5 Second Day 2019 - POW!

For this year's Titmouse 5 Second Day I participated in a collaboration with 5 other artists at my studio! Organized my Jordan Theberge, we all got together to create an exquisite corpse animation. Here it is called POW!

Mine's the second part with the space cadet! The design for the character was a reuse from a quick collab I did with Koko Chou two years ago. You can check out the collab here:

https://twitter.com/_sbko_/status/929266490330640385

Quick colour scheme I made 2 years ago.

Koko Chou's interpretation of our Space Cadet!

I ended up adding a portal gun to his design because when I agreed to do the film the first idea that came to mind was: PORTALS. I don't know why, other than the fact that it's my most favourite game ever. I guess I'm always thinking with portals (I'm sorry). After the idea with portals I didn't have enough time to create a new character so I whipped up an old design I made that I never had the chance to finish animating. Minor tweaks to the little kid such as his limb colour because it would blend with the black background and minor simplifications to get the animation and clean up done in a week. 

Yes his own portal gun design was a reference to the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device. Let's just say this was my homage to my favourite game. I was going to make the portals orange and blue like the game but that would have been too much info going on in the screen in a short amount of time and he was already orange, so I didn't want any confusion with the colours.

Also here's some rough animation because I always love showing progress work!

Dilemma

Here it is! My thesis film! The film that consumed my entire life for 8 months and I enjoyed every minute of it. I put a lot of work into the film and I I hope you enjoy it and take something away from it.

DILEMMA

Here are links to posts about the process and a concept art dump:

IDEA DEVELOPMENT

ART

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!

Dilemma - Concept Art Dump

Some art I made during the process of making the film! I'm just going to dump them all here:

Original Dilemma title design by my good friend Juan Munoz! Really great but I felt it was too serious and didn't convey the fun and energy of my film. I really liked the colour choices and the placement of shapes a lot though and wanted to keep that. The final title design is by me taking inspiration from old UPA cartoons whenever they used type in their films as well as old cartoon episode title cards. 

Some colour schemes and images that I referenced for them. I referenced a lot of Rothko's paintings for colour schemes. 

Some super early thumbnails playing around with colour and composition. The large orange and yellow one was an attempt to see the least number of colours to create a space, in this case a down shot of a room.

Colour Script

Making the colour script was difficult! Certain colours needed to seep into the next sequence but each sequence needed to have a different mood. There are 1 or 2 moments in the music and timing that allowed me to cheat and change the colours in an instant. I wanted primary colours at the end due to their abundant use in minimalist paintings but I didn't want one of the three colours to just appear out of nowhere in the end. So I decided to make the first four sequences focus on one primary colour and transition into the next. 

Here are some old in progress colour scripts:

Here's the only layout that I had to do and I needed to get it right. I looked into that Gobelin film, Stewpot Rhapsody as inspiration. I needed Art to fit into the world and also be a contrast to the clean flat painting in order for it to stand out. I ended up picking a the one with the least noise since I wanted to audience to focus more on Art and Dilemma. I was close to choosing the second but the frame took attention away from the characters.

I have posted a lot about the character design process of Art, but here's one of the (spoiler) second character that appears at the end. His name is Intrigue and rather than base it off a question mark ?, I wanted this character to be based off an exclamation point ! Even though he's there for a very short time I imagined his personality is that of genuine interest in contrast to Art who was curious. 

Animation Tests

Here are some animation tests I did very early on while I was still storyboarding. I wanted to make sure I was able to manipulate the characters and shapes in a way I imagined. I also made it as a means to test character timing and emoting basic shapes.

Intrigue

I needed a character that fit in with Art's design but still be different in order to contrast him. All Intrigue's shapes and gestures, from his arms to his feet, are based off thin triangles and circles to mimic the exclamation point. 

Dilemma Premiere!

I'll be making my film public very very soon! So soon you won't even believe it! Here's some boards and final screenshots of them to whet your appetite!

