The Shepherd is Out!

Hey all!

So at long last, the film I directed over the course of last year with Lasse Bruntse is out! If you love sheep, aliens or mysterious mountainside hermits, you might like this! You can go see it on Youtube or Vimeo, both of which I have linked below.

I hope you enjoy it!

I Return

Boy, it's been a long time since I last updated this blog!

Nowadays, I am nearing the end of an internship at LEGO in Billund, Denmark. Next year I have no idea what I will do, but I'll finally graduate from The Animation Workshop, and then it's out into the big wide world!

Lately my most recent work can be found more often on my new facebook page, which you can view here: https://www.facebook.com/JohnMullerArt/

Otherwise, here's some work from a creative environment design course I've been taking!

I've yet to decide what to do with my blog, but if I decide to move ship to another site permanently, I'll be sure to post it here.

Until next time!

The Shepherd: The Final Hours

We're entering the last two weeks of production on The Shepherd!

It's been a very tough few weeks with little time for personal work, which is why I haven't posted much recently. That said, last week Friday I did manage to produce a grumpy selfie of myself.

Until next time!

Star Wars Studies

Not too long ago a new teaser for the new Star Wars film came out. Being a massive Star Wars fan, I was compelled to do some studies from it. :)

This was a super fun exercise, and I'd really like to do some more some time. For the time being however, it's back to The Shepherd.

New Portfolio Site!

Our internships are coming up, and I've put together a new website to serve as a portfolio for my applications! You can check it out here. This site is the culmination of a lot of my work from the past year or so.

I even made a cool little logo!

Now it's time to send out some application mails!

Long Overdue Update

Hello again!

I realize it has been a month since I last posted, that's partly due to business and partly due to me moving my more regular updates to my facebook page, which you can view here: https://www.facebook.com/JohnMullerArt

From now on I think I will be moving to slower updates here that will be longer. At the moment that means that I have a lot more background work from The Shepherd to show you! We're currently about 6 weeks from the film deadline, so the animators are all-hands-on-deck while the CG's ferret around plussing backgrounds and comping. Below are some of my contributions.

It's a busy time as we prep for internships, try to finish the film and enjoy the sun as it is finally returning to Denmark, but I think the film is shaping up to be something special!

Until next time.

Backgrounds from The Shepherd

A few weeks ago we finished all the layouts for The Shepherd. Now we're moving into background painting, which is a nice change of pace! I've hand picked some of the more interesting ones I've made recently to show here. 

As you can see, there's a lot of work to go around! But it's a great deal of fun, and quite rewarding work after all the lineart. It's great to see some colour finally injected into the film.

More to come!

Some Fanart

Every year or so I end up doing a fresh portrait of Eureka from Eureka Seven, as a test of skill I suppose.

My portraits aren't that great yet, especially not stylized ones, but it's fun to do. :)

At the moment I am also building a portfolio website for use in my internship applications. It's still quite a work in progress, but you can check it out here:

johnmullerart.com

More layouts and some painted backgrounds will come soon!

More Layouts!

As I am lacking in other personal work to show, I thought I could share some more layouts that I did for The Shepherd!

We are just about finished with the layout stage, which means that soon we will move on to actual background painting, finally getting some colour into the movie! It's an exciting time. :)

More to come!

Asmita is a Badass

The film churns steadily on.. In the meantime, I drew one of our lead characters as an older, more heroic character on a lazy day.

Until next time!

New Updates!

So, the other day I looked at my blog and realized I haven't posted in over 2 months! Needless to say, I've been very busy with family, Christmas stuff and The Shepherd over that period, but I do still have some things to show.

First of all, I finished my design of Sarya a while back.

Next, I did a quick sketch for my sister, she wanted a piece portraying her as a sorceress with her cat, Specs, at command.

Both pieces were a lot of fun and a welcome change from the full time work on The Shepherd. Speaking of which, we have finally locked our animatic, which basically means we have a movie, it just looks and sounds terrible. Now we move into production, where we make the art and sound assets to complete the film. At the moment, I am busy making layouts, a few of which you can see below.

These are essentially the early drafts of the final shots which the animators will work on, and which we will later paint. It's a pretty fun stage to be in after months of storyboarding - I finally have the time to draw things in detail!

That's about it for now. I'll be building a new website soon to prepare for internships, but the blog will continue to exist alongside it - so keep an eye out for that!

Cheers

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!