Four Days with Dan Haskett

I attended a character design workshop with Dan Haskett at SVA this past week.

First we were asked to design a character that we connected to emotionally, or at least appealed to us in some way. I didn't manage to come up with anything that I really loved, but over time I developed a "loser knight" character that sort of encapsulates what I draw.


We were asked to draw Mickey Mouse, and everyone failed miserably. I think my redesign is way cooler than the Disney version.


Other than that, I just doodled a lot while Dan regaled us with stories of the animation industry, past and present.



I really liked drawing this skull spaceman/deep sea diver.


It's too soon to tell how much or how little I learned from this workshop. It occurred to me that when I'm designing characters, I don't consider how well they work for animation. Basically Dan said round, simple characters work best for fluid animation, but I think ideas like that can be limiting. It would be terrible if everything looked like a Disney film just because that's what moved best. Animation is an art like anything else - the more diverse the better. Even if I didn't agree with everything Dan said, he had a lot of great insight from years of experience, and though the change is subtle, I'm definitely thinking about my drawings differently.


The End.

Clean Up

Some stuff still needs to animated/revised, but I've moved onto the clean-up and color phase of production. This is the look I'm thinking of going with - strong blacks with yellow and white for contrast. I've never been good with real color.

Last Leg of Animating

I've got three scenes left to animate, and none of them have been completely fleshed out. My brainstorming sessions are always a mix of business and pleasure, thus not all of the drawings in this post are directly related to my commercial.

Layout Switching

Fooling around with layout compositions, because I hate some of the current ones. Everyone thought this was a comic...

Animatic

I was finally able to somehow cut this thing down to a minute.

Commercial - Storyboards

Still working on the thumbnail storyboards... I'm somewhat displeased with how this is turning out, I may rewrite the script.

Thesis - Seven Ravens

It's never too early to be completely terrified of senior year. These sketches are character designs/brainstorming sessions for an adaptation of a fairytale by the Brothers Grimm, The Seven Ravens, which may or may not be my thesis film.

Commercial - Initial Sketches

For the Spring 2007 semester, my animation class is required to write, direct and animate a one minute commercial. I thought it might be fun to do an intergalactic internet dating service.