eVault Ad & Goodbye Laika Friends!

 I was recently commissioned by fashionbuddha here in Portland to design, storyboard and animate this ad for eVault, a server company. It's a pretty fun campaign where they've asked a bunch of different animators (you can see all the spots here: http://www.evault.com/BestCase/) to animate in a wide variety of styles. I (you know, the guy who's trying to get a side career in children's books going?) was asked to animate the script that involved a, let's say risquee film cast and crew falling threw a ceiling onto a server. I thought it was a pretty funny concept and it was a lot of fun to bring to life - it's not often in animation where I'm asked to design things pretty close to my own personal style and that was also great. I also purchased Toon Boom Harmony (the software I've used at Laika for years) to complete this and it worked like a charm.

Which leads me to one other piece of business - I resigned from Laika recently and am currently swimming in the freelance pool. Send business my way! A huge thanks to everybody at Laika for the last 10 years, we've been through a lot and couldn't have done it without their support. I had so many great friends there and hope we can all keep in touch and continue to work together.

Cut-Out Animation Demo Reel - 2012

Chris Purdin - Cut-Out Animation Reel 2012 from Christopher Purdin on Vimeo.
Here's my latest demo reel of digital cut-out animation that I've done the last few years. My background is in hand-drawn animation but I've had a blast learning this different medium (I feel like it's as different as stop-motion or CG) and hope to do more. I've been particularly interested in the ways that After Effects and Toon Boom allow to push the "puppety" nature of it into more fluid territory. Hope you enjoy!

Scarlett Johansson Gets Mad At Me For OxFam PSA

Here's a PSA I worked on for OxFam - I animated Scarlett Johansson (so yes, she's putting me down throughout the whole ad) with a bit of help from Eric Kilkenny (he also animated those great chickens and some other BG characters). She was animated in the new version of ToonBoom Harmony using their cool deforming tools. The spot was directed by Gesine Kratzner and additional animation/compositing was done by Erich Richter. It was all based off ilustrations by Jessica Hische. If you've got a few extra bucks by somebody a goat for Christmas at www.oxfamgifts.com

Green Lantern Animation Test

This is a test I did to learn some aspects of ToonBoom Harmony -  it was hand drawn digitally and all effects were created in Harmony too. Why Green Lantern? My 4 year old digs him and so do I! Did this way before I heard there was going to be an animated series, so I kinda wish that they had gone 2D (though it does look pretty cool)!

PS Blow it up to fullscreen - it's not terribly visible in this small preview window.