Storyboards and Sketches

So I thought I might show some (not too spoilery) rough storyboards that I've been making as part of The Shepherd, as well as some of the sketches I've been doing on the side so as to not go nuts.

This is usually how I start my storyboards, as very quick rough sketches on paper with printed panels (drawing a tonne of panels gets annoying very quickly). As you can see they are just meant to get the basic idea down so I have enough room to add or remove frames as I work out where to put the camera, how sounds will factor into it and if there will be any particular camera moves. Working this small and fast helps me to avoid being precious with my panels and gives me the space to experiment a lot. After I've figured it out I'll go into TVPaint and redraw the sequence at a higher level of detail for use in the animatic.

This first sequence is from the opening of the film, where we introduce the girl and her plight, as well as the Shepherd.

Secondly, I've been doing a little bit of drawing at home for fun so I have something else to do and think about than The Shepherd. First I have a character design for an Elvish Wizard that I did on a whim one night, and then some fanart for a character called Tracer from Blizzard's new game, Overwatch.

That's all for now! Back to storyboarding.

Shepherd Logos

Oh man it's been a long time!

Mostly I've been busy storyboarding these past weeks (and those storyboards are secret), so I don't have an awful lot of work to show right now, but I do have some gun sketches from class and a first pass at designing a logo for The Shepherd!

Hopefully I'll have something more significant to show soon, it's just a slow month in terms of finished work.

Alien Sketches!

So we've been pretty busy making The Shepherd a reality! Sadly for me that mostly means talking a lot, so I've not as many drawings to show lately as I might have liked. That said, I have some alien sketches that I made, and a look test put together by some of our artists!

The alien has been an interesting design challenge, and I can assure you the final result is less cute than my own examples. ;)

Finally we have our first look test, put together by Benjamin Bach Nielsen (painting the background) and Emilie Stabell (editing) with the help of some of our animators. Really cool!

These are exciting times! I can't wait to make more. But for now, back to talking about story.

The Green Gribbly

My girlfriend is always going on about invisible gribblies, so I took the liberty of drawing one a few days ago.

Fan Art

So here's a little drawing I made earlier this week during a lecture, then polished up digitally at home.

Blog Revamp

So part of the third year involves preparing ourselves for the future, including improving our online presence and preparing a portfolio for application to internships.

That means this blog is going to undergo some changes while I try to figure out how to present myself and my work in a more professional way, starting today! So in you see some weird stuff happening on the blog that's the reason why.

Until next time!

Character Sketches

Pre production is crazy-time! Here are some sketches. :)

It's been fun to work with something a little more simple and appealing than my usual style.

The Shepherd Style Tests

So this week the CG artists on our team have been working on deconstructing Santiago Montiel's style and figuring out how we want to render our backgrounds. Here's my contribution.

Slowly learning a little about line and lighting, it's a good time! :)

The Viborg Animation Festival

So after a long wait, VAF is finally upon us and we can show the commercials we made a few months ago during the commercial project!

Here is the short I directed. We wanted to mix 2D animation and live action footage in Viborg to reprsent the festival coming to town, and I think we succeeded despite our lack of experience in live action.

This wouldn't have been possible without a fantastic team, so I want to thank Martin Baadsgaard, Max Jarl Christiansen, Louise Gregersen, Marylou Mao, Sabine Pedersen and Pernille Kjær for their hard work during those five very intense weeks!

Finally, our lovely lead character designer, Pernille Kjær, was contracted afterwards to make some posters for the festival!

Overall it was quite the experience! It was really different to work with a client producing an advert in this way, but it seems we were successful in the end.

If you'd like to see more of Pernille's work, she has a Tumblr here: http://pernillekjaer.tumblr.com/

Until next time!

The Shepherd Production Blog

So our film has a production blog now! If you'd like to follow the development of our bachelor project, you can sign up to tumblr and follow our progress there! It's available at: http://shepherdfilm.tumblr.com/

Of course, I will still post personal stuff here, so stay tuned!

Some Concepts

So it's been a while! Pre-production on The Shepherd continues, and although I spend most of my days talking I have managed to draw a few things.

Firstly I did some lineart tests disguised as story beats.

And then last night I spent the evening putting together a mood piece of sorts. No idea if the final film will look anything like this, but it was a nice experiment. 

As ever, my team and I are hard at work making this film a reality every day! It's an exciting and exhausting time, but I can't wait to see the result.

