This Demo reel is a compilation of my work from studying for my Masters degree in Animation in the Netherlands. Even though I do have experience in 3D animation, I wanted to see how far I could with 2D animation by using Blender’s grease pencil animation tool for my projects.
The first projects I show my for the first few seconds in my Demo reel are my favorite ones because I had the most fun working on them. It was also the first time where I got the chance to work with clients, and where I worked within a group of the nicest people I ever met. So I will write brief descriptions about what goes on in each clip - see below the video.
Clips Shown in order:
Intro of my short-film “memory box”
Shows the opening scene of the small futuristic town buildings and and ships I designed. My short-film was mostly rendered in Eevee.
Playgrounds Intro
Had fun animating the buildings and trees with this one. It was the first time I learned how to use geometry nodes to speed up the pop-up buildings. Including the yellow beetle definitely beats animating them individually, and my friends were easily impressed by this. The trees however were animated manually on a 2 step interpolation, and I just copied the animations several times. The few things I didn’t work on were the rigged character models and the lighting.
Storyboard for Playgrounds
It was a combination of using the line tool in grease pencil and just animating the objects in snappy way. I know for pre-viz its not required for animation to be this smooth, but I had fun doing that.
Animated 2d Transformation exercise
This was a fun excercise where I was tasked with animating a transformation and jump sequence. Each classmate was assigned this in a specific alphabetical order, so we had start with someone elses character design that came before, and finished the transformation with our own character design afterwards. I had fun animating the monster character from a classmate that really liked drawing monsters all of the time.
Walking to the beach scene from my short-film
This was one of the first scenes I designed when I started my short-film project. I am not sure from what I was inspired by, but I thought this shot was really beautiful and simple. I knew I just really like strange environmental designs in alien worlds, and this really didn’t even have a name yet, but finalizing the look of this scene early on really pushed me to finish my short-film.
Renders for Eye film Museum’s 75 year anniversary
I was in charge of the designing the material for unique tile pattern of the real Eye Film Museum in Amsterdam. And I rigged the light sources to playback films that the museum featured. In addition to modeling the background buildings on the left and right side of the Museum, and helped render the final shots in Cycles.
Alien planet scenes from my short-film
I didn’t have much time in my schedule to rig and model complex aliens, so I just modeled some simple flying creatures that were inspired by sea slugs. Roger Dean’s gorgeous paintings really fueled my inspiration to design the rock arches. The floating city scene was also partially inspired from Roger Deans “Mushroom Towers” and inspired from background artist Hiroshi Ohno from Akira. I really had fun designing the city with a simple light strip material.
“Patched” commercial, (The part with colorful flying dress and flowers)
My first time doing VFX on Film was dress extension. It was just simple flat projected planes with a basic cloth sim coming down. I modelled the flowers using geometry nodes again. I can’t remember what flower they exactly were based off of. I was just given a reference and went ahead with it. Even though I did design an rigged the real-time simulation part of the dress, my group members were actually responsible for the dress flying through the air and modeld the birds. Not how I would’ve animated it personally, but to each their own.
Real-time dress simulation test sequence.
They were really impressed by this one. High poly mesh bound to a low poly mesh on top of it, and a basic cloth sim controlled by an empty was a piece of cake.
3d Arm rig that was used as a reference for my alien character for my short-film
I did not use this rig often for short film. Only scenes that involved the hands. But I wanted to try a different way to rig the fingers. You’d be surprised with what you can do with damp tracks.
War-flashback sequence of my short-film
One of my favorite parts of my short-film, even though its horifiyng to the character. Used Megascan rock meshes in the background and animated the camera shake to the light flicker. The speed streaks are actually an animated material on a disk plane. The rest is grease pencil.
2 Second practice animation tests I did at the start of my course.
These test animations made realize what I can do in 2D animation. I learned how to use faster techniques and I tried to use them as effectively as possible in my short-film schedule. Especially in 43-4 months.
First lipsync practice of Daniel Thrashers “Anxiety demon”
I am kinda a fan of Daniel Thrashers Channel, how he acts out characters in a lively way. I thought the anxiety demon was perfect for my little demon character that I doodle on occasion. I could polish this this given another chance.
