May Animation Practice - Armor Hand (Final Animation for 2021)

Oh man oh man oh man, May's animation being posted in November? What gives?! What's up with that?

Actually, here is what's up with that. Life has gotten in the way too many times this year for me to keep up with monthly animations and since I'm a full six months behind, I'm calling it quits for the rest of 2021. There's no way I can catch up this far into the year.

I do have animation plans for 2022 that doesn't involve making animations every month, but I'm not sure if I'll go through with those plans.

I just wanted to give out that update; hopefully it won't be too long for you guys to see another animation from me. Now let's talk the animation that I do have, right now!

You know how in Marvel films they have the actors wear these weird markered suits while filming so that the actual suits are CGI'd on top of them in post production? That's the idea for this animation. I wanted to try my (literal) hand at that, but with 2D animation.

It's not super polished, but I think I got a decent end result.

What do you guys think of my robot hand armor prototype? The boys in the lab just finished working on it yesterday; Tony Stark's gonna like this one.

I had a work-in-progress version of this animation that I showed to a couple of people, and one of them described it as "rotoscoping," which I didn't think of it as such at the time, but after seeing the finished end result, I guess I can agree that it is rotoscoping.

This animation was originally supposed to be longer, but as with all ambitious animation ideas I had for this year, I had to cut it short. The second part of the video was me shooting out a laser from the index finger and etching out a happy face on the wall behind the hand. Oh well!

The animation was also to serve as a stepping stone for other ideas relating to creating animated elements on top of recorded video footage. That is something I still want to experiment with, so who knows? Maybe I'll work on and post something similar to this some time in the future?

Thanks again for every one who's been following me on my journey to creating monthly animations for this year! The purpose was to push myself and give myself more animated mileage, and I think I've done that! See you in the next post!

April Animation Practice - Interrogation

Hey! So good news! I got myself a new laptop, which means I can continue with my digital art and animation shenanigans!

And with that, comes gooder news! I finally finished April's animation! I can't believe how slow and stubborn I was to finish this one! Of course, it's not in a completely polished state, and I was very close to publishing it in an incomplete state early on, but I found a groove with the animation and was determin
ed to finish it in a more presentable state, hence why it took forever to post it. But it's here!

The main focus with this animation was animating with video reference. I didn't trace from my recorded footage; it was just all about referencing the acting, movement, and timing.

Here's the animation:

The part that took waaaaaaay too much time to animate was the part where the bad guy walks towards the tied-up guy in the foreground. Ugh, what a headache, but I like the end result.

And of course, how can I say I recorded video reference and NOT post it along side the animation? Here's the video of me acting it out! This was recorded before I did any animation.

I recorded about 12 takes before choosing take 11 as the primary reference for the animation. What do you think? Do you think I can fare as an actor? Ha ha ha ha, probably not.

Geez, I can't believe I'm about 4 months behind for animations! The next few animations are going to be extremely short or simple looping animations for the sake of catching up. Of course, with this year's theme of being experimental, I'm going to make sure that the upcoming shorter animations will be something different for me to produce.

Look forward to that!

March Animation Practice - Insult to Injury

Back with another late-as-hell animation!

The main focus for this one was to animate a character walking in a z-axis path, like walking from afar to close up to us. I've never animated a walk cycle like that, and I think I've made a decent first attempt? How do you think I did?

And of course, those are my vocals at play for both characters.

I sort of gotten a grasp of animating a walk cycle going towards the camera; I know there's probably a small couple of details I missed for doing a walk cycle in general, but overall it doesn't look bad, off-putting, or too unnatural.

Welp! Off to start on April's animation!

February Animation Practice - Real World Escape

February's animation? In June? How late am I???????? (Don't answer that)

Yeeeeeah, I know I'm very late on this one. AND on top of that, I have to do March, April, May, and June's animation to be up-to-date.

What can I say? Things have gotten pretty busy these past few months. Now that the dust has kinda settled, it's time to go into TURBO MODE.

But before I do, I want to present February's animation! Shot in my own room!

I'm still set in being experimental for this year's set of animations, so for this one I wanted to execute the idea of a digital character going into our analog world, which involved some stop motion work.

The animation/camera work for the stop motion bit is pretty rough, but I wasn't aiming for perfection; I wanted to try something new and see if I can pull it off, and I think it's pretty competent!

Just like with January's animation, the original idea/length of the animation was longer in concept, but I had to cut corners to speed up the process. Even after that, I had to go in and cut out even more corners to really be able to have a finished video for today's posting.

