Flintstones

Apparently, I was under the impression that Fred was an amputee.

Hitchcock Presents... Vertigo!

Hellboy

Though I love the film, this animation is purely based on the comic book.



I was super-honored to discover at one point in the past that it not only ran on AICN, but also actually graced the front page of the official site. Not anymore, but... once.

T2

I definitely feel this one could've been a lot more involved. Probably I should revisit this at some point.

Moriarty

Please remember before reading this post:
At no point did I promise the contents of this blog would be pretty.

Eventually, I was asked to provide avatars for some of the other spies that made up the motley cast of Ain't-It-Cool. Primary among them, the evil genius, Moriarty.

At the time, Harry sent me a paragraph-long write-up on what he wanted included in these character designs. I'd include these descriptions, but they are literally 4 computers ago, each computer dying violently, and so the records are lost (at least on MY end, to the ages).

Regardless, my first shot at Mori ended like this:



Not so hot, and (luckily) not satisfactory to Harry (I'm not sure if it was run past Moriarty at this point, but I'm sure if it was, he was equally unimpressed).

I was given a bit of design clarification and came to this:



So at this point, the design was approved, but the animation was junk. The only reason I can even claim to guess at what I was trying for is by looking at the revised version:



'Oh! I see. He was supposed to be tugging on his goatee. Huh. I never would've guessed. I see it now.'

I can only look back at myself and shake my head. At least that last version works well enough. I'm not entirely sure it ever ran as a corner animation, but I'm pretty sure Mori used it at the bottom of his articles for a little while.

Any resemblance to Vincent Von Ghoul is purely coincidental.

Oscar Harry

I did two versions of this head.

The first:



had no fatty expansion at the end. This was still pretty early on in my relationship with Ain't-It-Cool and with Harry in particular, and I didn't know how far I could go with things. I had no interest in offending the guy, that's for sure, and I already felt like his head on the skinny body was gag enough.

I sent it off to Harry, and he disagreed. He immediately emailed me back with the suggestion that he suddenly explode into corpulence at the end, and so:



Which is definitely an improvement.

But more importantly, it made clear that Mr. Knowles had no issues with his cartoon avatar being fat, nor with that fatness being the punchline in some of the heads. Obviously, this reframed the ground rules on what I could or could not do with these animations, and gave me more freedom than I had been giving myself.

Freedom that I have since happily abused.

6th Day

Hey! Remember "the Sixth Day?"

No, me neither.
It was about cloning. I believe. And so:



I have not actually seen the film.

This animation is kinda neat though. It's simple, but it's cute. I like how it speeds up as more and more replication happens. (I'll admit, I'm easily amused).

Matrix

In my archives, I have two versions of the Matrix head. The difference between them is all in the timing.

The first version is timed very evenly. Each action has its slot in which to occur, and the next one comes after:



The second version has more thought put into the timing (and is just about twice as long).



There's more time spent held, but there's also more variation. It just feels nicer, and what's more, it kinda feels "cooler." The former is more pressurized, as though it's racing through a list of things to do, but the latter takes its time, unhurried.

Not a big difference between the two, really, but enough.

T-Rex

This one really doesn't relate to any specific movie. I just wanted to have a dinosaur chomp Harry.



I like how his bits go everywhere. tee-hee.

By this point, I probably shouldn't be, but I am once again shocked by my own laziness. How hard would it have been to animate a typing loop for Harry? A half-an-hour of work at the very top. As it is, he's just dead - a mannequin waiting for his own demise.

Ah well. Still like this one alot.

Somewhere, buried in my studio, I have a little cardstock flipbook that I made of this animation. I should really dig it out sometime soon...

Spiderman

I'm not a big fan of this one, personally.



I don't think that the idea was bad, but it comes off as pretty cheap. Bad timing. A weird freeze-up for the tingly bit. All that and sausage fingers, too.

Sorry, Spidey. You deserve better.