2023 Reel

Student Animation Showcase

Animations from Monmouth have once again been included in the ASIFA Hollywood Educators Forrum Student Animation Showcase

Indemnity.exe @ EB Indie

The 2021 group animation Indemnity.exe has been selected for the East Brunswick Independent Film Festival. The festival is slated to take place on August 12 – 13, 2022. Last year’s Drive In Festival can be viewed on YouTube.

Congratulations to the team: Alyssa Cirillo, Mike Gatta, Lauren Haug, Jeremy Kaston, Emily Ronan, and Connor Trapani, and composer Max Adolf.

Hamster Christmas!

Dutch commercial for a grocery store. I think you can get the message even if you have no idea what the people are saying.

A completely different take on the Holiday Season was created at Buck:

Indemnity.exe selected for MetroCAF 2021

This year's group animation, Indemnity.exe has been selected for the MetroCAF 2021 festival! MetroCAF is the annual NYC Metropolitan Area College Computer Animation Festival organized by the New York City chapter of ACM SIGGRAPH. Congratulations to the animation students who created the film: Alyssa Cirillo, Mike Gatta, Lauren Haug, Jeremy Kaston, Emily Ronan, and Connor Trapani. Congratulations also to composer Max Adolf, a Music Production student at Monmouth University.

MetroCAF 2021 will be virtual this year. You can view the livestream of the show on Friday, September 24 UPDATE: October 8 at 7:30 PM EDT. The awards for Individual, Small Group, Large Group, and Best of Show will be presented at the end of the screening.

The image on this year's MetroCAF poster was created by our very own Emily Ronan (BFA Animation, 2021)

Student Animation Showcase 2021

This year's group animation, Indemnity.exe, is included in the ASIFA Hollywood Educators Forum Student Animation Showcase, which will premiere this Friday! And that is 7PM PDT.

Reel 2021

Not Stop Motion

This reached me through multiple channels. It was made in Blender

Animation Reels

    Hey everyone, here are two really good demo reels that I found online. The first one is an Animation reel that features primarily 3D work. It is around 2 minutes and 30 seconds long and I really enjoy the different models that he showcases throughout his work. He also handles the audio throughout the reel very well because the different clips he shows have their own sound in them so you do not want the music to overpower the original audio in the video. The second reel is by Joanna Davidovich. She has a variety of professional work assembled from her freelance jobs over years and also some of her own self work. She references below a shot list with details of what she did for each clip and gives thanks to the different studios that allowed her to us the work she did. The thing I enjoyed the most about both of these reels was the variety of clips and how it was displayed. The different styles allow the viewer to see the artist is not just one dimensional and can express their work in multiple mediums.

First Reel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYGjnuK8nYo

Second Reel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsP8_H_65yk

Animation Reels!

 Heyya, everyone, Alyssa here to bring you a couple of demo reels that I personally found interesting to look at. I found these all from an animation subreddit of people ranging from students to professionals sharing their works through demo reels and other methods. Here they are:

Owen Smith - First Person Animation Reel 2020

This one is from Owen Smith, and this one primarily focuses on his capabilities with first-person animation. I have plenty of nice things to say about it, especially in the presentation. A lot of times with these styles of animations, it can get monotonous real fast when you're just watching various guns being shot over and over again. However, he keeps it dynamic by changing up the background by making it animated and changing color per gun as well (a demo reel I decided not to show here had the problem of having a monotonous background in these demonstrations). The main critique I have, however, is the use of copyrighted material. Although he credits it all at the end, he uses a Rolling Stones song and various sound effects from other video games for the gun sounds. I also do not know what those projects were for initially. It would have also been nice to indicate which of the model credits go where, and it can be done in the description of the video. Overall, way to make what could be a monotonous specialty to display more interesting!

Sarah Abbott Demo Reel Fall 2020

This next one is from Sarah Abbott, a 2D animator. She really does a good job with music choice, prioritizing her best work in the front, and giving a brief variety with her projects. There is a perfect amount of time spent on each animation, and they each have a purpose and reason for fitting on the reel. My critiques for this one I'll keep brief: in the section with the dialogue, one of the character's lines get awkwardly cut off mid-speech and it's a little jarring on an editing standpoint. She could have cut it off before that character started the line. In addition, I cannot tell what role she had in these animations, whether she did some aspects of it or all of it. Those can be recorded in the description as well, so it can be easier to tell from someone looking at this in an internship standpoint what she did. Either way, I found this animation to be relatively smooth (with the exception of that one editing mistake) and displays the variety of what she can do.

