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!

Exams!

Hey there.

It's been quite a while since I last posted, due to the ending of the commercial project (which we are not allowed to show yet) and a week of writing papers, and some work on other projects which I am not ready to show either.

However, this week we began our two weeks of exams, where I am doing a concept art assignment! I will show more work when I have it, but for now I thought it might be interesting to show how I put together my reference material in Mural.ly

Soon I'll have some space stuff to show, very excited about this!