Stephen M. Levinson's Blog

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Ace and Aqua is in BEST IN THE SW!l!! Please don’t for get to leave good comments here! I hope I do well in the festival! All good comments will help me :D!

Steve

Indeed I am. Recently starting as a freelance animator for Animax Entertainment, I find myself extremely busy. Animating for them is great! The cartoon I’m working on is great, it’s funny, designs are beautiful, and what’s better than doing what you love? I didn’t realize how busy I would be animating on this show. I try and wake up at 10 and then end at 6 with a break but sometimes it’s just too hard getting distracted.

Over the summer I’m coming to california. I’m going to be pitching ideas, visiting Cal Arts, and then whatever else I can find doing. Not to mention, still animating while I’m there. Deadlines people, deadlines!

I have these 3 ideas that I will be pitching ( as you see in the image ontop ). I’ve been writing the pitch-bibles for them but I still don’t know if they’ll be done in time. I have 2 of the ideas completely written out, but then comes the art work which takes equally as much time to do- and I haven’t started that yet. I have only acouple weeks to get things done. Here’s the list of what needs to be accomplished incase anyone is interested.

1) Write the pitchbook for my action idea
2) Create the art work, and design new characters for the Ace & Aqua pitch-book
3) Design all the characters for the action show, and then add them to backgrounds my good man Elliot Byrne did for me…they look spectacular by the way. Will post them once I pitch.
4) Design all the characters for my skunk show.
5) Make an animatic of my action idea powerpoint so that a very talented musician knows how long the music will play for.
6) Oh yeah, and I’m animating 10-6 each day which is more than exhausting and time consuming.

I really gotta get on it… wish me luck :{ ( nervous smiley face )

-Steve

Needed to just take a break from animating and relax outside in the warm weather, and draw. These trees are outside my house, along with tons more, and they’re like a border between my backyard, and a golf coarse.

-Steve

The terrific flash animation studio known as Animax Entertainment is looking for people.. A great guy named Burt told me I should show the head of production my work. Thanks a lot dude! So I showed the head of production Ace & Aqua and I was invited to take an animation test. Hooray! Basically I was given these 2 characters, Slammo and Sloshie. They were in a standing pose arms down with very limited symbols. I was also given an audio clip. I had to act out to the audio clip, have good animation, but more importantly have believable/good acting. So after I roughed out the actions i thought fit the audio best, traditionally, and I had to create a bunch of symbols since they were not given. I finished the test, sent it to the directors, and now I’m their newest animator! ( well they may have hired more people since me ).

Watch Test!

So now I’m going to be starting animation on a flash cartoon called “Slacker Cats” that will air on ABC Family. I’m neither an in-betweener, nor am I a fixer-upper of animation already done. I will be animating some scenes. Animax has been hired to do 2 episodes. I’m working on one of them. It seems like a really cool show from what I’ve seen so far. It’s more of an adult cartoon. Think Futurama? This seems like a great opportunity for me, and tomorrow morning I start! I’ll keep everyone updated on the date the show will premiere and other info about it!..like when my episode will be on so you can look for me in the credits!

More soon!
-Steve

The newest shirt to my Cafepress shop. Unfortunately this shirt didn’t even make it to the scoring round at Threadless even though I think people will think it’s funny. A Little Drizzle

-Steve

Symbolism -[sim-buh-liz-uhm] - noun

1.the practice of representing things by symbols, or of investing things with a symbolic meaning or character.
2.a set or system of symbols.
3.symbolic meaning or character.
4.the principles and practice of symbolists in art or literature.

-Steve

Been working on some AFX designs for an upcoming pitch. The level of intensity and action is something I really want to be unique. Many cartoons now a days aren’t as action-packed, intensely insane, the way I picture they could be. I love everything glorified and FX that look and feel incredible to the viewer. I want people to watch the action and be blown away by the level of it. I’m trying to bring it to a new notch.

The first image at the top isn’t as glorified as the image below but I think it looks a lot simpler and less complex.
The design below it is on more of an extreme level. I’m thinking it may be overdone but I love the feel to it.. the more intense the better but that doesn’t necessarily mean more complex. As they say, the simpler things in life are the better things.. just gotta keep working on this until I get it the way I want it/ until it looks right.

-Steve

I am a huge action-anime fan. I love the look and the details the characters have, I love the fighting animations because they’re really intense and well done. Here’s an image I did recently.. It’s just some evil kinda guy I thought up.. I was kinda inspired by this as well as this.<- That image is really what made me decide to draw this. I thought “that’s really cool but it would look so much more awesome if it was detailed like Dragonball z style”. After I finished everything I thought the colors werent so great so I added a gradient map to the drawing and the colors changed to what’s above. I think it looks much nicer and also alot like the colors in first link I posted. Special thanks to Elliot Byrne for his advice.

I’m working on my anatomy and shading…i’d bet 80% of the shading in the drawing is wrong :p

I am posting this drawing because I want to know what I should do differently for my next drawing. As far as color and shading and anatomy go. All help is appreciated! Please don’t just say nice things I’m looking for advice.

-Steve

… and it really is. This is my first real life drawing and I want to improve my skills in this area of drawing as much as I can.. I want to show Cal Arts something impressive when I apply. So above is the giraffe I drew and below is the original giraffe. You can see many thing’s are off and I need to improve on tightening it up alot. Of coarse it being my first life drawing it’s FAR from perfect and maybe you can help. Any tips, advice, and recommendations you have about how to approach life drawing and tips to help me with it would be greatly appreciated!

Original:

More to come!
Steve

After I came up with my character designs and was happy with the way they looked, I wrote the script. As always, things from beginning to end always change around a bit. I think that changes I made came out for the better in getting out how I really pictured Ace & Aqua to be!

So the first thing I usually do when I start writing is opening a word document that looks like an actual note pad ( I don’t know why, it just looks really cool! ). I make an outline first of what is going to happen and how the story will flow, but mostly how Ace is going to get to antarctica.

After I get the summary to my liking, I just go right into it with the dialogue and what’s happening. As you can see the summary and script are a little bit different than what happens in my final animation. After over a year’s work, things are taken out, added, changed etc.

Now after several revisions are made and when I have my story the way I like it, I make the final script. As you can see I numbered the lines and made it easy for the actors to see what they’re going to perform. I used a simple type-writer font and it looks really “legit”

CLICK TO PLAY RECORDING
After I have recorded the actors I painstakingly go through my 50+ audio files and cut every single line into audio clips- most of the times lines are cut into 2 or 3 different files so that I can possibly mix and match them. I ended up with 1,019 quicktime files. Have a listen to ace saying hi squirrel. These are just a couple cuts put together- I have about 12 hi squirrel’s alone but I put only a few in progression of the recording. As you can tell I directed Brian Ufen ( Ace ) on how I wanted it to sound more like. He was a great actor and really got the voice I was looking for! I will also talk more about the recording and how I found my actors in another post.

After all the recording was done I board it out on post-its. <a href=”http://smorgasbordproductions.com/
“>Dahveed must take credit for this part, he gave me the great idea of using post-its. Why use post it’s and not just board it out on panels first? great question Stephen! Well you see Steve, with the post it’s I have very rough drawings and this way I can actually SEE my short and how it’s coming to look. Also, if I decide to change something, or re-order something I can easily pull off the post-it, get a new one, and I don’t have to re-board the entire page. More about the boards in my next process!!

Stay Tooned!

Ace & Aqua!

More to come!
Steve