The time difference between Hong Kong and the Bay Area is cruel. I’ve been at Lucasfilm for a week now and am still struggling to deal with the jet lag. Since I can’t sleep I figure I might as well paint. Here’s my little drowsy eyed, late night doodle.
I’ve doodled quiet a bit on my Wakefield project these last few weeks. One of the bi-products has been this half-finished thought of a storyboard sequence. It has kindled a lot of conversation amongst my friends and family who are all very close to the story. I’ve learned that nothing is set in stone and sometimes the best thing for a stagnant project is to throw away convention. I’m curious to see where Wakefield will take me in the coming weeks.
This was my first time keeping a small sketchbook. I usually prefer a more traditional 8×10 inch book. It’s all mixed media, pencil, ink, watercolor etc. and took about four months of very sporadic doodling to complete.
I bought this little fellow because Moleskine advertised it as a storyboard notebook. Lesson learned, always remember to read the description when buying something and don’t judge a book by its cover. I bought this thinking it was going to be an awesome storyboard “sketchbook”. Aparently notebook and sketchbook are not the same thing. Good to know. Still purchasing snafus aside, I don’t know what they were thinking. For some un-thought-out reason the books layout isn’t consistent. On some pages the frames are a half-page spread and on others it’s an eighth. The odds of running out of frames half way into a scene are very high. Why on earth would you want to switch sizes in the middle of a project? This is like printing a journal that changes line spacing from 12-point to 5-point at random intervals. My biggest complaint though is that the book was printed using a 1.33 aspect ratio. 1.33 is all but dead so if you have to pick any aspect ratio for a storyboard book at least go with the modern standard of 1.85.
Long story short, do to technical difficulties I gave up on any boarding ambitions i had at the cash register and just turned this little fellow into a handy pocket doodle book. In that regard it was much more functional. Let me know what you think.
This is a rough zbrush sculpt of the king I designed for Space Chimps. He was cut but I resurrected him here to appease my curiosity. Its been a long time since that project but I have been dying to know what my designs would have looked like in 3D. Now he’s still a work in progress but I wanted to share him because I’ve got a lot on my desk at the moment and it may be a while before I can finnish him.
I’ve done a lot of work on the site these last few nights but still have ways to go. You should now see a rough version of what’s to come. I’m working to update all the pages and my portfolio at the moment. Thanks you for your patience.
This is a rough pass on a silly sequence from my Dick and Don project. The set up is that our heroes were framed for a robbery they didn’t commit and at the moment are hot on the trail of the real villains. The gangsters are followed to a newsstand which opens to reveal a secret passage.
What lies behind the newsstand no one knows.
This is a very old character of mine, I created him a life-time ago. I believe I was ten.
Recently, I have resurrected old characters like Don here to see what my adult self would do with them. In this case it was a zbrush sculpt. Start to finnish this project took me one night of work. The base mesh was made in Maya and then polished up and roughly painted in zbrush.
I found this animated gif of him, dated 1996, and put it up here for reference. At the time of this drawing he is already a few years old. There are boxes of better Don drawings sitting up in the attic that I really should scan.
These are the roughs for the big jetpack chase scene at the end of the Space Chimps 2. It’s particularly memorable because my wife went into labour while I was working on it. This is also why it is incomplete.
THE WORST CIRCUS IN THE WORLD- Everyone else at the time kept drawing very traditional circus’ but for me I kept thinking about the little half ring circus that used to run every year at fairground near my house. The Swan Bros Circus. I was in 4H and had seen their act every year my entire childhood. The Swan Bos. were both awesome and terrible at the same time. John Williams always called this the Napolean Dynamite version of the Space chimp opening but for me it will always be the Swan Bros. version. I thought the drab setting would could provide contast to the hyper-saturation of the second act and at the very least be a nice brake from the all too common opening musical number.
The following two animatics are what got me the storyboarding gig on space chimps. Both were made before there was a director or any set stylistic or visual direction for the film.
THIS WAS A SUPER ROUGH FIRST PASS
Keith graves had made this little number and I was asked to do some boards for it. At the time the idea of a musical was still on the table. Here is what I came up with.
ONCE AGAIN SUPER ROUGH DRAFT STUFF HERE
After this I was asked to attempt another pass using Jungle Boogie.