SgtHoggin - Art and Animations by Marc Cox

I'm Marc Cox, a freelance artist and animator, and graduate of the University of South Wales. Here I post behind the scenes snippets of personal projects, commissions and artwork I've done and little doodles from time to time.

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Art Commissions are [OPEN] https://goo.gl/forms/kH7l4xRu6Poul8Dl2

Animation Commissions are [OPEN] https://goo.gl/forms/bVgn8Was3pDYYPTV2

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This Saturday, an adventure will begin.

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Here was my contribution to the Totally Tubular Collab, the Oney Plays Animation Collab of the Lord of the Rings Text Adventure episode, organised by Blabberdookie and PixiusMaximus

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Some progress from an upcoming Oney Plays Animation I’m currently working on.

Smear frames are funny. :^)

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Stephen in the woods with a guitalele

£36 commission for Stephen E.B. Potter

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Moogleh in the style of Night In The Woods

£18 Commission for MooglehKupo

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COMMISSIONS ARE OPEN!

If you would like to commission me, then please get in touch via one of the services listed.

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TAG SPACE RACE - Original Animatic

This is the original animatic to what became Tag Space Race, back when it went by the name ‘Rolling On The Boarder’s Line’

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TAG SPACE RACE - Inspirations

The film in its concept and graphical style was mainly inspired by the Sega Dreamcast game 'Jet Set Radio', a game where you play as a gang of rollerblading graffiti taggers in Toyko. The game is noted for being the first game to use a cel-shaded graphical style and is also well known for its funky and eclectic soundtrack, some originals created by Hideki Naganuma, and others by various artists like Jurassic 5, Guitar Vader and others.

I found a website based on the game, JetSetRadio.Live, which features music within the games ethos plus lots of videos of graffiti, extreme sports and other little artistic bits and bobs. I used the video content on the site for visual inspiration and reference, and passed the website over to my composer, Stephen Potter, for musical reference.

Among other inspirations, artistically and musically, Gorillaz is a big one, Hayao Miyazaki shows and movies like Lupin III and Sherlock Hound, and for other skate related things were the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series, and the documentary film Dogtown and Z-Boys. For other music inspirations, we have The Avalanches, C2C, Royksopp and Fatboy Slim.

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TAG SPACE RACE - Environment Building

One of the creative decisions that was decided early on in the film's development was how the environments we're going to be handled. Naturally, I'm not good at being able to draw environments myself without a large amount of time on my hands which I just wouldn't have. Then brought forward was the idea to incorporate elements of 3D into the film.

The environments in the film were created using SketchUp, a free 3D design program that's primarily use to create architectural designs or 3D models with a bit more user friendly ease than most 3D programs. An original intention was to create super basic versions of the environments, and then sketch building details over them afterwards, but this would've made the process a bit more time consuming, so I instead opted to go with creating the environments entirely within SketchUp.

Environments where created in stages. First, referring to the original storyboard shaped how the environment needed to look. It was essentially a case of creating spaces and areas the characters would be in. Afterwards, the buildings were given some more shape, and eventually texture.

One benefit to using Sketchup was that it's on lighting, paired with the outlines that it gave, would give a good sense of the Cel-Shading style, similar to Jet Set Radio, the main inspiration to this project.

The biggest obstactle to tackle was camera movement. Sketchup allows the user to create 'Scenes', which are essential the viewpoint of the camera in the world, and then the program animates a transition between them. However the movements themselves are very static, as well as have a mind of their own which you need to find roundabout ways to manipulate. One original solution was to export a video and try to ease the timing myself, however I found out that I could export.

the animation as image sequences, which benefitted creating the animation afterwards, since the movements could be brought into Flash and animated over.  This also meant I could create faux easing, by creating long transitions then removing frames to create the slow in/slow out effect.

Billboards, graffiti and and character cameos (which all consist of friends and colleagues online) were then created and pasted into the world to bring more splashes of life to the mix. 

There are also 2 cameo creations in this, a billboard of Flyaway Lya, by James Ward (aka Oddboy18) and a large graffiti piece of Zeke & Antonio by Nik Castaneda (aka OmeletteCounty)

The character cameos are all 'billboarded' into the world to face the camera, a technique used primarily in old games where 2D prerendered graphics would be placed into the world, and would often seem a higher fidelity than the world around it. This works in favour of the toon since the characters are already 2D acting in 3D space.

Personally I would have preferred to learn how to use a 3D software package like Maya or Blender to create the environments and camera movements, but the time required to learn those software packages would've eaten into the time needed to create the assets. Sketchup as a program was no built for the purposes that I used it for, so using it in this film was a super gimmicky experiment, that I believe paid off in the films favour in the end.

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TAG SPACE RACE - Animation Process Breakdown

​The animation in the short uses a process I adopted from animator Toniko Pantoja, a former CalArts student known for his short films Crayon Dragon, Wolfsong, and Tiny Nomad, who in the last few years created an online workshop series called The StringBing Workshop (now known as the Pow-Ow Workshop)

The process involves 4 steps:Keys, TieDowns, InBetweens and Detail.

Keys are the super basic, but most important positions of the animation. I either kept them simple or included small things to indicate which character it is or their expression.

TieDowns are basically a better version of the Key but with more roughened out detail that will look similar to the final product. InBetweens are just making the TieDowns then move from point to point as flowing as possible. 

Most people choose to animate the basic keys and then the actual animation over this, but I find it more complicated to layer the detail over multiple versions of the basic frame.

Detail is self explanatory, the crispened and complete lines and colour.A small note to add to how I animate in the inbetweening stages. 

