Chirp

Apart from A Wondering Minstrel, I also worked on another film that premiered for the fall 24 Hour Film Festival! I teamed up with two extremely talented first year animation students Bernard Malijan and Vincent Sanyoto, the same people I collaborated with earlier in the semester. 

It was an interesting experience with a few bumps along the way but we managed! The most difficult part was teaching the two of them the programs and the entire pipeline and process of creating a short film. With them having only been in the program for 2 months, they were still getting the hang of animation and the animation process altogether. Even though I'm in second year and I was teaching them these programs, animation techniques and whatnot, I too learned a lot from working with them such as cleanup.

For this film we all contributed to the story and the storyboarding. I did the majority of the animations which I had to keep as simple as it can be with the time limit we had (we originally planned 3 days but it spanned over a week of production). I also did the colouring during clean up and the compositing. Bernard did character designs, small animations and line clean up (WHICH ARE AMAZING CLEAN UP LINES) and Vince did layouts and a tiny bit of animation. And just like with every small collaborative projects, everyone helped each other out and contributed and critiqued each other's works.

The collaborative process was fun and I like how the film turned out. The two of them put in so much effort into this film it was great to see the passion they had. For their first short film, we did a spectacular job!

So here we go, enjoy Chirp!

A bird hunter hears the call of a rare bird and attempts to hunt it down.


Kingfish Studios Team:

Bernard Malijan III: http://bernardmalijan.tumblr.com/
Marco Rivera: http://artofmarcorivera.tumblr.com/
Vincent Sanyoto: http://vincentsanyoto.tumblr.com/

Art and other Doodads:

Character designs by Bernard Malijan

Dancing bird-versions of us by Bernard! 

(Yes I'm aware there isn't an earring in one of my frames, there was a fixed one but we can't find it)

Intro pan by Vincent Sanyoto

Book design by Vincent Sanyoto 

Here's the beautiful Bernard posing with our story beats. The origins of our story stemmed from an idea of some buzzing sound annoying someone and them trying to figure out where it came from. Instead of getting into the details, we worked with the basic phrase "What's that sound?" instead. Bird calls not making bird sounds came into mind and it went from there.

Our totally legit storyboards...

And our totally legit "leica". It's mostly just rough timing no sounds. Enjoy the drawings, we're the finest storyboard artists you'll have ever come across.

A Wondering Minstrel

IT FINALLY PREMIERED

Ever since starting production on it during winter break 2013 last year, this film went through a bit of a hiatus with work being done on and off. This summer we put our all into finishing it, we even submitted to some festivals because why not? The film was pretty much complete after the summer except for one scene needing clean up and a few mistakes that needed to be fixed. Then the premiere for the summer 24 Hour Films was delayed and then it was finally shown! HURRAH!

What a long strange trip it's been.

It's weird thinking that it's almost a year since this was created, and the small animation I did at the beginning with the first musician makes me wish I could redo it since I have become way better since then.

SO HERE IT IS STUDIO MONGOOSE'S THIRD FILM:

Credits:

Studio Mongoose Tumblr

Studio Mongoose Team:

Matthew Ramirez: http://ramirezart.tumblr.com/

Melissa Cho: http://cheeeesu.tumblr.com/

Marc Lefevre: http://maclefame.tumblr.com/

Raymond Dunster: http://raymonddunster.tumblr.com/

Kennith Concelos: http://kennith-concelos.tumblr.com/

Kathleen Martin: http://martinartin.tumblr.com/

Concept Art

Title Design:

I decided to go overboard with this title design. I wanted it to look like those old fairy tale Disney logos with the occasional metallic-gold look, so I looked at the recent version of the Sleeping Beauty logo as my main source of inspiration.

Disney's Sleeping Beauty logo

I looked for a font that looked like it came out of old medieval pages. Unfortunately the letter "A" didn't look nice, so I cheated and it is a combination of the letter "O" and "N". And here's the process of designing the logo.

Original black and white logo.

Digital painting process.

Final title design.

Final title card.

The House Boyd Flag design by me.

Character designs by Kathleen Martin:

A Mistake - Storyboard

Sorry for the lack of posts recently, school has been extremely hectic especially these past two weeks. Luckily this week isn't so bad but unfortunately the week after is. 

Here is the final storyboard for the story beats I made previously, I hope you enjoy it!

Making my first legitimate storyboard sequence was a really enjoyable learning experience. I learned a lot like what are good and bad cuts, especially how to save a bad cut. Reading my instructor Nancy Beiman's book, Prepare to Board was extremely helpful. The book is easy to read and explains things in a simple way with a lot of visual examples (great for artists!). I highly recommend the book. The process of creating the boards was a bit of a struggle at first but I found that once you find a good way to start, boarding the rest just came easily.

