:53:00.001-07:00

And it begins. Here's a quick character blink test for the 2009 indie! I'm going to update the aniboom.com character, as I've been drawing him for 2 months already. I'll post as I go.

Updated: Rough keys/break downs for a simple yawn to play around with the design to see if it is animatable-ble

Gorgamörf the troll!

2009-09-04T17:18:00.001-07:00

Project Awesome II is a go!

This short is based on my old troll character "Gorgamorf!"

All the drawings are done I just need to play around with PS/Flash to get it to clock in at 15 seconds. Should be do-able. I'm trying to push the principles a bit more. The colouring will be a bit different. And I'm spending more time tweaking the in-between drawings based on the principles of element animation. I'll post it as I go. The tests will look pretty ugly but you get the idea!

Update: Done like dinner. The colouring idea was so-so. I alos added the 15 sec audio clip Stephen Mercer did for me to spice it up.

Aniboom holliday submission

2009-08-27T19:43:00.000-07:00

Here's the final edit for my aniboom holiday submission. A big thx too:

Stephen Mercer for the music and sound effects. Awesome work.
Lee Atkinson for answering all my flash questions and critiques.
Ian Jeans for his animation imput.
Kirsty Boudah for searching for sound effects.
Alan Stewart for improving the character design 100% with 1 drawing.
Trent Correy for helping compiling it.
Shane Plante, Colin Tsandillis and everyone else for thier positive comments and support.

Click Here to vote on it at Aniboom!

Project: Awesome is a Go!

2009-07-05T16:12:00.000-07:00

Updated August 19th 2009
Finished animation:149/120 seconds.
added: I'm over the 2 minute mark. I have a few small scenes after seq 2 I want to do of them swapping the new video game with an old one. You are about to be dazzled by some of the most limited animation ever done!

Here's what I'll be working on for the next 2 months. I'm calling it "Project: Awesome is a Go!" atm as a general description of what it actually is. Basically the goal is to have 2 minutes worth of animation done by aug 31st. In order to accomplish this I'm going to be taking as many short cuts as possible and as few drawings as possible! We'll see how it goes, and i'll keep you posted on the progress!

11 second June

2009-06-30T20:18:00.000-07:00

Here's my entry for the June's 11 second. Again I ran out of time and for awhile there I had shelfed the idea of doing it. Originally I was going to just do a line test at the college, but that fell through, so I spent 8 hours today scanning each individual drawing via my scanner. This is after staying up till 5am in the morning trying to tween some of it. I didn't really attempt the lip sync. Boo urns. Still it was at least 100 individual drawings which is up from last month. Tonight I get to hear next months audio and start planning that one out. Remember to go vote for this months entries!

Also is anyone else having problems seeing the video? I think it has something to do with the exporting.

June 11 second

2009-06-06T16:38:00.001-07:00

Thumbnails for the June 11 second club। Basically the plan is too learn from the May one and continue in that direction. Better mouth shapes. Limit some of the animation where I can, and ideally, colour this thing. In terms of design, I'm going to most likely go with something between 18 and 25. I don't want to over complicate the design in favour of sticking with something a bit more flat and simple. We'll see though when I get into the blocking stage.

11 second Club May

2009-05-31T21:51:00.000-07:00

I pulled a few of the drawings from my May entry to the 11 second club. I'll link the video once it's downloaded. I def learned a few things which I'll be applying to a June entry (assuming I'm not working much) I wanted to try applying some of the principles of limited animation to this project to lesson the amount of work (ie redrawing things I don't need to redraw.)

What I learned: Animating the whole head for the first phrase looks a bit wonky, it's better to manipulate a few of the features of the face and only redraw the big action (ie when he says "Go")

I put the majority of my time into "and see im fly and better still see im back." Which looks decent. The lip sync is off, but the action works. I ended up putting a lot of it on ones, so some of the purty' drawings got buried in the motion. More settle more secondary next time.

The rest of the dialoque got rushed due to time and the lip sync is really chopping because I started it on friday. I was running out of time so "it's dead exciting" didn't have the the impact I was hoping for. For the next one I'll build better mouth shapes so I have more to work with and slug it out better. All in all it was a fun experience and I look forward to hacking away at another one.

11 second club

2009-05-03T15:56:00.000-07:00

If I can pry myself away from Resident Evil 5 long enough, I'm going to work on a submission for the May 11 sec club. Here's some of my rough drawings for what I'm hearing as a scottish/viking sort of character. So far I'm up to "when you let im go .."

