The Meteor and the Moon

This is a short story based on an idea from a young student at the Great Ormond Street Hospital.

The animation was created by Sarah Feldlaufer and Beorn Leonard based on a song written and recorded by Chris Tavener.

Showreel July 2018

I just updated my showreel with some more recent work.
Included are shots from Paddington 2 and Lego Batman, as well as previous work.

Enjoy!



Showreel July 2018 from Beorn Leonard on Vimeo.

Glass Half

The Blender Foundation just released its latest short, "Glass Half".
I wrote and directed it, (this is actually my debut as a director) and it was produced at the Blender Institute in Amsterdam.

The production was very quick, just a little over 7 weeks, so it was quick and intense. So far the response has been really good!

UPDATE: Here is an interview I did with Filmnosis on the making of the movie.

Inktober 2014

This year I participated in #inktober, an art project open to everyone, where you do an ink drawing every day for the month of October. It got a bit nerve racking, especially since I haven't been drawing much in recent years, and I elected to do all my drawings only in ink, with no pre-pencilling allowed.

Still, it was fun and I'll definitely be doing it again next year. Below is a selection of this year's drawings:

Blender Addon : Automatic Rig Layer Panel

Here's a simple addon I just wrote for Blender. It automatically generates a panel in the Properties shelf for toggling visibility for the layers of a rig. Previously this required a custom python script for each character, but by using this addon you can have a panel simply by adding some extra properties to your rig.

Firstly, download and install it from here:
http://www.pasteall.org/41442
(copy and paste it into a new text file, save it as "autoRigLayers.py", then install and enable it in Blender via the user prefs)

Now all you have to do is prepare your rig...

1. Make a property called "autoRigLayers" and set its value to "1"
2. Make a property called "layer.1" and set its value to the appropriate layer name.
3. Repeat step 2 for all the rig layers that you want to appear on the panel

Optionally you can set the number of columns in the panel. This is done by adding property called "layer.cols" and setting its value to a whole number.

Hope this is useful to you. Let me know in the comments below if you find any major bugs.

New short movie - Caminandes

At the end of last year I got together with Pablo Vazquez and Francesco Siddi to make a short movie. The idea was to do something simple and quick. Pablo and I came up with a story involving 2 of his characters, Koro and Pichin. who are based on animals from Pablo's home territory of Patagonia. We also wanted to finish the whole thing in about 2 weeks.

I ended up doing the principal animation on all but 2 of the shots (that's about a minute's worth of animation in 2 weeks). Unfortunately the rendering side of things took longer than expected, largely due to some technical hitches we encountered, but in the end we finished it and I'm actually quite happy with it!

We also got the very talented Jan Morgenstern to make us a Carl Stalling / Warner Bros type soundtrack, and as soon we added it the whole thing came alive.

Check it out:

We're hoping to do some more shorts in this style in the future. They sure are fun to work on, and I think we can get a style that you don't often see in other shorts being released these days.

Check out http://www.caminandes.com/ for more info.

Big update - The CookieFlexRig and more

Alright, it's been a while (yikes! almost a year) since I last updated, but that's because I've been very busy.

In 2012 I worked on a game (Eat Sheep), a tv series (Jokie), 3 short films ("Tube", "Diamant", and "Caminandes" all soon to be released) as well as teaching a one week course at the Blender Institute, producing a new training DVD and developing a new character rig for the Blender community. It's those last two projects that I will cover in this post.

Following on from the success of the "Blender Animation Fundamentals" training series, I was asked by CG Cookie to produce another series. For this one I wanted to go into more advanced topics like lip sync, acting and how to set up a multi camera, multi character dialogue shot.

For this, I need a new rig. So I enlisted the help of concept artist David Revoy, rigger Nathan Vegdahl and CG Cookie's own Jonathan Williamson to help with the modelling. Together we worked for months to develop a flexible character rig for people to use when studying animation. You can see some of the results in the pic above. All these characters are the same rig.

The training series "The Blender Animation Toolkit" was released in November and so far has been very well recieved. Nathan also contributed some tutorials for it, so it's well rounded and shows many different approaches and techniques to animating characters in Blender.

In the spirit of open source, we also released the rig to the world as creative commons. You can get it here.

Eat Sheep - work in progress

I'm currently working on Cg Cookie's new iPad game "Eat Sheep". I'm doing the rigging and animation for it. It's lots of fun, with plenty of cuteness.

Check out the animation tests below:


For more info, check out:
http://eatsheep.com/

My shots on Happy Feet 2

Here's five of the thirteen or so shots I worked on for Happy Feet 2.
It doesn't seem like much (28s), but it was a big challenge and lots of fun.

My animation training series

"Animation Fundamentals in Blender"

http://cgcookie.com/blender/2011/12/20/pre-order-animation-fundamentals-v1/

This was some of the hardest work I've ever done...
Trying to do something in under an hour I would normally do in a couple of days, while trying to describe what I'm doing in an understandable way. A real challenge!

Still, I think it turned out alright, I'm really excited about the possibility of getting people into the crazy world of animation!

Happy Feet 2

About a month ago I finished up work on Happy Feet 2. I worked in the animation department at Dr. D studios in Sydney for the last 3 months of production (aka "crunch time"). I worked on 13 shots all up, mainly facial animation on motion captured penguin characters, but I was also lucky enough to get to animate some fully keyframed bird flying shots. It was a great experience to work on such a big production and with so many talented people. The movie is being released world wide this month.

http://happyfeettwo.warnerbros.com

Once it is released I will be able to update my showreel with the actual shots I worked on.

Split Second: 2 games, with a difference

Earlier this year I was lucky enough to work on 2 games projects for "A Split Second", the games project produced by Submarine Channel for the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
The games were designed by contemporary Dutch artists Han Hoogerbrugge and Marcel van Eeden. Each have their own very personal styles and it was quite a challenge to try to reproduce them in a realtime 3d environment.

I modelled, rigged and animated all the characters in Blender, and exported them to the Unity3d game engine, where the very talented Jorrit de Vries integrated them into the games.





For more information check out:
http://www.submarinechannel.com/transmedia/a-split-second/

An Introvert's Tour of Amsterdam

see the rest here...

New Reel is Up!

Here it is....
(check out the animation page for more info)

Biff - Strange Hours

This is an animation test I did as part of my final class at Animation Mentor.
I used the "Biff" rig by Denny Lindberg.
My mentor for this was Sean Sexton.
All up I spent about a week on this and was quite happy with the result.
Oh yeah, the beer rig is, of course, the classic one from Jeremy Davidson.

The Stuff I did on Sintel

Here is basically all of the shots I worked on for the Blender Foundation's open movie "Sintel". It was one of the greatest learning experiences of my career as a pixel monkey...



For the record, I wish I could further polish every one of those shots. Like I said, it was a BIG learning experience.

Animation Mentor progress reel: November 2010

This is most of my work so far at Animation Mentor. I'm now working on dialogue shots. My first is included here.

Facial expressions - sketchbook assignments

Here are some of my sketchbook assignments for animation mentor. The idea is to pick a photo that conveys a clear emotion and reproduce it with a cg character rig. The rig they supply,"Bishop", can be a little tricky to wrangle into shape, especially given the HUGE eyes, lack of the bridge of the nose and lack of forehead.
Any way, here's what I've done so far...




(This is my favourite one so far.)

Sintel is finally here!

After months of work, it's finally released. It was such a big learning experience, and I'm so glad to have been involved...

Durian Timelapse

Here's a time lapse I did of the Project Durian team at work at the Blender Institute:



The music is "Perambulator" by my Simon Leonard