Miaomiao

Miaomiao teaches little kids and toddlers a few words in chinese.

It is a series by Mark Animation. Each episode is 2 minutes long.

The first season was recently released in Kidobi's website! 

Click on the image to see :)

I helped out with some animation, some modeling, some texturing and some designs for the project. 

It was a lot of fun working on it!

Miaomiao iPad app

I helped out on this iPad app, 

and it was recently published!

(click on the image to go to the website)

It is made for kids and toddlers to learn a few words in chinese.

I made animations and designs for this, 

it was a lot of fun and I learnt lots 

(including some chinese)

:)

A Fishy Story

6 months worth of work, some more to planify, and still full of mistakes,

but not extremely awful for an average 3D first-timer :)

(please don't be too hard on me! Dx)

BIGGER VIEW

The Blast Light: Cups

The Blast Light: Cups is a project made by a team formed by EBM students Bo Gembarsky, Daisy Ozga, Amanda Magalhaes, Michael Oulton and Martin Havey.

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A little about the project:

The beggining
It all began when Amanda saw "Cups" when we were recording the voices for it, and she thought she had to do something with it. So this all happened thanks to her.

The story
She wanted to use it to help BC Children's Hospital, since the animated short was about a friendship between two kids, and one of them has a cancer. We got together a couple times to talk about how things would be done and were the project would go to. At first, her EBM team recorded interviews at various locations from the people involved in the project "Cups": VFS DIP instructor Jim Inkster, VFS Graduate and Sound Designer Moises Torres, and from me, as well as BC Children's Hospital Director of Communications Stephen Forgacs, to grab some information about what kids with cancer have to go through and the stress it involves for their families and friends.

The experience
It was all very unreal, because "Cups", which did have a message, but was only gonna be used as a part of my portfolio, got to serve a little purpouse out there. And I not only got to meet Amanda's awesome team, formed by great optimistic people and real hardworkers, but I got to visit BC Childrens Hospital, where I learned a lot about children with cancer and their situation. Cups probably didn't really help on anything actually... but I did learn a lot and I hope at least I helped pass a little knowledge about this children's situation to others. Right now I can't do much, but I have the hopes that this is gonna reach the hands and hearts of those who can actually make a difference.

The culmination
The filming part was finished, but the project remained at a standstill for a while because a couple people involved in the project dropped off from the program for personal reasons, and then the pieces were picked up again by other students so that the project could finally reach an end. The final piece would be released in youtube on October 19, 2010.

How to Make an Animated Film (Flash film, 2010)

(Flash, 2010)

This is my flash film, made at VFS during a year in the Classical animation program.
The whole thing developed in less than a month.

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A little about the project:

The idea took a while to settle for a couple reasons... but it was so long, that I ended up leaving too little time for it's execution in the end. So, the character was built in 5 days, and animated in 2.

Sound design
I tried recording the voices by myself but the files had too much noise on them. DIP instructor Jim Inkster helped me record everything again, in a noise isolated room. He also helped me with the final editing of the audio. I wanted elevator music for it.
I used my voice for it, because I was running out of time, and because I thought it was the best thing to do since, from the beggining, it was my inner dialogue what was going on.

Story
I was gonna make a film about cute tiny bugs from a ficticious planet habitated by cute child-like creatures called "Gunis". The story had no ending... nor story... It was gonna be like a little documentary. And... nothing really interesting nor fun happened at all. Thinking about a climax for that story, I scribbled a storyboard with this idea on a couple pages in my sketchpad.
For "How to make an animated film", it is actually me having an inner dialogue and scolding myself, what brought to those papers the storyboard. I showed it to some classmates, and they found it amusing, so I showed it to our flash instructor, Edwin Poon. He told me to do this idea instead.
The initial storyboard is longer and the story changed a little for it's final version. A day before the deadline, I realized I wasn't gonna finish everything on time, so I re-built the structure of the story. The original one had a single and longer dialogue. This one is divided in 5 different blocks, and each block contains a fragment of the original dialogue. And although the story was altered, the main idea remained, but the changes made the message stronger.

Art Direction

I was gonna use different colors for the clothes, eyes, and hair, of the character, but using different hues of the same color was the less distracting thing to do. I tried using different blues, yellows, browns and other colors. I liked it best in pink.
I also wanted to use soft colors for the environment, and make it a room or office or park... but since it was inner dialogue, I thought a plain texture worked out the best. Also, no other color than a dark one was good to make the character pop out in screen as I wanted. If I was gonna use soft colors for the background, I would have needed to use darker ones for the character. And I wanted her to look girly, cute, adorable, funny and delicate. Darker colors would have done any of those words become an opposite.
To make everything blend in properly, I used a soft-yellow highly-transparent screen over the whole film.

Cups (Classical Animation, 2010)

I did this video as my final project during a year at VFS in the Classical Animation program.
The whole project was done in 5 months from the planification until it's very end.

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A little about the film

The sound
Thanks to Moises Torres (Sound Designer), the sound ended up as expected. I asked for his help since the beggining of the project, and he helped me out picking up songs, mixing them all to fit the animation, and to record and fit the voices as well.

The voices
Me and my friend Jenn Jackson (Animator) recorded our voices for the characters.
I'm the girl's and she's the boy's. We used a voice alteration device.

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How one does an animation:

It all begins when some braincells pass electric impulses to each other,
Lots of ideas start coming out and the animator puts them into lots of papers,
written or drawn, then rewritten and redrawn, time and time again, until once,
the animator starts to love one of his ideas very very very much...
and, adding a lot of heart, paper, sweat, tears, blood, efforts, flowers, colors, stars,
and as much time as the animator could possibly afford to give to the project...
An animation is born.
And dear reader, I hope you enjoy this one I bring to you :)