Assignment 4B: Ori Gesture Sheet

This is a second gesture sheet based on the titular character of the 2015 video game, Ori and the Blind Forest. Unlike the previous sheet, the drawings in this one are the original rough sketches drawn on paper, as well as two drawn in Harmony during a class exercise. Ori conveys a lot of emotion through just its postures alone, and its anatomy and eyes complement the way I generally draw characters as a hobby. Because of all this, Ori is a character I would be willing to animate, though its dog-like legs and certain body parts that flow, such as the tail and the horn-like tuffs, appear to be a challenge.

Assignment 4A: Sandbag Gesture Sheet

This is a gesture sheet of a sack character based on the sandbag from the Super Smash Brothers series, initially drawn on paper, scanned, and drawn over again with line-art in Photoshop. The tiny limbs on the top and bottom of Axton serve as tiny arms and feet and he walks, waves hello, attempts to kick, or pushes himself up. Drawing him many times was relatively easy with the help of the guide-lines, breaking the anatomy down into quadrants that tell where the eyes, top and bottom should be drawn relative to one another. The more I drew him, the more familiar I got with how his body functioned and where the parts go,  though there were times I re-drew a certain pose just to ensure the model was consistent throughout.

Assignment 3: Hanging Object

The objective of this assignment was to animate a noun whose movement depends on an object it's attached to. I chose to roughly animate a character deploying a parachute that resembles Sly Cooper, as he would use a para-glider throughout his series of PlayStation games. Starting by making a simple sketch of the character to find basic model shapes for animating, I began the process by drawing key frames of Sly as he deployed the chute, reached the furthest points of his swings, and came to a resting place in the center as he glides. Given that Sly's movements would be dependent on how the parachute moves, I then animated the parachute first as it gets caught by the air and comes to a more stable gliding state. Afterwards, I drew some guidelines to represent the arc Sly would swing at and added more frames, going back and forth between key-frames and in-betweens to ensure he swings at a consistent arc. I finally added the strings to connect Sly with the chute. Animating this was a process that involved re-tracing steps many times, ensuring that Sly swung like a pendulum coming to a slow halt, the parachute's size didn't change too drastically, and Sly's legs swung naturally without losing model consistency.

Assignment 2: Bouncing Ball

This was the first animation I ever made in the ToonBoom Harmony software, and so crafting it proved to be a challenge. I wanted to adapt to the features of the program by animating a ball at high initial velocity bouncing around the objects of an urban alleyway at many different angles, similarly to the action of a pinball machine. All of the key objects were roughly sketched out, inked with the pencil tool, and arranged around the canvas before animating the ball. I frequently played with squash and stretch, even on stiff objects such as garbage cans, to make sure viewers felt the strong weight of the ball as it rams itself in.

In spite of the concept's simplicity for this animation, it was a very difficult procedure. There were a lot of situations where I had to completely redraw certain frames or entire sequences of frames to ensure the flow of the ball was smooth, fix layering issues, or make key objects look more polished and contrast with one another. It was a series of trial and error, to put it lightly, that resulted in my learning more about Harmony layers and pen. Almost 3-5 hours were spent just on cleaning up the layers to make the objects look properly spaced out.

Personal Assignment & Background: Fiesta Bowl Fan-Art

A large portion of my interest in animation comes from comic strips, cartoons and video games, all of which led me to draw fan-art as a hobby and influenced my design choices in many art courses. This is some of the most recent fan-art I had drawn of some of PlayStation's mascots, based on an image I saw of a child with the three at the PlayStation Fiesta Bowl in late 2019. From left to right, the mascots shown are Sly Cooper, Ratchet from the Ratchet & Clank series, and Crash Bandicoot. Each of the games they appear in have their designs and animations influenced by those of western cartoons.

The original photo from the Fiesta Bowl this fan-art is based on can be found here on the Instagram page of Cat Power Productions, the costume designers behind the mascots.

Who is this "Alex McMurray"?

Alexander Houston McMurray was born in Nashville, Tennessee and raised in Tampa, Florida. In 2018, he graduated from Brooks DeBartolo Collegiate High School with high honors. For two years, he served as a designer and the chief photographer for the school yearbook. For the rest of his term, he served as an independent photographer at many school events. He also dual-enrolled for a year and took courses in 2-D design and traditional photography at Hillsborough Community College.

Alex is currently a student at the University of Tampa who majors in graphic design, with possible interest in an animation minor. While there, he completed courses of 3-D design, illustration, frame assembly, experimental drawing, and graphic design. Presently, he is studying typography, intaglio printmaking, and 2-D animation.

Alex also manages the social media sites of Floor Coverings International, a flooring industry branch owned and operated by his family. He has designed advertisements for the company that were published in the monthly World of Westchase magazine for several years. Ever since then, he enjoys working with Adobe creative software and continues to strengthen his skill and abilities each day.

Outside of education and work, Alex enjoys using this software to illustrate characters mostly associated with film, animation and video games he enjoys. Doing so inspires him towards graphic design, as he hopes to contribute in those fields of expertise someday. Though he is just starting out, he is eager to see where his path in life will go.