Update: It's very ugly to look at, but what the hell, I thought I'ld add a quick line test I did for "when you let im go. .." It's just keys and prob not lined up right. My idea is basically to just animate the head and PS it on the body and just nudge it with the skew tool for "go." Anything to avoid redrawing the body 14 times ish. Then do a big animated action for "and let them fly." If this works I can put my energy into that and avoid wasting time redrawing stuff that isn't really moving.

Tiki Volcano warrior.

2009-04-30T19:52:00.000-07:00

Today's "fun drawing." I was thinking about tiki/volcano's today. It's just a quick sketch with some minimal PS.

Expressions

2009-04-26T18:46:00.001-07:00

Over the next few weeks I'm going to try and draw a lot of expressions based off my own poses and anything else I can find. It'll be a mix of the classic John K style and my own. The plan is too take my film character and redesign him to be more animatable and 3 dimensional.

Youngbloods in the car!

2009-04-12T19:32:00.000-07:00

During my trip home from an Easter weekend with the family I did some drawings in the car based on a "Youngbloods" comic I rescued from my home. Chapel turning out pretty good! I also did a quick drawing based on the Savage dragon tonight.

Pages

2009-04-07T01:52:00.001-07:00

Page 1 and 2 of Fine tuning, pre-last minute revisions.

Monsters, mobsters and ... life drawing

2009-04-04T14:26:00.000-07:00

A Run stride drawing and a second pass on an older drawing and a few of my life drawings. Very random, but eh.

Hodgey Demo!

2009-03-31T17:56:00.000-07:00

I'm bumping up two of my scenes to the first post as reference for my portfolio. They are: My coloured run cycle and scene 24. I need to refilm the rough one with the FG element. More animation is buried further in. Below are 2 drawings from Ed08

2009-03-29T21:57:00.001-07:00

45 min quick drawing ftw.

2009-03-20T07:11:00.000-07:00

Working BGs for the movie. I'll be revising them based on some good imput. Def a fun experiment with PS and textures, which I've incorporated for the first time.

Obi Wan says ...

2009-03-17T23:53:00.000-07:00

Editorial drawings. I've returned to the two fundamental principles which I often overlook for more "fancy" ideas like rendering and computer age tomfollery. They are:

Draw through and my old mantra "shapes, not lines."

I've been saying the second one since around second year, and you can see it in those drawings when I really push it. In the end, it's often the most obvious things that we screw up, and if I was to take anything I've drawn this semester I could easily find dozens of errors. This is not to say this drawing is perfect, just that it's a bit closer than it's first rendition. Plus I have a deadline and I still have 3 more of these plus mini BGs too do. I'll post im' all

2009-03-15T22:20:00.001-07:00

Me playing around with the idea of using PS and Flash to simplify the animation and knock out as many inbetweens as possible. I'll post a full video of the scene when it's done. The downside is it's going to look "flashy" and the secondary animation may get stiffer. The upside is I don't have to draw settles. Bascially what i've done is inked 3 drawings. Then done all the colouring in PS in separate files. I then compress those and transfer them to a "master" scene file. I then copy that to a "stretch/squash" file where I can tinker around with spacing/stretch/squash. I then flatten each individual drawing and export it as a jpg (these being only 15% the original size." I may export on the BG or I might do them as a file compatiable with harmony and just have them layered there.

2009-03-11T19:10:00.000-07:00

Lika Stills ftw. I'll add them to this post.

2009-03-09T22:36:00.000-07:00

Playing around with drawings.

AM PS ftw

2009-03-07T01:15:00.000-08:00

This is just me playing around with PS at 3am in the morning. I'm working towards using shadows and the possibility of coloured lines. We'll see how it goes. I'll update this image as it progresses. The original design was from a pitch package for a show based on aboriginal classic stories.

Art Rant V1

Personal "style" is very important. It's like a thumb print. Traditionally, we are the products of our predecssors. We take their foundations, stand on thier mighty shoulders and hopefully add our small contribution to the mix. It's often small, some slight arrangement of lines and shapes that by chance sets us apart from the flock and defines us as us. A Pollock could have only been painted by Pollock, Picasco only by Picasso.

This is not to say that this is is an example of such a thing. No, not in the least, but it is what I want to see when I look at something I do. Nothing is more discouraging for me, then when I see tired, old conventions being worn out in my own drawings. When I do, when I start to rely to much on the old circle for a head, ovals for eyes, I often dig through the old pile of drawings by my desk and look for something that is uniquelly "hodgey." I may pick up a "bad" drawing, but if is still unmistably my drawing, that's a better start than to simply rip off someone else.

