Maroon

I was watching Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and got inspired to make a design of Maroon... slapped some color on it for the hell of it:

gesture drawing

So, a group of us at Blue Sky have started to take half an hour everyday to just draw. It's been great: we stop working, go to a room, and let the worries of our day stay on hold for a full thirty minutes while we let pencil meet paper. It has made me realize how much I really miss drawing...

It's been pretty fun having animators pose for each other. I have seen a lot of poses in the past 3 weeks that I had never seen done by the models I have drawn before. We have been trying to get story key poses here and there, and come up with emotions etc to draw from. We have also only done 30 sec to 1 min poses, and nothing past that. You have to be fast, lose and in the moment, NO TIME TO THINK!!

Anyway, I have gone through a sketchbook and a half already in 3 weeks. It took me a while to sift through it all and scan the ones I thought I had been somewhat successful... I am still trying to work on pushing poses and finding the story within the pose... got a ways to go, but the improvement over the last few weeks has been somewhat encouraging:







I will try to keep up with posting since this took a while to put together! I am also still working on the 2d dialogue test... taking me a while as I am experimenting with work flow and such as I go.

Indiana Jones

Last weeks BlueSkyChallenge was Indiana Jones, so I decided to color a sketch I did at work while I waited for playblasting for practice. Here is the sketch and the color attempts... not sure which version I prefer, although the one with the yellow background pops more:




I am still working on my first blocking test for the cowboy dialogue... It's been hard to find the time to sit down and animate after getting home from animating all day, but I am making slow and steady progress. I will post that as soon as it is presentable!

planning

So here is my planning thus far for the dialogue test I am doing with the cowboy character I have previously posted. This will A) help me nail down some more of the design B) help with working out some character and C) Get me animating in 2d! This will actually be my first 2d dialogue test ever... kind of rediculous, but nothing that I have worked on in 2d had any dialogue! This will be a huge learning experience so lets see how this goes... but here are the tumbnails and notes:




Well, I will try to keep this up and get a pose test/blocking up soon. By the way, the clip I am animating to is from There Will Be Blood. I'll post it next time!

more bandit

Some more bandit explorations! Next up, I am going to to an animation test to a clip from There Will Be Blood to test moving this sucker around... I am somewhat daunted by this since I have not done 2d in a while. It will be interesting to see how it turns out.






Most of these were done a few weeks ago when I flew out to the Horton Hears a Who Premiere out in LA. Good times.

Oh, and here is a rough pass at another character from the short: The Bartender

why hello there

So it has been a while I see... I was working long hours animating on Horton Hears a Who from July to the end of December, so I had very little time to myself. Since then I have had a month off and got some rest and started a new project with a friend of mine. We were inspired to tackle a Western, and have a pretty sweet outline already. All we need to do now is design and flesh out the story for a while. Here is what I have came up with thus far for the bandit:



We will be finally uploading to our production blog sometime soon, so we can document this sucker.



In other, more exciting news, I was hired full time at Blue Sky Studios, and I start on Ice Age 3 on Feb 11th! I know, I know... I tricked them all!! It has been an amazing experience thus far... I can't express the level of dedication and talent that surrounded me everyday. Hopefully I can keep up with them all...