Animation - Noelle Nichols

Needle Felting – First Impressions

While perusing the internet, I stumbled on this strange crafting process called “Needle Felting”. Since I’m quite a curious person, and I like trying new things, I decided to look up some projects that people had made to see if I might try my hand at felting.

Kay Petal
http://feltalive.com

One of the most amazing creators I found, was Kay Petal (do visit her website – Felt Alive.) She has an amazing website dedicated to the artform. I’ve learned all I needed to know about needle felting from her FAQs on her website and ordered my first needle felting tools from her store where she creates her own needles for felting.

I found the process fascinating, especially because I majored in Animation and have an intense love for it. Combine that with my recent interest in Stop Motion Animation, and you have an artist just itching to take off running with this new technique.

I’m planning on creating a Stop Motion puppet and needlefelting the body and details. I believe that the freedom that is given with Needle Felting will combine with an armature. It should create a very cool way to create fur on a character because of the ability to felt the wool to make it more pliable.

My Needle Felting supplies

I just received my order today, and I have to admit, I had a blast just creating a little felted ball. I’m looking forward to getting more colors of wool and learning how to create intricate pieces.

And nothing compares to a video to demonstrate the pure skill that is used to create Kay Petal’s Little Celebrities. Check out her Whoopi Goldberg.

253 days ago PERMALINK 0 like 0 Comments

Possible New Webseries – “What if..”

I had a recent idea to create a new series focusing on the possibilities of a person’s “what if–” moments. This will be a series focused on thinking “what if I had done this?”, “what if I could be this.”.

Choosing the color scheme for a possible new webseries.

My first idea was that this would make a very interesting way to use drawings to tell a story. I’m thinking very limited animation and a more sketchy style to keep the amount of time per episode down to a minimum. It’s going to be more focused on possibilities rather than the visual style. I thought about maybe green screening a live actor (more than likely myself – for lack of anyone else), and then using photos or special effects. However, I believe drawings would create a more imaginative series.

Below is the intro I’ve created for the pilot episode of the series. All music, drawings and motion graphics were edited and done by me.

I’m working on the script for the first episode now, which will focus on giving the viewer and introduction to the series and give background to the character. From there, I will record the narration and drawing up some visuals for the story. I’m excited to see how this series will turn out. It’s more of an artsy series which contrasts against Needy Cat, my other webseries.

309 days ago PERMALINK 0 like 0 Comments

Moments with John Ross

If you haven’t heard of John Ross: American, it’s a project to create an animated documentary of the WWII Veteran named John Ross. Right now we (the studio I intern for, Worker Studio) is trying to raise funds to go back to Florida to record more of John’s stories before they are lost. http://indiegogo.com/johnrossamerican

For the final week, we are releasing a series called “Moments with John Ross” where you can hear and get to know the man himself. These were edited together by me and hand picked from the rough footage captured last year. Please take the time to enjoy the following videos. This is an inspirational man, who is genuine at heart with everything he does.

For more information, please visit the following link: http://johnrossamerican.wordpress.com

322 days ago PERMALINK 0 like 0 Comments

John Ross: American – A Personal Appeal

John Ross: American is much more than just a story about an amazing WWII Reconnaissance pilot. It’s a leap of faith in ideals that is depending on the support of everyone in Colorado and American to complete its goal.

I’m one of the interns that work for Worker Studio and this is my chance to work on something I love and believe in. For the past four years I’ve attended RMCAD (Rocky Mountain College of Art +Design) and worked hard to graduate. This summer I’ve been working on the trailer, editing and pre-production for this inspirational film.

John Ross is an amazing person. I’ve had the joy of watching interviews and the ability to hear his stories. He’s so down to earth and genuine. He fought against his lack of education to do what he wanted to do. Fly! He set his sights on flying a P-38 in WWII, and overcame all of the obstacles. “Fighter Pilots win battles. Photo pilots win wars.” His legacy in bringing photos back from the battlefield is what helped win the war.

