Birthday card for Mom

This is a birthday card I made for my mom last week:
http://www.darkroar.com/20090516_big.html

It wasn't overly inspired or anything, and I didn't spend my life on it, but it worked out OK. I got to play with the writing on the screen trick, which was kind of interesting to do. The cat's final pose when he's writing had his head drawn on paper and I traced it with the wacom tablet, which worked better than if I had drawn it directly. As an inbetween to scanning and drawing directly on the tablet I may try to make use of this in the future.

As usual, I started too late and had a lot to do at the last second and didn't do as much as I planned.

There will be quite a few birthdays end of July and early August, so I will have to start working now if I want to do something for everyone... We'll see... I also would like to do a few shorts (6-8 mins), but haven't found the time or energy.

A Birthday Card for Ken

This is a birthday card I made for Ken... (again with some limited sound effects). It's only about 7-8 seconds long: http://www.darkroar.com/20090328_big.html

A lot of it is kind of "inside".

Ah, memories...

• Ken was into AC\DC (see the poster).
• He's the only person I ever met who made farting noises with his hands (which he's doing when the video starts). It's the same principal as doing it with your underarm; you make some suction and then push it. I can do it as well, but Ken was always the master.
• Ken destroyed my SNES "R" button by doing the Razor's Edge in WWF Raw (see the controller above the window)
• Ken moved to Australia (see the boomerang on the wall and kangaroo in the background).
• Ken was balding and had a goatee when he left here. Somehow he managed to lose both sets of hair in Australia. Now we know it's from an exploding present.

The present exploding is kind of loosely based on Jokey Smurf. I don't know why... Again, this could have been better with more time spent. I didn't spend that much time with this one, but I think it's both personal and captures some tiny bit of funniness with it.

Anyway, hope he enjoys...

A Birthday Card for Lauren

This is the e-card I made for Lauren:
http://www.darkroar.com/20090302_big.html

It is about 45 seconds or so of animation with sound. The idea is that the cat is doing all these "bad/gross" things in the scenes, but it's for a good purpose. The scenes spell out the happy birthday at the end. So the hairball coughed up at the start becomes the "H", etc. The only exception is the double p's in Happy are via the one scratch scene and Lauren's entire name is spelt out with the rat's intestines.

On the one hand I'm happy with the animation for a start and I'm also happy it got done. On the other hand I would have liked to link the letters and scenes more closely. So, a mixed bag, but I didn't have enough time to really think things through properly.

I may post some sketches or scene ideas later that lead up to this.

This was done with Toon Boom Animate. I recently "cross-graded" to it from Toon Boom Studio and like it quite a bit. There were some irritations with it, though.