Dilemma - Idea Development

I had the concept for the film at the end of first year/early second year. Just the look of it popped into my head: A round cartoon character juxtaposed with straight and edgy abstract shapes. That's what I wanted my film to look like. The image was there but the full idea wasn't. 

At the beginning of the second half of second year I quickly drew a concept drawing out since I didn't want the image I had in my head to go away. So here's that drawing from 2ish years ago!

Even that early on I already knew what I wanted in my thesis film. 5 things:

1 - Cartoon animation

     Because I love it and have fun doing it.

2 - Motion graphics and moving shapes  

     Because I love graphic design.

3 - Music based (specifically big band) 

     Because I like old music and big band fits with cartoon animation acting as sound effects.

4 - No layout 

     Because I'm not good at it.

That's it! I wanted my film to be about everything I enjoy and I wanted it to play to my strengths. I didn't want to spend time on things I didn't like and things I wasn't particularly good at. My thought was that if I spent time on something I'm not good at, that is time away from improving on something that I want to be better at. I also wanted it to be 1 minute since during industry day they only show 1 minute of our films during the screening. I wanted a whole product on the screen and I also didn't want to overwork myself. 1 minute was already a ton of work for this film and I would have ripped my hair out if I did it any longer.

I also wanted to incorporate a bit of fine art into it because in the end I have a huge passion for art. When I saw Michel Gagne's Sensology had imagery that resembled Wassily Kandinsky's work, I had a direction I wanted to take it to. Other works I referenced were iPod silhouette commercials, Day & Night by Pixar, Carnival of Animals from Fantasia 2000, The Dot and Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics by Chuck Jones, UPA, Fleischer Bros., Piet Mondrian, Picasso, Saul Bass, and more that I probably missed. 

Here are some stuff I made in 3rd year. Quick doodles that I made in order to get the idea across.

Although Kandinsky was my first idea, I experimented with boards and sketches with much more basic shapes. A lot of people suggested I simplify things and choose the basic shapes to make the workload a little easier for myself since I was already planning to fully animate characters for the total 1 minute. Which was a smart suggestion since in the end the workload I had was already enough and challenging for me. But I still think about how my film would have turned out with more elaborate Kandinsky style effects.

Here is the first image I made that incorporated the idea I had of using flat shapes to suggest perspective and only when placing the character in it would it give context. I created a rough storyboard sequence in 3rd year using this concept and my instructor suggested I take that idea further.

Progress Reel

Here's my progress reel! I locked down my storyboards by end of September and started animating in October. Other classes got in the way so full on animating didn't start until January to very early March. Clean up took the whole month of March and colouring was a breeze on Toonboom which took 3 days. My original plan was to finish in March but I took into account delays and revisions. I still managed to finish several weeks early! I also never pulled any all nighters and only worked at school from 9am - 9pm and took weekends off! I had to come in on weekends a few times during clean up, but apart from that I had a very healthy lifestyle in fourth year compared to my other three years. I felt great!

A few of my friends kept asking about how I time manage well. Here's the secret: JUST WORK ON YOUR FILM. Don't get side tracked. Fourth year was deceiving with all the "free time" you have with less classes, I just spent most of that working but still took time to have fun. So to any upcoming fourth years working on their thesis films and are reading this: work on your film as much as you can. Lock down your boards as soon as possible. Aim for something manageable and to your strengths. And most importantly sleep. Don't work tired, it will just make the work you output worse. Good luck!

Clayton & The Cactus - Toonboom Animation

Here's my first legit toonboom rigged animation! We had to design the character, rig it, animate it with lip synch with a background! I had a whole lot of fun animating this way, which I didn't expect at all. Really looking forward to practicing this a lot more.

Here you go! The audio clip is Pete Campbell, Accounts, from Mad Men:

The only thing is I wish I was better at rigging, but mine turned out the way I designed and needed it to so that's all that matters! 

Here's a near final doodle of the character that I made:

My approach to designing a rigged character involved making it more graphic. I originally wanted more floating features (such as the spurs and eyebrows) to make use of the fact that it's rigged and features sort of stayed in place. I looked into UPA and The Fairly Odd Parents as reference for figuring out how to simplify the character and figure out how it would move. He was originally a king character but many people pointed out many similarities with King Candy from Wreck-It-Ralph, so I changed it to a cowboy instead. 

Multi-plane Layout

Long time no see! I'm back and will be posting some stuff from the past semester. Apologies for the lack of posts but school got busy, then busier, then even more busier. It was non-stop. Anyway I'm back since it's winter break so here's my first update!

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Here's my MLA assignment which turned out way better than I had ever hoped considering I'm not much of a layout guy. I love compositing so putting it together was a ton of fun as well!

