Learning how to draw Basil and Dawson quickly was a headache, and as you can see it wasn't a complete success, but it was a fun attempt nonetheless. The inside panel originally had the little mouse girl leaping out of the way of the falling table, but somehow it didn't seem right to involve her in a college drinking party. Anyhow I hope this doesn't ruin your taste for The Great Mouse Detective forever!
When I got into 3D animation in High School, one of the traditions I had started was to always try to model and rig this dragon form of Mandy every time I learned a new 3D software. Now that I've learned Maya pretty thoroughly, I've been planning on doing a rather robust model and rig of this new design. Her old design was something more non-anthro, and was kind of cute but I think this form lends itself better to 3D. We'll see if I ever get around to doing it.
A progression of a life drawing I did in Glen Vilppu's life drawing course at UCLA last fall. Sketched on tablet PC, so all the joys of being able to draw in layers easily.
Here is a random foxy dude that I sketched during a lecture in micron pen. I had been working exclusively with tablet PC for several months, so it was a nice moment to return to pen again and remember how much more control I can get.
And here is an in-progress concept sketch I did for a friend. This is his dragon character that he has been asking me to draw for quite some time. I told him I would do some practice drawings to warm me up to drawing a much better final pose. This was the first full-body I did of his character, done on the ol' tablet PC.
Last night, Jungle Gym grabbed the Best Animation award at the 14th Annual Shorttakes Festival at UCLA. This year's festival felt more like an animation festival than a general film festival, since approximately half of all entries were animation. As mentioned in an earlier post, they were basically all CalArts entries, and then Raul and I. Some really nice CalArts stuff, I particularly enjoyed Jose y Maria by Edward Juan, and Word Fisher's Secret Piano by Wenchung Lu. Of course, it was awesome to see Raul's Fly on the big screen again. His films always have such great character appeal, and seem to always have epic title sequences, which I adore. So anyhow, Jungle Gym wins it. Incredible. I guess there are people out there who still have love for the purple hippo!
The official entries have been announced for the 14th annual UCLA Shorttakes Student Film Festival. The entire animation category for this years competition apparently consists of my film "Jungle Gym", my fellow colleague Raul Cardenas' film "Fly", and then a million entries from our friendly neighbor CalArts. I'm really interested in seeing it this year since I rarely get to see the films from the CalArts kids. I'm sure they're totally awesome, but Raul and I will be rooting of course for the home team underdogs!
This is a fancy looking image of a character "Troy" that was part of a game / comic series I drew when I was little called "Davidworld". When I was 12, I apparently thought not only was I such a good artist, but a well known artist that it was important I number my different drawing styles for my adoring public. I particularly love the crap-tacular tiled image whose pattern dies miserably as it approaches the right side of the page. Strangely enough, I even remember drawing this image at a hotel / restaurant called "The Virginia House" in Cape May, NJ. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this masterpiece from the past...erpiece.
Today the School of Theater, Film and Television at UCLA released the nominees for the 2007 Directors Spotlight award. There were a lot of brilliant animation pieces submitted this year along with the live action pieces from the production program in our film school. However, for some reason this year, zero animations were accepted.
I received my annual "we got your reel and we're checking it out" postcard from Rhythm & Hues today. I should start making a wall out of these things! And now I play the waiting game again. Animation gods have mercy!
