I just saw this on Drawn! and had to pass it along to anyone who might have missed it.
"Disney artist, Stef Kardos, is posting iPhone sketches to his Flickr page. The miniature digital paintings were done on-site using the Brushes iPhone app."
The real kicker is this video. Who would've thought you could legitimately paint on a phone?? Quite impressive.
Oh...and HAPPY NEW YEAR from all of us at Creative Juices!
As some of you might already know internally, Allie and I have been pushing the boundaries on background stylings in some of the short animations we're working on. I was taken by a bunch of backgrounds Rob Richards posted over at Animation Backgrounds yesterday, from Disney's Paul Bunyan. Be sure to hop over to his blog to see all of them. They are credited to Walt Peregoy, who was likely influenced by the more modern approach used in Sleeping Beauty.
The two biggest things to note for me: color and space. Color shifts in hue throughout the film...blues, greens, purples, neutrals. They are not monochromatic, each image is composed of related hues using a limited palette. But the design approach from background to background is consistent. Also, even though the application of paint and patterning is flat, there is a vast sense of space.
I'm most taken by the above background, how he used these polygon ponds and lakes in receding scale to truly map out the topography of the land. Vertical arrow-shaped trees sprout up in varying scales across the landscape as well. All of these visual devices are working perfectly to create the overall effect.
The river is skewed in a similar way in this background. The blue is completely flat, but recedes back in perspective. He sprinkles in beaver dams to a similar effect here. Plus, check out the shape of the river (I mean, COME ON...how cool is that?). It's straight out of something Stuart Davis would do.
Finally, here's the cartoon, in two parts: (note the colors are washed out a bit)
An article by Sarah McBride of the Wall Street Journal. Things to consider, as we continue to think about how we deliver media and storytelling. Get the FableVision holography pilot program started...
Hollywood studios and tech companies are rolling out a host of innovations that will change the way we experience films at home and in theaters. They've already begun to serve up DVDs that let you chat with other people who are watching the same movie. They're also sprucing up theaters with crystal-clear screens and amenities like cozier seats and restaurant-quality food.
Coming soon: kiosks that can burn a copy of a movie while you wait, from a library of thousands of titles. The industry is also working on ways to easily send movies from gadget to gadget -- so you might download a movie on your iPhone and stream it onto your TV.
Down the road, expect new ways to easily store digital movies online, so you can access them from any computer, anytime. We might also get theaters filled with dozens of speakers for super-sharp sound, as well as much more lifelike animated characters."
We've been posting a bunch of videos at Creative Juices, lately. Back to drawing. Just moments ago I had a chance to hop on over to John K's blog, where he's talking about a term I'd never heard used before: how to avoid twins in your poses. See Mickey, above.
"Another sign admonished us to watch out for 'twins' in our drawings. This is the unfortunate situation where both arms or both legs are not only parallel but doing exactly the same thing."
Drawings like this should remind you of how you probably started drawing when you were a kid. I drew countless Ninja Turtles that looked just like this. John talks further about how this ties in to avoiding symmetry in your drawings, period. Symmetry has the effect of sucking the life out your character. He posts tons of great model sheets of Mickey to show what an alive character should look like.
I'm mentioning this as a reminder to all you Flash animators (that means you, Fablefolk!). It is INCREDIBLY easy to be tempted to copy, paste, and flip arms and legs to save time. Especially when you have a character facing forward. Every shortcut has a consequence. If you can spare the minute or two that it takes to rid your drawings of symmetry, they will appear all the more lifelike...less mechanical.
David Rosen has taken the time to do a video walkthrough of World of Goo. He pays special attention to all the little details that put the game over the top:
"Whenever I play a game, I look for design lessons that I can learn and apply to my own games. Recently, I decided to show these lessons in the form of a video tour of games that make interesting design decisions."
We should do the same at FableVision. And World of Goo is exactly the kind of game we should be studying to make our games better.
Food for thought (juice for creativity) from cartoonist Bob Camp:
(from a post on his blog called The "ON MODEL" rut) -------------- Here's my design approach:
I have an idea of a character and the overall form of the show, comic or whatever. Then I start experimenting, scribbling mostly like in the horse and pig drawings I posted the other day. VERY loose. I try to get to know the character first. Draw them as many times as it takes to start to feel like you are getting some where. NEVER start carving out thick black lines in an attempt to get a style. Lots of people perfect a style but do not perfect the underlying character construction, line of action etc. I catch myself doing this too. All icing and no cake. It's a dead end trap. You spend so much time working on a beautiful rendering over a badly constructed or boring drawing.
Once you start getting to know your character, try to create a shorthand version. I find in storyboarding that after I've drawn a character a few dozen times I have developed a shortcut way to draw them that is always more alive, simple and yes funnier. Now that you know who you are drawing you can start to refine the individual moods and emotional states that you will put him through. You know when Ren gets really angry he suddenly develops harder angles and much more realistic anatomy?
Here's the main point of this whole diatribe: The style you choose for a drawing should be about who your character is, what he/she is feeling. It's about how to use style as another layer to tell the story in a funnier way and not as a way to design the life out of it!
Do not grip your pencil tightly! Hold it loosely and use gesture. Use your whole arm. Do not draw slowly. make quick confident gestures/strokes. These gestures will bring you character to life and you always want to push the pose and expression because you know that once the drawings are translated into animation, much of the life will be corrected out of it.
Being a good cartoonist is like being a jazz musician. You need have great chops and not be afraid to..
Experiment Invent Exaggerate --------------
Store all that away the next time you take your pencil for a spin :)
Greetings zany animators! I haven't redirected your attention to John K's blog in a little while, so I thought I would share some of his most recent posts with you. In particular, this post from today (Inbetweens Can Be Fun Too). It's often common practice to focus your efforts on keyframes in animation, but much like his idols from cartoon days past (Bob Clampett), John reminds us that you can have fun with every frame of animation if you so choose. Be sure to watch the quicktime at the end of his post to see the animation in action.
More "Yogi posts" here and here. In later, he talks about how he channels limited Hanna-Barbara techniques---still using fun drawings.
I'm spreading the Halloween wishes from Randall Sly over at the Character Design blog. He's posted a candy-haul's worth of character sketches and concept art from The Nightmare Before Christmas. Definitely take a look--->HERE
I just saw this on Drawn! and had to pass it along to anyone who might have missed it.
via Animation Backgrounds
We've been posting a bunch of videos at Creative Juices, lately. Back to drawing. Just moments ago I had a chance to hop on over to John K's blog, where he's talking about a term I'd never heard used before: how to avoid twins in your poses. See Mickey, above.
Greetings zany animators! I haven't redirected your attention to John K's blog in a little while, so I thought I would share some of his most recent posts with you. In particular, this post from today (Inbetweens Can Be Fun Too). It's often common practice to focus your efforts on keyframes in animation, but much like his idols from cartoon days past (Bob Clampett), John reminds us that you can have fun with every frame of animation if you so choose. Be sure to watch the quicktime at the end of his post to see the animation in action.
I'm spreading the Halloween wishes from Randall Sly over at the Character Design blog. He's posted a candy-haul's worth of character sketches and concept art from The Nightmare Before Christmas. Definitely take a look--->HERE
