Animalis audio book, new cover, and trailer!
I’ve loved hearing feedback from friends, family, and strangers over the past few years of their experience reading my first book, Animalis! It is encouraging and I am excited to finish the series. In the mean time, I’ve taken the opportunity to collaborate with an excellent voice artist, John Hanks, to create the Audio book for Animalis, and commissioned an all new book cover from Chaz Walgamott, and book trailer by Digital Gravy!
You can check out the audiobook on Audible, and start a free trial if you’re new!
Ghost, Animated Music Video
My Oldest Friend and Lotus Mountain Creative present: Ghost. An audio-visual feast. Would love to hear feedback on how you feel it turned out! For this post I wanted to look back on the process, share what went into it, and do a post mortem on what went right, what went wrong, and lessons learned!
Jacob and I started discussing the project back in Feb of 2018. He gave me this brief description for the tone he wanted:
Early in the animation process I envisioned anime-style limited animation (6-8 frames per second), but the budget wouldn’t allow for the hyper inflated clean up required. This one scene ended up taking almost 1/5 of the overall budget!
Production finally wrapped in Feb of 2020. Unfortunately almost a exactly a year later than my original estimate/delivery goal. The video was met with a moderate amount of interest, being featured in a handful of Canadian music online publications and receiving a minimal amount of attention from un-promoted social media posts. Many film festivals were canceled, and the rest were relegated to online ‘events’ because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Not knowing how much attention a film would get under these conditions we chose not to enter it into film festivals. Unfortunately this made the debut of the video feel underwhelming and it’s impact, if any, quickly faded.
Looking back at the final product after more than a year out of the trenches I have a few final thoughts and changes I’d make. Creating smooth frame by frame animation takes skilled and patient craft work that unfortunately was too much for me to lend to the project out of pocket. The boards told a complete story that was hard for me to want to deviate from. The result was that many scenes in the second half of the video have almost no animation, and many character poses and final art is sub par. There are some early scenes that are almost to the quality I aspired to make the whole video. If I were to do the project over again with the same budget I would make these two dramatic changes.
- Focus on a small number of key animations and really polish them. High frame rate (12 fps), tight line-work. Then re-edit the film to fill run time with large chunks with beautiful but easy to generate loops and ambient shots. Slow pans of environment, hypnotic animations like butterfly’s and walking, etc.
- Edit the film to hit the beats of the song. Originally I had wanted to create a short film with Ghost as the soundtrack. I made a conscious choice that the editing wouldn’t ‘dance’ with the music beyond one notable exception, when the woman’s foot falls in a dramatic emotional shift in the song. I believe if the budget had allowed for fully animating and polishing the entire film, this choice would have been preferred, and have highlighted that the music was ideal to use as a film soundtrack. But audio and visuals ‘dancing’ together looks and feels good, and is a quick and easy way to enhance the experience.
I am considering doing a cut of the film edited to the beats of the song, and will post and share if and when! Thanks for going on this journey with me. -Peter
Music Video Trailer Released!
I was deep into storyboarding for this project this time last year, and am finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Just got this trailer cut together by my friend Chris Finch and am excited to share it!
A splash of color, or not!
Been working on a few new products from my yoga art. Working with Printful for now… if you have a printer you like, let me know!
Space Sharks
Working within a very fun theme for this latest video: Space Road-trip! Here are some highlights from the video. I was responsible for storyboards, color, illustrations/designs, animation, and placing in sound and music.
Music Video Progress!
This is so rewarding and a great project to learn and grow from. This sequence is the product of about 2 months of work, including storyboards, animatic, color boards, animation, compositing. It is a short clip from the film (also has the most going on during this sequence too). Here are some of the steps along the way that it took to get here!
Woo! These storyboards were some of my favorite to create. I had discussed ideas and had a good amount of time to cultivate elements of what I wanted this video to look like. Then during an event called “Inktober” I blasted through on a wave of inspiration to storyboard the entire video with only 1 frame being scrapped from the project. 50 storyboards for a 4 minute animation.
Here is a quick look at some of the progress from there.
First, experimenting with a few scenes to find the final cleanup style
This was a lot of work in itself! Some things I discovered: Backgrounds were going to be more important than I first assumed. Even though he is walking through a big empty mostly black space, there needs to be something in the background to give depth and grounding. So I have a few backgrounds now to work with, especially when he gets close to the glowing pod. And there will be lots of particles and smoke vfx.
Next, I moved on to completing a whole sequence. Here you can see the animatic. Followed by some individual frame renders and a background (foreground?) for an upcoming scene. Findings here: The budget for this project is very small, so I am looking to cut time and effort without cutting quality as much as possible. One thing I found was that having the animation remain on a low frame rate looked great with the final compositing and camera movement. I am going to be able to use most of the animation from the animatic as rough animation and clean up straight from there. Time saver!
Once again, here is the sequence in progress, rendered from After Effects:
Yogis Fight Cancer
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Science!
Here is a highlight reel from some earth science videos I helped produce for Western Governors University. A few illustrations were used from Getty Images (lemonade stand, soccer ball, bowling ball, background for the penguin flying), but almost all of it is designed, illustrated, and animated by myself. Voice of the science guy character is me, too.
