Ampharos Animation

I did a short little animation of Ampharos (Pokemon) for practice and fun- here's the result!

Done frame-by-frame in Flash/background element done with Photoshop/composited in After Effects.

New Items in Redbubble Store!

I updated my stock in my Redbubble store today with several greeting cards and postcards- if you're interested in purchasing my work, please do check it out!

Update 06/26: I decided I wanted to offer more products for my recent uploads than just greeting cards, so I took the time to put up some higher-res images- now most of my new stock is available as various prints, posters, throw pillows, and tote bags! Check it out below!

Moon Animate, Make-Up!

Back in April I finished up my contribution for the "Moon Animate, Make-Up!" fan project, the goal of which is to re-animate an entire episode of Sailor Moon by assigning one shot to each volunteer animator.

Here's the result of the shot I was given:



The shot that I was assigned was a relatively static 10-second-long shot. I tried to think through what the most entertaining thing to do with it would be, and I decided that I could try out making puppets (not something I really have experience with!). The puppets were needle-felted onto wire armatures; nothing fancy- I only gave Sailor Moon anything extra to manipulate the puppet (the wires coming out of her arms).

I tried to figure out a way to get the faces puppeteered as well, but it just wasn't working very well. I ended up just felting a few different mouth shapes (seen stuck on their faces in the group shot) and they got composited in after the fact.



The first picture above shows the "stage" - just a couple of lightboxes set up in front of the makeshift green screen made simply by sticking some green paper onto my fridge. Victor Courtright took care of filming while Salina Trevino helped me with the puppeteering as we listened to the audio over and over to sync up the performance. We filmed Sailor Moon separately as she was in the foreground and needed two people to handle her (Salina took care of the overall body movement while I took care of the arms/details of the gestures). Malachite (Salina) and Ninjana (me) were filmed together since they interacted a bit and didn't require anything other than bopping around in front of the camera.

For the background I just did a quick watercolor copy of the original background from the show; I didn't feel like it needed anything different and I liked the look of it with the puppets.

With immense help from Victor, all of these elements were composited in After Effects to get the final shot together. And that's it! It was lots of work getting the puppets felted and it felt like I was kind of making it up as I went along...but it was tons of fun to pull this off!

Miss Tibet: Beauty in Exile

The end of last year/beginning of this year for me was spent working on something pretty different than anything I've worked on before. I did some animation for a documentary called Miss Tibet: Beauty in Exile, a really fascinating film about Tibetan women living in a modern world yet still trying to embrace and represent the traditions of their culture, and a controversial beauty pageant that ends up becoming a political platform for these women to speak up about Tibetan issues.

For this project I took a go at animating in a way I never have before. I used pre-existing illustrations by the hand of another artist, originally from a book titled Where Is Tibet?, and collaged and edited them to become moving illustrations; to complete everything I had to add in some completely original elements that needed to blend in with the style of the illustrations.

The small bits of animation that I did are being used as transitional elements between different sections of the film, so I'm afraid they won't seem like much without the context of the film, but here are some teaser screen shots of what I did.






To learn more about the film, please visit the website or go to the film's Facebook page and give it a "Like"!

New Project Coming this Year!

Just giving a very first teaser for a new project I'll be working on this year- a web comic called "The Adventures of Potato"!

Follow Me on Facebook!

For those of you who like using Facebook to keep up-to-date, I started my own artist page today! You can find me at https://www.facebook.com/jordanhill.animation.illustration to see collected updates/news on any work I'm posting online. So be sure to like my page!


Jordan Hill Animation & Illustration

Storyboards: "Grandmother"

Here's a new set of boards I worked on mostly earlier this year and finished up last month. This is an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's short story "Grandmother" (which is easy enough to find online if you want to compare my boards to the original story!) I believe this is the first set of boards I've done that's an adaptation of something else or otherwise not an original story of mine. Check out the storyboard section to see the rest!

New Animation: Another Dog Loop...with Food! - Made for Loop de Loop Monthly Animation Challenge

I did this animation in a day to submit to this month's Loop de Loop animation challenge (the theme is food). Yes, I am doing lots of dog animation lately for a reason... :)

New Animation, "The Dog Loop"

I did this little bit of rough animation just ro get back in the groove of animating lately. The gif on the left is the point that I finished up on it; Victor Courtright did the awesome color cleanup on it on the right!

New Storyboards: My Hero Potato and Multiverse Agents: Monster Patrol

I've added two new sets of boards to my Storyboards section; the first is a new story in the Potato Adventures, featuring both old and new characters! The second is the intro scene to a new story I've been working on called Multiverse Agents: Monster Patrol.