Daniel J. Hogan: Writer, Lovable Geek

Animation

"After writing, animation (along with drawing...and maybe rake fighting) is my next passion. I love what you can do with animation - which, like writing, is anything and is limited only by your imagination...

...So click on the buttons below and you'll be able to watch it on YouTube. I'll get around to actually embedding it here on this site at some point. Also, sorry 'bout the watermarks...blame those bozos who steal other peoples' stuff on the ol' internet."

"One of my first real shorts, and perhaps my favorite. This baby was actually accepted to three separate film festivals - including one in Europe (where I was one of only a handful of Americans to be selected. See Links and Press for more details). Always a crowd pleaser. I think I'm going to remix the audio on this soon, the levels are a little hot, so watch your volume."

"My GVSU Animation swan song. A fun mix of live action and animation with a dash of old timey fun. Stars my old friend, Kevin Knipstein. I shudder when I think of the hundreds of hours I spent on this...but I don't regret a single second. Originally there were even more segments, but I scrapped them either before or after I shot the video, one of which was a Lord of the Rings movie joke - I'm very glad I left that out. I based the 'silent' film look on old Edison, Lumière brothers and Méliès shorts from the early days of film. Yeah, I'm a big film history geek...and hooray for public domain music!"

"I originally threw this together for a Nickelodeon sponsored short animation contest. Long story short, I didn't win (or even get in). I love the characters I came up with for this as well as the odd-ball world they inhabit. This is one I'd love to redo and make even better, my shoddy Cary Grant impression doesn't really hold up too well...however, I think my singing does (I wish I hadn't credited myself as 'Brok Toxic'). I played the title song on my bass with lots of distortion, the background music I made in Apple's Soundtrack program. I regret that most of this was quickly thrown together since it wasn't for a class, and it shows in some parts. It isn't on par with my usual (very) high standards, but I had a deadline to meet. Also, to answer the most frequent question I get after people see this, no I don't do drugs - I just have a wacky imagination."

"A few years ago I was awarded a scholarship from GVSU's School of Communications to attend a Stop-Motion Animation Workshop in Grand Rapids taught by animator Tom Brierton. It was amazing! We built our own puppets from scratch and then animated them. I love doing stop-motion. There isn't much of a plot here, but I'm very happy with how it turned out. I think mine was one of the few that actually had a plot of sorts and showed my character thinking and having emotions."

"More stop-motion fun. This was all done with paper cut-outs (like South Park in the early days) under a camera and was one of my first ever projects while I studied animation at GVSU. We were all given a theme of people only have $2 a day to live on - the average income of people in third world countries (I think). This was a lot of fun and not too hard. (note: made along with Dan Goodell)"

Sound of the Beast(1:26, © Daniel J. Hogan. All Rights Reserved.)
"Roto-scoping fun! For those who don't know, Roto-scoping is when you draw over film or video to give it a more 'real' look. Disney was famous for it back in the old days, such as with Snow White (she was roto-scoped, that is why she moves and acts differently than the dwarves). This is actually me playing bass and just making things up. This was another early animation project. Lots of fun and LOTS of work. There are 30 frames a second in video and this piece is almost a minute and a half - do the math. Actually, not all of it is at 30 frames, I 'cheated' on most of it and repeated frames (called 'shooting for two'), so I 'only' had to do 15 frames a second...my brain hurts thinking about it. There is a reason some animators don't date much."