Illustration Friday: Trick or Treat

Sexy wizard! Wooo!! Finally had time to do something for fun. :D

John K Lesson - Constructing Bugs

John K just posted an awesome lesson on constructing Bugs Bunny. Here's the original image:



And my attempt:


The test:

Wow! I thought I was doing so much better! And the one you see above is after I enlarged/moved the dogs head so I could compare it better. Things I did wrong:

1. Proportions - Bugs' neck and body are too long. Dog's head was drawn way too small.

2. Angles/Direction - Bugs's ears and neck are pointing the wrong way. Dog's cheeks are funny.

There's probably a lot more wrong with it...what a great exercise! I gotta do this every day.

Adventures of Mark Twain Clip

As I was surfing through Digg today, I came across this clip from The Adventures of Mark Twain...a Will Vinton claymation film from the 80's. One of my professors from RIT, Tom Gasek, worked on this film back in the day. This particular clip always freaked me out and is definitely worth a watch.



Definitely not for little kids! You would never see something this interesting and frightening in an animated film today. Thanks for doing something different, Will Vinton! The surprising part is that this clip has over 655,000 hits, 5,000 comments, and has been favorited almost 10,000 times. Who knew this film was so popular?

More Cats

Here are the other two paintings I did for the Berkeley Humane Society auction.

Wanna buy one?? The important info:

2nd Annual
Purr-casso Art Sale and Gala

When: Sunday, November 4, 2007
12:00pm - 4:00pm

Where: Hollis Street Project - Grand Hallway 5900 Hollis Street, Emeryville

All proceeds from this event will benefit the Berkeley-East Bay Humane Society. For more information call (510) 845-7735, ext.13.

Illustration Friday: Momentum

Dancing cats! This is a piece for an upcoming benefit auction in Berkeley this November. (For an animal shelter.) I am working on two more (smaller) pieces that will also be for sale. More info on the auction to come soon. Acrylic on paper, 11x11".

Illustration Friday: Captain

Seeing as how I work at Three Rings, with people like this, 'Captain' was a very fitting theme. (I know the perspective is wonky, but I'm too tired to fix it!) I'm busy busy busy, sorry lack of posts.

Horton Hears a Who Trailer

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And just to renew your faith in CG animation (after that Alvin horror) here is the new trailer for Horton Hears a Who. This movie looks beautiful! (We'll see how the story goes...)

Alvin & the Chipmunks Trailer

Alvin literally eats poop in this trailer. Enough said.

Beowulf Trailer Hits the Net

The new Robert Zemeckis mo-cap adventure flick has posted a trailer over on Apple. The CG humans hold up decently for about...3 seconds. Then it suffers from Final Fantasy-itis, where all the characters look slightly too perfect and move just a little bit off. I love Zemeckis and Neil Gaiman wrote the script...I just wish it was made with real people. (I wonder how people will feel about a hot naked CG Angelina Jolie...why not the real thing, huh??) What's with making actors over in CG anyway? Yes, its Anthony Hopkins voice...does the character have to BE Anthony Hopkins? The official site says that the film will be shown in IMAX 3D and Digital 3D - sounds like the only option is 3D. If they could come up with a way to show 3D movies that didn't involve glasses, and didn't feel like a gimmick that took me out of the film...I might enjoy it.

Illustration Friday: Poem

It's been a little while, but I'm back with a new one for IF. I'm a fan of e.e. cummings, so I chose one of his poems for inspiration.

who knows if the moon's
a balloon,coming out of a keen city
in the sky--filled with pretty people?
(and if you and i should

get into it,if they
should take me and take you into their balloon,
why then
we'd go up higher with all the pretty people

than houses and steeples and clouds:
go sailing
away and away sailing into a keen
city which nobody's ever visited,where

always
it's
Spring)and everyone's
in love and flowers pick themselves

Vintage: The Wizard's Duel

The Sword in the Stone is one of my favorite Disney films. Well, that's a lie...I really only like certain parts of it. Namely, the part with the squirrels, the part where Merlin packs his house into a bag, and this part...the wizard's duel. I found this at a flea market on the Cape a few months ago and snatched it up for the awesome illustrations inside. I've created a .pdf of the book and uploaded it to Scribd. That site is awesome! As you can see, (I hope), it allows you to share documents easily. I would like to start some sort of animation library on there, much like a Flickr pool, except for documents and books. So scroll through the pages, then if you like you can download the .pdf through Scribd. (When you open it in Acrobat, or FoxIt as I prefer, you can view two pages side by side, just as the book intended.)

