more MAKING OF!

The Making Of Morris: Part 6 (Full Circle Of Exploration) from Moonbot Studios on Vimeo.

SKETCHES!

Here are some more sketches from this week. Just warm-ups and having fun.

We also started a Sketch Tuesday a while back, over at the Moonbot Blog - check it out each week!

Morris Lessmore production art

Even with a film as short as 12 or 15 minutes (long for a 'short film', I know) takes a LOT of creative people and a LOT of design and artwork.

At Moonbot Studios, we are fortunate to have the approach of hiring multi-talented artists who are willing and ready to wear many hats and tackle many challenges. I am lucky enough that I was hired as a storyboard artists, doing a majority of the boarding for this film, but also moved directly onto character design, production design, color scripting, concept art for environments and miniature sets, prop design, then textures, and even 2d animation.

This was an amazing chance to experience nearly every facet of the 'art department' of an animated production. I enjoyed all of it, and have a lot of artwork to share with everyone, but it would be far too much for one post here, so I'll parcel it out over the next few months, along with some tastes of what we are producing "after Morris".

I hope you dig... here's a first look:

This is the first quick 'paint' I did of Morris Lessmore. It was based on Bill Joyce's first pencil illustrations of Morris, but with a bit more cartooning and flow to it. This was sketched and painted in Photoshop.

Here is the sketch that influenced the final direction of Morris Lessmore's character design. We were going a much different route where he was meek, chubby and small-eyed, however Bill wanted me to get some more Buster Keaton in the movement and poses. So I sketched from DVDs for a few hours and this is the one that everyone latched on to enough to redesign him. This sketch is done with pencil and a Pentel Pocket brush pen and is no more than 4" tall.

These pencil sketches are concepts for layout and shots, done during the storyboard process. Bill had some specific shots he wanted and some he had sketched, some he had described. These are nothing special or sacred, just 2" wide each done with blue pencil in a sketchbook, scanned later for reference. It is nice to look back on these looser and 'smaller' sketches and see what it informed and what it did not. Either way, the small sketches are just as valuable to production.

I ended up doing a LOTTTT of prop design and the following orthographic drawings for the modelers and CG production team. I found that I have a specific eye for detail, and am very critical, so it came into play here naturally. These 'turnarounds' are essential, and while they are rigid, they are also fun to do. These chairs in particular, were actually not used in the film, but at one point, we had a place for them. Integrating these "William Joyce details" into each object, giving it unique character to this world, is really fun.

(click to view full size)

These are just a few panels from the color script. A few artists worked on the color script, and we all really enjoyed it!

Texturing characters and objects is essential. The color and surface of an object must be created by putting an image on it, that essentially is a 'wrapper' of color and surface properties. Here is just one of the many textures I created. This is part of the cover of the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme book character. You will really enjoy his part in this film.

This is part of Morris' design and breakout pages. Giving the animators a reference of poses and personality of movement is helpful, especially when we are specifically referencing Buster Keaton in certain ways. These are silhouettes of some of the poses drawn for Morris, and below (click to enlarge) is one of the full pose sheets:

I hope you enjoy seeing this artwork. There is a LOT more and I'll continue to share it with you very soon! In the meantime, check out the film trailer here.

Morris Lessmore ART SHOW and PREVIEW!

I am SUPER DUPER stoked to announce:

This coming Friday (one week away) we will be hosting a PREVIEW of (our) Moonbot's first short animated film, "The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore" here in Shreveport.

There will be a "making of" art show at ArtSpace, and when you get your ticket, that's also good for one of the five preview screenings at the Robinson Film center.

Last, this, and next week we are taking our time and attention putting together a beautiful show which will put you behind the scenes, share the process, and show you the art and work it takes to put together a 15 minute "CGiature" (cg animation + miniatures... I know, sort of a goofy coined term).

We will all be there, there will be food, art, miniatures, drinks, video, film, friends, and my parents! (blush) -- get info and tickets here, and come enjoy the evening. This team has worked so hard and the talent is immense. It is beyond a privilege to be working with William Joyce, Brandon Oldenburg, and many other craftsmen and storytellers. The talent is high, the result is fun, beautiful, magical, and I really feel this is the start of something big. I hope some of you can make it, and I'll see you there!

Critters, UNITE!

We are playing around with sketches and ideas for a local mural that will be born this summer, and it (of course) has spawned into new ideas, new characters, and a fun sketch. This is a collaboration between the studio (moonbot), ideas of Brandon Oldenburg, Bill Joyce, sketched by myself and painted by Adam Volker. This is not the actual mural image, but a part of the brainstorming process that may end up in it somewhere...

I can't wait to see where this goes...

Virgin Ads Complete

They have been finished for a little while now, but the Virgin Media advertisements which I was a big part of designing are finally all aired or being aired in theaters and television in the UK.







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Mel B and Virgin Media

Here's the second of a very cool series of advertisements from Virgin media, that I was fortunate enough to be a part of. The amazing team of creatives and hard-workers at So! Animation are responsible for this one, just like the Mick Hucknall "KWACCS" advertisement aired last month in England (as well as more to come...). They did a great job and are a great team to work for.