The stop motion part was heavily cut short to save time while the 2D animation's original beginning had to be entirely scrapped in favor of something more simple and easier to complete.

The final video wouldn't exist if I didn't have my brother and friend helping me out with this one! I had my brother to help snap the photos while I had a friend of mine help out with some video editing work, so a big thanks to those two!

Now I'm off to start March's animation!

January Animation Practice - Tennis Ball Storm

Whoa! Another late arrival! We finally have 2021's first animation practice starting with January, even though it's currently March. What can I say? It arrived late with style!

Lately I've been pretty bogged down with life-related nonsense, so I haven't been doing a good job at keeping up with the animation stuff lately. Because of that, I had to cut off a ton of what I wanted to animate in this one in order to get this done and posted. Included with the animation, I wanted to throw in some character design sketches and its original storyboard!

As mentioned before, I wanted to try and be more experiential with the monthly animations this year, which means I'll set out to animate different cartoon styles, use different animation techniques or processes, use different animation programs, and other such things. I'm aware that I stayed in a sort of comfort zone during 2020, and I want to try and change that.

Initially for this animation, not only did I wanted it to be longer than what the finished result ended up being, but I also wanted to experiment with using Google's Song Maker to do some sound effect work for this animation.

I also wasn't intending to bring this animation to a finished look as well; since I intended this year to try different things, I wanted to not aim for making a polished-looking product, leaving animations looking rough instead for this year.

I only brought this to a finished look because I didn't want to deliver an unfinished-looking animation after a two month tardy for January's animation.

All in all, this was fun. I liked the character design and style in this one. I'll be sure to start on February's animation asap so I don't fall too behind.

December Animation Practice - Moonwalking

Whoa! I'm extremely late with this one but here's December's animation practice (for 2020.)

This is the first time since April 2020 that I had to post an animation incomplete (and first time posting it almost two months late), so to make up for it, here's both the second rough pass and the first rough pass of this animation.

Second rough pass:

First rough pass:

I knew from the beginning that I was gonna late with December's animation so I initially wanted to do a simple loop; I went with animating a moonwalk since I don't think I've animated that before. Then I thought it'd be boring having just a moonwalk with no context around it so that's when I added the interaction between Aika and Marilyn. As I said before, I was busy behind the scenes with other things during this time and I was steadfast on reaching some level of polish before posting.

Ultimately, I realized that was never gonna happen (considering it's currently February.)

That's a wrap on 2020's year of animation practices! On to 2021!

November Animation Practice - Magic Malfunction

Wow! I feel like I'm super mega hella late with this one! And I am!

I went through a bad art block during November and in early December. Because of that, I literally had zero drive and motivation to animate. I was incredibly frustrated with early versions of this animation and completely started over on it twice.

Hell, even before the art block I had zero ideas on what to do for November's animation!

The process for November's animation was a bit of a wild ride, but I finally finished it!

Autumn returns for November, trying to get the hang of using a more powerful magic wand.

(Right click on the video and loop it for a better effect)

She's got much to learn if she ever wants to become a more powerful witch.

Normally, I try to finish last month's animation before the 20th of next month and start a new animation on the 20th (i.e. finishing November's animation before December 20th, then starting December's animation on the 20th), but with the many issues that rose during November, I wasn't quite able to hit my marks and deadlines.

Oh well, at least it's done! And I like the end result too!

Now I have less than four days to start and finish this year's Christmas art! Oh dear oh my!

October Animation Practice - Pumpkin Haircut

I'm back with October's animation practice!

In this short bit, a pumpkin meets with a barber. I wonder what kind of stylish cut he will get? This time around, my voice acting makes an appearance.

Besides the fun joke that plays out here, I wanted this month's animation to look like an animated comic strip, complete with word bubbles and everything. Right from the start, I gave myself the non-serious challenge of completing this animation in less than a week; I started this one a few days before Halloween, so I was aiming for a completion date of either October 31st or November 1st/2nd.

Obviously I never hit those dates as I finished this on the 11th.

Going back on this looking like an animated comic strip, I drew it out initially as a rough comic strip (or a storyboard) to have a base for the pumpkin designs and how it would play out. Here's that rough strip:

I had a completely different idea for October's animation, but I feel like that idea would bring the animation to be about 30 seconds to about a minute long. Anything at that length would be qualified to be posted on my YouTube (which I promise I'll update with a new video whenever I get the idea/chance.)

As a matter of fact, I'm still unsure if I should post these animation practices on the Doji Pocket YouTube channel. Maybe as a compilation? I dunno yet.

I currently have no idea what to do for November's animation. Guess we'll see what I come up with next month!

