character research&design

Here are some character development sketches for the Mr. Miacca short story. This is the little boy in the story, Tommy Grimes. My sketches had too much of an anime style at first, and I didn't really imagine that fitting well with the story. Then moved into more of a Ghibli style for the character by sketching parts from their movies, but it ended up being too similar.

Ended up moving towards a simpler, more stylized character, something more like Coraline. I think this style should work well with the story.

This last image is the character turnaround for Tommy. There might be some small changes to the finalized character, but most of it is there. Next is storyboarding. Hopefully I will be able to take all this preproduction work and use it to make a short for my capstone project.

Background Research & Design

Here are some background sketches/research/design done a few weeks ago. Have not had much time to post them until now. These are backgrounds for a short children's story about an old guy that eats kids! These will lead to a final finished keyframe from the story. Will post character designs soon, and start working on storyboards...

Here are the sketches leading up to some color keys for the story.

79 drawings #2,3,4

Got behind in scanning these in, but here are a few of the panels from the last few 79 drawings a day. I think I'm getting better at figuring out what to put into the drawing in such a short amount of time, and trying to add some value. I'm not uploading all the panels, but here are a few I liked.

These first three are from Prince of Egypt. Never saw the movie, but looks pretty good, seems like there is some singing though....

These Next two are from Rushmore. I have seen this movie, and it's a classic.

These last three are from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Never seen this movie, but I liked the camera shots, so I'll have to watch it soon.

My sketching hand is getting tired, but will come back stronger!

79 drawings #1

My storyboarding class started today, and at the beginning of every class, we will be doing 79 drawings of frames from movies/animation. They start out as quick 10 second sketches and gradually build up to a final 5 minute sketch. It's hard to do quick 10 second sketches at first, but you get used to it, and just move on to the next one. I actually liked it a lot, really good practice of making quick drawings and quickly deciding how much detail you need and what is important in the scene.

Here are the 79 drawings from the first day, and the movie today was 2001: A Space Odyssey. Will try to post these from each session. Should be a fun class.

portofolio

Working on a layouts for a mock-up of my portfolio website. I think we are just creating the mock-ups for class, but not coding this. Hopefully I'll be able to code it fairly well by the end of the class so that it is easily updatable through CSS.

p.s. resisting the urge to use helvetica!

11 sec august blocking

I've been working on an 11 second club entry with the August sound clip on and off for a few days. Here is what I have so far. Still blocking things out, but I think I have the main character mostly done.

Still need to add the secondary character into the background, hopefully won't take long. Then will get to working on the spline tangents. Also need more work on beginning and ending so people understand what's going on a little better. Not sure if I'll be able to get this done in time for an entry with school starting, but I will try. Still good practice anyways.

Getting really tired of listening to this sound clip after hearing it 1000 times...

cycles

I've been messing around with maya lately, so here are two quick walk cycle tests on different rigs that I did to practice animating in maya.





The robot is still in blocking stage, not sure if I'll go back and finish it though. Will probably move onto other things, maybe the 11 second club clip from this month.