Officially: the showreel

It's been a while since I posted here anything, but I'm alive and busy with a looooot of stuff. It's mostly my MA degree (here is my course blog), but there's much more on top. Haha, remember myself saying about working hard last year - I'm dreaming about those "relaxed times" now.

Today I finally put together some of my animations and looks like I have my first official showreel. It's not perfect yet (of course) but at least gives an idea about "my style": overall hand-drawn look, my love to vivid colours and VFX, "liquid flow" movement, timing and particular character animation skills.

It took me almost a year to start, but in reality I spent much more time searching for music than actually to put it all together.

LIVE: Moscow mural

This Xmas break was super intense - since October we've been working with my fellow friend Wumzum at a huge project commissioned by Aton Investment. It's a 30 meters long mural describing 23 years of the world history through the eyes of the company.  The most time consuming part was an actual illustration of these events (about 20 for each year).


After approving everything we went to Moscow to bring it to the wall.

There we met another colleague - an expert in decoration Maks Hikm and jump straight to the work.  5 Days, 84 sq meters, three of us - nobody could believe we can finish it in time. But we did it (even if our final "working day" was about 23 hours).

That was a dreamteam, especially with our pretty assistant Svetlana!



According to the plan that was a holiday surprise to the ATON headquarter on the first working day. We were too tired in the morning to stay for champaign opening ceremony, but we've got the super positive feedback day after.







Overall, that was hard work, but definitely worth it!

bearrrr walk

LIVE: Music Happening

Everybody is busy with Xmas right now. I’m super busy too, but there is nothing about holidays yet :) Here is one of the projects we’ve been working recently.

The ‘Happening project’ is another unique and exciting adventure BnB has recently embarked on in which word, image and music beat as one to create a rich mixed-media narrative, inviting their audience to enjoy an explosive ‘mix’ on both physical and metaphysical levels and interact freely with the artists’ and musicians’ works…on a dance floor. 

One of the stories for the collaborative music project. The main goal of the project is for the artists of the collective, along with the musicians involved, to produce an epic journey which takes the form of an animated audio-visual installation, or as the eponymous title of the project itself suggests: a ‘Happening’. Once the three different written narratives (inspired from the work of the three musicians involved) were turned into illustrations, they were then animated and merged together into one multi-faceted story in which the musicians would meet and perform to, for and with their public ‘live’.

Here is the first chapter in the story of Otto and Nome.
Story by Mohamed-El-Haddi
Characters by Karl Millet
Graphics and animation by me.

To give an understanding of the whole image I put music as a soundtrack, but the idea is to use this animation with anything similar. Even if the synchronization with the music is not perfect but it works with almost every kind of beat.

Based on created visuals I made a set of transitions to put in-between the stories.

a stripper mathematician

One of the recent briefs at uni was to create a character, work out his/her personality and show him(her) at three different stages of life.  Then I had to make her move, showing a change of mood through the walk.

So, please say hi to Ruby, a stripper mathematician from a small town in America.

 She’s smart and optimistic, but a bit impulsive.  She's not pretty but the way she moves and her voice make her very attractive.

She was very shy at school, but changed a lot after a while. She was always brilliant at math classes and went to college to study science.  After her parents died  she decided to go travel around the country, hitchhiking and working as a strip dancer. Now she has settled in another small city  working as a mathematician in a primary school (her brother is one of the sponsors of this school that’s why they took her here) - kids love her because she’s cool and kind, other teachers respect her but trying to convince to follow dress code Her dream is to make her own show in Las Vegas and go travel around the world. She can do that if she wins a pole-dance championship, but she needs to work hard, get some money for costumes and special effects.

When she got old, she's sort of "super-granny", having several grandchildren and cooking pancakes every weekend. She lives in countryside, has a vintage scooter and a lazy cat. Nobody knows about her stripper career as she tells everybody she was a ballet dancer.

Some concept sketches, emotions and body moves:

Character sheet for the animation:

Here she is, walking in the room

some more effort

Here’s one more exercise we’ve been doing recently. Not sure if I’m absolutely happy with the result, but let it be as it is (this is the third version of the same thing). Also, it’s meant to be a simple line test, so don’t want to clean it up either.

In addition to the ‘effort and weight brief’ I wanted to try some other movements (guess it’s fine, just need to plan in advance what exactly i want him to do),  black outlines (didn’t like it much, prefer solid shapes), liquid quality (hair and ‘rope’) and subtle sfx (dust, drops). And it’s a loop again, what adds me +10 points in my eyes 

Spiderman vs. brain

Keep telling everyone that I have a dream course  - could you imagine Monday starting from watching Monty Python's sketches with a teacher dressed up in anatomical costume and then continue the lesson riding office chairs?  It's hard work tho :)

The next day we had even more fun making  crazy stop motion shorts. Luckily we came with the idea quite quickly, shoot it and yesterday I just put it all together with sound.   (yep, you can notice some Monty Python's influence as well)

Enjoy!