Unfortunately my roughs are at school and they aren't open until next week! I will update this post or make a new one when I do get my hands on them again. We had to make a mini pitch package with the concept art we did for it.

Final Digital Painting

For our final digital painting we could have painted anything we wanted in any style. I took a previous composition that we used for a layout assignment and created this using the pen tool. I like how it turned out! I might give this way of digital painting a go more often as it's more design-oriented.

Demo Reel Year 1

YEAR ONE COMPLETE

PHEW. That was exhausting.

Here's my demo reel/a look back at some of the work I did in first year:

It's been one week since I finished school and I already miss it so very much, I want September to arrive already!

 What I enjoyed the most of my first year was the people. They made me enjoy every day at school and made me want to go there nearly every single day. With summer break here there's been people that returned to their respective provinces and countries and it was a pretty sad to go to school the other day to clean out my locker and not see people in the studios. Familiar faces you expect to see right around the corner/station weren't there and it was somewhat crushing.

It's only been a week and I already can't bear this 4 month long hiatus, this will be a very long summer and I'm actually not looking forward to it.

Apart from that I enjoyed year 1 immensely. It was everything that I hoped it would be and much much more. I enjoyed all the classes even ones that I didn't like much (electives don't count) because it was always animation related anyway! There were several instances in the middle of any class where I realize, "Geez, I'm drawing cartoons for school. This is going to be my career." It's literally a dream come true. It was such a surreal feeling to experience, learn and apply knowledge gained from the entertainment that I grew up on.

I HAD CLASSES WHERE WE ANALYZED THE LION KING.

Anyone that knows me knows how much of a big deal that is, it's my all time favourite film and to watch it and learn from it is something from my dreams.

Overall I enjoyed it and I most definitely improved A LOT in drawing and I'm proud to be where I'm at skill-wise, even though I'm known for not being confident enough with my work. I have 3 more years of school ahead of me and a lifetime more in improving. This summer I've already got a few film plans with some friends and an idea for my own. Hopefully they get finished and completed and I hope my own idea works out. I'm also taking an animation course starting May so maybe that might make my summer go by quicker, although it's only until June.

Now I must get back to preparing for next year and getting some well deserved sleep and rest.

Marco & Sarah's Epic Short Film

For our final digital tools assignment we had to make a short film, so I collaborated with Sarah Kieley to create this silly little short. We stuffed it with as much cliches as we could:

We animated our own character's transformation/weapon sequences, you'll probably be able to tell with the clash of styles haha. I also animated the beginning with the distant shot of the girl jumping.

Since I'm not particularly good at layout, we agreed that I handle the transformation sequence backgrounds. For references I looked into typical anime transformation sequences such as in Sailor Moon and mostly from one of my favourite ads: the Fratellis Flathead Ipod Commercial. I wish we had more time because I enjoyed animating these design-oriented backgrounds and they could use a little bit more polish.

Concept Art

Sarah's original drawing of her character.

My redesign of Sarah's character. She's nameless but I kept referring to her as "Pointy" even in file names or when I talked about certain scenes. So she's unofficially named Pointy. Only request I had with her character was to colour her jacket yellow, I just thought it looked like a badass raincoat and it would make her stand out from the backgrounds.

The character I designed based off the style of Sarah's concept and my redesign of her character. I named him Bino (Bye-no) because of the binoculars he uses. In the end you don't even see him using it haha.

There was an up to date colour test but I can't find it, so you'll have to settle for an earlier one that's missing the back of his jacket. 

Storyboards, here you can see a deleted scene that involved Bino.

A background I designed for a scene that got deleted because we didn't have time. It's the part where Bino is looking through his binoculars behind a rock and walks away in the storyboards.

For the final freeze frame we wanted a ton more detail on our characters and drew them in the most badass pose possible. Sarah and I drew our own characters but Sarah coloured both of them in.

Seahorse Jazz - Character in Setting

Final painting assignment involved making a scene with a character in it. We were allowed to do it with any medium and even take it farther by using cut outs and make it more of a conceptual piece. 

At first I couldn't decide whether or I wanted to make it a painting with an acetate overlay or cut out due to time constraints. With a last minute decision I decided to do it as a cut out because I knew I would regret not trying it.

So here it is done with watercolour paper, watercolour, and gouache:

Seahorse Jazz

I really like how the seahorses turned out in terms of design and construction, I like the silhouettes the most. I really enjoyed going back, cutting out and painting more details on it. I also made sure that in order to give it some 3 dimensional feel to it, I curled the tips of the paper just a bit so that they stick up a tad and only glued small areas so that gaps were still present. The seaweed in the foreground is elevated a bit using small pieces of foam core. Foam core was also used for the border. I knew hoarding extra foam core from previous projects in VCA would come in handy!

