Animation with a moustache

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

Author: Olivier Ladeuix

CGMA Character design week 01 4

Character design / Drawings / Education / Painting / Portfolio

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CGMA Character design week 01

This is my assignment for the CGMA Character Design workshop. We were to design a monster based on a basic circle, triangle or square shape. It is a similar exercise to what we did at the Animation Collaborative. Those three shapes are the basic foundations, the building blocks of strong character design.

Here is what I came up with. The line work and painting job are a bit poor for the moment. Nate will help us with those in the next few weeks so expect a new version soon. The bottom picture are explorations that I first did with pen and paper then cleaned up in Sketchbook pro.

Story week 02 1

Comics / Portfolio

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Story week 02

Sorry for the lack of updates lately but believe me, I was REALLY BUSY. As a side note, I cut down my Facebook use DRAMATICALLY, as in, I only open Facebook to check my mails twice a week and I am way more productive now.

Anyway so, after few weeks attending the Schoolism Gesture class, I grew more confident about my drawing skills and when a friend told me about the CGMWA Character design and Story classes, I knew I couldn’t pass on those rare opportunities, especially seeing who the mentors are.

AnimC has a great character design class with Chris Sasaki this term and an awesome Storyboard class with Louis Gonzales but moving back to San Francisco for three month is not doable at the moment, and summer coming, I am better off being on the French sunny sea side rather than cloudy/cold SF.

CGMWA is offering two great classes this term with the incredible Character Designer/Vis Dev guy, Nate Wragg and Dreamworks story artist, Steven Mac Leod.

I have been following Steven Mc Leod’s blog since he was at CalArts and always found it inspiring, the class is said to be for beginners but we are already creating some solid portfolios.

As for Nate, I discovered his blog by Googling the Ratatouille End Credits and immediately bought his first video lecture when it came out. I love the way he paints digitally as it looks like real brushes.

When he announced he was starting a Character design class, I loved his first video so much that I HAD to enroll. Now, I get to pick his brain and watch him work every week.

The CGMWA classes are only 8 weeks but they are pretty cheap compared to whatever is out there and certainly cheaper than CalArt that both mentors graduated from.

For the Story class, we had to submit few pages of sketches on the first week and this week was about creating one picture gags. I was busy moving house so I only did one which I used for both Character Design and Story. Clever hey!

This week’s Character Design assignment was to design a Templar. I am never really short of gag ideas, let’s see if that one makes sense!

Forgive the rough line work, I am very new to Photoshop for clean up and still have to find a good brush. I am getting there though. I will post something more worked out in few days.

My upcoming comic, sneak peek 0

Comics

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My upcoming comic, sneak peek

Thanks to the Schoolism gesture drawing class, I am feeling inspired to do a bit more work on my, many years ongoing comic strip, or Bédé (Bandes Dessinées), as they are called in France.

I have a whole series about my rediscovery of France and the French town of Angoulême two years ago, an other one about my addiction to coffee and Moka coffee makers, and a third one about my life in San Francisco.

I will be starting slowly with a bunch of random stories as a warm up and to try different worklfows.

As a teaser, here is a rough drawing from the first story I will be publishing. The story is well fleshed out but I started drawing on newsprint paper and I got stuck when I wanted to import this into the computer. Good thing a friend asked me to clean his Tablet PC last week. I also had one laying around and realised it would be a very handy tool for my comics!

Related posts:
Tablet PC
Schoolism gesture drawing week 03

Zebe at Aardman 0

Animation

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Zebe at Aardman

Old Santa

I don’t think I ever mentionned the work of incredible French cartoonist/character designer/story artist Christophe Lourdelet alias Zébé on this blog. Actually I did but that was a reaaaally long time ago.

Zébé has done some great work for Aardman a while back and he is sharing some of his designs with us through a series of posts related to the production of Sony/Aardman’s “Pirates, Band of Misfits” and “Arthur Christmas”.

Albino Pirate

I would also recommend a comic strips he posted right after his first trip to Aardman in Bristol. Sorry it is only in French but you might be able to understand the story through the clear facial expressions and poses.

Zébé is probably a very modest, down to earth guy but in that strip he depicts himself as a pompous and haughty French man, completely unfazed by a gig at Wallace and Gromit’s creators studio, Aardman.

The poses, gags and facial expressions always crack me up. Mistaking a Guiness for a Cappucino …. genius!

Zébé’s blog and his strips actually inspired me to start my own comics and I have been fleshing out some stories for the past few years. I will share some of them with you very soon.

As a teaser, here is a quick digital clean up (still learning) of the main character. The posing is a bit wonkey but that’s the overall design, unless I decide to draw myself a bit taller.

