OdderNod

Another cleaned up old animation

2010-04-04T19:31:00.004-05:00

Here's another quick animation that I worked on in Flash to try to learn the Pencil tool after playing with the Brush tool on that last animation. I'm eager to get onto some new animations so it's just b&w for this one. Tried to control lineweight and stay cleaner than the last one.

Btw, if you can find it in your neighborhood, go see Secret of Kells!

Flash, updated (with a little assist from After Effects)

2010-04-02T01:22:00.004-05:00

(click to view movie)

I dropped the little run cycle from yesterday into After Effects and built a little set for him to run through, complete w/ fake 3D parallax. Gotta love the Grid and Motion Tile effects! Also, I'm surprised how well Magic Bullet Looks helps tie the whole thing together.

I might start doing some more tests like this over the weekend.

Flash?!?

2010-04-01T01:48:00.004-05:00

Finally got around to banging my head against the desk long enough to get over the weirdness in Flash's workflow and UI and start doing some old school traditional animation. It's sloppy but it sure is fun!

More soldier designs

2010-03-24T19:55:00.003-05:00

More development based on Option 'B' from the previous post.

Getting closer to the right personality

2010-03-22T00:35:00.002-05:00

Starbucks sanctuary...

2010-03-19T23:39:00.003-05:00

Soldier designs

2010-03-17T09:17:00.001-05:00

LA is my new home...

2010-03-13T21:24:00.002-06:00

...finally settling into my new apartment in Los Angeles, figuring out where everything is at and taking in some of the great stuff the town has to offer. I just went to an incredible Lighting Workshop, saw a bunch of Oscar nominated shorts, and hung out with a bunch of new friends. And I've started up the sketch sessions again.

Experimenting...

2010-02-11T23:55:00.000-06:00

I Want That Rock! progress...

2010-02-11T10:31:00.001-06:00

I'm finally digging in and trying to solidify some designs for characters for I Want That Rock!, an idea that I worked up a long time ago that I want to relaunch as a web series or comic book one day. Perhaps even something that could find it's home on an iPad one day too.

What an exciting opportunity that device offers for comic book artists.

Sometimes Sunday Sketch sessions stretch out into the week ahead...

2010-01-31T19:51:00.003-06:00

SketchSundays in full effect

2010-01-17T23:13:00.003-06:00

In between sessions of Avatar and Books of Eli I've been catching up on sketching.

Getting the hang of the Wacom

2009-12-08T23:35:00.003-06:00

More sketches done on the laptop waiting for car repairs to be finished...

Hurtling Through Space...

2009-11-16T21:34:00.004-06:00

...At An Alarming Rate!

Once again, I've been trying out something new for the first time. In this instance, it's matte paintings for an indy web series called Hurtling Through Space At An Alarming Rate. So far I've done 3 quick matte paintings on each of the last 3 Saturdays and while I'm embarrassed to show them, I've started to get a little bit more comfortable with each one. It's nice to have a blank canvas and a problem to solve and know you only have to finish in a couple hours. It's a bit of a misnomer to call them paintings as they're mostly just quick collage and levels-balancing exercises, but I'm getting there! Here's each of the them in order of completion.

Riding on an aeroplane

2009-10-19T17:26:00.003-05:00

Just some sketching done on the plane ride back from LA; kinda hard to keep the lines smooth and straight with all that turbulence!

Planet Hundo

2009-10-11T10:23:00.004-05:00

Working up some character designs for a small project I'll probably start up early next year, once I get my head around character animation in Flash. They're related to characters I worked on way back in this post!

By the way, if you're interested in a terrific book on drawing for animation, pick up Wayne Gilbert's Simplified Drawing For Planning Animation! It's a quick read that you'll find yourself going back to time and time again.

Sunday turns to Monday...