Sheridan College Industry Day Commercial 2017

Ayy check it out! It's the promo for my year's industry day! Check out some quick glimpses into my year's awesome films! Mine's at 2:12!! Get excited!!

Colour Correction

Here it is our group film Colour Correction! I hope you enjoy it as much as we did making it! Lots of love and hard work was put into this project and I'm still proud that our team managed to accomplish this ambitious film. Go Kaleidoscope Studios! Woo!

I will make a post with my artwork on the film as well as some behind the scenes stuff sometime next week since I also finished my Tinternship today! It was a great experience working at Tinman and I learned a TON of stuff there and had the pleasure of working on so many cool projects! Now it's time for one week of vacation until....FOURTH YEAR. 

Tinmanijam '016!

The artists at Tinman each got 4 hours to come up with an animation based on the previous person's sequence (an anijam) and this is what they came up with. Enjoy!

This was a super cool thing to participate in and I had a lot of fun rushing to get it done! My bit starts at 1:10! Everyone did a super awesome job!

Agent Leon In...Colour Correction - Pitch Package

Group film blog is live! Check it out!

http://kaleidoscopestudios.tumblr.com/

A permanent link to the group film blog will also be on the sidebar right under the "Cuphead" badge. 

Look forward to seeing more film related stuff here soon! All group film related stuff will now be posted under the tag "group film". Just click the label at the side in the future!

HERE IT IS! THE PITCH PACKAGE FOR OUR GROUP FILM!

Filled with amazing artwork by amazing people! Go Kaleidoscope Studios!

***

I designed the entire layout of the pitch package from scratch. All the contents of the folder such as the paper, paper clips, polaroids, tape, rips, shadows, glare, texture blemishes, creases etc. were all done by me! It took A LOT of time to make. I spent a good 8am-10pm in the studio for an entire week just to compile and get it all together looking nice. It's a labour of love!

Since the beginning of coming up with the spy idea I had the idea of doing a dossier folder for the pitch package. I mainly looked at Creaturebox's books as a main influence since they format their pages in such creative ways that have story to them as well if you take the time to look. From logos to little written details behind the main drawings, there's a story on every page.

So for each page I decided it should be fitting for the content presented and informed the reader as though it was informing a spy on his next mission. The front page is the folder closed with a stamp of the title as though it were a "classified" or "top secret" stamp. I wanted a bit of each page to show behind the current page as though you're flipping through it. The caricatures were wonderfully done by Koko Chou after we all decided to make ourselves as super villains. Each of us drew an extremely quick sketch of how we wanted to be portrayed as and gave it to Koko to finalize. She knocked it out of the park and they all turned out amazing! Considering we have her really rough sketches of ourselves.

For the synopsis page, there was no other choice but to use continuous stationary for the text and the beat boards as though they were photographs of an event. For the character pages I wanted to keep it as simple as possible as though it were a bio page with a compilation of police sketches. Our first location takes place in a fictional Hong Kong-inspired city, then I remembered a postcard I found from my mom sometime in the early 90's with the stripes on the edges and used a similar look for the background for that page. For the secret base I decided on a blueprint background with ripped up sketches and secret photographs of the location as though they compiled the few bits of information they knew about the location. 

The props page I treated as though they were like stickers, for that I honestly didn't know what to present it as but I did my best. For the colours page I thought about how you would normally present photographs which is mounting it on a black board. It was also so that the colours would stand out much more, kind of like how I have a dark grey background on this blog so that my artwork is more noticeable.

And finally for the Chinese writings I had help from Jade Poon such as the stamps on the Hong Kong streets page and figuring out what text to put behind the main synopsis paper. We ended up just slapping on text from the Chinese wikipedia page for "chameleon". 

I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did making it!

"I'll Do It" Leica

After multiple attempts at uploading this assignment on various websites, I finally did it. The video was taken down and muted on one website, the file was too big on the other, the pages with the boards were also too big for Blogger and Tumblr. So after multiple attempts and delays I finally managed to take time and re-export all the files and finally figured out a way to upload it somewhere. 