September Animation Practice - Wet Floor

Hey! Another month went by which means another animation practice!

I was originally going to post this yesterday but I completely forgot.

And even then, I added a light background artwork in the animation several minutes ago.

Things have been really stressful lately, so it was nice to create and enjoy the end result of this funny little animation. It's nice to give life to characters that hardly get that treatment.

I'm still not sure of what her name should be. I have an idea, but I won't say it yet just in case the idea changes.

August Animation Practice - August Heat

I know, I know, I finished this one really late. I hated the fact that this one took waaaaaay too long than normal to finish, but it went through a lot of revisions to get the movements right.

I hope it paid off.

(Be sure to right click on the video and set it to loop since it's, well, a looping animation)

Normally I take a break for about a week or two and then start on the next animation, however this might be a back-to-back kind of situation. September's animation will definitely be a more simpler one to do (I hope.)

Do I like the end result for this one? Kinda, yeah. I tried to rush it in the process just to finally finish this one. I especially like how the melting animation turned out at least.

In case you don't live in California, things have been really hot these past few weeks. We're in mid September currently and the weather has kinda gotten better? I say kinda because we're currently going through our 23,572,357,264,848,234,681,786,908,135th forest fire right now.

Originally I was gonna use Danielle for this animation, but since the whole melting thing is very silly and Mr. Ridiculous is a silly character, it just seemed like a better match.

Stay cool everyone!

July Animation Practice - Biking Witch

Glad you all are comfortable with Autumn from the last post because she's the center point for July's animation!

(Be sure to right click on the video and set it to loop after playing the video.)

I wanted to do a simple loop for July, but didn't know of what at the time. Luckily, this character's creation came at the right time to give me a good idea for a loop. I thought animating a character riding a bike on loop would be pretty easy, but of course from someone who hasn't animated a bike rider before, it was more complicated than I thought.

I like the end result though! I had to do a minor edit before posting because the background scroll in the first version of the animation was too fast so I had to slow it down so it looked a bit more natural.

Overall, good to see this new character get the animation treatment so quickly after creation!

June Animation Practice - Android Repair

Hey, I got this one done with decent timing! We're still in the first week of July!

After looking through my list of characters I haven't animated yet, I initially decided to take care of two of them at once: Kate and Kevin. However, the two are from different story series and it wouldn't make much sense to mix the two right now (even thought they both take place in the same universe), so I replaced Kevin with Robert.

I've animated Robert before, in case anyone forgot that.

Despite advancements in A.I. and technology in the future, androids still need human assistance for repairs. Robert's always open to help Kate out, and the results are shocking

This one took me about a week to complete. I really wanted to finish this quickly so I sort of rushed the rough animation for this one. I totally paid the price for that since it was more difficult to do the final line work, with unadjusted timing for certain movements and placements of certain elements being off after refinement.

I like how it came out! I really try to make time to do the final line work and color for these animations since the end result looks like completed animation for television.

Speaking of which, I've thought about using one of these months to go back on an old monthly animation to either redo it or to fully complete it. Not sure if it's a good idea to do so, but we'll see. After all, we have have six more months left for 2020!

May Animation Practice - Mandy's Makeover

What a month! Good thing I've got something to help take a load off from the craziness!

I have yet another month of animation practice to present here!

Best friends don't try to change each other, a lesson Sally was happy to learn:

After the weirdness of trying to adjust to Toonboom from April's animation, I had the original intention to post May's animation in a rough, unfinished-looking state.

Once completed however, I figured what I had was pretty good enough to give it a polish, so I spent another extra week with clean-up and coloring. And plus, with having that finished animation of Danny and Daisy back in January, I've been wanting to do another piece of TV-ready-looking kind of animation!

I also realized early on that this is my first time animating Sally; it's so great to finally give her proper life and movement!

All in all, I really like the end result of this one! I think I'm slowly getting the hang of using Toonboom.

April Animation Practice - Bank Blast

Hey! Man, Blogger really changed behind the scenes. It's weird as hell.

Anyways! I held out on posting April's animation because I wanted to finish the clean line version, but with some school stuff getting in the away, general Toonboom-acting-stupid nonsense, and the time it's gonna take to actually finish the final version, I decided the cut my loses and post the animation as is.

Still not too bad for it being half completed!

I'm still in that stage of getting the hang of Toonboom so I've been having issues with the program, but I think I have to keep chugging along and continue using the program, no matter how much painful it can be.

Doing an animation this long was probably a bit too ambitious in the early stages of using a program like this for the first time, so I'm gonna try to dial it back in terms of length in the future. Keep word: "try."

