My student film from 2010

Kozak Mating Dance from Amber Holowaychuk on Vimeo.

Sheridan College 4th year graduate film.

A Ukrainian cossack and his lover are happy together before he leaves to defend her - then discovers upon his return that she has taken up with another man!
The story is told through Ukrainian folk dance to a Ukrainian folk song Розпрягайте, хлопці, коні (Unhitch the Horses, Boys).
Film by Amber Gail Holowaychuk (www.ambergail.com)

Music by Bohdan Slavutych Jr.

Sung by Nadine Veroba and Bohdan Slavutych Jr.


All animation was done digitally in Digicel Flipbook 6 for Mac. Just my laptop and my tablet and me on a couch for 8 months!


Lyrics translated-


Unhitch the horses, boys
And lay down and relax
As I go into the green orchard
To dig an orchard well

Chorus:
Marusya* - one, two, three - kalyna**
The dark-haired girl who picks orchard berries.<

I know, I know, dear girl
How I have offended you
Because I spent all of last night
Exchanging words with another

Chorus x2

She is not yet a fully grown lady
And is still young in years
Her dark hair, braided, reaches her belt
And the braid contains a darling pale blue ribbon

Chorus

* Marusya is a common girls name.
** Kalyna is the viburnum opulus, a local plant which has cultural symbolic significance. In this song its use makes reference to virginal beauty. Historically, young women promised to plant kalyna on the graves of cossacks who died in battle.

Thesis Film Background Painting

Some of the backgrounds I painted for my thesis film project.

DEMO REEL

DEMO REEL Amber Gail Holowaychuk from Amber Holowaychuk on Vimeo.

01) Kozak Mating Dance - 0:03, 0:08, 0:12, 0:20, 0:22, 0:24, 0:28, 0:41
 • All Character and Environment Design
 • Animation (paperless in Digicel Flipbook 6 for Mac)
 • Layout and Paint (Photoshop)
 • Colour (Digicel Flipbook 6 for PC)
 • Compositing (After Effects)
02) Higher Education - 0:05, 0:06, 0:17, 0:19
 • Environment Design
 • Involved in Character Design
 • Animation and Layout on paper
 • Background Paint - Photoshop
 • Colour - Photoshop
 • Compositing - After Effects
03) Higher Education - 0:13
 • Environment Design
 • Involved in Character Design
 • Animation and Layout on paper
 • Character Colour in Photoshop
 • Beard Interaction in Photoshop
 • Compositing in After Effects
04) Exercise Action Analysis - 0:33
 • All Character and Environment Design
 • Animation and Layout on Paper
 • Animation and Colour in Photoshop
 • Compositing in After Effects
05) Voice - Patrick Stewart from "Jeffrey" - 0:37
 • Animation in Maya
 • Vocal Breakdown in Magpie Pro
 • Compositing in After Effects
Demo reel assembled in Premiere Pro

The music in the demo reel is Korobushko by Bond, used without permission.

Kozak Mating Dance Poster

Sheridan Flipbook 2010

This is the page I put together for the industry book this year. The arrows behind the characters were intended to show the direction of the movement as well as the direction you should "read" the images. Marusya across the top goes from left to right, while Bohdan across the bottom is read from right to left. Dance dance dance! Gogogo!

Production on my film is now essentially complete! Most of what I am choosing to do for it now is all gravy, icing on the cake, window dressing. An exciting time to be me!!... after I get some sleep =_=