Music Video, Color Script Progress
Production is moving along. Here I am exploring mood and color script. Moving on to making a vertical slice of one or more of these scenes.
Animated music video in production
I am incredibly honored to be working with a Canadian musician for a really cool project. We wanted to create a music video that fed our mutual love of Silent Hill and other creepy but beautiful fictional worlds. These storyboards came out as an organic stream of consciousness after extensive brainstorming sessions. The story is deeply meaningful to me, and I hope you enjoy as I share the creation process along the way!
DreamHack Atlanta 2018
Work on Summoners Fate continues as production moves closer to release! I had a fun opportunity to join D20Studios at DreamHack Atlanta, where we participated in a game pitch contest AND practiced some marketing techniques on the generally not-interested-in-indy-games-but-passing-through-just-to-see-everything crowds. I made these two images for the pitch, and crafted squirrel armor! Overall a different kind of success than we anticipated, but success nonetheless.
Inktober 2018!
First time participating in Inktober! A friend from work got a bunch of us to join him, and I’m so glad I did. Making these cute little finished works was such a joy, and reminded me that I really do love drawing and creating art. I don’t have the entire 31 drawings here, because I’m counting a few that I’ll be posting soon for a Music Video project I’m involved with. See you Inktober 2019!!
These and more can be found on my instagram: instagram.com/peterartandyoga
Animation for Accounting
Jumping right into video production for Western Governors University! First big project was 7 videos for an Accounting course.
First goal of producing a video? Clarity! This is communication after all, communicating ideas and concepts too students.
Second goal? Engagement. Motivated students will pull information from any source they can get, but why not make it easy and enjoyable for all students to get this info? It’s like a treat for the mind!
Here are some of the highlights from the videos. I had great help learning the ropes with audio recording, and snagged a few great props from Getty Images. All other characters, props, and backgrounds were created for this project.
Summoners Fate
I’ve been involved with this incredible project, mostly animating, sometimes art directing, and I’m stoked to share its progress with you! I animated all characters and creatures, and helped lead the art direction for the overseas art team. Enjoy!
http://www.summonersfate.com/
https://www.facebook.com/D20Studios/
Riddick Obsession Continues...
Painted in Procreate
Studying some beautiful films and compositions. I love having a reason to rewatch all the Riddick movies.
Boy Engineer - children’s book progress
My wife turns out to be a wonderful writer, so we are working on a children’s book together! Here is a sneak peek.
Read the rough draft: Preston, Boy Engineer- Star Snatcher
Honor Park, non-violence Animation
Honor Park has an epic musical in the works for its non-violence episode. As part of the storytelling, I developed a short animated sequence to go along with the beautiful song Andrew Young wrote. This is the rough concept I used to pitch my idea to Andrew.
After Andrew approved the rough concept I developed the color script for the sequence.
Because the sequence was meant to look like ancestral historical story telling, the design of the characters was geometric and flat. I translated the rough concept into a defined animatic and continued on to animate and color the sequence.
This episode is still in development, but I will update here when final compositing and sound are added! It has been an inspiring project to work on. Andrew Young is a complete powerhouse of talent!
Rough Honor Park Animations
In Honor Park, young boys are inspired to become great men. The host, creator, and mastermind, Andrew Young, takes viewers on high octane adventures and always comes back to home base, Honor Park. Some stories are told through Andrew’s interactions with his lively chalkboard.
The VOID
Art credit – THE VOID
Love of VAIN GLORY
Art Credit – Vain Glory
So there’s this game on iPhone called Vainglory. It’s an online team vs team game (MOBA). For those uninitiated, you start each game from scratch. Pick a character that will play a role on your team. Level 1. As you and your team cut a path of distraction through the playing field, you earn gold from killing small minions, holding strategic points on the map, and killing enemy heroes. As you successfully achieve your goals, you move closer and closer to the enemy’s base where you win the game by destroying the Vain Crystal.
Let The Games Begin
Kat has physical fitness as a priority this year to shed the weight gain from four babies, and I’ve decided to try and be a better writer. A successful writer.
Above is a guide for how to level up one of the characters in the game. As you earn gold you level up. Each level you can upgrade one of 3 abilities. For this character it is Bramblethorn Seed, Yay-Pets! and Spontaneous Combustion. Below, I’ve taken these abilities and customized them into goals. Instead of upgrading the abilities because of leveling up, I level up when I achieve one of the goals.
Earn And Spend Gold
I’ve got to kill minions to earn gold! Write 500 words to get 25 gold. Tweet for 5. Submit a story to a writing contest for 500 gold! But what to do with all this gold? In the game you are constantly buying items to give you a competitive advantage by making you stronger, faster, deadlier. For our game of life I tried to think of a few things that would actually help in my writing like going to conventions and an Audible account. The gold earned from tweeting and blogging and writing probably isn’t going to pay for these items in real life, but it is a fun way to set a budget for them!
Destroy The Enemy Vain Crystal
Ultimately, you are trying to destroy the enemy’s crystal. You can go for it at any point in the game, but if you haven’t leveled up and destroyed plenty of minions and turrets, you are Doomed to die a fast pitiful death. I’ve erected New York Times Bestseller as my Vain Crystal to destroy.