Help Japan, Animated Buzz, and some story panels

I know it's a bit late in coming, but I'd like to take the opportunity here on my blog to urge anyone that hasn't yet done so to consider making a donation to help Japan. What is now known as the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami which occurred on March 11, 2011 has claimed almost 14,000 lives as well as causing thousands to be injured. The destruction has left over 300,000 people as refugees without homes, and over 14,000 are still reported missing. All of this based just on the reports so far.

There's a lot I could write about Japan, it's people, and it's culture that have affected my life in so many important and special ways. I've been fortunate to visit there several times since my early twenties and I've written a small bit about that here as well as on my other blog here. Anything I could write about Japan now however, would all be in effect to say that, while seeing any country dealing with this level of destruction would be terrible, it's been especially hard for me to witness this crisis due to my personal attachments and experiences with the wonderful country and people of Japan. Luckily the people I know who live there have remained safe so far.

The links I've posted below have a great list of options on how to help Japan. The bottom most link specifically lists charities and what their commitments are in regarding the use of all their designated funds for relief efforts in Japan.

http://www.refinery29.com/5-ways-to-help-japan-disaster-victims

http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=content.view&cpid=1221

Art Director Dice Tsutsumi from Pixar Animation Studios has also initiated a charity movement called Artists Help Japan. He has created a nice, comprehensive blog where you can find a link to directly donate to the Artists Help Japan group's trusted organizations as well as find out about some art based charity events to help Japan as well. The site is here:

http://artistshelpjapan.blogspot.com/

In other news a very talented animator, fellow CalArts classmate, and friend of mine, Mario Furmanczyk has recently transformed his Animatedbuzz.com site into a new, animation based social network. Click on the graphic here to visit the site:


Mario has done a really spectacular job with the updated version of his site. Animatedbuzz still has the same great forum that many have used to seek advice for getting into the CalArts Character Animation Program, along with some exciting new added features as well. There are Portfolio and Film sections on the network for members to exhibit their artwork and animation, as well as various Art School and Animation Studio networking groups, and a brand new Mentor service too. For a small fee, interested members of the site can receive a direct, in-depth critique on their work by a mentor of their choice. Many of the mentors on Animatedbuzz have either previously worked or are currently working at many of the major feature animation studios in the United States including Walt Disney Feature Animation, Pixar, and DreamWorks.

Which now brings me to the final part of my posting. I don't plan on being a mentor on Animatedbuzz anytime soon, but I wanted to start putting together some examples of some things I've done to possibly post in the portfolio section there. I've assembled a few pages of storyboards I've done from "How to Train Your Dragon" and "Shrek Forever After". These are just a few samples of what I thought were some of the better story panels I drew. These are not in continuity, although there are some A and B poses from the same shot set ups shown. None of the sequences presented here for "How to Train Your Dragon" are in the final film, but they are from a very early screening of Chris and Dean's version of it . If you've seen "Shrek Forever After" you might recognize some of the things I boarded that actually did make it into the final film. Some of the boards towards the end on the last page however are drawings from moments that aren't in the final version of that film either, but I thought they'd be fun to show.

As for my work on "Ratatouille" and "Up", it will take me a bit of time to put those together because I can only scan or take screen captures of the boards from the media that has been publicly released by Pixar.

I hope you'll find these interesting to see. Some of these boards are pretty rough, and some are more refined. The more refined boards were tied down for the purpose of public audience test screenings, so that the test audience could read the boards better as well as to soften the impact of things as they switched from the completed CG imagery back into the story reels .

Supergirl Sketch

Summer 2010 sketches

2010 has been a really busy year so far. I've been trying to keep up with environment sketching when I have the time. I attended the 28th Annual Sketchcrawl at Hollywood and Highland on July 31st. A couple of these sketches are from that event, and the one drawn in the box was done in Burbank. I scanned them in from my sketchbook and then added some tone in photoshop.


I've been sketching people quite a bit in my off hours as well. I've been drawing really small, and trying to simplify. These are some of the more successful ones I've done lately:

Kind of a boring update here, but what the heck. Okay...now back to work.

Do the Roar!

Well another film I worked on at DreamWorks just came out this past weekend "Shrek Forever After". It was a fun crew to be a part of. I came on to the movie in the final eight months or so of the production and the story crew I worked with was much smaller this time around.

Anthony Zeirhut, Maggie Kang, Joel Crawford, Ryan Crego, and our head of story Walt Dohrn, who voiced our fantastic villain Rumpelstiltskin, were all great folks to work with in story. Mike Mitchell, our director was awesome, as well as the production staff including Gina Shay, Suvi Booth, Mary Quinn, Bonnie Ann Robinson, and Daniel Inkeles. Again I've attached links to everyone where possible. Congratulations to everyone who worked on the final chapter, it was cool to work with such a nice crew.

