Howard's Way

Hello World,

Maybe it’s because I’m a dreamer or maybe it’s because I’ve never worked in a corporate environment before, but whenever I see bankers or big business men spouting nonsense on the television, I automatically assume they are secret fetish wearing deviants who take late night trips to playgrounds and ride seesaws together and maybe go down slides as well. Taking inspiration from this unsettling thought I decided to introduce a seedy undercurrent to the animation. Before long I’d redesigned my two main characters to be greedy bankers enjoying a good old late night seesaw session whilst wearing ladies underwear, happy in the knowledge that they are filthy rich.

The thought struck me in the middle of the night whilst I was thinking about bankers secretly wearing ladies undies that it might be nice to have an additional character involved in my animation. The new character (I’ve called him Howard) will also be a frilly knickers wearing banker/business man who is sat on the floor getting electrocuted in some sort of kinky sadomasochistic act. Why I hear you ask? I have no answer.

Anyway I think this probably says more about me than I’d like to admit in pleasant company so I’ll quickly move on by showing you my design for Howard.

And here’s a simple looping animation test I made of him being electrocuted.

Well I hope you all found that electrifying…sorry.

The end.

Neon This! And Neon That!

Hello world,

I’m back with another fabulous if slightly boring blog about my on-going e4 sting adventure. Today I started putting together images of dilapidated buildings for the background of my animation and whilst they were all very nice and dilapidated I felt they could use a little oomph! But what on earth could give my buildings the desired spark I required? One word - Neon! (I’ve just realised you probably guessed that from the title).

Below is a bunch of designs I made on an A4 sheet of paper of possible neon lights designs. Naturally I decided to go down the slightly sleazy route as it turns out there are no classy neon lights.

With a few designs picked I then somehow managed to force the paper into a Photoshop so I could make the image glow like a neon light. It can be seen below.

Finally I made a simple animation of the light in action.



Here's the final background plate with added chimney lights for no extra cost. 

And that’s the end of my neon light adventure - or is it? More words and pictures coming soon.

The end.

Project Infidelity

Hello world,

It’s been far too long since I last plopped out some wonderful words into a blog and you’re all probably wondering what the hell has happened to the Beatles animation I promised you months ago? Well its well on its way (I promise), however I have to admit that I’ve recently been cheating with a newer, fresher more attractive and younger project that won’t get me sued Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono for using copyrighted music. 

TV channel e4 every so often do an e4 sting competition to advertise the e4 channel e4. The rules are simple. The sting has to be 10 seconds in length and must feature the e4 logo and use the e4 music that they supply. The content of the sting can be anything you want within reason (here’s a link if you wish to enter). Enticed with the whiff of fame and fortune (£5000 first prize) I thought I’d give my creative muscle a flex pump and throw my hat (metaphorical, I don’t own a hat) into the ring. I thought it would be nice if I got brewing a regular blog again detailing the journey of making an e4 sting for an e4 competition to design an e4 sting for the e4 channel (the first blog will be a little introduction about me entering the 2013 e4 sting competition).

A lot can happen in ten seconds; you could fall in love, shoot a pigeon, fall in love with a recently deceased dead pigeon (necrophilia and bestiality all rolled into one lovely perversion, I’m sure somebody must suffer from this (not me))  or you could slowly or quickly (depending on your speed) walk up a flight of stairs. My idea for the 10 second e4 sting is two business men going up and down on a seesaw for ten seconds (I’m not joking but seeing it written out like that I’m not sure it’s a good one). Whether I can make this stupid idea entertaining enough to win a shiny prize or get shown on a television that isn’t mine remains to be seen, but that’s the idea I’m going for.

Below are some quick visual representations of ideas that entered my brain whilst I was thinking about making an entry for the e4 sting competition. I’m not going to explain them.

 More to come soon.

The end.

We All Live Where?

Hello World,

I’ve been busy beavering away on my little Beatles animation and it’s finally starting to take shape. I’ve finally completed all the backgrounds and the animation itself is well on its way. So to reward you for your patience dear reader, I thought it would be nice to show a little screen shot.

Get it while its hot guys and females as this is beginning to look like it’ll sadly be the last animation I do for a while. I hope you like it.

The end.

David

Hello world,

I thought it was about time that I put my graduation film onto the internet for the world to see (well the two people that read my blog anyway). So here's David in all it's glory. I hope you like it.


