The Christmas Post

I worked on this animated Christmas card with a bunch of people about two weeks ago.  It was a short project, and I ended up animating the beaver (not the clean-up), doing all the compositing, and adding all the sound work.   Didn't spend very long on it, although I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.  Worked on it with Anne-Marie, Kaitlin, Margaret, Maria, and Rebecca.

I'd love to post more film work, but I'm also trying to keep that "secret" until it comes out, so here's more portfolio stuff.  These were actually from the first portfolio earlier in the semester.  I did one coloured piece for it, although I was sick during that particular weekend, so it ended up looking pretty blah for my liking (I even touched it up a bit in Photoshop just now so that the colours were a little more interesting than the original).  I wanted to touch up some of the other pieces a bit more too, alas, I didn't feel good and ended up going to bed.  Here's a few of the better pieces for that particular portfolio :)

Posting November... in December

I'm late with posting for last month... again.  Here is a whole bunch of life drawing work from the latest portfolio.  I wanted to do some more colour pieces and maybe a digital piece or two.  I just ended up going with drawings from class though, since the fourth year film is simply taking up a lot of my time.  I haven't posted my midterm portfolio yet.  I should get on that.  Anyway, here are some life drawings and a quick compilation of some sketchbook work.

Tiny Animals and a Tree Root

We're nearing the end of October and I haven't done a blog post yet.  I really didn't know what to upload, since I don't want to give away too much film stuff (yet?).  However, since the film is the thing I'm working on most of the time, I kind of have to post something related to it, so here are some character design sketches from a couple of weeks ago.  I made the salamander a bit younger than what he initially was, whereas I tried to finalize the dragonfly a bit more.

So here's another random thing: a currently unpainted tree root that the salamander will be standing on for maybe half a second.  Yup, that's all :)

And I just dug this up again today.  I figured I might as well upload it, since I did this last summer.  It was the setup of an earlier story that, well... didn't make the cut.

Wings

I didn't post anything in September!  So to make up for that... I'm posting this a day later!

So my fourth year film is about a salamander and a dragonfly.  I don't want to give away too much at this point, but here's a test of the dragonfly wings that I've done.  It took a while to get the blurs to behave, but I think I'm close to getting it.

I tried different styles of animating the wings.  I had one that was more "realistic" in which you could barely see anything but a light blur in place of the wings, but it just didn't feel the same as seeing glimpses of the actual wings.  I don't really know what else to type.  So yeah, here is a GIF:

It's That Time of Year

Blog header update!  I wanted to do something different than the past years, so I kept the drawing rougher.  And... I didn't use any blue!  That's a first.

So yeah, that's that.  Here's a higher resolution version of the header.

Past Mey-Me Monsters can be found here:
2013
2012
2011

But how would my last summer post of 2014 be complete without animal drawings?  That's right, here's a whole bunch more of 'm from the last couple of weeks:

There comes a time where one has drawn too many giraffes.

Aaaaand fourth year starts in two days.  Wait, what?!

Graphite Animals Have Returned

Summer is sneakily trickling by and I'm almost starting fourth year... weird.

Here are some more zoo animal drawings for y'all, because... well... we're still doing zoo trips.  I switched over to drawing with a pencil again recently, which feels nice and stuff.

Compiling these is always odd.  I'm moving all the drawings around on the page and I'm never quite happy with their locations.  And then suddenly I'll just stop and upload them, like today :)

I Like Rain

Rain usually means the zoo isn't too busy, which is very nice when trying to draw animals.  And you don't get sunburned as easily!  Here's a whole bunch of drawings from the last zoo trips.  All pen drawings :)

And here's a whole bunch of fourth-year film development.  The story with the salamander and the dragonfly is constantly being tweaked, but I'm slowly arriving at something I'm excited to work on.  In the mean-time, I've been doing drawings all over the place to explore the designs of these two characters.  I think I'm getting close to the final design of the salamander, but I'm still figuring things out with the dragonfly, who's (currently) a very jolly character.  Here's a whole bunch of pages:

I've been doing a bunch of Rayman Legends colour studies recently, as that game has some of the most amazingly beautiful paintings and colours I've come across.  Ever!

There's a whole bunch on these original artists' blogs.  They're all awesome, so check 'm out!

http://cmessier.blogspot.ca/
http://jbdugait.blogspot.fr/
http://sebastiendujeu.crevado.com/rayman
http://luyangartbox.blogspot.ca/2014/07/the-art-of-rayman-legends-2012-ubisoft.html?m=1

And if you, too, like rain, listen to this while doing anything and everything:
http://www.rainymood.com/

Third Year Film

This is a big post.

First, the film:

So, there was a looot of time put into this.  I was one of the production managers on this project, which means it got pretty hectic at times.  A lot of the work I did over the two semesters during my third year can be seen below.

Here's a beat board.

Patricia did the other three :)

Next up: storyboards!  I did a lot of these in the first semester.  We divided our entire group in three smaller groups: character design, layout, and storyboarding.  So as you may have guessed, I was part of the storyboarding group.  Many late hours were spent on this, but it was fun and helpful to collaborate and solve story-problems with a group.  Some of the stuff here was cut, as we simply had too much going on at some point.

Some colour keys here.  We didn't end up using these, but they were fun to do.  And good practise too!

Here are some of the rough character designs I worked on beside working on the storyboards in first semester.

An expression sheet I did for Edgar.  This was at the end of first semester and we were all super busy.  I did these all at some late hour.  In pen, haha (except one!)

Speaking of that end-of-first-semester rush, we had an animation journal to write for our animation and stop motion classes.  We also had to draw something for each of the ten topics we were discussing.  I used our film characters for this.  They were all drawn super fast and I must have been pretty sleep deprived at that point.  It's funny to look back at them now though, so I compiled them all here:

Backgrounds I did for the film.  I sadly didn't get to paint any of them, but I did put in the blocks of tone that could then later be coloured.  I only did the workbook of the third one here, so that one is still rough with some... uhm... discarded storyboard drawings in there :P

And yes, I animated too!  I wish I had some more time on some of the scenes, but there were other things that had to get done too.  I didn't do the clean-up for most of my scenes, so I worked on them up until the tie-down stage, which you can see here.  It was a pretty quiet video, so I added some music from the film to it :)

And as a little bonus, I tried doing a whole bunch of "Scary Edgar" drawings, for when Edgar loses his mind towards the end of the film and sneaks up on Bob.  Everyone kept saying I drew him too cute, so we didn't end up using these.  They were interestingly fun to do though, haha!

And that is all (I could find)!  I worked on almost all of the sound and music in the film too, which was quite a bit of work as well.  I learned a lot from it though, so that's great.

I have some zoo trip animal drawings I could upload, but I'll save that for another post.