I got to design and help create the characters, from start to finish. Here you can see some sketches and versions of the design for the to-be animated Melanie Brown (aka Mel B, aka Scary Spice). I offered a few versions of each character and some revisions, based on the team of creators and writers at the Y&R agency, responsible for this campaign. This will air in theaters (HD!) later this month. It really was a fun process, and you can see the result is just as fun:

PS- It was great to work with Ed Steckley on this one: can you see other influences (for those that know me or Ed) or art that Ed and I collaborated on? Maybe on the walls? hehe.

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New Book for Comic Con!

If you or a friend are attending the SOLD OUT Comic-Con in San Diego this week or weekend, you will love the new stuff I've got at my booth, table B-2.

Here is the first look at Blubber Lubber, a new book featuring the observant and unique people-sketching of Dan Hay. Dan is an artist in Florida whose drawings of interesting strangers are dynamic and hilarious. This book is just over 6" tall, thick and sturdy, and will be priced at a special rate for Comic-Con visitors. It will be available, with other books, this fall at ArtSquaredBooks.com.

I'll be doing commissions and will have other books and new artwork at the show, so stop by!
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Mick Hucknall

Here's a new Virgin Media ad featuring the popular Simply Red frontman. I was fortunate enough to have done the character design, modeling, texturing and supervision. I am so proud of my studio-mates and the amazing animation, rendering, lighting, interior, compositing, editing, modeling and everything else they put into it. It turned out great, and there are more to come! These can be seen in the UK (nationwide) in Odeon and Cineworld theatres.

Kylie Minogue, CG Animation

Here are a couple sketches that were done for the current animation spots I'm working on (these specifically will not be used). They are for commercials to be aired in the UK, containing a celebrity and an original character or two.

The clients on this project are quite wonderful. They write a script loosely around a celebrity that they begin to woo, and if they get an agreement, they finalize it and we start. To keep it enticing, they've begun showing sketches to with whom they are negotiating, in efforts to both get a head start and better sell the idea. These are not the final designs, but a jumping-off point for critique. I've also learned to not get too polished or invested in any of these, because the clients and agency both hold different priorities at times. I've learned that it must be a malleable process, and would not be successful if it were not.

I was asked to do a few sketches of Kylie Minogue (digitally for speed) that were fairly rendered, and I had only a few hours. I'll share more details on this project when I can.

Kung Fu Panda!

I don't know why, but I was unsure of how I felt about this movie, simply based on the trailers and advertisements. I wasn't too excited, but was sure I wanted to see what it was all about, so a friend and myself caught a midnight show last night. All I can say is that this is giving (one of my all-time-favorites) Pixar's Ratatouille a run for its money in animation as well as beautiful colors, textures and surfaces.

Kung Fu Panda is one CG animated film that goes the extra mile with color design and the animation is top-notch. The animators really have outdone themselves. The character traits are very inventive, detailed, human, exaggerated, cartoony and active. The voices are fun and the script is very good.

I could go on and on in detail what I enjoyed and critique it in depth, but I'll keep it to this: Overall I give this film two thumbs up. From a creative standpoint, I couldn't enjoy it much more than I did. It is definitely worth checking out, so go see it this weekend - twice!

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Character Design

I've had the pleasure of doing quite a bit of character design in the last couple years, more heavily in the last few months.

Character design is much like caricature, yet you must define, simplify, exaggerate and focus on all of the subject's scope, rather than just the face or head. It can involve cars, animals, objects or anything that needs definition and style to fit the "world" that you are creating.

At the moment I'm doing character design full-time. I can't share the current projects just yet, but for now I'll show some of the past work I've done, in pieces to show how I approach it. I see it as eye candy for those who like process or rough stages. Much like published sketchbooks, this is fun for me, so I'm hoping others find it enjoyable.

This project (circa '06-'07) involved taking an illustrated children's book (concept copyright: author) and optioning it for a Saturday morning cartoon with a more "hotrod" feel. To my knowledge the project didn't go through but the process built a few relationships that are great and I had a lot of fun. I got to draw DOGS and RACECARS... how can you beat that! Below is a fraction of the drawings and steps in the process:

My friend Brian Haimes did most of the modeling along with the great folks at So! Animation. I was still learning, so my help in the construction of the wireframe models was small, but I enjoyed every bit of it.

This next project is much more recent (January 2008) and was for Bette Midler's Las Vegas show. My task was to design fish characters to interact with Bette's character, under the sea. She is auditioning in a singing contest (an obvious American Idol parody) and they needed three fish judges to be designed to match the personality and likeness of the 3 American Idol judges. This was another dream job that I put as much concept as design into, contributing to what fish were chosen and even character animation traits. This was done with the great team at Atlantic Motion Pictures (AMP), also in New York. This is just a small piece of the work done for that job:

The final animation is displayed on a 120 ft. wide screen that drops on the stage, giving a cinematic "happening in front of the viewer" feel which, through the reviews I've read, is very effective. There was also some great and timely contribution through the producer, director, modeler and animators in this project. They really brought the drawings to life.

I really am enjoying character design as much as I enjoy illustration. It's an impossible lifestyle, as while I do one I miss the other... I guess I feel blessed to be able to go back and forth. I also find that very often one helps me with the other.

When I get permission to discuss the current projects and show the artwork, I will. I can't wait to share this unique and fun project, so check back soon and let me know what you think.

(this topic may also explain the flying pigs on my blog header: another character design project from last year)

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