The same thing happened with the story I'm boarding now, I struggled and spent a week trying to figure out how to begin. After coming up with the best idea I could, the rest just came quickly. I'm enjoying the storyboarding process so far! It's difficult but its extremely satisfying to put together a story and develop it in the end.

COLLAB!

A couple weeks ago I collaborated twice with some extremely talented first years!

Bernard Malijan: http://bernardmalijan.tumblr.com/

Ruby Poon: http://rubyspoon.tumblr.com/

Vincent Sanyoto: http://vincentsanyoto.tumblr.com/

To pick our theme we wrote a bunch of random things on pieces of paper and picked them out of a hat (more like a bowl). 

Collaboration #1: Space Knights, Gambling

I said that adding the word "space" before anything would make it 10 times cooler. There was a possibility "space swans" could have been chosen, which I was really hoping for. Unfortunately Vince could not attend this one due to being sick.

Collaboration #2: Birds, Skating

I absolutely adore how this one turned out, especially with the colours!

I didn't get to contribute to this last one but I'm posting it anyway since it was part of it. Also look at how cute it is! 

All artwork are copyright to their respective owners. 

Daily Doodle Round Up

Some of the daily posts I've been making on my tumblr. I have more but they're Inktober stuff and a collaboration project, and I would like to make separate posts for those.  

A dapper fellow.

Pink Punk

Hammer Designs

Trying out a different style.

Wave Boat Sack Animation

Here's my wave boat sack animation! I really like how it turned out! Only gripe I have with it after finally looking at it again a week later is the wave. It slows down a tad too slow at the peak but you can't even notice it if you're watching the boat and sack which is weird. 

Apart from that, it was a nice refresher to get back into the groove of animating. With the number of new Cintiqs and having our own Cintiq Pens, I decided to do this in digital. I regret it because the other assignments this year I would like to clean up which is easier in digital, and this project doesn't really need it. Plus I miss flipping paper.  

I'm also excited and nervous about animation this year since we're finally doing characters! YAY! I hope I don't butcher them! The next assignment that I'm currently working on, I decided to work on ToonBoom Harmony. So far I'm loving the line work on it more than Flash since I'm able to keep my messy way of animating intact. I'm still figuring out the program but so far it looks like I'm going to stick with ToonBoom with the remainder of my work...

Maude

Here's another character designed from a thumbnail! I said would post them after the first one, but crazy workload at school came out of nowhere. I won't make any promises on when I'll be posting the other ones as it's difficult to predict when I can get things done, but they will come in due time!

So check out Maude, inspired by Robert Valley's work:

Surprisingly this wasn't a thumbnail I wasn't really fond of, but I suddenly got an idea for the design of the head and then I just needed to do it.

Storyboard Beats

*Updated*

Our first assignment for storyboard was to create beat boards from 2 poems that were given to us. We were to interpret each poem however we wanted. 

I had another idea for the Mistake poem that my instructor liked except the ending, so I decided to change the entire first one's story to what it is now. I will update this post later if I manage to scan those, but my scanner at home currently isn't working properly.

After pitching these beat boards we are to expand and actually storyboard one of them. My instructor extremely liked my Good Little Girl idea but thought that the story had already resolved. So I am currently in the process of elaborating on my A Mistake idea.

I found the process of figuring out a story was extremely fun, I was able to flex my storytelling imagination. My whole process was thinking of the first idea I had and then completely scrap most of it if it wasn't at all interesting. Surprisingly my prediction that my first ideas would be filled with cliches was true as I saw many other stories with similar ideas I originally had. That's not to say that my stories are free from cliches, I just think that these are stronger than what I originally had. 

Rough Work

Character development of Isabelle, my favourite is the bottom left. 

Two other characters from my original interpretation of the Mistake poem, the couple Bruce and Holly. I did keep the name Bruce for the bear in my final idea.

The two pictures above are roughs of first idea I had. The top one of the first page and all three panels in the bottom page were used to pitch. It involved a couple snowed in their home, Holly giving Bruce a snowblower as a gift, Bruce riding and crashing the snowblower into their home, and finally them celebrating Christmas while using the crashed snowblower in their home as a Christmas tree/furniture. It was a decent idea with an okay ending, I decided to change it because I wasn't really satisfied with how the plot develops, it required decent perspective/layout which I'm not so good at, and the fact that it was too "realistic" and not really animated. 

Early Bruce and Bib designs, Bib remained pretty much the same.

My original idea had Bruce swinging at the hive only to have it get stuck at the end of the stick he used. The bees would then swarm and attack him. This idea didn't work since in the story the characters didn't accomplish much. Plus I had no clue how to conclude it in the final beat. 

The final roughs of Bib and Bruce's designs. Keeping these character very shapely (oval and circle) helps a ton when having to draw many storyboards with them, and makes them extremely easy to identify.