This, I find, is the mistake we make when determining what is a good and what is bad, in terms of aestitics

In my opinion, a bad drawing is as follows: It is a poor imitation of a successful drawing which lacks any original insight or creativity. It is literally a copy. Google "anime fan art" and you will find many, many bad drawings. It's not that anime drawings are bad, far from it. It's that someone has taken something already drawn and redrawn it ... poorly. If you've seen it before, it's not necessary to repeat it.

Which brings me to Jean Dubuffet. I was introduced to Dubuffet in university. I had to write an essay about him. I may not remember much about that essay, or any of the paintings, but ... I do remember his philisophy about art. It sticks with me today. He took the idea of the tradtional foundation and outright rejected it. Too quote

" Art doesn't go to sleep in the bed made for it; it would sooner run away than say its own name: what it likes is to be incognito. Its best moments are when it forgets what its own name is ".

Jean took the idea to the extreme. Have a look at a few of his paintings and collected pieces. Most people find them ugly and crude, and by any tradtitional sense they are. However, approach them from this perspective: When he created these pieces, the idea was to avoid relying on any tradtional conventions. He wasn't drawing the balls shapes in the heads, he wasn't sight measuring, none of that . The idea is to approach it from a completly new and fresh perspective. The idea is dazlling. Personally, I've always been inspired by the potential there. Imagine stripping away every convention you use when approaching a piece and realizing it in a way that is new. What would it look like?

Jean Dubuffet

2009-02-27T22:30:00.000-08:00

Scene 20 clean with BG.

2009-02-26T15:54:00.000-08:00

scene23 rough animation and clean (almost done) plus I tinkered around with the colours in PS ftw. Nothing I'ld use. I was just ... well bored and wanted to put all those fancy effects to some use.

2009-02-06T09:38:00.000-08:00

Run cycle coloured in harmony.

2009-01-22T15:01:00.000-08:00

Clean animation for the run cycle (ftw!)

2009-01-21T15:45:00.000-08:00

Editorial 6.

2008-12-15T02:01:00.000-08:00

Pastel life drawing.

2008-11-19T09:37:00.000-08:00

Rough posing for scene 7/8.

2008 demo

2008-11-17T06:29:00.001-08:00

2008 Portfolio and demo reel.

2008-11-17T06:04:00.000-08:00

Portfolio pages 2008

2008-11-12T20:30:00.000-08:00

ed ftw.

2008-11-03T21:00:00.001-08:00

Here are some random drawings from my storyboard. Keep in mind this is 1/10 of the actual boards, and not all the key ones (these are just a few of my favs)

2008-11-03T20:56:00.000-08:00

2008-11-03T20:49:00.000-08:00

2008-11-03T20:46:00.001-08:00

2008-10-27T09:37:00.000-07:00

Thumbnails and some quick inked boards for the lika for 2 of the locations. They're not the end designs, nor to scall (they've about 1/3 the intended size.

2008-10-21T14:31:00.000-07:00

Stride pose ftw. It was the one drawing I put actual time into, so I'm posting it.

2008-10-16T14:45:00.000-07:00

Here's a quick rough animation of a run cycle for my character. Thus far I've only spent close to 4 hrs on it. I'll do a few more passes then clean-up/ink it and play around with colours.

Editorial 3

2008-10-16T09:23:00.001-07:00

The cleaned up inked version. More stretch on the shirt ftw, and some depth to the background. Aside from that, it was a fun drawing.

Ithink another pass on the rough would have really improved this editorial, but it's done and I have other things to do. It's not the most brilliant/catchy ed idea, so I'll prob leave it as is. If I do get time though I might fix it. The rough had some nice character/pose design.

2008-10-12T23:40:00.000-07:00

Here's the ball assignment we did quickly on the side. I wanted to attempt my inking/photoshop idea with something animated. The animation itself isn't stellar, but it was primarly to see if the idea could even work. It's not terribly time consuming and def doable. I went from rough animation at around 2:30 today to clean coloured at about 10 est.

2008-10-12T22:37:00.000-07:00

Concept drawings for the main character "Eugene" "Kir" and a few other sketches. The assassin is a quick version of Nash Robel's main character.

Side note: I used the design for my main character and entered it in the "Starz Character Concept" Contest and won second place. Thus far, technically, I've made $100 profit on my film.