2009-10-05T22:37:00.003-05:00

...and the only way to get by is to keep on drawing. Having lots of fun with the silhouette studies, not so much fun with the shading attempts. One day I'll have better control of form and lighting.

another Sunday, another set of sketches

2009-10-04T23:16:00.003-05:00

Started playing with Sketchbook 2010 on my little Dell Mini 9 after finishing up an actual sketchbook for the first time thanks to the building momentum of SketchSunday Sessions. I'm trying out all kinds of new things, like silhouette studies and, gasp, color! Trying to see how far I can take Sketchbook 2010 after I watched the amazing Creaturebox screencaps that popped up this week. So much awesomeness!

A request?!?

2009-09-13T16:33:00.004-05:00

Another Sunday, another sketch session. A waitress asked us both to draw up the Joker; it's been a long time since I've been requested to draw something on the spot.

Jeff's turned out way better.

Photo Monkey

2009-09-07T20:32:00.004-05:00

Fresh off of a trip to Comicon I started pouring through the 300+ photos I took on the trip, and I was immediately frustrated with how flat my pictures felt. These were shots of heroes and mutants, Star Wars & X-Men, and they were just plain boring to look at. I've been following the Flickr account of a guy by the name of Stu Maschwitz, and I'm head over heels for the color, drama, and storytelling in his stuff, and I've been wondering how he manages to consistently get there.

Besides a boatload of skill, he's also an experienced VFX artist/director, as well as the father of the DV Rebel movement. Or at least he wrote the book on it. Well, I found a post of his that raved on and on about Adobe Lightroom and it's photo manipulation tools. Well, when the guy who developed Colorista and Magic Bullet Looks raves, I tend to follow his lead.

And he was dead on. Lightroom really is amazing, allowing you to twist and bend RAW photos to your will without destroying them in the least.

While I'm most certainly too heavy-handed right now in my vignetting, cropping, and color correction, it's gotten me stoked about picture-taking again. Check out my Flickr account if you want to see more. I'd appreciate any comments you've got.

Sketch Sunday Returns

2009-09-02T22:40:00.002-05:00

Fresh off of a wonderful wedding, I called up Jeff (@AnimationCosmic) and we started SketchSunday back up in full force. I was a bit rusty, but chose to dive into designing a specific character I've been posting up here for a while. I'm starting to get more comfortable with facial proportions and just now starting to get into some expressions. He needs some more elements to break away from a generic character, and I'd like to get him a little more elastic, but he's getting there.

The other page is just some more heads. And a scary looking Uncle Sam.

Wedding Day

2009-08-15T08:35:00.002-05:00

I'm finally getting married today. Here's my favorite picture of the little lady.

Drawing while flying...

2009-07-23T02:06:00.003-05:00

Some more sketches this time on my laptop with Sketchbook 2009 on my Dell Mini 9 while flying out to San Diego Comicon. I'm still getting the hang of that...

Making Up For Lost Time

2009-07-06T00:43:00.004-05:00

We missed out on a SketchSunday last week due to a Transformers intervention, so Jeff(@AnimationCosmic on Twitter) and I rocked it twice this holiday weekend. Wolverine made an appearance as well as the innocent bystanders of Starbucks, Panera, Borders, & Barnes&Nobles. Thanks all you unlucky and hopefully unknowing models!

By the way, if you care to know what I thought of Michael Bay's efforts on Transformers 2, you can actually hear them now. That's right, someone was crazy enough to point a mic in my general direction after I saw TF2. Check it out if you dare over at the Sci-Fi Partyline podcast.

SketchSunday means more faces...

2009-06-21T22:18:00.002-05:00

Lots of people watching today...

SketchSundays!

2009-06-15T00:24:00.003-05:00

My good mate Jeff Williams, otherwise known as @AnimationCosmic on Twitter, and I have started hanging out on Sunday mornings to get some breakfast, catch up on the week that was, and get an early start to what otherwise would end up a wasted day. Jeff's a mean sketcher, as well as a kick-ass animator, so he always forces me to raise my game. Or at least crack open the sketchbook for a good try. Here's some of the better ones from today.

