Internship at Ka-Ching Cartoons!

The past 5 months I've been on an internship at Ka-Ching Cartoons. Which is an amazing animation studio in the heart of Rotterdam that specializes in tv shows, short films, and commercials. I had a great time at the studio and learned tons of stuff. I mainly worked on a 2D cartoon series for Nintendo called The 3D Machine: The Series, which can be seen in stereoscopic 3D on the Nintendo 3DS console. On this series I got to work on almost every aspect of the production which was a great experience.


More info on the series can be found here.

Beside the series I got to work on some other projects and created an episode of the Plunk series.
I'll include some of my work from my internship in a new showreel which I'll make in the coming months.

Updated showreel 2012

My showreel has been updated with some new work.

Miniature sets

Lately I've been experimenting with miniature sets. Below are two shots in which I tried to combine sets with CG elements.

'Akira' color charts

Recently I bought "The Art of Pixar" book which is full of amazing color scripts. Inspired by this book I'm currently researching the use of color in animated feature films, especially how color changes are connected to a mood and story. After some research I came across some very interesting projects related to the use of color in movies: Cinema Redux, Color Theory for Cinematographers, Moviebarcode, Cinemetrics and Jason Salavon's "The Top Grossing Film of All Time".

After discovering these great projects I've decided to make my own color charts for my research. I created my own method to develop these charts based on a technique Brendan Dawes used in his "Cinema Redux" project. 'I  sampled a movie every second and generated a 16 x 9 pixel thumbnail of the frame at that moment in time. I did this for the entire film, with each row representing one minute of film time.^'[1]


The first chart I made is from the anime "Akira"(1988).

Inspired by Jason Salavon's "The Top Grossing Film of All Time" 'I simplified each thumbnail by averaging it to a single color best representative of that frame^'[2]  This way we get a clearer view of the individual frames.

Another approach is the "movie barcode" in which 1 frame per second is compressed to an 1 x 480 pixel image and merged together to form a color bar. This results in a 7471 x 480 pixel image which can be read from left to right.

(click here for full size)

This way the image becomes pretty big, to keep an overview I resized the first barcode underneath to the format used by moviebarcode. The second picture underneath has simplified colors representative of the average color per frame.And the third is the average color of a set of seconds combined.

In the coming weeks I'll post a few other color charted movies.


Reference:
1. Dawes, Brendan. Cinema Redux. 2004.

http://processing.org/exhibition/works/redux/index.html. 26 March 2012.

2. Salavon, Jason. The Top Grossing Film of All Time, 1 x 1. 2000.

http://salavon.com/work/TopGrossingFilmAllTime/. 26 March 2012.

2012: A Klik Odyssey

"2012: A Klik Odyssey" is an unofficial leader I made for a Dutch animation festival called the 'KLIK! Amsterdam Animation Festival' as an assignment at the Willem de Kooning Academy.

One characteristic of this festival is that the audience is encouraged to "click" after a screening with a special clicking toy instead of clapping. The Dutch word for click is klik, hence the name "KLIK!". You can hear this clicking sound at the end of my leader.

 

Cat

Animation is done by me and the background by Elian van der Heiden

Playground

This is a short animation I made of a lonely boy playing on the beach. The animation can be looped.