For this animation, the goal was to build up tension to the highest peak before releasing it. I naturally rolled with action horror.
These designs were based on an Idea from Secondary School when I was enthusiastic for 1st person shooters and custom mods, with Transylvanian and Post Apocalypse motifs thrown in for good measure. The blackened creatures are demon-werewolf hybrids. I went with green gore to lean towards an age rating of 12 A \ PG13.
Besides studying similar animations and films that use tension and release, it was encouraged to explore personal facial expressions and poses for inspiration. You could say this unnamed soldier's face looked like mine back then.

My first proper 3D Animation. This course aimed to test the water by having students animate for 30 seconds Objects of our choosing, giving them movement and personality. We were also asked to choose between 3D Studio Max and Maya. After dabbling in both, I felt most comfortable with texturing, animation and vertex editing in 3D Max. From my young video gamer days, it was the one program I always wanted to try.
We modelled various objects and settings before creating the final piece. I chose the Whisk, Scissors, Kettle and 3-way Adjustable Ceiling lights (i.e. 3 heads) as I felt these anatomically different objects gave me a good variety of traits to work with. A basic jazz soundtrack was added later.

Following up on the 1st 3D animation, we were next required to animate living organic characters for 45 seconds. We could create and portray whatever we wished so long as we added in 3D modelling "bone structures" or skeletons to make them animate. I remember having to make do with the distinct lack of tutorials back then which was a slight bummer, but I did score notably well for this one regardless.
The story here is straightforward. 2 anthropomorphic corn cobs gain life only to run afoul of a vegetarian dog called Seymour. The title is based on the album "Curious Corn" by the Ozric Tentacles. The corn cobs, named X-Moody and Kiddywinks, were animated with the aforementioned skeleton rigging to give their limbs a tentacle-like effect. Seymour was animated through Polygon editing. It was a joy to animate these, not just to integrate an art style into it but also to play around with slapstick, cartoony effects within the 3d medium.

The original title for this concept from many moons ago was Zyshok. It eventually got integrated into the separate title, the Tytronitek City Incident, which more recently was integrated into the universe of Genma Visage. For this animation, we'll explore its own context.
Here we have a futuristic world where monsters exist, superheroes and villains duke it out, and robot cyborgs work in the military and teach Gym. Enter Max Juggernaut, a no-good street punk who was arrested for a big crime and given the option of Jail or the Army. Choosing the latter, Max was brutally maimed on the war front and presumed dead. He was then taken in by a shady Super Weapons corporation who performed ghastly experiments on him using Cyborg implants and Velociraptor DNA. Escaping the facility and the authorities, Max was shunned by his own mother and society for his now mutant heritage.
While on the run, crying on the sidewalk, Max meets a young Shiki Logan (called Emiko in this cartoon), a superheroine to be who takes him in and hides him from the Law. Touched by her kindness, Max soon leaves the shelter of the Logan family, vowing to turn his life around and fight for good, with everlasting respect for the young protector who he now refers to as his Niece, God-Daughter or sometimes just Daughter.
12 years later in the present, Shiki has grown into a super-strong hottie. Max is underground carrying out his vigilante activities against the Corporation that wrong him and keeps a watchful eye on Shiki, not that she needs protection. When she is (erroneously) given an F for Gym at school, the mentally unhinged Max sees this as a mission from God to find the guy who did it, tie him down to a chair and make him pay for his misdeed.
The teacher in question is Mr Tamano, a human who was scarred in his youth by a freak Alligator accident, having to take Cyborg implants to survive. He later took up sports to regain his confidence and got a job as a bullish Gym instructor, one with a hidden heart of gold and a fear of reptilian monsters. He also loves donuts.
Of course, very little of the above information is specified in the cartoon, but I believe volumes of context can still greatly influence the few minutes of screen time, such was the case with this module.
The key focus was on characterisation, body language and voice acting. We had to convey a scene where a character walks into a room, talks with another prudent character, display various amounts of emotion and then leave. I took some creative liberties here which the tutors didn't seem to mind. It was also required to take lots of film footage and photos of ourselves posing and portraying our characters. Most of these shots were practically rotoscoped.
Max's voice was me doing my best attempt at an Australian accent which I would alter to sound deeper and monstrous in the editing process. Tamano and Shiki were brilliantly voiced by Andy Ornelas and Angela Osborne. Regarding the character leaving the room, I decided to have Max's exit through the wall as a comical stinger in the credits in case the tutors thought I had forgotten.
Very fun to work on all the same, and I'd like a chance to draw more of Mr Tamano, Max and Shiki in the future. For more information and context, check out their bios in the cast section and the Tytronitek city comic in the archives.

Revisiting this, I thought "Zulie gets animated before old Red-eyes? That jammy girl!"
This project centred on coming up with a video game design based on rules and animating a demo reel of its gameplay. The catch was that the handheld game console in question had only one button besides the power switch and that movement of cursors \ characters was done by tilting and rotating the device at different angles. For me, a DDR-styled dance game was an unlikely choice, but my other ideas didn't embrace the rules imposed, and this seemed the interesting route to go. Concept-wise, like Puzzle Bobble and Beat-em-Up games, competitors from all crazy walks of life would show up in a grand dancing contest with a story. Zulie was one of those competitors.
It was a shame that I didn't have the programs at the time to render in the onscreen dance user interface (i.e. the scrolling arrows that you have to tap) but it still was a gas to design the actual Handheld console in 3D Studio max before compiling the demo reel.

This predates all the other animations by a few years. Like The Trap, this was also inspired by 1st Person Shooters. Most of the sound effects were adapted from Doom and the music of Aubrey Hodges. Unlike the Trap, half of this was animated with Stop motion pipe cleaner models. I recall taking quite a few shots against a sheet of paper at a relative's house where I was staying at the time. The characters were lassoed from each .jpg photo and edited into the scenery. Like the 5th wheel and the Genma Visage animations, this was animated by creating each frame individually in Photoshop and importing them into a video editing program to make them animate in sequence.
The main hero is Max J from Max gets Even. This is his cyber-monster soldier days when he was out hunting drone scrubs.