Some cool NEW stuff!

Well I guess I should post up some new stuff. Posting just these old animations looks like I’m not doing anything productive just living in the past (man!).

First up Roseline and I have just finished (pending client approval) a mobile phone worker recruitment animation that is intended (I believe) for the web. The storyboards and character design were done by my ex-animation lecturer and fellow ‘Dogstar’ employee Todd Millias. For a short web animation it was a little bit more complicated than we were expecting. Especially the opening shot that is a track down from the city into a dungeon where there are a whole heap of these ‘bean’ characters working. I think Todd threw that in to give me a challenge haha.

(camera moves down from city to bean worker word)

Roseline and I split the work up so that I would do the backgrounds, effects and the animation in the dungeon scenes and she would do all the character animation in the cloud 9 scenes. Working for the web it’s really important to reuse as much as possible and after spending a year working on ‘Dogstar’ it was hard to change our wasteful ways of creating millions of new symbols. Rose did some really beautiful character animation of the main ‘bean’. He looked like a character out of those old 30-40s informational cartoons with his wide happy smile. My ‘beans’ looked more like my ‘Mr Gough’ stuff with their dopy spaced out eyes.

(my dopy beans)

(Roseline's beans in Cloud 9)

Speaking of ‘Mr Gough’, Roseline and I attended another comic ‘draw-off’ with fellow comic artists that took part in that 24hr challenge that happened last year. It was supposed to also be another 24hr comic but I wanted to do something a bit more planned and executed than ‘Kinetic’ and Roseline also wanted to bail early for her own reasons. So we both did about 3-4hrs which was a little weak on our part I hope the other guys did better (sorry yo!). Anyway Rose (check here) and I are doing two separate comics that we are going to combine into one AWESOME!!! large comic. My comic will be about ‘Mr Gough’ it will loosely follow where the short animation finishes off and it will all be done in full page and double page spreads. With this comic I’m putting a lot of effort into the design aspect and trying to make a ‘Mr Gough’ world. I’m taking some of my influence from what I remember ‘Super Mario World’ being like and also a bit of ‘Dr Seuss’ surrealness. There is one spread that Roseline and I co-wrote where a couple of characters (a fisherman and a frenchman) do a little song and Roseline is going to guest draw this as she will draw the singing poses very funny.

(first page)

Another comic that I’m sure you thought I have forgotten about ‘Vicious and Faust’. Since the webcomicnation comics have now caught up to where I left it here on the blog, there will be new issue put up every Saturday over the next few weeks (I’ll probably stick to only doing 13 episodes per series). I’ve already pencilled out 2 eps and it’s now a bit more character comedy like the first season. I’ve been reading John K’s blog a lot and he did a post a little while back about how artists seem to always be doing the same expressions that they should try and look for more interesting faces. ‘Vicious and Faust’ has always been my comic to experiment and try new things so I’m giving this a go and I’m pulling funny faces in my mirror and trying to sketch them.

(issue 17)

(issue 18)

And finally ‘Porcelain’. Roseline and I are pushing to get this film out of the way. We’ve got a whole heap of stuff we’d like to move on with but we can’t touch that until this film is done. That isn’t to say we are going to rush out whatever, we’ve spent ages on this film and it has to be worth it. Hopefully by next week we’ll begin putting all our work into flash and I’ll start posting some more progress on this film.

(layout for scene on bridge)

Well there’s an update on what I’m up to. I hope you enjoyed all this new stuff. Tomorrow I’m going to put up a very old stop motion film Rob and I put together so stay tuned!

Tim