Blue Mammoth Year 1

I am a 2D Animator at Blue Mammoth Games.  I take cut out pieces of art work like this...

And make them do things like this.....

I start off by putting the character in key poses that get the basic idea across

I then time out how long each pose is shown.  It gives me a rough idea how the final animation will look.

Then finally I'll make several more poses that play in between the other poses.  This helps smooth out the animation.

I started my internship at Blue Mammoth Games January 2013.  They had me do various practice exercises to get me up to speed on how they do things.  My first assignment was to simply make a mechanical arm pick up a ball.  It was frustrating. The way they did things was very different from what we were taught at school.  What should have only taken me about 2 hours took over 7!  After a few weeks it finally clicked.  Now it actually saves time. (For you animators out there who work in Flash, this was the Motion Editor)
Shortly thereafter, they had me do an attack and several stock lightning effects.

Then our next project came up.  I worked on it for a month or so before I was put back on Dungeon Blitz.  We were working on what would be a huge update for the game.  My job was mostly to add more emotes.

Basically, I made characters do personality type stuff.  I was able to go through certain bosses in the game, and made them do a little something special during their dialogue

Eventually the pets in the game needed attack animations.  They weren't created the same way other Dungeon Blitz characters were.  These had to be hand drawn (for the most part).
It was a very long process, but it felt sooooo good to finally do some hand drawn character animation again.  Oh so good.

I work with two other animators.  Our Senior Animator, Darolle McKnight, and lead Special Effects Animator, Jade Joyner. There was a time when Jade was going be out for a week, so Darolle and I worked on special effects. 

Since then though, I have been moved over to our next project.  There have been several processes we have improved greatly upon since Dungeon Blitz.  With this next project we will be able to push the aesthetics much further.  Also, I get to do a lot of crazy fighting moves.  So be looking for some pretty cool things in the future!