Coraline

So there is a new film from the director of Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas and it's called Coraline. It looks beautiful with stop motion animation that moves the medium forward. It will be presented in stereoscopic 3D. To see some of what has gone into the creation of this film go to coraline.com and type in these passwords to view the individual clips.

stopmotion
buttoneyes
moustachio
puppetlove
armpithair
sweaterxxs

Lifestyles of the Rich and Tasteless

You wont believe this but I just got home from an LA fashion show. You wont believe this either but I wasn't the worst dressed person there. You may not even believe that it was actually kind of fun. I went to assist the house videography crew "Oh Rio! Productions"
( www.youtube.com/ohrioproductions ) shoot the show and gave myself the title "The Better Boy Grip." Some of you will get that, some will not. We met a few celebrities there and while the big name of the evening was Mandy Moore we also spent a fair amount of time with one of the coolest celebrities ever, Aimee Garcia. If you ever watched the George Lopez show whe played Veronica in the later seasons. It was great fun chatting with her and whitnessing one of the wonders of world culture that is fashion. It's almost as bizzar as I had imagined it to be. I have no photos to share because I didn't have my camera with me. I didn't think that I would be able to use it but I learned that I could have and as I sat in the photo pit durring the show I could have gotten some great shots of scarry clothes on bony models. Next time I'm bringing it. I don't believe I just said "next time."

2+2= -1

This isn't mine but I had to share it.

A lecture about English

A linguistics professor was lecturing to his English class one day.
"In English," he said, "A double negative forms a positive. In some languages, though, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative. However, there is no language wherein a double positive can form a negative."

A voice from the back of the room piped up, "Yeah, right."

Nerf Wars

Okay, thank you Ashley for bugging me for not having uploaded any Nerf War photos yet and reminding me that a posting is past due. I've been a bit preoccupied the last couple of weeks, and I'm a bit absent minded to begin with. So here is the one and only photo I took at what was truly an epic Nerf War. It must have lasted close to three hours and darts were flying everywhere.

I had brought the camera with the idea of possibly shooting some photos of the event but when it came time to get down and dirty my hands were busy. I brought two single action guns with me and so even when I wasn't double fisting it I needed the extra hand to constantly reload my gun for the next shot. Jenny's place has proven its self to be the ideal place for such events as there was plenty of cover and multiple rooms to hide and snipe in.

I spent a bit too much time crouching behind cover that day and felt it big time for the next three. I was completely sore and stiff. It took far too much effort to sit down let alone stand back up again.

The only reason I even got this photo was that I had been taking a bit of a beating from both Justin and Dayna (who was getting way too many head shots) and I needed a good offensive strategy to make a quick run and gun attack that would enable me to get a couple good shots in while throwing off their aim. I the realized that I could use my camera flash as a sort of flash bang grenade which has the purpose of stunning the opponent with blinding, unexpected light. It sort of worked. You'll notice that Justin is not shooting at me yet and Dayna has yet to even take aim at me and I managed to hit my target.

That was a fun day. I need more Nerf.

By George

People keep saying I look like George Lucas. I don't see it.

Random Sketch 001

Just a quick sketch from earlier today.

Brief Update

One more brief update. I'm back on a full time production schedule for my film and I am currently working on background layouts. I've backpedaled a bit having originally planned it as a 3D animated short and am now on a traditional 2D rout. So I'm experimenting with different materials to use for the backgrounds. I will be using a dry medium like charcoal or conte on one of three different papers which will be touched up digitally. I've got a week to make up my mind and then another three to four to produce most, if not all my backgrounds, at which point I'll be animating. So I'll be posting some background tests sometime next week.

Also, I'll most likely be posting some photos early next week of this weekends Nerf War. If I can manage to shoot with my camera and my Nerf guns at the same time.

Strummin' Along

They say hobbies are important for your health. They help to reduce stress, clear the mind, and can prevent murderous rampages. I'm making a profession out of my favorite, animation/filmmaking, so that can no longer be considered a hobby for me as it now comes with deadlines and reviews and the occasional need to throw out weeks of work to start over again. It's a lot of fun and that can help keep stress levels below that of say, a surgeon so I could never look at my career with a glass-half-empty point of view. It's something I love to do and even the worst it can get couldn't be as bad as say, estate planning so I won't ever get bored with it. And every new job/assignment is actually new and different from the last.

So I have had to look away from animation for hobbies but then I always had a few of them anyway. I like to play video games, watch movies/tv, read, draw/sketch (different from animate), and take random photographs including stupid self-portraits of me being immature. I've also recently picked up an old one that I started nearly ten years ago, the ukulele. I grew up in a musical family and had a talent for music but I no longer have a trumpet and a tuba would be too heavy and awkward to carry around so I'm strummin' on a ukulele I picked up in Hawaii. So I have permanently cemented my reputation in place and I will never be taken seriously again. I may have out grown Toy's R Us, but that doesn't mean that I'm not still a Toy's R Us kid.

Oh that's right, I've one more hobby. One of my favorites too. Nerf wars.

Sketch Vomit

So I'm going to try to keep up with a blog finally starting with this drawing of Nariko from the Playstation 3 game Heavenly Sword. I had been in a real artistic slump for months and months now producing very little that I would consider acceptable let alone something good enough to put in my professional portfolio. I used to draw constantly with no real direction or intent. I'd just draw whatever random thing came to mind once I had already started to put pencil to paper. They were usually monsters or comic book heros but the point is my approach to drawing has completely changed.

