I haven't been on this site for a while, I have been very busy working and applying to colleges, but I always like to post my work on here when I finish something. I was hired to animate this 3 minute clay animation for an organization here in Kentucky that helps abused and neglected kids. This was a really fun project, it was the first piece I have done that was for a real client. I have never had to develop existing characters before, so it was interesting to take someone else's drawing and turn them into workable puppets. Everything for this piece was built from scratch and animated in my very humble studio (more like an attic.) It took several months of work, trying to fit enough time in and around my senior year of high school. Any questions, comments, advice, or criticism is welcome.  

Here is the link to it on YouTube http://youtu.be/ap7Q5Ew05gk

Can you exlpain in greater detail on how you took out the lines on mouth? 

Wow iantimothy, what a fantastic ad!  I'm very impressed that you managed to fit this in around all your school work too.  Great to see you doing client work, looks like the start of a fantastic career!

Thanks Katie. Mason, so basically I used replacement mouths, In a similar method to how they did them for Paranorman, and i think Aardman did the same for Pirates. I had a set of mouths that were made out of an air drying clay that had a piece sticking out in the back that attached to a hole in the head. The a hardened clay was then covered with the clay for her skin tone and sculpted with each different mouth shape. In order to speed up time during the animation process, and try something new, I didn't smooth out the clay where the seam was. Instead I import the individual images into photoshop as an image sequence, so I can view it like the movie, but each of the images are able to be manipulIt then I use a the spot healing tool to get rid of the seam and the clone tool to fix any mistakes and make sure it is consigroom from frame to frame. All in all it maybe took a little but longer than if I smoothed it out in the clay, but it kept the clay cleaner and allowed for more concentration on the performance. It was a very interesting experiment. I know Mason has seen it, but if you look at my demo reel on YouTube you can see some shots without the cleanup.

Nice, I'll have to try that sometime.

beware! it's not fun! But it does look good!

Great!