My Portfolio Website is Under Construction

I just wanted to alert those who regularly visit my portfolio website www.segun-animation.com that it is under construction.

I had to change my web host, and upgrade the site's design.
I haven't had a chance to update it since 2012.

I'm still alive and animating.
The updated site should be up and running again soon.

Desert Mirage - 18+

I got to contribute a tiny bit of animation to the 2016 Indie feature-length live-action/ animation hybrid - Desert Mirage. It's a very crazy film, and it's not for everyone. It contains crude humour, language and other things not appropriate for minors.

Rough Animation by: Segun O. Mosuro
Clean-Up, Ink and Paint by: Bobby Soto (see his reel from the project here: https://youtu.be/cMZKExpW1Do?t=37s)
I think Bobby Soto did a great job of following up my animation.

I did about 4-5 seconds of (fully inbetweened) rough animation for the film. I animated the Racoon character, Riley, seen below.
The gig came in 2014, at a time when I was doing a lot of cut-out animation at my day job, and it was a welcome break for me.

Above: Some animation drawings from the first shot.
Medium: Adobe Flash - Brush Tool

The first shot was animated and inbetweened in Flash (now Animate), while the second shot was animated traditionally with pencil and paper. It was all animated on Ones. I'm not too happy with the acting in the lip sync part, I think I used too many poses for that line of dialogue.

Above: My animation thumbnails for the second shot.
Medium: Ball-point pen and pencil on paper.

Below: Some of my animation roughs for the shot.

Medium: Pencil on paper

The bulk of the crew worked remotely, with Chad Kaplan being the Animation Director and Character Designer. We all kind of drew the characters differently...

If you would like to see the film, kindly order it via their Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/desertmiragemovie/

The Booksellers Ltd - Animated Short

The Booksellers Ltd. - Animated Short

This was a solo effort, except for the music which was licensed from Kevin MacLoed, and the script which was a collaboration between the client and me.

The colour script for the video.
Medium: Photoshop, Wacom Tablet.

I used natural lighting, showing the progression from an early morning in Ibadan to an evening sunset. The colour script, for the most part, suffers from an over-reliance on rim lighting to separate the characters from the backgrounds. I've learned a lot since I did this colour script in 2013, I would approach it differently today. The final backgrounds were painted in Photoshop.

A Rough Animation drawing from the short.
Medium: Graphite & Col-Erase Pencils on Paper

I started out wanting to animate the characters using the puppet tool in After Effects, but early tests didn't look as good as I wanted. I ended up using a combination of hand-drawn animation (pencil and paper), frame by frame Flash animation and cut-out animation techniques for the characters.

The lineless animation style proved challenging in the beginning, mostly because I was doing it wrong. I eventually figured out a less laborious way to handle it in Flash. The whole piece was cleaned up in Flash, although Photoshop was used to clean up some effects such as the speed lines that trail the boy when he zips in and out of the frame.

A frame from the final video.
CG vehicles and a partially CG animated background are used here.

For a good portion of the scenes involving moving vehicles, I used Blender 3d to create, animate and render the vehicles. There is also a scene with an animated background that was created using Blender. The integration of the vehicles with the backgrounds and characters could have been better. In hindsight, I should have given the vehicles the same flat treatment as the characters.

One of the fun things to do was explore gimmicks like Smear Frames and Multiples.

Rough Animation drawings - Smear Frames & Multiples
Medium: Graphite on Paper

Above: a rough animation smear frame drawing.
Below: The final frame.

Yoplait Strawberry Banana (Yoplait 40 Flavors of Inspiration)

Back in February, I produced this piece for Yoplait as part of their "40 Flavors of Inspiration" series.


Credits:
Concept, Art & Animation by: Segun O. Mosuro
Agency: Aniboom / Saatchi & Saatchi
Client: Yoplait
Producer: Yonny Zafrani
Music: Apollo Symphony Orchestra, Joe Sacco


My initial pitch was heavily Greek influenced, the concept was "You'll feel like a goddess when you're eating Yoplait's Strawberry Banana flavor yogurt" (the target audience was women). The cast would include Cupid, and a young woman, named Lisa. The setting was a modern-day Greek garden, Lisa would interact with the garden after it is transformed into a strawberry-banana wonderland. Based on feedback from the client, I revised the concept; The Greek garden became a park with a gazebo, Cupid became a strawberry-banana fairy... The whole idea was pushed into a more "life is a party when you're eating Yoplait's Strawberry Banana flavor yogurt" direction.

A still from the piece. © Aniboom.

