Animation with a moustache

The animation with a .... je ne sais quoi!

Author: Olivier Ladeuix

‘Pressing matters’ 01 rough first pass 1

Drawings / Portfolio / Short film / Story

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‘Pressing matters’ 01 rough first pass

You saw it here first ! 😉

Just so you don’t get mistaken, this is a short film I am working on. Well, I am only interested in telling stories those days so it might just stay in the state of boards.

This is the first time I use Photoshop for storyboarding so bare with me if it looks a bit rough. I will probably do a clean up version afterwards anyway. I have few more sheets coming in the next few days and you can expect the character design and the drawing style to change a bit as we go along. Let me know what you think!

Annecy 2012 2

Animation

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Annecy 2012

Quick report on my Annecy trip.

I got to attend a workshop with Bill Perkins, a talk with Disney Story artist Josie Trinidad and Disney Vis dev guy Jeffrey Turley. I was also part of a classic 1h30 long queue for a pay-to-see “Lorax behind the scenes” that nearly ended in blood bath. The “Brave” and “Paperman” queues were 2h so I passed on those (my knees and elbows were still swollen from previous brawls). On a side note, Pixar didn’t hold their regular Mifa presentations which was really unexpected and sad.

Josie Trinidad won us over with her enthusiasm and Jeffrey Turley gave a very funny talk spiced up with lovely cartoony ink-brushed beatboards at the Disney booth. We were not allowed to take any pictures or report anything on their Wreck-it-Ralph presentation so I can only share with you the following pictures. (sorry for the picture quality, I had forgotten my charger and used my phone instead)

Here is the Wreck it Ralph trailer if you haven’t seen it yet:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf4r5q8-aWo[/youtube]

Despite the rapidly changing weather, Annecy 2012 was once again a great event and we will be back again next year …. with a mouth guard 😉

>Related links:
Wreck-it-Ralph official website and arcade game
Josie Trinidad interview

The secret to becoming a better artist 4

Drawings / Education / Portfolio

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The secret to becoming a better artist

I was browsing this kid’s blog the other day http://devon-stubblefield-interview.blogspot.fr/ and something he left in his comments section struck me.

I think he said he regularly fills up one sketchbook per week., granted they are only 100 pages, but still…

Anonymous asked: How big are the sketchbooks that you fill weekly? and like what kind of paper?
I use either a “Strathmore Sketchbook (green book) 100 sheets, 9×12 inches” or “Strathmore Windpower Sketch (blue book) 70 sheets, 9×12 inches.” The sketchbooks contain recycled sketch paper (fine tooth surface) (

In term of hours, he said that’s about 4 to 7 hours a day 😉

I never believed in talent so this only confirmed what I always thought. Success comes with dedication and drive. The more you want something, the more likely you are to reach it.

For the little story, the guy is only 17 years old, he already interned at Disney and is now heading for a summer internship at Pixar with my friend Pris and Richie…

Since I attended Animation Collaborative with a bunch of crazy artists (I will post about it as soon as I can), I have also started carrying a sketchbook and mechanical pencil in my hands at all time. As soon as I find myself waiting or idling, I open the sketchbook and start drawing. This is a great way to improve and also to remember situations and events.

Here are two of my latest sketches drawn while waiting for my friend Sebastien and an other one on the Ferry between France and England. I was really surprised to see that guy on the second drawing with a pen in his hand, I thought he was also sketching but he seemed to be composing some music. Nothing like pen and paper I am telling you! 😉


CGMA Story Week 04 2

Education

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CGMA Story Week 04

This week Steve asked us to analyse some movie sequences in thumbnails, I chose one of the first sequence from Akira Kurosawa’s very graphic movie Ran. I could have used some tones but I am not very good at that yet. Instead I went for clean sketches. This exercise is very interesting as it makes us really pay attention to the kind of decisions directors take. The use of long lenses here is very unusual.




The second assignment was to get acquainted with camera lenses and different type of cinematographic shots. I now a thing or two about camera lenses so instead I decided to do some sort of tutorial. The panel 03 (Change of lens with moving camera) is probably the most interesting. For that one, I wanted to show how flat the picture can look when using long lenses. It is a great trick when you want to frame two character of different height or if you want to make the distance between two characters seem smaller.






Related post:
Story week 02

CGMA Character design week 04 1

Character design / Drawings / Portfolio

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CGMA Character design week 04

This week we had to design the head of three librairians. I finally got around to create a Photoshop brush I am happy with. Not too clean and not too rough. I did a quick colour pass just for the sake of it. Nate showed us his painting technique this week so that is what I will be using in the future.

Till the very end of the week I wasn’t happy about the roughs I came up with. Only few days later I finally saw how I could make those designs more appealing and more cartoony. They still lack some acting Nate will probably say, let’s see.

CGMA Character design week 03 1

Character design / Drawings / Portfolio / Tablet PC

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CGMA Character design week 03

Here is this week’s assignment. Nate asked us to create a line up with three pirates with contrasting shapes and proportions.

As usual I had a lot of fun exploring different shapes and silhouettes. Clean up was the most difficult part as usual. I had started with the Wacom tablet and fancy line work like Nate but I ended up reverting to pen and paper as I wasn’t getting anywhere.

If Photoshop wasn’t the industry standard for portfolios, I think I would stick to pen and paper. Mind you, I just saw some of Carter Goodrich’s sketches from Brave and he doesn’t seem to be bothered with modern design pipelines.

Anyway, here is what I did this week. Here is the final line up, a rough personality sketch and my research. The final cleanup was eventually done on the poor man’s Cintiq and Photoshop. Great progress compared to last week but still a long way to go before I can reach Nate’s great line work.

Related posts:
CGMA Character design week 01