I feel like I've gotten a little too much structure from school. A blank sheet of paper is intimidating now because I feel that whatever I do with it, it needs to be good and if it's going to be good it needs some direction. At least that's what goes through my mind. I know that's really a load of rubbish but I guess that just proves that I do have a feminine side. So I've recently started forcing myself to just sit and start drawing before I have time to think about what I'm doing.

One of my early teachers Marshal Vandruff had recommended that we keep an "I don't care" sketchbook. Something that we could draw in and not feel the need to make every sketch and drawing perfect, we don't need to fear all the crap that may flow from our implements of destruction after all, even the best artists have at least 10,000 bad drawings in them. "Better out than in" as they say. Hence the name, "Sketch Vomit."

So I started this drawing as a random female character portrait with no intentions of making a finished drawing. I was just sketching trying to get out some of those vomitus sketches out of me, but it started to take the shape of something good. I liked where I was heading and so I started to give myself some direction now that it was heading in the right direction for a more "finished" drawing. Just so you know, I've not taken any drawings to a level that I would consider "finished" in well over a year. I've been working on animation related stuff so I've been working roughly without any real detail. I was just getting the point or idea across and leaving out all the time consuming work that was unnecessary.

So my sketch is taking shape and I know that I want to take it somewhere at this point but don't know what exactly I should do with it. Being a portrait with minimal room for a figure it could become anybody I wanted and I could go back in and change whatever features I needed to in order to make her someone specific. So I thought about who I should turn her into. She could be a comic hero or villain but I haven't been reading comics much lately so no one came to mind. Then I remembered that I had a small list of characters and other "fan" related art that I wanted to get around to eventually and I remembered that I had always wanted to draw Nariko from one of my favorite games, Heavenly Sword.

The thing about Nariko that stood out to me was that when I had first seen images and video of her character in the game I believed that she was based almost entirely off of a real life actress or model. Everything about her seemed too perfect in it's imperfection to not be modeled after a living, breathing human, unlike a certain tomb raiding heroine who could put Barbie to shame. But aside from her motion performance based acting she was in fact entirely hand made and that fascinated me. She started life as an artists quick sketch and ended up being one of the most beautiful and believable (aside from her hair which seems to be self-aware and have a life of it's own) female characters in any game.

So I pulled up my reference images that I had saved for just such an occasion and started to define the character. It's been a long time since I have had this much fun drawing. Don't get me wrong, I love to draw but for me, this one was like riding Space Mountain, my favorite ride.

So after a good hour or so I ended up with this sketch.


At first my animators mind thought that I would leave out the pattern on the costume as it patterns are a lot of work to draw and such things would be avoided like ebola in even the most ambitious traditionally animated film but then I realized that I had no intention of animating this and I was having too much fun to leave it unfinished like that. Of course the other reason I considered leaving it out was the fact that the actual pattern used in the game was unavailable to me and so I would have to create something myself from scratch based on some early concept drawings. I used the basic curved shapes and pattern that had loosely been laid in on one concept image and built on that.

At this point I decided that I would clean up the line work and give better definition as to where the line really were in the image and to do that I would use a technique I had learned from Gnomon instructional DVD. I would first draw directly on top of my sketch with a regular pencil essentially putting black lines over the red lines of the rough sketch.

What I ended up with was this.


Now I would scan the image into the computer which had to be done in two parts as I was working on 11x17 inch printer paper and would put the two parts together in Photoshop. Then, continuing in Photoshop I went into the color channels settings where the three primary colors red green and blue are separated and I deleted the green and blue, leaving only the red information which basically eliminates all the red sketch lines leaving only the black pencil lines.


Now I can easily add color to my image but before I could do that I would need my color pallet to work from. I once again went to my resource images and selected colors from the official studio artwork to help me find my colors. My drawing is a lot more cartoony than the hyper real stuff of the game studio Ninja Theory so I only needed a handful of colors and I simply used the paint bucket tool to block in the base colors. I then used the pen tool to create shapes and paths that I could use to fill in the shadow areas as well as the little bit of highlights in the lips and eventually ended up with this.


I could have called it quits at this point but being one who is never fully satisfied with his work I felt that there was more I needed to do. First up is the background. While I was not too lazy to draw in the costume detail, I am too lazy to draw in background details so I just wanted to go with a simple flat color behind her but what I've got isn't working well enough. It's value is too light and too close to the value of Nariko's skin tone and costume colors so while it makes the deep red hair stand out, her skin and costume can blend in with it too much. I needed something that would make her whole figure stand out from the background. I ended up once again going back to my reference images looking for the colors used in those images and went with a darker brown that would not only make her hair pop out from it but the rest of her would stand out in great contrast from the background as well.

I also decided that I still wanted to incorporate my original sketch lines as a sketch has a certain vibrance and energy that is too often lost in the cleaned up image. So I opened up the scanned image with the black pencil lines and dropped it on top of the colors and set the layer to multiply. This not only returns much of the lost energy from the original sketch but it also adds a whole new level of depth to the image by adding texture.


In the end I'm very happy with the way this drawing came out, something I rarely feel and can say about my work however good it may really be. I also had a lot of fun making it. I hope you like it too and I hope you found this entry at least a little insightful or interesting. Shoot, I hope it made sense.