Richard Silvius

A little something for @Sketchdailies. #KIRBY

It IS for my reel… but… let’s be honest. This is really just an excuse to animate a large anvil falling on a character. I mean come on! If you haven’t animated that, you haven’t ANIMATED, amirite?

Just finished rigging this guy in Toon Boom Harmony:

I had a blast doing these boards for the knight sequence of Stone Mountain’s new 2015 Laser Show! It was kind of a unique assignment in that they were not looking for any narrative structure as much as a series of gags. Ya’ll know I love me some gags!

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I changed the designs up for them on almost every frame, because they didn’t have designs when they came to me and weren’t sure what they wanted it to look like.

They went with the dragon because their new show has cool new fire effects. I haven’t been to the show yet… I can’t wait to see how it turned out!

I’ve never done a TBT post before, but I’ve been wanting to post this film up here for so long I think it now qualifies as a throwback. So, here it is:

I completed the Follower at SCAD in 2012 with Brandon Moulton and Tom Nguyen. We were taking a class called “Short short” in which students put together an entire film in 10 weeks.

The assignment was to create a “biographical impression” of an interesting (and deceased) individual. Students formed groups of three, and each student pitched an idea with a styleframe. Charles Manson was Tom’s suggestion. His appropriately menacing styleframe inspired the film’s angular look and color palette. When I found an entire album by Manson on archive.org, we had the perfect creepy soundtrack for our film. The choice was made.

Charles Manson was not dead in 2012 (still isn’t as of this writing), so technically we weren’t following directions to the letter — but our Professor liked the idea anyway and encouraged us to move forward.

Tom’s original Styleframe

It took at least half of the 10 weeks to nail down the story, and I ended up redoing the boards three times. We thought we’d never finish with only 5 weeks left.

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Fortunately Tom and Brandon moved ahead with rigs, sets, and lighting, so we caught up and had a mostly complete film by the end of the class.

In addition to building and lighting all of the environments, and helping out with the character animation, Tom abandoned sleep for days at a time and staked out the computer lab so he could finish rendering all the scenes.

This is how I found my friends one morning after a long night of rendering in the lab.

Brandon was (and is) the best rigger, so that task fell to him. He worked relentlessly on the fluid effects that became such an integral part of the film. Getting that to look right was easily the toughest challenge of the entire film. Brandon also figured out how to apply our animated squiggle texture as the dogs transformed into wolves.

My contributions included the boards & animatic, layouts and camera animation, the character designs, character animation, and audio/post production.

Recently I was given a promotional piece to work on — it’s a Product Demo for the learning platform we’ve been building at GPALearn™.  Well — I should say THEY’VE been building, because I don’t build anything, I just draw pretty and/or goofy pictures.

Here’s the Demo:

Pretty cool, eh? Who’d of thought one day we’d actually be able to make math FUN… but it seems to be working! Thank God we didn’t have this when I was growing up or I might have wound up being an engineer or something smart instead of a cartoonist…

Anyway, I had a lot of fun working on the designs for it, so here’s what that stuff looked like before being colored and animated for the video!

Some of these designs didn’t make it in.

These are actual caricatures of someone who works in our office. Drawing goofy pictures of him has become a running gag for me…

In case you were wondering, everything was drawn digitally. The animation paper in the background is just something I like to use to give me that nostalgic drawing-on-paper feeling. Also, it’s way easier on the eyes than looking at a plain white background in Photoshop.

And yes, that is a mouse lollipop.

Back in November 2014 I was on vacation on Maui. I was at the beach at sunrise to do some photography and this fellow showed up.

He said he was blessing the day for the islands. As the sun rose, he blew on the conch shell and performed a ceremony.

I created this image to showcase our characters on the GPA website.

When I graduated from SCAD in 2012, if you had asked me what I wanted to do with my career, I’d have told you I wanted a chance to do all aspects of animation, rather than focus on just one thing for an entire career.

I could not have imagined that less than one year later, that very opportunity would fall right in my lap!

Since late 2013, I have been working at GPALearn, a company that uses animated characters to make learning math more fun for elementary school kids. During my time at GPA, I have been a writer, a designer, character rigger, a story artist, an animator, a director, an art director, a voice director, and a marketer. It has been SO much fun. Just when I’m starting to get sick of one thing BAM — on to something else.

I’ve been meaning to share some of the animation, designs and artwork I’ve done, and am finally getting around to this post!

PEMDAS, the 4th Grade Owl-Wizard!

Pemdas was the first GPA character I had the chance to design. I’ve grown so much as a designer since then! Still, he’s fun to animate and I’m looking forward to doing more of his films. This was my first time directing (people other than just myself)! I have to give props to Ryan Ingram, Kathy-Jo Ryan, and Davonne Dupart for all their help, and for their patience as I learned the ropes of directing. (I’m still learning the ropes).

The 1-100 Rap!

My colleague, Al James, and myself did NOT want to do this. We were buried up to our eyeballs in work when this project was added to the pile. After a while though, it grew on us — and now this video is getting our company tons of hits on YouTube and Vimeo, and driving lots of traffic to our website! Not to mention there are a lot of happy schoolkids out there rapping to 100 now…

I animated a few things in here — the dancing, the bouncing car, the final scene, and a few other things. I did some of the effects and compositing — but the bulk of the credit on this one goes to the crew mentioned above. Kathy Jo art-directed and boarded the whole thing. (If you know Kathy Jo, it’s REALLY obvious.) Al James brought his After Effects skills to the table and did all the lighting effects, and most of the compositing. His greatest contribution though — was the music!

Just a few of our fun GPA characters:

Background Art with Ryan Ingram

Art directing our background artist, Ryan Ingram, was a lot of fun. I’d basically do the layouts, and he’d paint them based on styleframes we did early on. But Ryan morphed the style and made it his own. And taught me some pretty great Photoshop tricks in the bargain. Here are some of our collaborations:

Cutout Art

For a couple of the grades, we wanted to get away from the same-ish look we’d had in Kindergarten and 4th grade. So I worked on this cutout style using photos of vividly colored construction paper in Photoshop. The look is still evolving, but we like how it’s worked out so far for 1st and 2nd Grade.

GPA’s 2nd Grade Character Guide, Adirehs.

I’ll be posting more of my GPA stuff as time allows, so come back from time to time and take a look around!

Also, if you or someone you know has kids in the K-5 range, you’ve gotta try our product! (Yeah yeah — of course I’m gonna say that because I’ve worked on it.) But seriously — kids actually seem to enjoy using it! (go figure!) I don’t have kids of my own, but I’m told that’s the intellectual equivalent of kids eating vegetables voluntarily. Anyway, there’s a free 30 – day trial, so you haven’t got anything to lose!

Check us out here: http://gpalovemath.com/