short short- rendering process #3

One last short explanation video for the technique I used for the bird.
It's very similar to what I did for the waiter, only this time the bird is sort of staying there and the 'seams' are showing ...potentially.
It worked well this time around because the movements are quitesharp, but the idea of printing out and painting over the animation on paper is something I find intriguing and I'd like to experiment more with it.

short short- rendering process #3

A new video explaining a little bit how I got the textures on the character. I left the subtleties out, but you get the idea.
This also reveals the one big mistake I feel I did on this short, which was to separate and tie down the head 'on the spot'. the original idea was to better control the textures, but it wasn't much help in the end and it gives the head a slightly disconnected feel.
A live and learn kind of thing, I guess...

Madeleine is the first of a series of very short films I'm planning to have fun making.
I've been working professionally for almost eleven years and have found that I have lost touch with who I am artistically. Of course there was Violince, but after two years, I've found that even there, I was falling into a routine, so this very short format allows me to experiment a bunch of new techniques and to stretch my legs a bit, and so far I love it.
My only regret is that this one took a bit longer than anticipated (though a reasonable two months...) because of the watercolour texturing I kind of stumbled upon, but I'm so pleased with the result that it was well worth it.
The main goal for me is to have fun making these shorts, but I also want to keep learning, so if you have comments, critics, I'm happy to hear about them!

madeleine_ render process

I'm almost done with the whole thing and I hope to be able to post the film early next week.
Meanwhile, I did this quick video to explain why it's taking so long.
I really wanted the waiter to disappear and be part of the background as soon as possible and I'm quite happy with the result.
The main character and the bird both have their own watercolour style rendering andeven though I'm a bit upset it takes so long, I think it's quite worth the trouble.
I'll try to post more process videos in the next couple of days.

short short- Animatic Madeleine

I really enjoyed animating the blog banner a couple of months ago and I kept the idea in the back of my mind that such really short format would be a great way to a; explore new techniques b; stretch my creative muscle a bit and c; have fun!
I made this animatic over two evenings last week, loosely based on something that happened to my wife, and I find the format really freeing, because there isn't much expectation. It's a nice break from Violince in that sense.
I already started animating and if I had a bit of trouble with the backgrounds-for which I had something specific in mind that I couldn't quite capture- the character work has been fun so far.
A new reel with the rough animation will follow.

GUM #4

I guess a professional, trained writer could lead a story towards a set subject without too much trouble, but I am not one and I when I 'write', the best I can do is assemble a bunch of things my mind has digested and make it work somehow.
And when writing Gum, I couldn't help but picking up on the fact that koreans have, how shall I put it?... a special realtionship to food. Well, that's a politically correct way of expressing what I really mean, that they're in fact obsessed with their food... First off, restaurants or food stalls everywhere (I mean everywhere...) but more telling than that, food is heavily featured on tv; you can't flick through channels without finding someone enjoying a meal, or competing for one...
In any case, if I can respect this um... passion, I find it hard to understand and relate to. Mostly because I can't for the life of me eat spicy food, but also because even though I do enjoy a good meal once in a while and my wife is a great cook, the way to my heart is definitely not through food.
So, to get back to my original point, all of this must have made its way through to the story of this grandpa who can't help but looking at chewing-gum as a disease-inducing thing that needs to be gotten rid of in favour of 'real food', rice.

GUM #3

I found a whole bunch of drawings I made while I was 'writing' gum, trying to figure out what the grandpa would look like. I can't really remember, but apparently I wasn't really set on a grandfather and I explored the option of having a grandma instead. though now that I think about it, it may be that I was planning for a moment to have a cute old couple instead of just one grandparent. You can imagine why this went out the window real quick.

In any case, I got a whole bunch of  pictures off the internet that I then drew from, trying to get a sense for what I wanted, let it brew for a while and finally came up with a face that I felt both interesting and that I was comfortable with.

The design then evolved a little as I was drawing the storyboard, but not very much. The kid on the other hand, I didn't even bother trying to design and left it for the time I would animate... Because honestly, the kid is not nearly as interesting as the grandpa.

GUM #2 animatic

As storyboards go, this one is pretty detailed and the drawings a lot more finalized than needed. It was the same for 'niledog' and there's a simple reason for that; I am not a story artist at heart and it's usually an exercise I don't really like.
I'm naturally very impatient, (which is weird considering I chose animation as a career) and storyboard feels both too slow and too fast all at once. It's a weird feeling that it should be done faster while I'm doing it, and I feel surprised and frustrated when it's done that I didn't connect with the scene or sequence; it falls right in my patience blind spot.
 So for me the only way to make working on a board enjoyable is to see pretty pictures at the end.
It goes without saying it's a silly way to approach a story work, as it makes every cut or editing choice very painful, but at the time I did this I didn't care much for efficiency; all I wanted was to make something pretty and to keep my 'artistic' sanity in the middle of all that TV work...


