Pages

Sunday, March 18, 2007

El Tigre stuff

"
Here is some rough animation from El Tigre, the show I"m working on at Nickelodeon. One of the main parts of my job is timing and editing the animatics. This invloves a lot of work, but basically it's taking the storyboard and timing it out, adding dialogue, editing action sequences, adding sound effects and temp music, etc., to make a blueprint for the whole cartoon to send overseas to be animated. We do very tight animatics on El Tigre, trying to get the cartoon cut to exactly the right length. A lot of new poses are added, layouts by the amazing Fred Osmond are added, and sometimes whole sequences are re-boarded. So there is also a lot of drawing involved. The board is then slugged based on the animatic, which I think most studios don't do. Well I guess some people don't do animatics at all and would scoff at the idea. But I love it. It's like creating a new short film every other week! I say every other week because my buddy Aaron Horvath works on the other episodes.

Of course we go over the animatic with the director, Dave Thomas, and the assistant director, Gabe Swarr, and then it's off to the network for notes. But when it's all pretty much finished, I get to go in and animate some stuff, time permitting. I try to choose harder scenes that require more new drawings, or difficult angles, etc. Most of it is pretty rough and is used as a jump start for the overseas studio. Well, like I said in the beginning, here are some quick clips.



As you can see, a lot of the scenes are pretty short. Even this run cycle above probably wasn't on screen for one and a half cycles. This clip and the first girl running are from "Enter the Cuervo", storyboarded by Ricky Garduno.

"

And these last two clips are from "A fistful of Collars", storyboarded by Luke Cormican.
"
"

26 comments:

samacleod said...

Man, those look really really great! I respect the TV guys so much, the speed is impressive. Way to go!

ryanrobot said...

Loved the art-style I seen in animation magazine. Exciting to see it in process. Good stuff!

Tony Mora said...

Great work Sean!

Sean Szeles said...

Steve: Yeah, tv is super fast paced! Thanks!

Ryan: Thanks man!

Tony: Say whaaaa?!! thanks.

Stephen M. Levinson said...

great work sean! The animation so far looks really beautiful! Now what do they do with these roughs to finalize them? Do they completely traditionally fix up the characters to make them on-model and color them? Or do they use symbols and such to match up with the rough animation?

Steve
www.stephenstudios.com

Niko Anesti said...

Sweet, I love seeing mid-production and behind the scenes work. Cool stuff!

Anonymous said...

Also, what tools do you use for the animatics? They have a pencil and paper look to them, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't digital, considering it's going to go through Flash anyway.

Rock on.

geenpool said...

really really nice stuff. love that first run cycle.

Mukpuddy said...

Dude, this stuff is killer!!! Great work!!

Sean Szeles said...

Thanks everybody!

Stephen:The overseas studio will usually use symbols to match up with the rough animation, creating new assets when needed.

Will:All the boards on El tigre are done digitally in Painter or photoshop. We then use flash to import the storyboard jpegs and edit them. Then any new poses, layouts, and rough animation is just done directly in Flash.

kevin kaliher said...

decent.

Piotr said...

always fun to see roughs! great stuff sean!

joe orrantia said...

I already knew you were a kick ass animator, just nice to be shown the proof. this stuff is really lively. nice timing.

Scott Warren said...

It's so awesome to see behind-the-scenes animation like this! Brilliant work.

Anonymous said...

Excellent work Sean! I didn't realize you actually get to do animation for the show. Seems like a dream come true.

boob said...

Really nice. It's great to see this level of work stateside before it gets shipped off. Looks completely fun!

Thanks for sharing!

Anonymous said...

In editing the animatic in Flash are you running into synch issues?I've always heard you can't get frame accuracy over one minute. DO you work in different files for each scene?

mudbubble said...

Sean - I need to ask you a question via email or some means - can you email me at your earliest convenience?
chris [at] mudbubble [dot] com

??? please - will only take a minute of your time.....

-chris

ZSL said...

lovely lovely!

david said...

nice work on these! i like timing on the run cycle.

Sean Szeles said...

Thanks again everyone!

Joe: Thanks buddy! You're too kind.

Ronnie Y: Yeah, I wish I could do more animation!

Anonymous: Yup, flash has a HUGE sync problem for long scenes. We usually break up an 11 min. episode into 4 fla's. And when we're done, we export swfs and sound seperatley, then render them together in After Effects, compressing back the sound to match the picture again.

David: Thanks man! Your animation is inspiring!

Unknown said...

these are simply fantastic!!! A rockin blog and inspirational stuff for a wannabe like me!!Bookmarked and favorited!

PotatoFarmGirl said...

These are full of great happiness!

goldenrusset said...

i WAY prefer this way of making animatics compared to what I'm forced to do. I'm expected to cut an animatic to time in 1 or 2 days using the old avid method, dictating to an editor. it's a slow tedious process.. and if i want any new poses i have to go to a revisionist and wait for new panels to be drawn, scanned and imported to avid. (even though its a FLASH show!) and of course since theres usually only a day or two.. i often have to make do with what i got, hoping to fix it in animation. Any future projects i work on , i am gonna INSIST on this method.

Anonymous said...

Hi Sean I read you work on El Tigre and wondered if you accept character ideas and was wondering if yuou would consider mine? My character is Eloisa Rivera aka LA Leoparo.Eloisa has a belt buckle like Manny to change her into La Leopardo. La Leopardo is a cat fighter like El Tigre.I'm just a fan of El Tigre.

http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/60694213/

Eloisa's story is being written up on fanfition.com.
http://www.fanfiction.net/s/3650152/1/Entrance_Of_La_Leopardo

Tiff Bertrand

If you intered my email is tiffbertrand@hotmail.com

Anonymous said...

Tiff Bertrand again. As I said I'm just a fan of El Tigre and not any kind of big shot.Eloisa is a tomboy and loves to rockclimb.