Colour studies

Trying out some different ideas for colouring my film and how to treat the space backdrop. Think the last one is close to the final look.

Yeti's

I sketched these characters in my notepad at work a while ago. Decided to ink them up and colour 'em. Think these two would make an interesting duo, might have to play with some story ideas for them. Good exercise in character design anyway.

Animation- WIP

DM Test Scene from Doug on Vimeo.

 

 

Sh 23 Blocking from Doug on Vimeo.

I took 2 of the most challenging/most fun shots to tackle first to set the style of the motion and get a feel for drawing the character. I was also thinking if the project turned out not to work or if I couldn't find time for it at least these would look good on my showreel as standalone pieces.

Gif fun

 

 

Been wanting to try out some looping gif's for a while. This was a bit of fun and also serves as a pitch for a freelance job. Hopefully I will find time to do some more of these.

Production Folder Structure

The whole production for my short film is on this card that's smaller than my thumbnail! If that idea doesn't make me back up files I don't know what will. I just spent a couple of hours building the folder structure of the project and copying the pre-production stuff into the new system.

Gives you a new appreciation of the tech guys at work doing this pipeline type of stuff :)

I found a handy program called Text2Folders which helps you setup folders/subfolders very quickly and since I don't know how to do a batch process this was a godsend.

So everthing's set up and ready to animate. Eek!

Astro Animatic

Dark Matter Animatic from Doug on Vimeo.

So this is the old version of my film. I've tweaked the story since then but I don't think I will post up the final version as I want some surprises in the final film.

Freelance Animation

Been looking for some remote freelance work on sites like elance. There seems to be great demand for these whiteboard type illustrated explainer videos so I had a go at doing one with a Karl Pilkington story as a kind of proof of concept. Quite fun to do.

Ant Problem - Karl Pilkington from Doug on Vimeo.

And here's my 2d Animation Reel...

2D Freelance Animation Reel from Doug on Vimeo.

Astro

 

Astro is one of many working titles for the short film I'm working on. It is a sci-fi comedy, the animatic is currently running at 2 minutes which should be do-able. I've spent months working on the story and reboarding it to improve it. I'm trying to tie down the animatic so I can start animating with set shot lengths. Once I'm animating I think it will start coming together quite quickly. I will be posting more progress on this in the coming weeks. Below is the sketcbook page for the image above. just to show how messy and crazy my page is when working these things out.

 

 







Graffiti

 

 

Whenever I travel I seem to gravitate towards any kind of street art. Here's a few of the best pieces from various places I've been to. I'm doodling a lot with graffiti influenced stuff but I guess comics/animation has influenced graffiti a lot over the years too so that makes sense. I always tend to get back into Vaughn Bode after looking at graf so expect to see some of that influence in my next post. I'm working on a title piece for my next short film.

Samsung Series7 Slate

This tablet is an undiscovered hero for artists, none of the companies making these seem to be marketing them correctly but if you scour the Internet forums like I have you will find that you can load Wacom drivers onto them and have full pressure sensitivity (512 levels I think) in all your favourite drawing programs and some smart folk have even developed a touch-screen hot key shortcut menu which has revolutionised my process.

The tablet is about £700 on Amazon and they were first class as usual with delivery etc. I won't bore you with the details you can find elsewhere but I WILL show you exactly where to go for the pressure sensitivity drivers and hot key software. It took me days sifting through forum posts etc to figure this out. Unfortunately it is not set up "artist friendly" out of the box.

First off go to http://support.asus.com/download.aspx?SLanguage=en&p=28&s=3&m=Eee+Slate+B121&os=&hashedid=Sr9xAv0Y2ZyvhqXw

Win7 64b select touchpad then u want the Wacom ISD_DualTouch_V7.0.2-21

After that follow instructions on the following link for the touch panel thing and the custom pressure levels.

http://forum.tabletpcreview.com/samsung/47422-how-set-up-your-samsung-series-7-slate-serious-photoshop-work.html

I hope this helps people to have less of a headache with this than I did. I cannot recommend this tablet enough for professional artists. If you are considering a Wacom Cintiq, then this will almost certainly be a fine alternative.

Fire & Lace

I designed this logo for my partners women's fashion ebay store. She gave me a few examples of styles she liked and I sketched it out digitally. Check out their store here: Fire & Lace