3rd Year Sheridan Animation Premiere is TODAY!

I'm super excited and nervous at the same time! After 8 months on the project the film is finally done! I will write about the experience after all of this cools down. But get hyped for those that can watch it today at 5:45 in J102!

Here are two screenshots from the film to whet your appetite!

The bottom one is a scene I animated! Get excited!

Also here's a bonus! Dom Corbett made an awesome drawing of the cast of the film at the premiere!

Not Dead But Hanging In There

Haven't posted in a while. Don't worry I'm not dead...sort of. Just extremely overwhelmed at the moment with the group film production and having to stay late or overnight at the studio this past week. It's going to be handed in this tuesday and screened on April the 21! So get excited for those that can make it to the screening at school.

Here's a little poster made by my story teacher with a fun Taylor Swift quote with the schedule:

Also check out our blog again at http://kaleidoscopestudios.tumblr.com/ for some neat behind the scenes stuff going on during crunch week!

Get hyped! Now back to work I gooooooo!

Star Wars Portrait

This semester's theme for the banner was Star Wars! Once again everyone did a fantastic job! Here's mine as a not-so-disgusting version of Nien Nunb. I purposefully avoided any jedi or sith portrait for mine, so the first short Star Wars character I thought of was Nien Nunb and it stuck.

Here's the full banner with everyone's portrait that submitted.

YELL

Sometimes you just got to let off some steam.

Played around with the lasso tool and really digging the style I did for this.

Colour Correction Poster and Kaleidoscope Studios Logo

Here it is! The kick-ass poster for our group film! Wonderfully illustrated by Jade Poon and text and design done by me!

Agent Leon in Colour Correction will be coming soon to a theatre near you!

Remember to check us out over at http://kaleidoscopestudios.tumblr.com/

Our group decided to go for a horizontal approach to the poster instead of the conventional vertical one as an homage to old James Bond posters from the 60's. Apparently we're the first ones to ever do it! Woo!

Everyone was doing small sketches of poster ideas and then about an hour before the meeting to vote on a poster design I asked Jade to check out the horizontal posters from James Bond and she quickly sketched an awesome composition that the whole group unanimously agreed on. We all liked how the James Bond posters was a beautiful collage of the best parts of the film and we wanted to incorporate something like that. A poster extremely similar to From Russia With Love was one of our first ideas since first semester that had that collage look with floating elements in white space. Overall Jade knocked it out of the park and we've received such a great reception to it so far!

Our group is called Kaleidoscope Studios in reference to Cinemascope and the colour theme we have in our film. For the Kaleidoscope Studios logo I heavily referenced this version of the Cinemascope logo. There are many variations of it depending on the credit design, but they all shared the same bend in the type and sometimes that 3D type look. Rather than achieve the 3D look through simpler means I did it all on photoshop by hand in order to achieve that airbrush-y feel to the three dimensionality of it. I really like how it turned out!

Life Drawing Dump

Just a small life drawing dump. This semester has been really relaxed when it comes to life drawing. Now it's all themed costumes and focusing on character personalities within the drawings as well as exploration of different mediums to draw. This semester has been so liberating and it's mostly been a "Do what you want!" kind of attitude it's great. 

Here's just a snippet from one session involving the model dressed as a butler. That was probably the best session I had so far and had a lot fun and neat drawings from gestures to sustained ones:

Here's some from a session with the model as a cowboy using marker!

I really like the contrast between these last two. One being a more realistic approach to drawing the model and the other a simple graphic caricature of him.

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!