2010 Update: Environment Sketches and How to Train Your Dragon

Happy New Year! Wow, it's been quite a while since my last update.

I've been taking the Environment Sketching class with Ed Li at the Concept Design Academy this year. It's been a pretty good experience, and I think it's helped me learn and improve on some things I've been wanting to get better at for a while. Most importantly it's forced me to go out there and get more experience sketching on location, which seems to be the best way to learn. I've still got a long way to go with it, but it's been cool to go to different spots in Los Angeles and do some drawing with the added benefit of being in the company of a knowledgeable instructor, who does on-site demonstrations and is available to ask questions to at any time. Here's a page I put together of what I felt was my best work so far:


Some of these I sketched on my own, and some of them I did during trips the class took to various locations. These drawings were done in Burbank, at the Americana in Glendale, inside the Bradbury Building in Downtown L.A., and at a coffee shop in Koreatown. I experimented with using markers a bit here which was challenging and fun.

Ed has been pushing us to do thumbnails to explore different compositions of the locations and to compose our sketches within a frame. It's been a good discipline to try out. It's also been interesting to experience how intellectual it can be drawing from a location like this, since I've found that you have to edit, organize, and change things so much. It seems to be pretty much impossible to draw everything you see and do it completely accurately, so you have to try and make good intelligent choices that express the feeling of the location or that highlight what you want to emphasize and focus on. Not that I've necessarily done a spectacular job with that here, but it's been exciting to finally be inspired by seeing the possibilities of using design. Figuring out why the shapes you're drawing in the landscape look the way they look according to the rules of perspective, form, and logical common sense is also something that the instructor got me thinking about too.

In other news, I guess it's no secret that "How to Train Your Dragon" opens in the U.S. this Friday, March 26th, 2010. All of us here at DreamWorks are very excited for it. I just saw the final version of the film at the crew wrap party last weekend and it was awesome. I hope that everyone can get a chance to see the film in theaters. I'm pretty confident that you won't be disappointed.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I got the chance to work on the movie with Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois during the first 4 or 5 months of their run on the project. I can't claim to have worked on a particular sequence in the final film since it was so early on in their new version of the movie and things changed and grew a lot since I wrapped, but it was a fun project to be a part of while I was on the story crew.

Speaking of the story crew, they were a great team to work with and they're a very talented bunch of people that I'd like to mention here. Chris Sanders, Alessandro Carloni, Steve MacLeod, Tron Mai, , Ben Balistreri, Tom Owens, Johane Matte, Mike Lester, John Puglisi, Aimee Marsh, Dave Derrick, Dave Pimentel, Gary Graham, Jeff Snow, Josh Pruett, and Mark Koetsier. I hadn't heard of many of these guys and gals until I started working at DWA, so I've attached to links to all their names where possible. Check out their work if you get the chance.

The production people on the show were great too. Producers Bonnie Arnold and Kristine Belson, as well as the other production staff I worked with including Kate Spencer, David Joyner, Scott Sakamoto, and Jabari Phillips.

So I figured I'd end this post with a small collection of sketches I did while I was working on the film. Before I start working on a sequence I like to try and sketch the characters so that I can get a feel for their proportions, shapes, and construction in order to try and develop a shorthand for them. The little old lady, Gothi, played a much bigger role in the earlier version of the story, which is why I have a drawing of her here. These sketches don't necessarily represent who the characters ended up becoming personalty wise in the final film, but I thought they'd be fun to show:


I hope to get back to posting personal stuff here sooner rather than later, but I'll definitely be back around in May to post a bit about the other film I worked on coming out this year, "Shrek Forever After".

How to Train Your Dragon

Image from the How to Train Your Dragon website gallery section.

I've been pretty busy at work lately, so I've missed my monthly post. I hope to get back to doing it soon.

It was about a year ago this month that I was in the thick of it, working with Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois on their early version of "How to Train Your Dragon".

It was a fun, challenging, and exciting project to be on.

The film has changed and grown a lot since then, and I'm really excited with how well the film has shaped up since I wrapped from the project. I've been pretty fortunate to have worked with some great Writer/Directors, Heads of Story, Story Crews, and Production Teams so far during my time in the feature animation world, and working on this project was no exception.

The film doesn't come out until March 26th 2010, so I'll post more about it in the spring of next year.