Getting closer

2009-05-26T01:12:00.001-05:00

Always tweaking this guy aren't I? Maybe at some point I'll actually start writing up his story.

Self portrait

2009-05-25T23:44:00.003-05:00

My fiance is off in California working on a big FX movie coming out later this summer while I'm holding down the fort here in Chicago. I missed her so much that I started drawing pictures of her. :)

In other news, how crazy of a movie season has this been so far? Watchmen was a terrific exercise in futility, Terminator Salvation was mindless fun filtered through a videogame inspired point of view, Star Trek made me a true believer of JJ Abrams as well as slightly more interested in the future of the Star Trek universe, and Coraline was a tiny gem that most missed. I'm still looking forward to Up, Inglorious Basterds, The Brothers Bloom, and the synapse shutdown of Transformers 2.

For some reason I finally watched The Spirit & Dark City in the same weekend, and I was pleasantly surprised by both. For the life of me, I don't know what people were expecting from The Spirit, but I loved it! There was something about it's manic wackiness and snappy energy that reminded me of a mix of old WB Looney Tunes and the anime FLCL. On top of that we got some of the most ham-fisted campy dialogue and scenarios Frank Miller has ever let free from his raging ego. Not everyone's cup of tea, but I was all over it.

There will be another day to talk about everything that's right about Dark City, but it's right in my Terry Gilliam, Akira, City of Lost Children, Blade Runner wheelhouse.

Incredible Hulk in 3D

2009-03-01T20:42:00.005-06:00

Started playing around with the newest release of Silo, & besides a few perplexing bugs (saving files to an unopenable extension?) it's a great modeler. Lightweight, with most of the commands working the way you'd like them to, plus the ability to retopologize your mess of a mesh puts Silo at the top of my list when all I want to do is sketch out some ideas in 3D. This weekend I started a layout for a quick little short with the Incredible Hulk and this was my first rough pass at a cartoony proportioned Hulk. So much more to do in terms of fixing muscle masses and getting edgeflows correct, but it was lots of fun.

Project: November

2009-02-27T12:36:00.008-06:00

Here's some sketches that I did for David Stripinis's Project: November short. David's been working on James Cameron's Avatar since the beginning of time itself, yet he's somehow put together a crazy-skilled team together for this project. I was lucky enough to stumble into doing some concept sketches for him. I'm quite stoked to see how it all turns out!

Rush Job

2009-02-02T09:45:00.008-06:00

Between GI Joe and the Fast & The Furious oil tanker tragedy, there sure were some rushed comps during the Super Bowl ads. Take a look at that leg or Heavy Duty's ear: I'm not entirely certain that this guy's head belongs to his body. Ouch, I have mega-tons of sympathy for anybody who has to push a trailer out for the big game.

Ghost Rider in progress

2008-11-02T23:06:00.003-06:00

Thought Faucet

So the Ghost Rider designs are humming along: working out head shapes, as well as researching reference images of Shibuya at night. I also finally dove into some 3D modeling again with a new update to Silo. There's a little Kinada-on-Bike figure sitting on my desk that is serving as a great reference for 3D sketching up a bike to draw over. We'll see how all this Frankenstein design work goes for me...

Hey, I just clicked thru to this wicked neat intro cinematic for Valve's zombie shooter, Left 4 Dead: incredibly inspired character models and animation along with some great cinematography make this one a post-Halloween treat. I haven't seen this tasty of facial animation for a game since, well, since Valve's last set of cinematics for Team Fortress 2.

It might be time for another game company to start thinking animated features...

ThoughtFaucet

2008-10-27T23:55:00.008-05:00

ThoughtFaucet

My old friends from WMS, Bob & Marshall started up a wicked cool new blog called Thought Faucet, and this is the warmup drawing for this month's Ghost Rider Redesign. It's way too early in the game to figure out which way the final drawing will go, but for now I'm feeling Akira-era Japanese street punk. I really need an excuse to draw Kinada's bike...

