For the Lookie-Loos

Here are some more images of mine for those of you that are interested.

A rough and Clean Up drawing of 70's film star Richard Roundtree... can you Dig It?
I haven't seen many of films and this was for a poster design I was trying out which I didn't get around to colouring and compositing. I will colour it up into a poster design after school wraps in December.

Basically I was trying to do a version of the 70's Exploitation film posters which featured caricatured art of the stars. This was a more toony version of Roundtree with some design influences from the TV show 'The Critic'.

This is yesterdays nights doodlings. Just a blank canvas of animation paper after putting registration marks on an animated scene. Its just a way to wind down, sketching out anything (facial expression in this case) with a number of different pencils.

Its supposed to be King Kong in the corner with mouth shapes influenced from Looney Tunes. Ill have a lot more updates like this one in the future with daily sketches.

So enjoy the pictures while I get back to registering my drawings.

Shot Composite

- Photoshopped Background
- ToonBoom character colour
- After Effects Shadow Blur and compositing.

Armageddon 2007

Last weekend I went to Armageddon (The New Zealand pop culture con) and had a good time. Now I don't go every year and most of the guests and stands don't interest me greatly, but the appearance of Billy West was enough to draw me in.

Many people went to see another West, Adam West, who unfortunately couldn't make it. Neither could Julie Newmar, Matt Wood or Ray Park. That was fine by me as the guest list had more than enough talents that I was interested in.
Animation Panel (Left to right) Neil Kaplan, Stephanie Sheh, Richard Horvitz, Rino Romano
Richard Horvitz, Rino Romano, Billy West, Neil Kaplan
Unfortunately Rodger Bumpass was left out of the snapshots.
After the 25 minute queue into the convention and the brief bombardment and disorientation in the entrance hall, I made my way up to the Top Floor to meet Bruce Timm. I was rather flustered at this stage and I tried to speak as clearly as possible...hehe . I asked him about Superman: Doomsday and Justice League: The Golden Frontier and had my Batman TAS dvd signed before moving to Timms right to speak to another tremendous talent and inspiration of mine. Andrea Romano. I had a slightly (marginally) longer chat with Andrea, I'm more familiar with her work and I told her I was a fan of the short lived rarity (in this country anyway) Histeria! Yes there was a lot of name dropping.
Then into another queue with a 40 minute wait. It almost turned into a 70 minute wait as I managed to meet the crew before they took off for lunch. I bought a Billy and Mandy dvd at the convention and got it signed by Richard Horvitz who did recited lines for every show I name dropped. He is a really fun guy to meet and he wrote "I like Pie!" on the dvd.
Next I met Billy West. Wow. My prepared speech came out in blurts, fits and starts. I told him that I am a fan of his work. From Ren and Stimpy to Futurama (and probably Billy Bastard). And Then I said I was a big fan of his work on characters like Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd. He scrawled his signature on my Looney dvds accordingly. I haven't seen Popeye's Voyage: The Quest for Pappy but "well blow me down" I got a sample of the Popeye voice. Brilliant.
Next in line was Rino Romano, a very cool guy who was happy to hear that there was a special feature on The Batman vs Dracula about the voice actors. We chatted very quickly about the show and how the way that its heading. Last in the line was Stephanie Sheh who I admit I really am not familiar with (and her Wiki page just confused me even more). I can't say I have watched any of the shows she has worked on and so we had a very down to Earth conversation, she said she loved the country and asked whether the Kiwis were clean. She really is the nicest person, I might have to watch some of her shows. And along side her autograph she wrote "I love New Zealand and ill do my best to keep it clean".

I have a great interest and fascination in voice artists and so it was terrific meeting all of these guys, I grew up listening to many of their characters and it was amazing to talk to them. I regret that I didn't meet Rodger Bumpass, and Neil Kaplan seemed like a great guy too. An animation Q&A happened in the afternoon and Neil Kaplan was going through a list of roles hes done.

"I am Hawkmon, Hawkmon digivolve to... Optimus Prime!"

The panel was a tad bit of a laugh as most of the attendees were under the age of 13 and weren't too familiar with these guys. One girls question was "Could the guy who does Zoidbergs voice do the whoop whoop" but things shaped up when Billy took a phone call from his brother on stage and Rino Romano pretended to be Wests brother responding to Billys replies.

So I really enjoyed it and I hope to meet them all again someday.

I also met Kiwi comic brothers The Sheehans, and had a big chat with Kelly Sheehan. Do check out their style, the earlier comics have a very thick graphic look while the newer stuff goes for a mixed media appearance.

In case you were wondering...
Bruce Timm - Designer and animator with a penchant for drawings girls and super heroes.
Andrea Romano - Voice Director at Warner Bros. Animation.
Richard Horvitz - Dagget Beaver, Invader Zim.
Billy West - Voices Several characters on Futurama and the Red M&M.
Rino Romano - Voice of The Batman.
Stephanie Sheh - Story Editor and Voice actress for Bleach and Naruto.
Rodger Bumpass - Voice of Squidward and Professor Membrane.

-A video interview with Billy West by the NZ Herald can be viewed here.
-The official website for Armageddon is here.

Life Drawings from Monday

Here are my life drawings from the start of the week. A page of gestures (with least 2 gestures that I like the line in), Two 10 minute studies and two 15 minute studies.

All the studies are roughed in with a graphite stick and then detailed with a 0.7 mechanical pencil, actually the same pencil I do all my clean up sketches with at the moment.




That was our last life drawing lesson as a class at Freelance Animation School. My next life drawings will either be from any extra lessons that crop up before the end of the year or from life drawing classes next year.

In other news, I have my poster layout finalised and ready for colouring and Im cleaning up several of my scenes and going through the ink & paint on them . I spent the afternoon at work experience doing some clean-up for an educational show that should air on a local tv station next year.

Shot Progression Chart

Here is a quick progression chart I whipped up. Some notes about the picture, the clean-up and coloured images are imported and vectorized in ToonBoom. In a future post I will do a shot progression chart with a storyboard panel, layout drawing, rough, clean-up, coloured levels and shadow levels.

Cheers.

Abandoned Idea...

At the end of 2006 I was beginning to draft out some ideas for my diploma project. One of the very early images I had was of a monster terrorizing Auckland city.

I must have been going through a Godzilla phase at the time, however it never amounted to more than just a few pieces of concept art. But for a 2 minute project I did not have a story outline for this setting that I believed could be pulled off. It all just seemed to end up looking like it would be a 2 minute rampage flick. Our tutors would not have approved it as it wouldn't have been a compact and compelling story.
But had I gone with this idea, I may be fronting my project as some sort of "Untitled Cloverfield" animation.

So that cartoon possibility goes back into the development soup, until I decide to flesh it out or at least scan and colour the above image.

The haze of the picture is from the haste of Digital Cam shots I took.

Life Drawings

Here are some of my life drawings from last term at school. I like working with loose lines in my drawings. I'm also a fan of big rough gesture drawings. I think, sometimes I follow the form too closely and end up with awkward shapes here and there.

I need to put some extra effort into longer detailed studies... breaking the comfort zone.

Tim Portans and some colour Studies.

Here is the main character from my cartoon. Tim Portans, He was created for this cartoon but will hopefully appear in other roles later on. Here he plays an aviator whose plane has crashed in the treetops of the Madagascan Rainforest.



And here are some colour choices I made.

Now here are some more colour studies. They are very early concept art and Tims model is quite different. Also is a background test.
So there you have a little bit of an inside into "An Eye for an Aye-Aye".
Enjoy!