I produced this an example for our animation students to demonstrate the use of Maya, Moho, Photoshop, GarageBand as visual and audio elements that could then be composited together in After Effects (in this case) or Final Cut Pro.

This little test animation was done with Moho. A great, intuitive 2D programme that I was working through as it had been recently introduced to the course curriculum. I thought I’d create something that would compliment the current Fox project that was on the go at the time. There’s a great feel to the programme, which is something that’s rarely said about the digital environment, it really wants to animate anything in it.

Quick demo for a series of animation shorts.
Professor Bigheadbrain continually experiments in his lab on experimental experiments that always go wrong. He was born in a lab from a genetic experiment that went wrong and in the interests of pointless academic science he’s used for observational purposes. He’s demented and so unsuccesfull in his work that he accidentally made contact with an alien life form that thought he was a primordial distant ancestor until he blew up the alien planet while experimenting on the spaceships Turbo Time Displacement matter Extrapolator which simultaniously transported Prof Bhb back to Earth where he was originally; incarcerated in his laboratory which is really a cell in a psychiatric hospital.

This little animation was done on the spot, in a manner of speaking, for a company who were looking for artwork to test the 3G (Or 2G as it was then) mobile phone network before it was opened for commercial, public use. They asked me to put something together and the next day I took it to their office on a CD (no memory sticks back then) because their internet connection was temporarily down and so was the website. They had quite a lot of 2D artwork which had been tested and wanted to try broadcasting some animation. I’d previously sent them some abstract animations which were very low file sizes due to the then narrow bandwidth and this piece was a little more adventurous.

I then thought it should work so I looked into 3DMax’ s Pyrotechnic options, created a flame and animated the whole process.

The image above is accompanied by a very short animation: