Gallery

"When his best friend is murdered, Jay Fitch will have to don the mantle of Detective Jay to solve the case! With the help of his dead friend's spirit (now possessing his own hair) and a sentient desk lamp named Larry Lampshade, Detective Jay will surely catch the culprit!" This is a remake of an older animation I made back in 2015 with Microsoft Paint and Windows Movie Maker. Because this was my first Clip Studio Paint animation I decided to redo an older short to see how well I could translate the designs of these characters to a digital work space. Before this I had just drawn all my animations with a mouse, so I was wondering how things would go with a tablet and an actual animation program. It took a little getting used to and these characters definitely look rough here, but eventually I got the hang of using a tablet.

"Dregg, Luc, and fakey brainstorm ideas for the next Uncharted game." For a while I've wanted to animate something using audio from my friends and a couple years ago during a session of Uncharted 4 Survival I got a pretty good clip. It took me a while to get around to actually doing anything with it though. The goal of this project was to see what I could get done in roughly a month of time. I'm planning on continuing to use and improve this style over the course of the year in order to produce videos sooner. I've got several ideas that wouldn't necessarily be worth fully animating in longer projects but I would like to do something with them. As a first attempt I'm OK with how this turned out. It was a lot choppier than I expected and if I hadn't been on a deadline of sorts I might have gone back to add extra frames for smoothness. I purposely went for a more "sketchy" style where the lines don't always connect properly and I think I may ditch that in favor of a cleaner look going forward. Overall though I think it's a good starting point to improve on. Thanks for watching.

"After being scorned by the college movie theater ticket attendants, Mike and Evan express their concerns in a well spoken manner." This was originally going to be one segment in a video of 4, but because I had another project given to me around the time I was finishing this up, I decided to just upload the parts individually as I made them. The audio is from my friend and I driving back home after failing to understand how ticket purchasing worked at our college's theater. We rant and rave and it's all in good fun, I swear.

"Become one of the Merry Men and eat some Robin Hood Cereal!" This was a short little animation I made for my dad's birthday. I took audio of him and his friend when they were kids making a commercial for a fake Robin Hood Cereal and animated it. I'm pretty sure it was a fake cereal at the time. I know there was some kind of Kevin Costner Robin Hood cereal/movie tie in at some point in time but I don't think this was directly tied to it.

So I was asked to make an animated PSA about hurricane safety and this was this first pitch idea I came up with. It started out simple enough but eventually I let things escalate and go where they wanted. Once I got to the whole dead family/surreal whirlpool storm part I knew that this project would take the better part of a year to finish, and would also probably get rejected. The audio is from me talking a friend through the pitch and I thought it'd be a shame to just toss it all away.

"A bio-luminescent sea creature is stalked by a large predator." There's not a whole lot to this one. It was my first 3D animation project I made for a class. Because the base 3D renders looked so dull I added a couple colored filters to them in Clip Studio Paint. I also animated the antennae and the legs in 2D, and just outlined everything to make it look hand drawn. There's a weird ghosting effect at times because I animated the 2D stuff at 12fps, while the actual video I was animating over was 24fps. It doesn't detract too much from the video so I didn't fix it.

"A couple of toons find themselves in a strange new world full of sights and sounds they've never encountered before...the world of the Third Dimension!" So this was part of a group project I worked on for a 3D Animation class. The original idea was to have a cartoon couple exploring a 3D city but eventually my partner, Kylie, and I changed it to be two little animal toons who would chase each other throughout the city. I think it actually helped to have that dynamic because it made transitioning from scene to scene a bit easier. They're constantly chasing each other, hence the locations are constantly changing, basically. Kylie designed the characters so when animating them I tried to keep their designs faithful to her original character sheets. I feel like eventually the longer I animate something, the designs become distilled down to the traits/features that stand out the most to me and the design gets translated into my own style and it just sort of happens. There was also a tight schedule for this project as well so we didn't have a lot of time to get hung up on the smaller details. I think one of our regrets was not utilizing the 3D space more, maybe having more camera movements, or 3D objects be interacted with by the cartoon characters. But again, time was an issue and we needed A LOT of it for rendering 3D scenes. When it comes down to it, I'm glad we prioritized the narrative over the visuals. A shorter animation with better visuals would have looked nice of course, but the story would have felt too short and, in my opinion, unsatisfying. Here's some links to Kylie's other works if you're interested in seeing what she makes: Webcomic "Otter Space" https://www.webtoons.com/en/challenge/otter-space/list?title_no=172647 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/kashtonbaker/ Twitter https://twitter.com/kashtonbaker

Like the title says here's an unfinished piece I worked on for my final project in a 3D animation class. I wanted to get the entire thing done but all I could manage to do was get the 3D parts rendered and do the rough line work for the 2D animation. I was pretty pleased with how this turned out, or at least how it's turning out so far. I haven't really done an animation with much action in it before so it was fun to experiment with that and just do some crazy stuff. I'd like to actually finish this at some point, but right now I've got another animation on hold that I want to get back to first. This may be something I revisit for my senior project or something because there were a lot of elements I didn't have time to include. As seen in the "WIP" I uploaded earlier, things like full color and shading on the 2D character, little effects like more motion blurs/smears, or dust clouds and more impact shots would be included in the finished piece. I figured I'd upload what I had so far given how I wouldn't be going back to this for a decent while.