He is a real hero, and I want his story to be told.

Worker Studio wants to animate this documentary and bring his story to life in a medium that has no limits. Just like John’s life.

I want to tell people about him and his stories. I want people to know the story of John Ross. I’m 22years old and this is the first time I’ve ever had the chance of hearing a hero tell his story and could relate. I’ve been completely fascinated ever since I got to know John Ross.

I live in Colorado, and there are no other opportunities for me and my fellow graduates in the state. I want other graduates to be able to find work here and not be forced to move to LA or Washington. This film has so may meanings behind it.

Most of all though, I want people to be inspired by John Ross, like I and many others have been. Please take the time to get to know him and share this story of inspiration with everyone you know.

Please visit the site here: John Ross: American

335 days ago PERMALINK 0 like 0 Comments

John Ross: American

The above trailer was edited together by me.

A couple weeks ago I mentioned that I have some exciting news to write about. I’m now an intern at Worker Studio! I’ve been lending my skills to this exciting new animated documentary that is in the works called “John Ross: American”. It’s based on the man himself, John Ross, and his amazing stories of epic photo pilot adventures, freight train hopping, pilot training and aspirations to become a pilot.

John Ross: American Poster

John Ross is a truly amazing person, with great Morales and actions. This would be an amazing new story, told in a fresh new medium. Animated documentaries? Yes please!

However, we are in desperate need of funding to go back and film more stories from John Ross. We need to capture all of the details we need, as told by John Ross, for this film to be a success. He’s 94 years old and once this opportunity of capturing his stories is gone, they’re gone.

If you love stories of inspirational men, love animation, or just want to help out a good cause, please take a few minutes to check out or campaign and if you have the means, donate a little money to the campaign. Remember to share this story so more people can hear about John Ross!

Indiegogo Campaign: http://www.indiegogo.com/JohnRossAmerican

Blog: http://johnrossamerican.wordpress.com/

I’ll be blogging more as we go farther into this campaign.

347 days ago PERMALINK 0 like 0 Comments

Graduation Exhibition

West Gallery from the RMCAD Senior Show.

After my graduation, I have to admit that one of the highlights was the Graduation Exhibition at Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design. The opening reception entailed a show put on by my fellow graduates and the night was spent celebrating our hard work and sharing stories.

My Gallery Space

For my gallery space, I installed my 5.1 Surround Sound in a dark room without any kind of visual aid to the presentation. The space was meant to provide a place for people to experience the story without any distractions and to experience the subtleties of sound transporting you to a place.

Below is a short video of what my gallery exhibit looked like. The monitor outside of the Surround Sound room had three of my videos I’ve edited (Pen and Paper, the Human Experience and Underwater Ambience), my layouts I had done for class and also an older sound re-design project I had done.

I have not shared any of my drawings or layouts on this blog yet, so I will post the five that I did for my layout class that were included in my grad show reel in a follow up post as well as the Surround Sound project with full details of the concepts and stories behind them.

391 days ago PERMALINK 0 like 1 Comment

Render Passes

I decided I would try and update this blog at least once a week, so here’s the weekly progress report. I started running into as many problems as you can think of when rendering out different scenes from my thesis. One of which is the surface shader and rendering out in different layers so I can tweak the settings. I have to be honest: it was the first time I have rendered out in passes like this so the trial and error process is understandable.

Apparently there is reflections on the surface shader that you have to turn off in Maya. Who knew?

After having to re-render way too many times, I made a list of things to double check before hitting the batch render and walking away for the rest of the day:

make sure things in top layer are turned on with overrides
file name is correct for the prefix
check renumber frames (if applicable)
correct camera and alpha to render with
shadow pass – turn off reflections on surface shader

My progress so far is three scenes almost rendered out. I think I’m getting the hang of render passes, but once I think I’m in the right….maya proves otherwise.

541 days ago PERMALINK 0 like 0 Comments

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