Mike Ollerton Blog

 After the long haul working on the previous animation I’m going back to doing shorter animation exercises as it was clear I need way more practice of the fundamentals. Today I worked on a character bounce where you take the fundamentals of the bouncing ball exercise and apply it to a character. 

 So I have been working on this personal project for a while called Liliana’s Quest, a adventure game with a visual style reminiscent of dragons lair and classic Disney movies. I have been chipping away at this project doing character designs and teaching myself how to animate and learn how to paint backgrounds in the style I want. I’m thinking I might create a specific dev blog for this project so I can share all my progress with stuff like character designs etc. but for now I wanted to share an update while it’s fresh in my head. I recently just finished the biggest bit of animation I’ve ever done. I’m still pretty novice at animating and wanted to take a shot to a relatively finished product to see if I can even achieve the style I have in my head, this would be helpful as I want the game to have lots of high quality cutscenes. I made a lot of mistakes in the animation that I didn’t pick up on until I was too far in the process, I decided to power through and finish the shot just so

 Andreas Deja has been working on this beautiful short film about a little girl and a tiger, I don’t know much more about it than that, except he’s been working away on it for many years. I first discovered it when I first stumbled onto his blog and I have been excited to see it ever since. We have now finally got a trailer and it is of course full of beautiful animation. Enjoy! Also check out this teaser from 2012! Gosh it’s been a while, I think I personally learnt of the project in 2017. It really goes to show how long animated projects like this can take.

 Little loop rotation of the character Morrigan. I’m enjoying working traditionally, I need to start working through some proper exercises though.

So far all my 2d animation practice and work has be done digitally. I have owned a peg bar and disk for a while but not knowing what I was doing, I bought the cheapest, largest paper available at the time. I had no idea the mistake this was for a beginner. So I’ve had a huge stack of really cheap flimsy 16 field paper that I just have really struggled to use.  As I’ve worked through more tutorials I’ve learnt even good quality 16 field can be difficult to flip and beginners are recommended to go smaller, also because my paper is so thin and flimsy the paper just buckles and collapses on its self as you try to flip. I’ve since bought some high quality 12f paper and the difference is night and day, I was really working in hard mode. All that said because I have so much of this flimsy paper I don’t want it to go to waste so I’m using it more for general drawing practice. Yesterday I sketched out a quick drawing of Chun Li from Street Fighter and well, before I knew it I had stuck another

 Saw these great pictures today, shared by Paul Briggs on twitter of Pres Romanillos animation desk, which I believe is now on display at the Walt Disney studio. Just look at those carvings!  Pres was a phenomenal artist and we lost him far too soon! I discovered him and his work after he had passed away though I’m very glad I got to grow up watching his work.  Here’s some photos of a book I own of his work, I love the way he could draw the figure, so much gesture and believable weight. Rest in peace Pres, and thanks for you wonderful art!