 

GUM #1

 GUM is a short film I was planning to animate up until about 2010.
I have done a whole animatic (that I will try to post next week) but somehow I was never really satisfied with it, it never really got any traction and bottom line, (though I only realized later) I have already done a short film and I'm not really fond of the format.
Some people do it really well, the 'anecdote' aspect of a short however doesn't really appeal to me, neither as an artist nor as an audience. I'm naturally drawn to longer stories, with characters develloping etc...

These drawings do not feature anyone that ended up in the film, but they represent the beginning of the journey.
I did those in Australia back in 2006  shortly after I met my then girlfriend, now wife.
I'm not crazy about all things korean, the spicy food especially, but I really like their traditionnal clothing; it just looks... cool.

I started drawing, playing with ideas in my head, but even though I liked where it was going graphically, I never got to anything looking even remotely like a good story and it slowly faded.

Cut to 2009, when I get offered a supervising job in Korea and spend 7 'difficult' months  trying to figure out what I'm doing there... My basic answer when I'm in a tough situation is 'work more', and so I did, and over the course of my stay, I wrote, designed and drew the animatic for GUM.


Now, almost nothing of my original ideas remain, not even my fondness for the clothing, but I still look back on it once in a while and I really like that small story of a grandpa struggling to connect with his grandkid...

niledog 2006

niledog #5

These are some of my favorite drawings, which is a big paradox because I never really liked that kiss...
I wish I had found a better way to bring the boy back to his human self, but well, it sort of works.
Anyway, as I mentionned before, telling a good story wasn't so much the focus as flexing my animation muscles and do a little bit what I wanted for a change.
Disney Australia was great, but in a place where the quotas are so high, you really quickly rely on your bag of tricks and avoid taking risks. It's a shame, but I guess it's the reality of the 'professional' artist.
It was a bit of a shock when they shut the studio down, but in retrospect, I'm glad that it did, lazy as I am, I would probably still be there now...

niledog #4

I just started posting  the rough of the week on the 'violince' blog and was lamenting the fact that these digital drawings do not have the punch of drawing on paper.
Case in point, this drawing, one of the few salvaged roughs I found in my hard drives.
This is a very first rough, probably done while I was struggling to find a pose and that I must have redrawn on a fresh piece of paper afterward.

One of my favorite things in 'niledog'were the girls.
All three have the exact same design, yet there is no doubt their personalities differ greatly. I love it that animation can do that and I wish I could dream up more project with a similar concept...

niledog #3

My biggest regret, after completing the film, is that I lost virtually all my roughs.
To make the ink n paint easier and faster, I decided to ink the drawings with a thick marker, and it quickly became obvious that it was even faster if I did it directly on the rough and erased the pencil afterward.
It's a bit of a shame, but since I had decided at the very beginning that I would only start this short if I were going to complete it, it was just one of sacrifices I had to make.
I was lucky to salvage a few drawings here and there, mostly those that I had copied to put up on my desk.
I also have most of the linetests, but the quality is not so good...

niledog #2

I usually do a lot of drawings prior to animating, but very few are worth showing.
I feel it's because I get a good feel for volumes and design tricks only after I start animating.
As with everything, I feel that it's only when I'm 'on top' of a subject that I can do my best work, when the brain stops working and it almost becomes muscle memory.
That only seems to happen when I flip drawings...
And of course, there is also something to be told about working on a scene that's part of a movie as opposed to doodling aimlessly on a piece of paper. You suddenly know what you need ( and maybe more importantly what you don't) you get a sense of your character and what it's all really about.
Having said that, I love some of these early drawings, done at a time when there is no real concern  about making it all consistent, easy to draw etc...

niledog #1

quick back story on the film;

I was animating at the time on Disney sequels, when I realized, one fine day, that I had drawn nothing but Lilo and Stitch for 6 months.
I was fresh out of college, where I filled sketchbook after sketchbook, so it was a bit of a shock.  that's why I decided to dig up an old project, or rather a collection of ideas that I tried to fit in, more or less gracefully into Niledog.
I did some research, an animatic, a few bgs and off I went, because let's face it, what I wanted to do was animating!