Demo Reel

This demo reel is a compilation of some of my favorite projects that I worked on during my time in college and during the last few months since graduating. I chose animations to go into this demo reel that show off what I believe I do well. During my time in school, I learned how to animate in a few different styles, but when I animated the things that I wanted to animate, I usually leaned in the direction of action and fighting. This animation style was usally more engaging to me than simple acting or monologue type animations. I find the process of animating something complicated and challenging to be more rewarding, almost as if I'm living vicariously through my animations because I certainly can't do some of these tricks or flips in real life. However, I did also include some dialogue animations in order to show that I am capable at doing that as well.

Of course it is vital to show some variety in this demo so I included more simple but very vital animation skills. Animating something simple like a walk cycle can be challenging in its own right. The walk cycle of the orc was a bit challenging to get right, we see people walk all the time and as a result can tell when someone is walking in an odd way, no matter how subtle. To get the look I wanted, I used a basic walk reference to block out, then added a bit of weight to it. The horse run animation was also very challenging as the anatomy of a horse is very different from our own. Horses have more joints in their legs than we do, therefore walk and run different the we do. I relied entirely on reference to get the horse run cylce to look right.

To show my ability to animate dialogue animation, I included two of my most recent projects. The first monologue animation with the heavy set character was animated to an audio clip from the tv show It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. In this scene, the character Frank is showing of his wrestling persona named The Trashman. The Sencond monologue animation is from the movie School of Rock where the protagonist is arguing about why being a musician is so important. Both of these animations were a challenge. I never really learned how to animate dialogue in a formal setting while in school. I found a video online explaining how to animate dialogue and learned that in order to convey talking, you have to animate shapes of sounds instead of actual letters. Despite how simple these types of animations seem compared to flipping and fighting, I found these animations to be the most challenging. I suppose it's easier to animate constant motion than it is to animate subtle movements, especially human movements.