I keep my use of LightBox/ Onion Skinning tools to a minimum. An important thing I picked up from The StringBing Workshop was to make more use of Flipping/Rolling techniques, since an over-reliance on these tools can cause problems just as the loss of form or ignoring arcs in movements that are meant to exist. Using flipping rather than onion skinning allows your eyes to properly observe changes in movement and form, as well as enables you to catch errors and correct them early on. - See Video

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‘TAG SPACE RACE’

This is now the name of the Skater Duel project I’ve been working on the past few months.

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5 Animation Companies I’d work for and why

Studio Yotta

Studio Yotta is a US based animation studio run by animator Jake Ganz, with animators worldwide, that primarily specialise in traditionally animated music videos and shorts on the internet, with some work on TV and in games. Their most noted works are the several music videos created for the video game parody band ‘Starbomb’, some shorts of Ian Jones-Quartey’s Cartoon Network series ‘OK KO! Let’s Be Heroes’, as well as providing assistance to well known internet animators, such as Harry Partridge, Chris O’Neill, Zach Hadel and Gene Goldstein.

One big appeal for why I would want to work with Yotta is mainly because I would not have to resituate to a specific locale in order to work with them, since most, if not all of the work is done through online correspondence and the range of projects they work on are wide in variety of style, atmosphere and charm. Alongside this, their work being particularly oriented within Flash, which I already have a good amount of skill within. I would be able to offer them my skills as a character animator, inbetweener, colourist and clean-up artist, along with being able to hone in some skills as a traditional visual effects artist.

The Line Animation

The Line is a BAFTA award winning animation studio based in London, formed in 2013 by 6 directors: Bjorn-Erik Aschim, Wesley Louis, Sam Taylor, Tim McCourt, Max Taylor and James Duveen.

The studio is responsible for producing music videos, games, advertisements and original short films. Some of their works include the music video for ‘Easy’ by Porter Robinson, the short films ‘Everything I Can See From Here’, ‘Super Turbo Atomic Ninja Rabbit’, ‘Leo’s Red Carpet Rampage’ and ‘Amaro and Walden’s Joyride’.They also run a podcast on Soundcloud known as ‘The Pegbar and Grill’ where the team will have interviews with other well-known animators and industry creatives. They have also worked with Nickelodeon, VIPPS, Freeview, Virgin Media, TBS, HSBC, E4 and TalkTalk.

The studio’s work have a bunch of diverse styles, from very simple and characterised, to very detailed and experimental, mixing animation into live action footage and more. The diverse range of projects, along with the quality production always remaining extremely high and eye-catching are just some of the things that make The Line a fantastic studio.

At The Line I could offer myself to help in the departments of traditional Character Animation, Storyboarding and as an Inbetweener.

ClothCat Animation

ClothCat Animation is an animation studio based in Cardiff Bay, located within the Gloworks Building alongside Thud Media, Bait Studio, Gorilla and other multimedia productions. A lot of their work is primarily centered in the creationof children’s animation shows, such as ‘Tolibob’, ‘Toot the Tiny Tugboat’, ‘Boj’ and ‘Grandpa In My Pocket’.

Their most recent work was on the feature film of Raymond Briggs graphic biographical novel ‘Ethel and Ernest’ along with Lupus Films and Melusine Productions, in which their studio handled work on Ink and Paint, 3D work, and animation compositing.

Having applied and worked an internship at ClothCat, the studio itself is a cosy place to work with plenty of equipment. Having also had my work previously judged by ClothCat at our university’s Animotion Awards last year, I believe I have a good chance to be able to get in and begin working with the studio. The area is already close to where I live so re-situating myself should not be much of an issue.

Titmouse Inc.

Titmouse Inc. is an American animation studio based in Los Angeles, New York City and Vancouver. The studio has done work on full cartoons series and title sequences for major networks like Disney, Cartoon Network and Adult Swim, some of their most notable being ‘The Venture Bros.’, ‘Superjail!’, ‘Motorcity’ and ‘Randy Cunningham: 9th Grade Ninja’. They have also recently put out their own independently produced movie ‘Nerdland’.

A large difficulty would have to be moving away to America or to Canada depending on housing prices in their respective economies, along with general living costs. Having 3 studios however and with the range of shows there are available to work on, there might be a lot of open opportunity spaces. 

Media Molecule

Media Molecule is a game development studio in Guildford, known best for the game series ‘LittleBigPlanet’ on the Playstation 3, 4, Portable and Vita, the experimental Vita and PS4 games ‘Tearaway’ and ‘Tearaway Unfolded’ and their current in development project ‘Dreams’ for PS4.

The main draw to a lot of Media Molecule’s work is how they try to obtain and keep a very handcrafted look that gives their work, uses of materials like cardboard, paper, glitter and other very child-like arts and crafts materials that all give their games not only a feeling of nostalgic vibes but also presents a feeling of these things being able to be replicated in real life with some forms of craftsmanship. Paired along with simple yet very poppy visual art makes their work stand out from the rest very prominently.

Since the studio is rooted mostly within 3D game design, it may be a little bit tricky to apply in this field. While I only have limited experience in 3D, I feel it would be easy to pick up the skill eventually and hone it. I feel that I could also offer service in Storyboarding if they plan to make any more story based games in future.

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Meet The Artist

participated in this on Twitter, throwing it up here too

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Refined Model Sheets and Construction Sheets for the characters in the film,

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Boarder and Blader model sheets. I haven’t thought of names for the characters yet but sometime in the future maybe!

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Palette Tests for the Boarder and Blader characters in my upcoming short film.