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My upcoming comic, sneak peek

Posted on April 16, 2012  | Leave a Comment
Filed under Comics

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

Posted on April 12, 2012  | Leave a Comment
Filed under Animation

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”

Posted on April 8, 2012  | 1 Comment
Filed under Animation

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

Posted on April 4, 2012  | 1 Comment
Filed under Animation, Story

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

Posted on April 3, 2012  | Leave a Comment
Filed under Drawings, Portfolio

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)

Posted on March 27, 2012  | 3 Comments
Filed under Animation, Education

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

Posted on March 27, 2012  | Leave a Comment
Filed under Animation

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

Posted on March 24, 2012  | 5 Comments
Filed under Drawings

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

Thought process (The graduate) – video reference

Posted on March 23, 2012  | Leave a Comment
Filed under Acting

I don’t normally watch TV but yesterday night I was so exhausted by a long day of doors sanding/painting and gardening that I only felt like switching on the evil box and got very lucky!

The evening started pretty badly with a weakly acted French TV series featuring an OCD striken police inspector reminiscent of Monk, then I found out that Dustin Hoffman was playing on two channels at the same time!

I started with 2008 “Last Chance Harvey” then got sucked into the very original 1967 “The Graduate”.

I had never seen “The graduate” but I loved it. It is a very light hearted movie with a fun spirit that reminded me of the French New Wave cinema for it’s very creative use of editing and reaaaalllly long shots. As noted by Mathieu Kassovitz in an after movie discussion, at four hundred, the amount of shots is well below the usual thousand to two thousand shots. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mike Nichols got some inspiration in watching Jean Luc Godard 1960’s “Breathless”.

The movie also features some really fun sequence transitions similar to what Ronnie Del Carmen boarded on “Up”, with the environment changing while the camera tracks the main character in the middle of an action. We see for example Hoffman leaps out of the swimming pool to lay flat on the bed of his lover 😉

So! Such a long introduction to a very short shot that could have probably lasted few more minutes. I still think it is a great reference for Take/Thought process as it is very well acted and shows a clear change of thought. Beware, this is the very end of the movie so it contains a big spoiler.

The scene only starts 3 mins 56 into the clip but I created a bookmark just before so you don’t miss the very comic shot with the entire bus starring at the youth. A shot that probably summarizes part of the movie. Here is the bookmark http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahFARm2j38c&t=3m46s followed by the entire clip.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahFARm2j38c[/youtube]

Related posts:
Take – video reference
Kids take – video reference

Madagascar 3 second trailer

Posted on March 22, 2012  | Leave a Comment
Filed under Animation

I must admit I wasn’t too excited by the first trailer but that one is looking a bit more promising. For some reason it reminds me of a mix between “Cloudy with a chance of meatballs”, “Open Season 3” and “Despicable Me”

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXgav4_hDOk[/youtube]

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