Thesis Film Movement Analysis

These three composite images were put together to go in a display case in the college this week. Overall I'm happy with them. They're a bit interesting because, if you look carefully at them, you can see that I've cheated each of those three movements in different ways.
The top one was a challenge for me because I first approached it as though I was hitting key poses. I looked at many reference videos to discover that although it is a very simple, straight forward dance step I was needing to cover a lot of ground very quickly. The footwork was so fast that I found the best way to tackle that movement was to approximate the foot positions (which is the area that was giving me the most trouble) in the live action video references and to sell the rest of it with the center of balance of the characters in each frame.
The second composite image was a step I don't feel worked too well as an animation, and I can't quite decide what I would have changed to get it to work more efficiently in motion. Rather than using a lot of squash and stretch in my animation for this film I made a conscious decision to hit poses very crisply and to use lots of secondary action on the hair and clothing to follow through along the arcs. Kaj Pindal gave me the advice to hit the poses immediately as he said that "that's what dancers are really trying to do". That's all well and good when it's not a long, continuous movement like this one. The constant changes in the body posing doesn't give the eye much opportunity to rest. I did my best to compensate for that problem here by using the arms to follow the hips just slightly in their rotation.
The third image was the first piece of physical dance animation I had done for my thesis film. There is a huge perspective change for that character in the scene, and the angle he is moving in along the z-axis is a pretty piss poor one for showcasing the center of balance of the character that is allowing him to make such a broad movement in the first place. The character design helps out here. His jacket keeps moving while he himself is not, as always. The sudden whip of his arm does read as being a large transfer of weight and sudden torque in the body. The relative speed with which he takes off is not realistic but, I felt, necessary for such a hefty character to supposedly become airborne. The last pose in that set, where he opens his body, is probably my favourite in the whole film... a silly little aside for anyone who bothered to read this far! Haha. Not as a drawing in itself, but for the way it feels in motion.

It may be worth throwing in a mention here that the bottom row on each image was the rough animation for the sequence shown above. I've been working entirely digitally, in Digicel Flipbook, if anyone was curious about that.

Thesis Film Coloured Animation

Click here to view the clip if the embedded video will not play for you. This is the scene I have been showing work from on this blog. That's all on this front for now! The film will be done in another couple of weeks. For now, try to imagine it with music and a background and... you know... the rest of a film surrounding it!

De Colores

There are many characters in my thesis film, and even though I'm shamelessly rocking a liberal amount of animation reuse, they all need to be coloured. A little bit of planning goes a long way here.

It's all very Beauty and the Beast! Green, red and yellow like the Bimbettes. That was not my inspiration for the colour choices, guys really do wear pants in those different colours with their folk costumes. I like that it has that similarity though.

Whenever I work on colour design I always want to sing De Colores.

Animation Equivalent of the Cutting Room Floor

I had been developing some scenes which got the axe fairly recently. Here's a comp of some rough work from one of those.

Thesis Film Clean Up Frame

Not doing much these days other than working on my film! So you get some more of that.

Thesis Film Inbetween

Hard at work on my film! I'm busy making this kind of "unimpressed" face at drawings on my laptop screen.

Old Working Boards

These were the working rough boards for my thesis film from the middle of September of last year. It's bittersweet to look at for me now - the huge chunks I've reworked, the original intent of what I was trying to do, the large amount of horses I was able to remove entirely. As a matter of personal preference I feel compelled to say that boarding this particular short film was a very frustrating thing for me. I was beating myself in the face with culture shock, getting lots of feedback from people without any previous experience with Ukrainian culture. Some of the comments I got you would not believe! It wasn't making it easier to get at what the issues with the boards really were.

Colour Studies and Exploration

I went through a whole lot of exploration of colour before I deciding on the colour styling for my film. Ultimately, I thought it would be best to stick to jewel tones and warmer shades, without straying too far towards a "cartoony" colour palette.

I started with the colour bars, making sure to cover the few variations I thought might be appropriate for this film at each approximate time of day. After building up the colour studies I weighed in on what I thought would be most effective for the content of each individual scene. Most of my opinions on those little decisions changed when I put my choices together, side by side.

Below you can see my working colour palette for the film. Kozak Mating Dance is ending up with much more red in it that I had set out thinking it would. I'm very glad I did this work, if only to have had the good sense to remove the whole "evening" palette from consideration. I think I've hit on something that works! As you can see, the workflow test scene a couple posts down is from the first colour section, in the top left corner.

Animating Dance

Animating dance has been a truly challenging, engaging, and rewarding experience for me. Never before have I felt this level of appreciation, consideration of, and care for what I am animating. I wish I had better words for communicating what this is like. Now, if only I wasn't on the 200 drawing a day diet (which is meatier than it sounds) I could really get in to breaking down the movement and caricaturing it for animation!

Thesis Film Test Scene

Click here to watch this clip if the embedded video does not work for you. Our most recent milestone deadline asked for by the school was to work an entire scene through our pipeline. I definitely have some opinions about what I still would like to change in this scene! Still, I do feel it was important to see what sort of quality I can churn out under the time restrictions I've set for myself for this project.

BG test

Not sure where I'm going with this whole "art direction" thing, but I'm steadily chipping away at it.