...as always, I need to work on hands and hair, especially when it consists of fire; I could do well to shake off the Cheeks infatuation with the posing a bit as well. We'll get there.

still rocking the slots...

2008-10-25T11:43:00.010-05:00

click picture for link

So I left a job working on slot machines, and what's one of my first projects at the new job? That's right, making a slot machine: I just can't quit you, gambling world... :)

Seriously though, it was a real quick & dirty assignment that turned out to be a lot of fun. the slot is just something from iStockPhoto.com, and I went in and added highlights, glows, some meter text, and the reel spinners after the fact. I'm learning a new 3D program in my spare time, Maxon's Cinema4D, and this was my first chance to use it at the new job. Surprisingly, the 3D text was accomplished not in C4D but in After Effects, through the use of Maltaanon's ingenious little CE Shape Extruder script.

I love After Effects a little more each day.

and you can paint on iPhone photos, too?

2008-10-24T21:52:00.004-05:00

Drawn on iPhone

Just another quick sketch to pass the time on the train ride into work. I had no idea you could pull in photos from the iPhone camera. Pretty neat. Now if I could only draw...

iPhone as sketchbook?

2008-10-18T14:26:00.004-05:00

Drawn on iPhone*

So I'll confess to having an iPhone and letting it consume most of my waking life. One of the best reasons to have one over any other phone out there is the constant influx of new and inventive Apps that increase the functionality of the phone into a supercomputer in your back pocket.

A sterling example of wide array of things the iPhone is capable of is Josh Anon's Flipbook App. Not only does it have a stunning array of tools to animate including onion-skinning, Photoshop-style layers, multiple brush & eraser sizes, & exporting to the web, it really is just a great little sketching & coloring app. It comes in a free "Lite" version or a $9.99 unlimited version and it's highly recommended by me. The train rides into the city, the waiting for food at lunch, or long Starbucks lines have become much more fun...

*One little tip that makes drawing with the Flipbook App more functional is the purchase of a Pogo Stylus for your iPhone. Otherwise it feels a bit like finger-painting.

Frank Danger

2008-09-28T22:13:00.003-05:00

It's a toss up as to which comic book project will make it to the finish line: Frank Danger, I Want This Rock!, or a secret third project I haven't talked about with too many people. Here's some more Frank studies: I feel like he's getting a lot closer, especially with the bottom left shot of him looking with wide-eyed shock at two blogposts in one night. :)

Back In Business

2008-09-28T21:13:00.004-05:00

So it's been a while, I know. But there's a good reason, really! I switched up jobs to make a pretty signifigant change in career paths. I left the good old gambling industry to help a good friend start up a new media company. That's right, podcasts!

I've been spending the last couple of months shooting, editing, and creating show graphics for a new online financial news company called ONN.tv. We started a new channel with six brand new shows, and we needed some logos done quickly: all that experience creating reel symbols at WMS came in real handy!

The new job's also opened the door to start producing my own content: fairly soon I'll be diving into preproduction on several video podcasts, and maybe an audio one as well. I let you know more as it gets closer to reality. Right now I'm just waiting on delivery of a new HV20 that I found on eBay, and then the greenscreen tests can commence!

The comic book plans aren't done either. With all this downtime commuting on the blue line, I've been drawing and writing more than I have since I was in college. So there will be actual drawing on this here blog shortly!

Tiny robots

2008-07-30T21:14:00.000-05:00

Comic Book: Engage!

2008-02-16T22:36:00.009-06:00

I'm starting work on the comic for San Diego: I'm still working through what the main character is gonna look like. I hope to have him tied down as much as I can expect to in the next few weeks, and then it's off to buttoning down the script & laying out the pages in thumbnails. It's been so long since I've done this!

Getting crazy with FlipBoom...