Here's a link to a page on the Trailer Addict website which has the latest preview trailer for the film:

http://www.traileraddict.com/trailer/how-to-train-your-dragon/feature-trailer


There's also an interesting discussion thread about the film at one of my old internet haunting grounds here:

http://www.drawingboard.org/viewtopic.php?t=71283

Check out what fellow DreamWorks Story Artist and Animator extraordinaire Rodolphe Guenoden AKA RodGuen has to say about the film there.

Monthly Posting

I'm trying to keep the tradition of updating once a month here with a new post. Nothing too exciting, just some sketches I did of people in front of the movie theater or in various coffee shops around town.



Obviously I'm no Christophe Blain, but these are some of the best drawings I've done lately. I drew them on paper with a ball point pen. No Cinitiq or Photoshop. It's a refreshing change to use somewhat traditional media.

People sit and stand in a lot of different ways. It's been kind of fun to try and capture their poses. I've been finding that I can't help but draw this stuff more on the realistic side for some reason. When my brain goes into "observation" mode, cartooning tends to get diminished in the process. That's something I'd like to work on changing.

I've been feeling kind of down about my artwork lately, hopefully I'll be feeling better about things by next month's post.

Messing Around

After drawing story boards all day, it's nice to relax and just doodle some girls. Try to play around with some shapes

I live by a jogging trail, and I often see this lady who's really into her exercise routine running by in the mornings. This sketch below is loosely based on her.

I've also been updating my other blog Buttermilk Skies quite a bit over the past month. Please check it out if you're interested.

Koreatown Sketch

I went sketching with Shiyoon last Saturday. We went to Hollywood and Koreatown. This sketch is probably the best one I did that evening. It was really fun.

I've recently been reading Egon Schiele: Poems and Letters by Elisabeth Leopold, as well as Drawn to Life: 20 Golden Years of Disney Master Classes, Volume 1: The Walt Stanchfield Lectures by Walt Stanchfield and Don Hahn. Both books are great and inspired me to get out there and do some real observation and sketching again.

I'm actually thinking of starting another blog where I'd like to talk about some of the books I like as well as share my thoughts on certain things. I know most people who have tried it have tended to abandon the double blog thing after a while, but I'd like to try it out and see how it goes. Mostly because I'd like to keep this blog focused as a place to share my personal artwork, while the other one would be more about things I'm interested in or that inspire me, and maybe even my opinions on certain things too. Even if no one reads it, I think it would be fun to do.

( Update: I actually just started my new blog Buttermilk Skies, if anyone is interested.)

Hopefully you may have noticed some of my new links here to other artists as well. I've met a lot of great people since I moved back to L.A., so check out their work if you get the chance.

Thanks to everyone as well for the new comments on my older posts. I just discovered them recently and I appreciate it.

Up continued...

I found out that Disney Hollywood Studios theme park in Walt Disney World has a display on "Up" a little while ago from this website.

http://pixarplanet.com/blog/disneys-hollywood-studios-up-display

They have some pictures of some of the storyboards I got to do on the movie. The sequence was mostly done by Tony Rosenast and was written by Bob Peterson and Pete Docter, but I got to help out in a few spots. I did the part shown where Ellie pins the bottle cap on to Carl, as well as a couple other things in the sequence that aren't shown in the photo, and I don't want to give anything away.

My boards start with the shot of Ellie looking down in the second row from the top, and continue all the way into the fourth row, where Tony takes over again at the final board in the row with the funny drawing of Ellie leaning in and smiling with her crazy hair.


Seeing the final film at the wrap party a few weeks ago was great. I think this sequence turned out well and is especially charming. The animators did a beautiful job bringing the kids to life.

Special thanks to Mr. Ronnie Del Carmen for his leadership and guidance of the story crew through making the film.

Up

Coming May 29, 2009.

I was very fortunate to have had the opportunity to work on this unique, and very special film while I worked at Pixar in the Story Department. During some late nights working on story boards for "Ratatouille" I would ocassionally wander into the small "Up" story/art area, they had at the time, and stare at all the wonderful concept art for the film, thinking,"Wow, I'd love to work on this movie."

Well, luckily I actually got to.

Working with directors Pete Docter, Bob Peterson, and Story Supervisor Ronnie Del Carmen is the kind of thing I had always wanted to do, and it was a great experience to be able to actually do it. Especially on such a wonderful and unique project as this.

Congratulations to all the people who worked so hard in the story department on the film, from early development all the way to the finished movie!

To the writers/directors Pete Docter and Bob Peterson.

