Showreels!

i finally got around to bringing my animation page up to date (with professional work at least); adding the most recent projects that i've been lucky enough to work on, with showreels for most of my shots.

Ted
this was the latest one to be released. such a fun project to work on.. though my vulgarity definitely got worse because of it ;P my older work can be seen under the Animation page.

Lesson 04 - Space

This week's lesson was focusing on space - so while we're moving in to more defined gestures, we're also having to pay attention to the figure in 3d space. a lot of these poses with the model were very flat to camera and we had to alter the angle of our gestures to give a feeling of depth. we ALSO had to spend half the time drawing with our subordinate hands (so left hand for me). this was meant to make us focus even more on the spacial value and not rely on our developed strokes with our dominant hands (which i've noticed can actually work against you at times). i have terrible line quality and control with my left hand, but there's a strange appeal to the contour-type figures that came from it..

it's a lot tougher to keep all of the ideas from previous lessons in mind as we move to more and more detailed gestures.. definitely going to take some practice. it was also a pretty busy week, i wanted to get a LOT more drawing done for this assignment, but it just didn't happen :S - next week!

Lesson 03 - Silhouettes

this week's lesson in our gesture drawing class focused on silhouettes. so now we're attempting to take the force that we capture with a distilled line or shape and express that within a full pose. you also need to keep the idea clear and not let the extra shapes get all muddied-up. it's so easy to get caught up in what i SEE once i'm adding limbs and everything, i'm really trying to force myself to keep the simplicity in mind and go for a feeling rather than recreating what's there.. i've got a LOT of pushing to do.

we're also required to get some 'cafe sketching' in each week, here are a couple pages that i scribbled down at a coffee shop, and i've picked a small handful of them to push beyond what i was able to get on the spot. good exercise!

:)

Drawing class, yay!

so Jess and i started a drawing class: gesture drawing w/ Alex Woo and Louis Gonzalez, through Schoolism. Alex and Louis are both story artists @ Pixar and the point of the class is to be able to create strong, story-telling poses. this is something i'm really excited about; being able to simplify or 'distill' a pose to it's true essence and not get caught up in all the unnecessary details. this should also help to strengthen our animation since good, clear poses are so crucial!

we just finished week 2, which focused on distilling poses in to abstract shapes. something i've found that i need to push myself on is really exaggerating the weight and direction of a pose, to get away from anything static or linear. i feel these are already pushed much further than the week 1 gestures, but there's still plenty of room for pushing.. *we also sketched quick gestures of the poses within our shapes to see how they help inform the drawing.

week 1 was the line of action - as mentioned above, these were really in need of some exaggeration, i was sticking too close to what i saw in the model and images and not pushing what we should FEEL in these gestures.

so far it's been fun, and i'm really looking forward to pushing myself through this course! yay for drawing!

Drawaholics - Raven

first illustration post since the big dallas-move - finally jumping on to the drawaholics wagon again, this week was 'favorite bird', pretty straight forward topic, didn't require much brain-power :P

it was either going to be a raven or an owl, and scribbling some lines on top of a black mass seemed appealing at the time. i tried to stay lose with the detailing and push for an interesting shape.

TED - Opening Weekend!

Ted finally opened this weekend! This is one of the last projects that Jess and I worked on back at Tippett, before leaving for Dallas. I really can't imagine that I'll work on another film quite like this one; an incredibly foul-mouthed child's toy, with Seth MacFarlane behind the comedic-wheel.. good stuff. This was honestly one of the funnest projects that I've ever worked on. The excitement for it at Tippett was tangible, the team was top-notch as usual, dailies sessions were hilarious, and Seth was a great director with the vocabulary to express what he wanted and incredibly appreciative of the work being done. Really, really fun experience.

If you're in to MacFarlane's brand of humor (Family Guy, etc) then you're sure to walk away from this one pleased. The story is straight forward, but with a lot of heart, and shit-load of laughs.