David Han - Character Animation Reel

Time for a professional one to end it off. This is David Han, a professional character animator who has worked on numerous studio films, and won an Annie for his character animation work on Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse. I thought it would be intriguing to include an accomplished professional on this list to see how a professional does a character reel. It's clear that he has a specific style in his character animations, with a lot of the scenes in display being action-heavy scenes with a few more toned down scenes in the mix (such as the segments with dialogue from Storks and Into the Spiderverse). I also found it interesting that he included play-blasts as well to demonstrate an aspect of his process un-rendered. In the description, he says that this is a "for funsies" version of a demo reel, but the way that the content is included and the fun framing device for the reel can serve as inspiration. Again, music is from a video game so we need to make sure to avoid those styles of music for our personal projects. Either way, this is definitely one to look at. 

That's all I have for now, and I'm looking forward to putting together mine for what's to come!

Alyssa out!

MetroCAF 2020 Tomorrow!

This is your chance to see the best computer animations created last year by students in our area, and this year it is free and you do not need to come into the city.

MetroCAF 2020 will premiere this Thursday at 7:30 PM as an on-line presentation at https://metrocaf.org/metrocaf/2020/show/

Acid

This animation is playing at the Ottowa International Animation Festival.

Rick and Morty Exquisite Corpse from Matt Taylor on Vimeo.

The Summer of Models and Textures

    Heyo, it's Alyssa here with a little talk about my personal progress on the group project over the summer, as well as something neat I discovered that could be applied to one of my characters.

     Summer was very different this year, and it’s both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because the group and I got the opportunity to work well over the summer, but a curse because of… everything else.The main objective: get the modeling done that summer. Six scenes divided among six people and the characters divided up in a variety of ways, and I chose the Flash Dive as my locale. After researching bar aesthetics as well as items to maintain the more “exposed” theme of the Circuit District, I modeled up the bar. A frozen drink machine here, the tables and screws there, ooh, what if the soda taps were like gasoline pumps? The modeling of the bar was complete by the end of July. 

Next up were the characters- I modified the Wattie model, redoing his jacket from his beta look, then created Nick LN Dimes, a mouse, and a background character I did clock motifs on.

 

    I was surprised to see it was mid-August when I finished my initial character models. I was pretty far ahead so I figured I’d texture as well! The Dive was going to be the biggest challenge and I realized that I needed to look as cool as possible. As a result, I took on the challenge of UVing and then using procreate to create most of the textures to recreate my concept art as closely as possible. 

    Afterwards I started texturing the characters and here we are at the start of the school year. 

    The biggest highlight from this week was a personal internal debate over Wattie’s eyes. When I initially designed him, I originally had his eyes as polygons behind a translucent screen, but I realized I needed Wattie to really express. The idea I had: texture the eyes instead and find a way to cycle through the textures whenever it's necessary. It's safe to say that I was inspired by Animal Crossing's method of character expression.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons (2020), Nintendo

    Deleting the polygonal eyes, I decided to take on the task of making 14 textures for the screen, Wattie’s eyes changing expression each one. My old pal Google told me that if I titled each file wattieface.0000, 0001 and so on in that, they could be brought in as an image sequence that can be cycled through and keyed. As a result, one model, in this case the screen, can now have multiple textures on top of it. I feel this will benefit a lot allowing Wattie to have endless possibilities with how his eye screen looks rather than be limited by the polygons. I used the Reddit question and answer here to find this out, look for the comment by user blueSGL (it should be the second comment on the forum there).

 

    There are still textures that need polishing, namely Wattie’s coat. The pockets are a bit askew and the texture of the coat is being inconsistent because of the UVs. I’ll probably have to redo Wattie’s coat UV and ensure that I have both a consistent place for the pockets using edge loops as guides and a better UV to make the patterning more even. In addition, I plan to program a driven key so that this feature could be accessed from the channel box tab rather than having to go back and forth between going into the attributes folder, going into the texture folder, and clicking on the color to get to this file attribute.

    Thank you for taking the time to read this, and I'm excited for how all the characters will end up looking once I get everything more polished.

    Alyssa out!