To the story crew and all those who jumped in to help out story:

Ronnie Del Carmen, Enrico Casarosa, Peter Sohn, Bill Presing, Josh Cooley, Tony Rosenast, Nick Sung, Rob Gibbs, Bobby Rubio, Dan Scanlon, Garett Sheldrew, Jamie Baker, Bosco Ng, Jeff Pidgeon, Nate Stanton, Jason Katz, Jim Capobianco, Ken Bruce, Erik Benson, Bob Scott, Don Shank, Nathaniel McLaughlin, Ricky Nierva, Matt Luhn, and Teddy Newton.

I hope that I am not forgetting anyone, I will edit and add to this as names come to me. I think all of these guys had drawings in the reels at one point or another, or at least helped develop the project with early gag drawings, beat boards, ideas...ect, even though some were officially in the art department. There was a great collaboration between Art and Story, long before I got on to the film.

Congratulations also to the great production team in the story department: Shannon Ryan, Brian Wright, and Veronica Watson.

And finally, congratulations and a huge thank you to the producer, Jonas Rivera. One of the most down to earth, and down right fun producers I've worked for.

There are a bunch of other people to thank and congratulate like Kevin Nolting and the other great editors along with their team, the amazing art team with people like Ricky Nierva, Bryn Imagire, Lou Romano, Don Shank, and Daniel Lopez Munoz , as well as some of my animator friends who got to work on the movie like Austin Madison and Rob Thompson, and then there's Layout, Lighting, and all the other technical departments, but this post could go on forever. Needless to say that the crew on this movie were some of the coolest, and nicest people I've had the chance to work with. Please stay for the credits and you can see all of their names.

I hope everyone enjoys the film.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USpI6Jzl3No

Another Girl Sketch

How quickly time flies. March is almost over.
So much for New Year's resolutions eh?
I'm working on another digital painting, but it's taking forever.
Work has been keeping me pretty busy too.

So here's the obligatory, generic girl sketch.

Mr. Friendly

Another one of my New Year's resolutions was to post more artwork here. This a painting I did in photoshop of Mr. Friendly the cat, who's getting ready for work.

Sansho the Bailiff

One of my New Year's resolutions this year is to watch a lot more movies. Out of the twelve films I've watched since the holiday break, one of them just really blew me away.

"Sansho the Bailiff " directed by Kenji Mizoguchi.

What an amazing film.

I never really intended on making a lot of posts about movies on my blog , but this film was just too good not to mention.
I hope everyone gets a chance to see it.

Here's a great quote about the film from Wikipedia:

"The New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane wrote in his September, 2006 profile on Mizoguchi, "I have seen Sansho only once, a decade ago, emerging from the cinema a broken man but calm in my conviction that I had never seen anything better; I have not dared watch it again, reluctant to ruin the spell, but also because the human heart was not designed to weather such an ordeal.""

Update:

My friend Shiyoon Kim had one of his drawings posted by John K. on his blog here:

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2008/12/appeal-2-big-eyes.html

I think that's pretty cool. I'm glad to see John using Shiyoon's work as an example of appeal. Shiyoon has amazed me since we started as freshman at CalArts together.

I hadn't looked at John K's site for a while, even though I enjoy reading what he has to say and seeing all the cool artwork he posts, so I started reading through the past entries that I had missed. I saw that John had posted a youtube clip called "Ratatouille - Character Profiles - Target Bonus Disc" in a past entry to basically criticize the characters in the movie, and he's definitely entilted to his opinion.

But watching the clip when it came to the Ego character profile I was surprised to see there were some of my drawings from the sequence I story boarded in the movie. My story boards are shown right at the beginning of the Ego character profile where he is talking with his assistant. The profile starts at 6:26 on the clip. You can watch it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAroxSedM3A&eur



I had no idea there was a target bonus disc, but if you would like to see some more behind the scenes art on the movie, it looks like it's a DVD that's really worth buying. I'm assuming they sell it only at Target.

I also really have to thank Mark Andrews for his help and guidance as the head of story on this film. First of all, for allowing me to do this sequence, and then helping me to see it through.

Still Alive...

Work has been taking up quite a bit of my time recently. I've been having to burn the proverbial midnight oil quite a few nights over the past couple months. So unfortunately I don't have much to post in the way of artwork this month.

I can't go to Japan this year, which is a bummer. I have really enjoyed spending the past couple of New Years there and picking up all those lucky amulets, called Omamori, for the coming years at the Shinto shrines. The luck from those amulets has served me pretty well.

Here is the Shrine I went to last year. When I was thinking about moving back to Southern California after my car accident in 2007, I picked up a "job" amulet from here. I was hoping to get some luck finding a new gig closer to home in L.A. and it worked out!


Speaking of the new job...
This year I have to stick around L.A. for the holidays, just in case some work needs to be done. We are on a pretty tight schedule. I don't think I'll mind it too much though. Working with Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois on this project I'm on has been a fun experience so far. Our head of story, Alessandro Carloni, has been cool to work with as well. Congratulations to him on his Annie Nomination.