David from Stephen Craner on Vimeo.

Into the Cavern

Hello World!

Well it’s all been very quiet and dusty on my little blog for…well the last five blooming months really, but let me assure my loyal army of one that I have been busy beavering away on a brand spanking new little project.

Inspired by the positive feedback of my little Beatles animation (as seen here); I’ve decided to devote all my spare time working on a slightly longer animation that hopefully will span the glorious history of the super group. I don’t want to give away too much of what I’m planning to do (mostly because it’s all in my head), but I thought it would be nice to update my progress every now and again with a brand new picture (you can already see a character sheet I’ve made here).

So without further ado here’s a background I’ve made for inside the Cavern Club which will soon be seen in my upcoming animation…coming soon…hopefully…

I hope it doesn’t look too bad.

The end.

All your need is some love!

Hello World!

I’ve been deathly quiet over recent months with various projects on the go and little time to post my usual nonsense. To squash the vicious rumour that I’d perished whilst out at sea I feel now is the time to make a brief reappearance and reward my patient army of a loyal follower with a new picture made by me. This time it’s a character sheet I’ve made for an upcoming Beatles animation that currently I’m working on currently. I hope it meets your approval.

***New picture of The Beatles at Budokan added***

 

The end.

Meeting the Beatles

Hello World,

I’m a massive fan of the super British skiffle and rock and roll group The Quarrymen, they later became the slightly better mega global band known as The Amazing Beatles; Starring: Mr John, Mr Paul, Mr George and Ringo Starr.

As a special tribute to the fabulous four of them and because I have a lot of time on my hands, I’ve made this little flash looping video of the group performing one of their numerous super sound songs (maybe She loves you or maybe Maxwell's Silver Hammer or maybe one of their lesser known ones).

For a slightly bigger, slightly less distorted, slightly more downloadable and slightly better quality version go to my deviantArt page here.

Is this animation bigger than Jesus? Possibly not.

The end.

Hide and Seeker (Now with 100% more sound)

Hello world,

The brilliant people over at indie games developer Fatpancake are working on a fantastic new computerised three dimensional game called The Seeker. The game is an interactive adventure set in a fantasy world where you find yourself in a long abandoned village high in the mountains. Using amazing super lost powers and artefacts, you’re able to switch between two worlds; light and dark, and must use your new found abilities to escape the perils of this mysterious spooky land! And it’s much better than the end of Lost.

I was given the privilege to make them an ident for the game, which I did with much enthusiasm; it’s below these very words so you can watch it at your leisure. Oh and if you’ve got a spare minute please take the time to visit their fantastic Technicolor website over at fatpancake.com, and then follow the twitter thingy at twitter.com/thefatpancake, and look at the game on www.indiedb.com/games/the-seeker, and have a very brief look at the amazing official website at www.seekerthegame.com and then like the Facebook page over at www.facebook.com/TheSeekerGame.


Hope you like it.

The End.

It’s not every day you blow up a planet.

Hello world,

It’s been over two months since I first got the idea to do a little project involving a spaceship narrowly escaping an exploding planet. Over that time I’ve designed, modelled, textured and animated two rusty spaceships. Got heavily distracted by making some time consuming, but neither the less nice looking fly-bys, and started to really learn how to use After Effects. Now, at last, I can say that my project is finally finished…I think.

I must add that none of this would have been possible without the fantastic tutorials by Andrew Kramer over on videocopilot; he’s like some kind of crazy After Effects god or something. Anyway watch the video below and witness just what happens when an unemployed animator has far too much time on his hands. My next on-going project will be a series of basic animation exercises to help strengthen my animation skills, it may be less glamorous than blowing up a planet, but hopefully it will help me get an animation job.

Exploding Planet from Stephen Craner on Vimeo.


The end.

Starships were meant to fly!

Hello World,

Oh blimey! I’ve only gone and made two blogs in a week, I’m going to need a lie down. Well here’s my spaceship flyby test video in all its Starship glory. The quality is a little more pixelated than I’d like but it seems this is as good as I can achieve and still have a workable file size. To enhance the film I added what I consider to be the best piece from Marc Streitenfeld’s Prometheus soundtrack and for no extra cost a smattering of Saturn from Gustav Holst’s Planet suite. Hope you like it.

Spaceship Flyby Test from Stephen Craner on Vimeo.