2008-01-19T11:48:00.001-06:00

What's this? Mr Effects & Filters actually animating? :) I started playing with a tiny little program called FlipBoom (even though I already have Flash) since I always wanted to be a 2D animator when I was a kid. It's a really intuitive and graceful little program that makes doodling some animations really easy and fun. After mucking around for 20-30 minutes I got a little blink and a smile, and a whole boatload of ideas for other little tests. I'll probably post some up in the next week or two.

In other news, I saw a midnight showing of Cloverfield (awesome!), got shoved across an intersection I was walking across by an Escalade (no broken bones), and I'm ready to see a concert in the 8º weather tonight.(Bang!Bang!)

New look and new posts!

2008-01-01T23:30:00.001-06:00

So it's a new year, and another attempt at livening up the blog a bit. My fiancé surprised me with an incredibly awesome camera for Christmas, so you'll be seeing a bunch more of my amateur wannabe photographer shots on the blog. We hit up the crazy busy Star Wars exhibit at the Museum of Science & Industry, which proved to be a great place to try out the new cam. I'm thinking about getting a membership there just to practice shooting: so many different lighting conditions, as well as so many different scales to play with apertures and shutter speeds, and ISO settings. It's like trying to put together a puzzle almost. you know there's a cool shot there, but you gotta line up all the pieces just right.

Just like drawing, there's so much to learn: I'm forcing myself to only shoot in Manual mode, so there's barely any salvageable shots. Most of them turned out underexposed or blurry, or both. Here's a few of the cool ones that survived the gauntlet. I think I've got some cool Millenium Falcon shots that may have made it fairly streak and blur free. We'll see how they look once I drop 'em into P Shop.

Sketchbook 07 and moving forward...

2007-08-17T00:10:00.000-05:00

So thanks to some arm-twisting from Bob, I rushed together a little sketchbook for the big Comicon 07 trip. Don't go and get too excited now, as it's just a Kinko's mash-up of the stuff I've been posting over the last year here, plus some old school stuffs. It's just a wee little pebble in the overflowin' river of goodness that was to be had from the artists that made it to San Diego this year.

Whatta trip! I'm lucky to have some amazing friends, cos I not only get to pick up their books, but I get to meet a whole boatload of cool peeps that they're friends of. You've got to check out the blogs, sites, and books of people like Deanna Marsigliese, Robin Mitchell, Patrick Morgan, the magic combo of Bob Rissetto/Dave Pryor, Kevin Barber, and Javier Guzman. Too much good stuff to mention in one post.

If you were crazy enough to want a copy of the sketchbook, shoot me an e-mail with your particulars and I'll send one out to ya. I've got a couple of 'em left, so get while they're hot!

I've got a huge mountain to continue to climb, but the plan is to have an actual comic book ready for next year's comicon. We'll see how that goes. Stay tuned!

2007-01-21T12:45:00.002-06:00

Just spent the day sketching at Borders trying to get kick-started into drawing daily again. It's a mix of live-people sketches, drawing based off magazine photos, and junk from my noggin. One of the characters that I'm considering basing the comic around is mixed in there. If I can nail down a design I really like, I'll feel confident that I could get something ready for the Comicon.

If you want to see a real comic book that's in production, check out my friend Robin Mitchell's blog. So awesome that it'll give you a heart attack!

Comicon 07?

2006-11-11T00:42:00.001-06:00

So I'm just going to deal with the fact that my stuff pales in comparison to the likes of my awesomely talented (not to mention inspiring!) friends and start putting together my book for the Comicon in San Diego next year. This is the first burst of stuff I put down in my sketchbook a couple Sundays ago, and it's all designs for the revamp of a comic I made way back in high school.

Yeah, high school...

More stuff soon.

More Hulk Smash...

2006-10-10T00:41:00.001-05:00

I'm so slow, but I'm starting to get a bit closer. The Hulk smashing Superman to bits should suffice.

Training wheels...

2006-09-27T00:23:00.002-05:00

I can't help but make the Hulk look like either an old man or a depressed Frankenstein. Off to more research.