My office mate and fellow story crew member, Dave Derrick, has also been great to be around, and he has really helped me learn the ropes at the new studio. We went to school together at CalArts. He was in my class, so it's been nice to be around an old classmate and friend every day. Dave just recently published his own art book called African Diaries. It's filled with Dave's beautiful drawings and has some really insightful writing about his experiences in Africa. I highly recommend picking up a copy.

I don't know if I'll get to post anything else before the New Year, so Happy Holidays to everyone and have a great New Year!

To close out, here are some photos of the things I will miss about going to Japan this year, besides those lucky amulets.

1. Riding bikes through Takatsu-ku.



2. The Christmas decorations in Odaiba.



3. Street/Festival Food. I think these are Okonomiyaki...



4. Sleeping on the train after a long day of shopping....



5. ...and finally Tina, she is a good dog.

Boxer Life Drawings

We had a model dressed as a boxer in the gesture drawing class at work the other day. Here's a few drawings I did of him, most of them are one to two minute poses.


The goal here was just trying to draw with a lot more simplicity. I used a ball point pen so that I couldn't erase any lines. I have a tendency to really over work stuff and fuss with the shapes and forms too much, so here I was just trying to draw with some simpler shapes and do it with as much economy of line as I could. Hopefully the character comes through and the pose reads clearly. I realize the drawings could be pushed a lot more, but I felt like I made some degree of progess with these.

As for those finished pieces I promised in earlier posts, I've been trying to work on some things, but they just weren't turning out well. It's been damn' frustrating, I seem to be incapable of finishing a single drawing these days, let alone doing a painting in the computer...

I'll try to post more when I can.

There's no place like home...

Thanks to everyone who's been leaving comments on the few drawings I've posted so far. No artwork today, but I just wanted to give a little update on what I've been doing.

I recently moved from Northern California back to Southern California in July. It was something I had been thinking about doing for quite a while, and even though it wasn't easy, I decided now was the time I needed to do it.

It's really nice to be back "home". I put home in quotes because technically I grew up in San Diego, but after having gone to school here for 4 years, Los Angeles is pretty much my second home. Thankfully San Diego is so much closer now that I can actually drive down there more often to visit my real home and family on the weekends. No more 9 hour drives! Woo hoo! I really missed so many people and places down here, so it's been really great to hang out at the cool spots with all my old friends again.

Meanwhile, I'll be patiently waiting for the entire Southern California region to eventually become San Angeles a la Demolition Man.

I also just recently got back from a trip to visit my girlfriend, who is studying abroad in the United Kingdom. My first stop was Glasgow in Scotland, where I saw a few NEDS. After a week there we headed to Palma de Mallorca off the coast of Spain and then hopped on a cruise to Casablanca in Morocco. We also stopped around to quite a few other places off the coast of North Africa and Spain along the way.

So that's it. It's been a pretty nice summer for me so far. I just started a cool new job on Monday, working with some pretty awesome people, and once I get more settled in I'll start working on this blog again.

I apologize for all the lame youtube links, but I left all the photos of my recent trip in Scotland. So to make up for that, here's a random travel photo of Darth Maul in a barber shop that I took in Japan last year.

Birds

From my sketchbook.
Still kind of rough, but I wanted to post them.
Thanks to Nate Wragg for showing me how to post the images at the correct size.

Cocktail Girl Doodle

I know I said I was going to post more finished work, and I promise I will at some point. That was actually one of the points of me starting this blog; to kind of have an outlet to experiment with a more finished, illustrative style.

However, I think I'm going to be pretty busy for a while, and I wanted to get a cartoon girl up here. I scanned this one in from my sketchbook, and kind of reworked it in the computer. It still could use a lot more work, but I just couldn't let those Life Sketches sit there forever.

I actually drew it in my sketchbook facing the other way, and then flipped her in the computer. I like to do that sometimes, just to see if the drawing holds up as a mirror image. The danger is that working it from both ways can even out your drawings too much. But I've found that drawings with great variation, like Ed Benedict's or Tom Oreb's hold up great when flipped. My theory is that when you flip your drawing or look at it in a mirror, you are seeing it as you will see it 2 years from now. It gives you a fresh eye, and hopefully seeing that mirror image will allow you to catch all that stuff about your work that will make you cringe 2 years in the future and allow you to correct it all right now.

That being said, I still feel like my drawings are too even, but I think using a mirror or flipping a drawing in the computer is something other artists might enjoy trying out.

I was also wondering does anyone know why my images are so huge when you click on them to open it in a new window?