The animation with a .... je ne sais quoi!
My buddies game designer Gary Napper and concept artist Burt Ross got recently interviewed about the game industry and their role in the game development process. Check that out, you will see some of the earlier concept from “Spare parts” and Ross look really sexy in that familiar Tshirt 😉
With my hero Mike
I just came back from California and I am completely jet-lagged 😉
This is the second time I visit San Francisco and Los Angeles but having been invited to visit some of my favourite animation studios made the trip much more special.
I had decided to focus mainly on my sketching skills this time and try to apply what I learnt during the past seven month. My knowledge in anatomy and proportion combined to 7 month of intense life drawing practice helped me to make the most of those very long journey on bus and subway. The Santa Monica/Downtown LA journey was probably the most fruitful since people tend to quickly fall asleep and not pay attention to that one guy with dark glasses and hat screwed on his head, frenetically moving a pen on a tiny notepad, in a corner, at the back of the bus 😉
If I lived in LA, I think I would take the bus everyday, the passenger always presented amazing features to capture and every ethnicity and age range was on display.
Here are some drawings and pictures from my trip. I had brought some watercolours but eventually decided against using them. I didn’t want to ruin the sketches with poorly chosen colours. I need more experience with those however….. the reason why some of the sketches don’t have any shading, is because I still intend to colour them at some stage 🙂 I just found a great video tutorial with Jason Seiler that could prove useful. Jason Seiler/Schoolism
Forgive the poor line work, I was using a cheap Bic cristal and those don’t allow much thick and thinness. I had in mind to buy Glen Villpu’s favourite Namiki Falcon fountain pen but at $180 a pop at Flax, I eventually decided against it. It is only $120 online. Still very expensive for a fountain pen but the nib is really really flexible.
Here we go, that’s it. Enjoy
[ps] if you don’t know Matt Jones, check out his work, he has some really nice sketches on his blog
http://mattjonezanimation.blogspot.com/
Related post:
Sketchcrawl material
Historically there are only two types of motion blur, 2d and 3d. The 2d one is post processed and the 3d one is done at rendertime. 3d motion blur is much more accurate but takes a lot of time to render.
Two years ago, Doug Sweetland gave a talk at 
Annecy where he explained how much effort it took to achieve a good looking motion blur and I would like to share with you some screenshots I took a while ago.
Character Design blogpost just announced a new training and workshop with Dreamworks Character Designer Nicolas Marlet, check this out
http://characterdesign.blogspot.com/2010/08/who-wants-to-watch-nicolas-marlet.html
After visiting the San Francisco branch of Dreamworks yesterday and getting to see a bit more of the story, I am getting very excited about Dreamworks next feature “Megamind”.
The movie is only coming out in November but they just released some new footage for the San Diego Comic-Convention.
Watching that trailer still won’t reveal the entire plot but at least you will get introduced to a new character that will take a very important part in the movie. Check this out
