Lights Out in Production

Hey there!

The thing I'm learning as we make this film is that there is rarely any art that is presentable. A lot is work in progress and a lot changes very rapidly as the film itself evolves. Very little of it is presentable. I can now see the challenge of putting together art books for games and other media.

However, I do have a little (now outdated) piece of concept art I put together for a character lineup.

The film is due on the 10th of May! So hopefully I will have some more stuff to show you soon as the production phase is now underway. 

Sneak Peak! Short Short Film!

So on Monday we began our Short Short Film Project.

This is 4 weeks of working alongside the animators creating our first joint film since we began here. It's the first time that we get to try our skills during a real production, and it's intense! We are tasked to make a 30 second long short, and given a few other criteria to follow so that we can learn the ins and outs of actual film production. After the first week, we have a strong story and animatic and we are roughing out the style guides and character designs. I am happy to announce my group's short, Lights Out!

I'm not going to reveal much more right now other than that the film has to be produced for a young age group, and we chose 4-6, so it's a lot of really cute stuff! In the coming weeks I'll upload some more stuff as it is finalized.

Massive Sketch Dump and The Short Short Film Project

So a few days ago my sketchbook expired, I'd officially used up all the pages! To indulge myself (and you), I thought I'd scan and upload all my best spreads/sketches from the book before it finally falls to pieces.

Some of these are pretty old, some you might have seen before and some contain text - so bear with me. I'll be putting them in chronological order.

Huge post! Tomorrow I'll have some stuff to show from our Short Short Film Project!

Cheers!

Colour with Lawrence Marvit

Sadly this week was our last course with the always excellent Lawrence.

Happily, we did colour! Very exciting week. It's clearly a stupendously large topic, but I'm already
dying to learn more. We did a lot of traditional painting and ended the week with a Hamlet render.

This could still use a good amount of work so I might revisit it soon.

On the flip side I picked up Warhammer 40K, and I've been testing colour schemes in Photoshop! Nice way to try things out before I get to the painting.

Next week we start the Short Short film project, where we will finally get to work with the animators on a (you guessed it) short film. Gonna be awesome!

Until next time!

Layout and Stuff!

Easter holidays are over and we move on to layout!

This is the production step between storyboard and the background painters/animators. Layout artists clean the storyboards up, refine the illustration and perspective and separate the elements in the scene into the correct layers to be handed off to the environment artists and animators.

Personally I'm not a big fan of this kind of work, but nonetheless it's good to know how it's done. We've stolen the storyboards from Iron Giant and Princess Mononoke as a basis to work on.

 

Tomorrow I'll be animating the second scene, as it is a panning rooftop shot.

I've also been doing a lot of sketching on the side, yesterday I drew this up for fun.

 

Overall my digital illustration skills seem to be improving. :) Next week we have colour with Lawrence Marvitt, which I am really, really looking forward to - so hopefully I will have some nice stuff to show after that!