Illustration Friday: Geeky

I unfortunately missed last week's topic of 'twist' because I was finishing up this painting for the Narnia Fan Art Contest...which is by far one of the more geeky things I've done lately. It's a scene from the book "Prince Caspian"...when Lucy first sees Aslan in the forest. The contest had some ridiculous rules about not including human likenesses...I hope I can get away with tree people.

Illustration Friday: Camouflage

Under 2 hours! That's good. For me. :D

(Apologies to pascal and ian for blatantly trying to emulate their awesomeness.) And for anyone who hasn't seen it yet...Ratatouille opens tomorrow!! Victor Haboush calls it "the best animated film since Pinnochio." And that's coming from a guy who worked on Sleeping Beauty and 101 Dalmations. Damn!

The Neverhood...is going to be a movie!

This is huge news. Amazing awesome news. Doug TenNapel's masterpiece of claymation interactive fun is being turned into a feature film, written and directed by TenNapel himself. Frederator will be producing the film (along with a new feature film adaptation of Samurai Jack!) Hooray Frederator! Your coolness factor just shot up about 1000% in my book.

For the uninitiated, The Neverhood was a PC game released in 1996 through Dreamworks Interactive. (This was back when Dreamworks took a chance on cool new ideas, rather than just making sequel after sequel...interesting that Frederator is making this film and not Dreamworks!) Check out some footage from the game:



Read the official Variety press release. Funny that the title claims "indie studio develops 2D animated films"...when the Neverhood is obviously claymation. I guess when it's not made on a computer people forget that it's 3D? Also, you can read more about The Neverhood on Wikipedia. Looks like a copy of The Neverhood will run ya about $40-60 on eBay...hopefully it still plays correctly on the systems we've got running eleven years later. On a side note, I met Doug TenNapel a couple years ago when he spoke at RIT (I even sat next to him at dinner!) and I got him to autograph my copy of the game. Maybe it'll be worth more now that there's the film coming out...and I can only hope this means another game too!

Surf's Up!

So after being hounded by fellow animators I caught a matinee of Surf's Up today. Wow! What a surprise! When I first saw the previews and posters for this film I had zero interest in seeing it. MORE penguins?? But to even try to compare it to Happy Feet is ridiculous. This film had everything Happy Feet was missing - character designs, a great story, fun music, actual animation done by real animators with a ton of personality...If you are thinking about seeing it, you should. You won't be sorry. (There were a couple of poop jokes in there that were unnecessary, but they DID get big laughs from the kids.) As Brittney said, it has a whole lot of heart in it. (Something Happy Feet was also lacking.) Now the film to really compare it to would be next week's Ratatouille. I have seen both films, and honestly I think they are both great and worth seeing. Ratatouille was a little more appealing to me right off the bat, and I think it has some really impressive performances and animation. Surf's Up was consistently funny and really made me feel for the characters...see them both! Now!

And while you're at it, go check out some of the sweet pics Marcelo Vignali has been posting on his blog. Marcelo was one of the designers on the film and he is great! He also worked on Open Season. If Sony continues to get better and better (this film was waaaay better than Open Season, imho) I think they just might give Pixar a run for their money.

Bizarre Andy Panda Cartoon

So today at work, Josh told me about this strange Andy Panda cartoon he saw when he was a kid. It featured a devil character and Andy Panda going to hell and being forced to eat apples. Ofcourse it is on Youtube, (in Portuguese?!) so here you can all see it. It starts out kind of strange, but really hits it's stride around 5:30. Gah.

Illustration Friday: Rejection

Ehhhhh...

Ratatouille Sneak Preview!

I just returned from a sneak preview of Pixar's new film Ratatouille. What can I say? It was amazing. Brad Bird has done it again. This is probably the most interesting and hilarious Pixar film ever made. EVERYTHING is spot on - the voices, the acting, the animation, the RENDERING...holy crap everything looks so real! But not in a creepy Final Fantasy way. In a beautiful dream world sort of way. The audience reaction to the film was terrific. (Though I did see it at Bay St. theater, which is about a mile from Pixar...so there may have been some slightly bias folks there.) Seriously, if you see one animated film this year, make it Ratatouille. And once you do, tell your friends to see it too. I can't get over it. I'm in animation heaven right now.

Illustration Friday: Suit

Just in time....

My Office is so cool it's in WIRED!!

Seriously! Click here to read the WIRED photo-essay all about Three Rings' awesome office. It was even picked up by boingboing! Hooray!

I love working here. (Who wouldn't?!) Here's a few pics, there are lots more in the WIRED article....




All this hard work was done by the amazing pair from Because We Can, based in Oakland.