Yair Mor's Blog!

Another body mechanics test in Flash – this time a small jump. It kinda reminds me of old Prince of Persia animation.

This is a very short little test I did last week while visiting Ziv. It was totally fun working together.

Next time we’ll clear the entire day and perhaps I’ll end up with a little more than just a small test…

A feature, maybe

This is another pass at the layout. I still need to fix some timing and poses issues. I think I’ll tweak the layout once again before I go to blocking.

But this is a big project, and I think it will be wise to switch to make time for smaller shots. More to come soon!

And the earlier pass, just for reference:

During the last few weeks I kept myself very busy with apartment hunting. A tedious process which has ended last week when I rented a cool apartment in the center of Tel Aviv. I’ve been thinking of moving to the city for the last few months, and I even wrote about some of the things I did in the city in a few posts, like snapping some pictures in a juggling party and the 100th anniversary of the city.

I made that decision because I wanted to live in the beating heart of the culture and experience urban life, which is something I haven’t had the chance to feel yet. So right now I’m in the process of unpacking and cleaning. I hope I’m done with that as soon as possible.

I have also decided to stop the weekly links post. I think I’ll leave this blog for my work, rather than other people’s stuff, at least for the time being.

And one last thing: here’s a couple of stuff I’m currently working on. My intention is to finish these two before I start anything new, or else I’ll never finish up anything. I’ll post updates whenever I make any progress.

1. This is a layout for a scene I’ve started working on. Audio is taken from the awesome TV show Jeeves and Wooster starring Hugh Laury and Stephen Fry.
   
2. A concept for a scene inspired by a photo from Asylum by Christopher Payne (which I wrote about here). The first sketch was made with Painter. It’s more detailed, but I don’t like it since I paid less attention to proportions and perspective. The second one is constructed better, and I intend to finish it before I work on this scene in 3D.
   

   

   

   
   
   

Last weekend, Fri-Sat to be exact, I attended the Global Game Jam event here in Hertzlia. For those of you who are not aware, the GGJ is an international game development event taking place at the same time in many countries all over the world.

My friends Dan, Yoni and I teamed up with Sagiv and we created some sort of a prototype for a Flash based guitar-hero style game. We named it Dance Fail Revolution. The idea is to dance the hero into “sealing the deal” with a girl in a club by pressing the right keys along with the music. Failing to do so will cause the character to fall down and embarrass himself. Since the development time was limited to 48 hours, we didn’t manage to really finish the game, but it is playable and really fun.

I was responsible for the design and animation, while the rest of the team coded the game and the level editor (which lets you record keys while listening to a song and put it in the game to play). As you can see, the design we went with was some retro Atari old fashioned style, which we really like. We were also heavily inspired by Junior Senior’s video for Move Your Feet.

This last weekend’s experience was amazing. We were working in some school lab all weekend long, and completely lost track of time.

Anyway, the game is not finished, but you can download it from the game’s page at the GGJ website here.

The amazing team behind Fail Dance Revolution. From left to right: Me, Yoni, Sagiv and Dan

This is the final version for this little shot. It’s a test for this character’s rig I’m working on. I decided to call him Hobby, partly because it’s looks is based on one of my favorite childhood heroes – Hoborg from The Neverhood.

Anyway here’s the final shot:

This is a new shot I’ve been working for most of the weekend. Concept is pretty simple. What do you think?

This is the final shot. As you can see I changed quite a lot in it since the previous version. The jump is more mechanically correct.

1. Parkour Motion
   I love parkour. You must have a combination of superb physical strength and you must know how to use it to move around in an urban environment. And this little video brings another thing I love into this mix, which is animation, of course.
   
2. The Marionette Unit
   A trailer for an upcoming Victorian sci-fi, or steampunk, horror movie. Check out the awesome website to see some artwork here.
   
3. Vladimir Rachev
   Vladimir is a fantastic designer. I got to know him from a Kitsune Noir post from earlier this week. Vladimir does a lot of interior, industrial and graphic design, and shows a lot of stuff on his website. His works are usually minimalistic and have a very clean design. He likes to take one product and mix it with a design of another, which creates some interesting ideas (i.e. the shaver in the shape of the desk lamp below).
   I love his website because it reflects his minimalist design.
   
4. City of Darkness
   I found this article on Design Observer about Kowloon Walled City, and it immediately sparkled my imagination. This strange city block in the middle of Hong Kong was about 33m^2 big, and it was mostly made out of slums, apartments and garbage stacked together. It was a dense settlement under the control of Triads. There were about 33,000 people living in it back in 1987, right before the government decided to tear the place down. I can sum this place up by saying it was a low-life city within a city taken straight out of a cyberpunk story, only without the sci-fi hi-tech stuff. Once I get a few days with some spare time I really want to make some drawings, or even 3D scenes inspired by this magnificent place.
   The Walled City is described in the book City of Darkness by Ian Lambot.
   
5. New trailer for Tony
   Thanks to sites like Quiet Earth, I’m able to stay up to date with all the upcoming horror movies. One of them is Tony, a serial killer horror flick. There were a few teasers a couple of weeks ago, but now there’s a trailer. I don’t know why, but he really reminds me of a pissed off version of Kip (from Napoleon dynamite). I guess it’s the weird hair and big glasses. Anyway, check it out. Sweet stuff.
   
6. Opening title for a Tel Aviv documentary
   The opening sequence for Tel Aviv Jaffa documentary series celebrating the 100th anniversary of the city. It’s a beautiful presentation of a miniature of the city inside a room (or a gallery). The windows outside show a typical Tel Aviv architecture, so it makes you realize you watch the entire city from inside the city, and both the miniature and the real world share the same sun coming from the windows. In this video you can see important locations in the city, like the fisrt kiosk in the city located on Rothchild blvd., Dizengoff Square and Azrieli Towers.
   
7. Angst
   I’ll finish with another short by Emiel Penders. I just love the animation and the mood here.
   

1. VFS Box Animation

   http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xbjooo_box-animation-vancouver-film-school_creation

2. Inception teaser #2
   This sci-fi thriller looks pretty cool
   
3. Ruben Fernandez’s Oasis Terminal
   A nice short directed by Fernandez set in a post apocalyptic world. The story revolved around a guerrilla fighter, his mission, his dream of the mythical haven Oasis Terminal and the memories of older, better times.
   
4. Princess and the Frog: Drawing Naveen