One of the ideas from my original pitch that remained intact was the transformation of the garden/park into a fruit-shaped landscape. The visuals of the fruit-shaped landscape, were inspired by the work of the amazing painter, Will Cotton (some of you may know him from his work on that California Gurls music video, and yes I'm aware he did lots of paintings long before that). That said I'm no Will Cotton, my final paintings are far from masterful.

I animated the characters and effects classically in Flash using a Wacom tablet, there is some motion tweening here and there but I generally couple it with classical Flash animation. The backgrounds were painted in Photoshop.

The animation is not as consistent as I'll like it to be, some scenes received way more attention than others, I ended up having to cut back on the quality of the animation and overall production value as the deadline approached. Drawing-wise, I had some problems keeping track of my volumes in Flash and clean-up was a long nightmarish process [using Flash's line tool]; I initially went for a thick to thin clean-up line, and very quickly abandoned that because of time restrictions. I was forced to reevaluate my approach to classical clean-up animation in Flash when the project was done.

In the future, I'll update this post with more behind the scenes work. Till then, enjoy this animation progression reel for one of the scenes in this piece:

Ursus arctos arctos studies

I've been studying Eurasian brown bears for a project. These quick studies were drawn from video footage, 1 minute per drawing.

Medium (graphite)

Medium (graphite)

Medium (graphite)

Boomerang Buildings Intro Video

I had the opportunity to design and animate this explainer video for Boomerang Buildings:

(I should add that this is the short version of the video)

Boomerang Buildings supplied the script and voice-over track (voiced by Brad Ziffer). I created a rough animatic to help work out the visual ideas, story and timing. I tried to keep it fun and convey the message visually. Here is a section of the animatic:

(Medium: Photoshop/After Effects)

The character design was initially based on a more '50s & '60s UPA look (as seen in the animatic above), but that was later abandoned for a stickman look.

Once the animatic was locked down, I created color thumbnails in Photoshop and style frames in Flash.
The overall visual design is simple & graphic. I don't think I did that good of a job on the design, but i'll keep learning.

Color Studies (Medium: Photoshop)

Style Frames (Medium: Flash)

The final piece was illustrated and animated in Flash. The character was all Flash classical animation (2d-Flash or drawn) on twos and above, depending on how much action the scene called for. Symbol animation (Flash tweening) was used for the non-character elements.

Here are some stills from the final video:

Sage's Song (Pumpkinheads™) Animated Book Trailer

I had the fun opportunity to animate this trailer for an awesome children's book called "Sage's Song".



"Sage's Song" is part of the Pumpkinheads™ children's book series. If you have young children, check out the books here. You can also view more videos and trailers here.

I received Adobe Illustrator artwork created for the book by illustrator & animator Matthew Wilson and creator & author Karen Kilpatrick. I used a combination of Flash, After Effects and Blender 3d to animate the art.

I did some minor editing, no animation from me (other than the end screen), on the trailer for "Ella's Toys":

It's Mine, It's All Mine!

Medium: Photoshop

I did this digital painting recently. He ended up looking a little like Pinky ("Pinky and the Brain"), which wasn't intentional.

I also drew some poses for the blue Ape.

Medium: brush pen on paper

His model is inconsistent at the moment, because I'm still exploring his design. Once I finalize it I'll put these drawings on model.

Vector Illustrations

I just added some vector character illustrations to my gallery. Here's a little teaser.

Blue Ape. Medium: Flash.

Update

It's official, my website has finally been given the long overdue update it deserves. The animation page now has a demo reel on it, and the gallery contains 1 or 2 drawings.
Here's a teaser:

I'll be adding more work to it as the weeks progress. Here's my short 2d animation reel:

I'll also be updating it in a couple of weeks, there's a couple of things I need to add and finish... 'Going to bed, it's been a long day.

Dog Studies: 1 - 2 Minute Gesture Drawings

Below is a selection of quick gesture sketches of boxer dogs in motion, done in preparation for a project I'm working on. They were drawn from video reference, I spent about 1 - 2 minutes on each pose. I filled up lots of pages of these, but the ones below were the ones I liked best mainly because of the dynamic gestures. My goal was to draw the dog from as many angles as possible, performing as many actions as possible.

Medium: Ebony Pencil on Newsprint

The last part of the exercise involved doing simplified anatomical overlays using colored pencils & tracing paper. These are not clinical studies, it was about finding the basic bones and muscle groups.. 

Above: working out the skeleton.

Below: working on the muscles.

It was a great learning exercise.

PS: The older posts are all gone.