Here's my second storyboard assignment from last semester that required us to make a story stemming from the conflict "I'll Do It". My teacher loved the idea and absolutely enjoyed the story and leica reel which I was extremely happy about! The leica even made it onto the TVs in the hallways! WOO!

Anyway enjoy the show:

Concept Work

Here are the beat boards I did for the assignment. I couldn't think of an idea when we were given "I'll Do It" and the only one I could think of was of ghosts taking turns scaring a couple away from their new home. The original beats involved a regular couple moving in to their new home with each ghosts' attempts at scaring only helping their move in day. The two gags I had in mind made it into the final but in a different context. The first was the possessions of boxes and furniture flying overhead only to land in the correct place (desks, couches and picture frames fall in place) and the other was blood oozing from the walls only to be used to paint the walls. Same gags different context.

It wasn't until I pitched the idea that my teacher, Nancy Beiman, who said to make them into artists instead and the ruckus they cause creates art they appreciate. I thought it was genius and it was then that I enjoyed working with the story, I honestly was not too fond with it at first. 

Original character line up with a regular old couple.

The penultimate line up. I ended up cutting the wife as she didn't contribute anything more to the story it was difficult figuring out when Arthur or Lily should appear when composing shots. It caused too much hassle and removing her made things much more easier. 

***

Overall I enjoyed this assignment a lot the more I worked on it and the more feedback I got. I even struggled with an ending with the final boards at first and a simple switch of two boards during a pitch gave me such a perfect ending. It originally had the ghosts just get angry being unable to scare him and my teacher moved a panel (page 11 panel 4) which made you interpret it instead as the ghosts not understanding the art. I then edited it so that it was in an art gallery afterwards and it made me so happy to finally have an ending.

Pitching was also fun! Especially with an idea of your own. Half way through my final pitch I actually got used it and started to enjoy it. It felt fun and really, not thinking about how to pitch it and just telling what it is made the whole thing easy.

Making the leica reel was also a blast. I had trouble picking from the bunch of music my teacher provided for a scratch track. Luckily during the day we were to work on it in class I found Alpine Pastures very last minute and tried it out. It fit so perfectly with the timing of certain moments in the story and my teacher loved the contrast between the cheerful music and horror elements which perfectly sums up the tone of my story.

It was a fun experience coming up with a story, pitching it, getting it critiqued and fixed. The whole mantra of "What If?" in creating a story is something extremely helpful. Seeing a mediocre idea evolve into something I enjoyed was exciting. 

It may not be the best story and storyboards you'll ever come across (layouts ugh, I'm so sorry), but I hope you enjoyed the story as much as I enjoyed making it.

Bogey and Mr. Fairway - Walk and Run Animation

For character design we had to design two contrasting characters in personality and design. We then had to take those characters and use them for an animation walk assignment and they had to interact in some form.

For my characters I settled on the idea of two 1920's golfers after coming across some old golf photos on the internet. So I came up with the two characters: Bogey and Mr. Fairway. 

Bogey is a newbie to the sport and is pretty enthusiastic about everything. He loves to play for fun. Mr. Fairway on the other hand has been playing for years, most of his life to be exact. He takes the sport seriously and plays "for the sport" as he would say. When the two decide to play a match together, things get a little awry.

I wanted to clean up this animation during the winter break but things did not go as planned and the school closed for a good chunk of the break which wasn't so swell. So here it is in its uncleaned state. I still like it a lot and I would like to come back to it and develop it more and actually clean it up as well and/or add some backgrounds at least. I had a TON of fun with both these assignments and I absolutely love the characters I came up with. I will definitely revisit them.

Roughs:

The first rough drawings of Bogey and Mr. Fairway along with potential names at the side. Sorry for the bad quality photo of it, the paper is too big for my scanner so I had to take a picture with my phone instead.