Some close ups:

Inspiration obviously from Brittney Lee and Mary Blair, I wish I could be at their level...someday...someday...

Flash Background and Animation

To learn flash we had to create a background in the program and do an animation in it. I like my background and I enjoyed making something with a cartoon modern style since you can get a nice graphic look on flash. The animation on the other hand is...something else... 

You can see the animation on my tumblr page here.

Jellyfish

Here's my cleaned up jellyfish!

For digital tools we had to clean up our marine animal assignment. I planned to have flying jellyfish since the start, so I delivered. Unfortunately I had to cut some stuff that I had in mind, such as a trail of sparkles that the jellyfish leaves behind.

One day...one day I'll make a better flying jellyfish that leaves a trail of sparkles...

For animation class, rough with placeholder background.

Rough (pencil clean up).

Digital clean up.

Layout with jellyfish test.

Circuit World

I know what you're thinking...

BUT

I didn't think of it once as I worked on these. It was only after did I realize the resemblance...but seriously, how can you not make anything with circuit imagery not resemble Tron?! I was actually thinking about the game Transistor by Supergiant Games, art deco (as usual), and of course computers. 

I thought: what if chipsets were structures? A high-tech temple? What about a city?! And then these happened:

I started with this one first of a basic structure, somewhat temple like, trying to see if the imagery I wanted worked out. I chose the green, grey, and white colour scheme to resemble a basic motherboard with some highlights of colour to give it a glow. Then I started working on the city piece below, then I returned to this piece after painstakingly tweaking the city to make these two work together. 

I thought about how a more "modern" civilization would look with the same visual style of the temple one above. So in a sense, the previous one is of something from the past in that world, and this is an entire society built from that. I also decided that a gradual change in height would look far more interesting than an entire composition of similar buildings. It also gives it a sense of scale far better than what I originally planned.

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For the lack of a post last week since I told myself I would update weekly this month, I'll be posting more than once (or even twice) this week. So stay tuned dudes and dudettes!* 

*Don't mind me...it's late and I kept tweaking the bottom piece all day.

Simplified

Tried out a different style and I ended up enjoying it so much I made two pieces in one day. 

I took some inspiration from My Life as a Teenage Robot, Olly Moss' recent poster designs, and Mary Blair's work. Only after creating my first one did I notice a similarity in style to Samurai Jack...maybe it's because I watched an episode last week. So I also looked at some Samurai Jack backgrounds.

I wanted to play around with very basic shapes, line, and colour and create a setting with a fitting atmosphere.

What started out as a landscape study of mountains quickly evolved into a sci-fi setting with futuristic pyramid structures. I couldn't contain my imagination, it went wild creating these. I even concocted stories behind them as I worked on it.

After finishing the first one I wanted to create another and work in a vertical format and take a more colourful route. This is when I looked at some scenes in Samurai Jack and I noticed several backgrounds had patterns of basic shapes in them (arcs, circles, semi-circles, rounded rectangles, etc.) that either served as texture, something for the viewer's imagination to make sense of, or sometimes for the sake of creating an interesting design and composition. I wanted to incorporate those techniques in creating this piece.

I was thinking of a miniature society with organic-like buildings on the very edge of a pillar. I moved away from a pillar and decided on a cliff instead, it also made much more sense.

***

I am really enjoying this style since it's so heavily design focused. It's also just so much fun to do!

I am itching to create more! I'll definitely expand to slightly more complex shapes as I go along.

Sheridan Animation Portfolio 2013

Sorry for the delay, had been busy with school but I finally had time to upload.

First let me get some basic information out of the way because I know people that will assemble their own portfolio will find this and wonder about certain things:

• How many times did you apply?
  I tried 3 times. I first attended Art Fundamentals then transferred into Visual and Creative Arts, then took the third year for VCA.
• What was your previous score?
  We don't talk about my first one...But my second attempt got me a 2.18 and this year I got a 3.37.
• What size was your portfolio?
  I used a big portfolio (18x24) to fit my life drawings, certain personal pieces, and it allowed me to present my smaller pieces in a tidier fashion.
• Which day did you submit?
  The second day. 

So here's my scoresheet.

And here it is! My animation portfolio! 

3 minute

5 minute

15 minute

Gaur

Orangutan

Here's Al, Spacemonkey Extraordinaire!

1. Cubism Drawing 
2. Hand Sculpture
3. CD Case Design
4. Stylized Portrait
5. A Sketchbook