The Shepherd Begins

So we've finally started up at TAW for our third and final year, which means we've just begun pre-production on the film I will be directing alongside a friend of mine, Lasse Bruntse, called The Shepherd (working title).

Our first week involved our team in an experimental exercise where we had 3 days to shoot and edit a documentary that would reflect the tone of our film. I think we went a little overboard on our one...



Then we got stuck into pre-production, which mostly involves a lot of talking and printing out of pictures... But I've done some rough concepts already. It's very nice to have some time to really explore a world, now that we have a full year to do it instead of a few hurried weeks.

We're still in the early days, talking a lot about style etc, so everything goes at the moment.

Lastly I've started a side project involving Jurassic Park that I will probably post about tomorrow. :)

Until tomorrow then!

Some Pokemon Fanart

I decided to have a little fun with my next image.

Like many my age, I've been a longtime fan of Pokemon, and with a new game coming out shortly I couldn't resist. :) Until next time!

Fantasy Game Project Continued

So the holidays are slowly slipping by, and I have more work from the game project!

More effort went into nailing down the specifics of the dragonkin warrior.

Then I moved onto figuring out colour for both characters:

Might still have one character left to work on, but so far this has been a nice distraction this holidays, also great to practice my methodology. Now more of my attention must be turned to working on The Shepherd though, only a month left till we begin!

Until next time!

Fantasy Game Project Work

So I'm currently on holiday, but I've been working on the story for our bachelor film next year, and doing some concept work for a small game project that involves myself and a few other students from my year. It's a fantasy RPG-type thing, so obviously it's right up my alley.

First we have some environment stuff:

Then I was tasked with designing two characters, a female human ranger and a male dragonborn (esque) warrior.

And lastly some skeletons for our intrepid heroes to fight:

I still have a few bits and bobs to do, and colour as well, but it's definitely been a pretty fun side project so far! Always nice to have an excuse to do lots of digital sketching. :)

Pitches and the End of the Year

So our second year at TAW draws to a close with pitches for the Bachelor projects, which will involve the entirety of the third year in the production of a small selection of films.

For the past few months I have been working with a friend of mine on a pitch called The Shepherd, and today it was selected to be one of the films that will be produced next year, which I will co-direct. I felt I should draw something in celebration.

Let's just say it involves sheep and aliens. Now I have a whole year to make it a reality.

Holidays are just around the corner, but I won't stop working, as I have a portfolio, a side project and now a film to work on, so I'll be posting more here once I've spent about a week asleep.

Exams are Over!

So today marks the last day of my 2nd year exams!

Over the last week I've been painting very late every night to get the key shot done, starting with thumbnails to the final render, and I'm rather proud of the result!

There were a lot of very intense challenges for me here, including the lighting, rendering skin and hair (still not great at that), and putting tonnes of work into each of the six layers that this image is composed of. Once all the layers are done you put them into nuke in a 3D space and point a camera at them like this:

Then you add some camera movement and voila!

At some point I'd like to do a making of video with epic music and such, but for now I think I'll catch some sleep!

End of Year Showreel

So the exams call for an end of year showreel to portray everything I've worked on this year at TAW. Here's my ramshackle attempt:



It's a bit rough around the edges, but time is short and I'd much rather be using a gallery anyways. But there you go!

Exam Week 1 - Concept Art

So I've gotten to the end of week 1 of my exams. Right now the end goal is to have a fully rendered and semi-animated scene involving a story moment between two characters by the end of next week. This week was mostly involved with designing the two characters, creating all the various expressions, turnarounds etc. to describe them and figuring out what my story is. It's been a lot of work!

So to begin with I chose to do a sci-fi scene where a daughter finds he long-lost father. After a lot of sketching I decided to go through several phases of design to get the strongest designs possible, starting with armor sets:

By merging elements of the ones I liked I came up with the final designs and moved on to colour, where I experimented with different looks.

After that I selected my two favourites and unified them a little more. Right now I'm thinking the reds and blues are sort of family colours.

And once that was done I had to create a lot of reference sheets, expressions and turnarounds to show all the ins and outs of each character. The expression sheets were definitely a challenge as I am not used to drawing a lot of different emotions. I am still missing range of motion sheets for each character but I might not have time to do them.

And finally here are the finished designs separately:

Going this in-depth with character design has been a very rewarding and intense experience, being completely different from my environment-focused self study. There was a massive amount of work involved in working this way but I think the strength of the resulting characters makes it worth it. I'm really looking forward to put them in a scene together!