Then again, that rotoscoping animation was also pretty ambitious, so who knows? It's already mid May, so I have to definitely scale back in length to get something done on time.

October 2019 Animation Practice - Jack

YOOOOOOOO WHY DIDN'T NO ONE TELL ME I FORGOT TO POST OCTOBER'S ANIMATION FROM LAST YEAR AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

For October's animation, I wanted to do something a bit spoopy with a splash of humor, and with a jack-o-lantern somewhere in there for good measure.
My voice-acting returns in this one!

It was a funny idea of "what if a jack-o-lantern came to life" sort of situation. I wanted to add color, but I was out of October at the time. I like how this one came out.
This animation is almost long enough to be posted for the Doji Pocket channel for content! Man, I miss making stuff to post to the official channel. One day, I'll have something new to post! I swears!

I can't believe I totally forgot to post this one on the blog! Good thing I was scrolling through past posts out of boredom; that's when I spotted the gap between September and November!

March Animation Practice - Rotoscope on Me

Hey! Sorry I'm late with this one! With the long tedious rotoscoping process and the coronavirus stuff kicking in mid March, this animation process was slowed down a bit.

But it's finally done! Thank goodness! It was such a slow-moving process, but I think the end result is worth it. See for yourself! (Oh, and enjoy that rare cameo of me in the animation!)

It's no secret that A-Ha's "Take On Me" music video was a huge influence on this one. I recently re-watched the video after not watching it for the longest time, and of course I always come out really impressed by it.
During the month of February, the idea of trying out rotoscoping was something that kept bugging me. Once March rolled around, I started on it as soon as I can since I knew it would take a while to complete. It was kind of a good time to start since the music video recently hit one billion views, so this was a nice way to honor such a popular video.

Hopefully, this will be the last time you guys see my irl hairy grizzly face.

February Animation Practice - Fight Scene

One day, I realized I've never animated an action/fight scene. So I decided to change that!

Usually, I start my animation practices later in the month, but this time I started earlier in order to try and reach a more polished state for publication.
Apparently, animating an action scene takes waaaaay longer than I thought so what I have here is the animation in its first rough pass.

Normally I do a rough pass, then I do a slightly cleaner rough pass to further define the art/animation, and then I go in and do the final clean line art and maybe color if I have the time. It feels kinda weird posting an animation in its initial rough pass, but the goal here is to post whatever I have done by the end of the month. That's the contract I gave myself!

Even though it's in a rough state, I kinda like how it came out! I was considering adding music over the scene, but decided against it.
Oh, and be sure to full screen the video when you see it! It was animated in a 21:9 ultra widescreen aspect ratio so it looks really killer!

January Animation Practice - Walk Jam

Initally, I was thinking of whether or not I should continue my monthly animation practice since the goal was to keep that up for just a year, but I figured that it's in my best interest to keep up my animation groove. Plus, animating is fun and it's what I like to do.

I'm really happy with how well this one came out! I really love it!

I couldn't stop rewatching it after its completion. It almost looks like TV animation quality to me! Plus, it's really nice to see my female characters animated and moving around for a change!

December 2019 Animation Practice - Santa's New Year Resolution

Hey! Whoa! It's February 2020 and it appears that I haven't posted my animation practice for December 2019? Shame on me! SHAME SHAME SHAME.

Welp! Here it is! Late as hell!

I started on this one really late (like in January 2020); I took it a little too easy during December, but it was the holidays! It's good to relax sometimes, ya know!

I knew I wanted to do something Christmas themed, but had no idea how to execute it. With New Years coming up at the time, I decided to combine the two holidays and come up with a looping animation of Santa Claus working on his weight loss New Year resolution.

Currently, I'm finishing up my animation practice for January 2020 so I hope I'll be able to post that soon! It's coming out really well; I can't wait to share it once it's done!

November Animation Practice - Jamming Out

Hey hey hey! It's December! I would have made this post earlier but finals week was happening! And of course, I needed some time to chillax from the semester's work. I'm here now!

Here's my animation practice for November!

I've never animated a dance before, so I decided to change that!

Now, some time ago I hinted that I was gonna add a new character to the Class of 2422 character line-up; the character here is that new character.

Consider this her early unoffical introduction since her character design is not finalized at this stage. I chose this character for the animation because she fits the bill perfect with the dance and music, so I just had to roll with it!

The video/animation is suppose to loop so set that up with the video player to see how well it plays by right clicking on the video itself.

The dance itself is based off of a funny dance from the show American Dad; check it here!