The End.

We're Gonna Need a Bigger Ship

Hello world,

Well once again I’m found guilty of neglecting my little blog but hopefully you’ll understand why. Over the last few weeks I’ve been delightfully distracted with making this rather large space(transport)ship. Keeping with the intent of designing a “used worn look” I free styled (not recommended) the design of the ship which kept getting bigger and bigger.  I’m busy rendering out some spaceship flybys now and once that’s done I’ll hopefully get down to animating my original spaceship scene of the ship(s) escaping the doomed planet.

PS. To enhance your viewing pleasure of the pictures below I've found it helpful to make some super space noises in your head or out loud. The choice is yours.

The end.

More of the Same Really

Hello World,

So you’ve gone and designed, built and textured a bloody great big space ship, what do you do next? Make a video of it slowly rotating 360 degrees so everybody can see your hard work of course. So, for your viewing pleasure, here’s my ship slowly rotating around in moving picture form with bonus spooky space soundtrack.

 

The end.

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Rocket Ship

Hello world,

Well I've been busy bee UV mapping and texturing the fourteenth fastest ship in the galaxy and I'm happy to say that it's finally finished (I think...). With that done I can now move on to the fun part of my little project and start animating the ship escaping an exploding planet.

Style wise I was going for a used worn look as utilized in films like Stars Wars films and Alien, but I thought it would also be fun to produce some extra textures of the ship all new and shiny. So below are a few comparison pictures of the ship looking nice and new and old and decrepit. I think I'm quite happy with how it's looking...I think.

The end.

It’s the Fourteenth Fastest Ship in the Galaxy…Give or Take a Few

Hello World,

Well I’ve got a whole heap of pictures to show today of my non textured spaceship.  I’m fairly hopeless when it comes to modelling in Maya (especially if it’s something organic), but even I’m quite pleased with how it’s looking; now all I need to do is start the long process of texturing it.

 The End.

Space my Ship you Mother

Hello world,

It's a nice sunny day so I thought I'd post a concept picture of the spaceship I'm building in Maya for my little space experiment. Hopefully it conveys the dirty used feel that I'm aiming for and a touch of Star Wars thrown in for good measure too. Pictures of the model/textures will be coming soon.

The end.

Zombie ate my Brain

Hello world,

I made a promise to myself when I started this blog that I wouldn’t make a couple of posts then never write anything again. I feel that I might already be falling into this welcoming trap, especially whilst I’m busy working on designing and building spaceships for my upcoming animation experiment.

So whilst I’m busy beavering away I thought it might be a nice idea to post a few of my animation videos which when watched will probably highlight just why I’m an unemployed animator. All the videos I post can be found at vimeo.com/stephencraner and if you have nothing better to do, don’t forget to check out my website stephencraner.com.

So the first video I’m going to post is Father Onions vs. the Evil Zombies, an apocalyptic tale of one man’s fight against the evil dead. This very quick short was originally intended to be the opening part of my graduation film David, as seen in this animatic. However due to time constraints and the fact I felt it added nothing to the story I decided to remove the whole section.

Me being me and with far too much time on my hands, I still had the urge to go back to this little tale of reanimated corpses and complete the sequence in full. So on a bleak December morning with boredom setting in I decide to restart work on the animation, below is the result. I hope you like it. The end.

Introducing David

Hello World,

I’m a massive fan of the great Scott himself, Sir Ridley Scott. In fact I’d go as far as saying that Alien is the best film ever and Blade Runner is pretty close to being visually perfect.  In honour of the upcoming Prometheus I decide to knock up a loving homage to the recently released David 8 poster featuring David from my own film. Oh, careful viewers might be able to spot a shade of shameless self-promotion going on as well.

Hope you like it.

The end.

Space is Ace

Hello World,

After being inspired whilst watching one of Andrew Kramer’s fantastic After Effects tutorials over on Videocopilot, I think I’ve come up with a neat little scene that if I manage to pull it off should spice up my showreel nicely. As homage to Star Wars and my geeky love of Sci-Fi, the little scene will involve a spaceship escaping an exploding planet just in the nick of time.

Below is a very rough storyboard of the ship escaping from the planet, I’m hoping it will look better than this.  Now I just need to model the ship, texture it, animate it, before finally learning just how I go about destroying a planet. Hmm maybe I’ve bitten off more than I can chew.

The end.