“The Sweatbox” 1

Animation

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“The Sweatbox”

If you are a true Disney fan, you know what this is about.

Watch it before it disappears again. It is a very insightful and dramatic documentary on how much of a roller coaster commercial film making can be. I loved “Emperor’s new groove” a lot and never imagined it could have started so wrong to the point that it nearly got canned.

As a bit of trivia, this is the first time we get to hear/see Disney’s young and very promising character designer Joe Moshier. Joe did some great character design work on that movie, and on the following not so great “Home on the Range”, I love his very angular/stylized designs in the tradition of the old Disney movies.

Joe Moshier is also the guy Ricky Nierva was talking about in his very funny Splinecast, yes, the guy with a tight tshirt 😉

Mark Andrews Calart lecture 1

Animation / Story

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Mark Andrews Calart lecture

Working on a new short film and a series of comics stips, I am really into story and storyboarding those days so expect several posts about the topic.

If the only copy of Incredibles you have is a pirated version without the exceptional behind the scenes (they don’t do extras like this anymore unfortunately), then you probably don’t know how intense Mark Andrews can be.

You are in luck though, someone just posted part of a lecture he gave at Calart.

As a Splinedoctor podcasts listener, you know there is a new trend at Pixar where people don’t pitch storyboards by performing as an actor in front of the audience anymore. Instead they totally down-play the pitch and that is exactly what Andrews does here.

An other interesting note is, DO NOT THUMBNAIL! Thumbnailing is about being precious. Instead you must draw rough. You must communicate your ideas as fast as possible so the bad ideas get put aside quickly.

Check it out, it is very entertaining and as a side note, it looks like Michael Giacchino is in the audience with his kid.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmd7YIHUI5M[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ayjNzBnFXo[/youtube]

March 2012 sketches 0

Drawings / Portfolio

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March 2012 sketches

Last week I went to the beach to capture some surfin action, a bit of BMX and attended an art fair where friends were exhibiting.

Sometimes you don’t even need to travel to find interesting models, I was very lucky to have some carpenters on the roof opposite my house exhibiting … their naked flesh 😉

Biarritz March 2012

Carpenters at work + guest

Tangled Crew (Raiponce) 3

Animation / Education

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Tangled Crew (Raiponce)

With the recent departure of Glen Keane from Disney to, I am guessing, an other studio in the North of LA, I feel that we should show Disney a bit more appreciation for the amazing work they did on Tangled. Here is a repost of something I wrote last year.

In a recent article published on the CNN website about the poor reception received by Robert Zemeckis latest motion capture movie “Mars needs mom”. A blogger was quoted explaining the difference between motion capture and keyframe animation in those terms.

the style of animation featured in “Mars Needs Moms.” It’s known as motion capture or “mo cap,” a process that involves attaching sensors to actors to capture their movements. Computers transform the data into realistic-looking animation. (“Kung Fu Panda 2” and “Cars 2”, by contrast, are completely computer-generated).

What the hell is this mumbo-jumbo supposed to mean? How are the readers supposed to understand what the writer call “completely computer-generated”?

Reading this article, it became obvious to me that the general public has no idea was kind of work is going into making an animated feature and why motion capture is so different from keyframe animation.

To be fair, before I got into animation, I also had no idea about the actual process and just assumed they got done by maybe some sort of machine but certainly not an army of artists working for month or years, frame by frame.

So, what I think we need, is to give the audience more information about the animation process and put the artists forward. This is what this post is about.

A really cool and inspiring montage of Disney’s Tangled animation crew surfaced on the net a while back and disappeared quickly after to finally reappear few days ago. Here it is

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jg6A6qx3-74[/youtube]

and here is an other fun video
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oWhovB02Hg[/youtube]

Jelly Jamm 0

Animation

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Jelly Jamm

A friend showed me Jelly Jam, a great looking Spanish TV show with a style in the great tradition of Pocoyo.

I think the show is being done by Madrid based Studio 737shaker. One thing that surprised me is the use of Arnold as a rendering engine. Arnold is a pretty complex software that was primarly aimed at Feature Animation (Sony uses it) but I am guessing the Spanish creator has made it more friendly to smaller production by integrating to XSI.

Schoolism Gesture drawing week 03 5

Drawings

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Schoolism Gesture drawing week 03

Alright I cheated a bit this week. The poses were supposed to be 1 minutes which I respected BUT I spent some additional time cleaning up the poses and fixing proportions. Without a very good understanding of anatomy and proportions, it is really really hard to draw a pose in less than a minute, especially when you have to turn the model around so the silhouette reads clearer. It must be possible with experience but I am not quite there yet. Give me few more weeks 😉

Related post:
Schoolism Gesture Drawing Week 02
Schoolism Gesture Drawing Week 01