Here are some Zenigata expressions that caught my eye last time I watched the 1995 movie "Lupin III - Farewell to Nostradamus." Most of the animation in it is pretty boring and typical of 90s anime, but the odd shot is kind of funny.
вівторок, 27 вересня 2011 р.
вівторок, 13 вересня 2011 р.
I was sorting through some books in my room today, trying to find some to get rid of. Imagine my delight when I found this Hagar the Horrible strip, cut out and filed away between two books.
This is a real strip. Hagar's wife is having an affair with his dog. That's the only conclusion I can draw from this. There doesn't seem to be any joke, apart from Hagar's marriage that is. Hagar seems to be taking the news pretty well. I guess by this point their marriage was mostly for show anyway.
This is a real strip. Hagar's wife is having an affair with his dog. That's the only conclusion I can draw from this. There doesn't seem to be any joke, apart from Hagar's marriage that is. Hagar seems to be taking the news pretty well. I guess by this point their marriage was mostly for show anyway.
субота, 10 вересня 2011 р.
Yesterday I completed a two-week intensive Digital Background Painting course at school, before classes start full-time for Year 3. It was really fun and I learned a lot of Photoshop tricks. I'm also working on more Fester Fish cartoons, and some other smaller projects, but I don't have much I can show yet except for this work from the Digital BG class...
This drawing might be familiar to Fester Fans.... It's the usual 'Fester's house' establishing shot, only now I've finally created a daytime version. Now I won't have to keep using that awful attempt at a pre-sunrise version, seen in Fester's Nephew and Fester Goes Fishing.
And during the final class, we were told to do a night-time version of one of our paintings, so I did this:
So now I have a daytime version, a night-time version... and if I REALLY need it, that stupid early-morning version. During the course, the teacher gave us a bunch of really cool Photoshop brushes, which seemed like they might be good for imitating that early Hanna-Barbera look...
The drawing itself was done in about 30 seconds, so obviously it sucks, but I'm pretty happy with the colours and textures. I really want to do a cartoon with more of this abstract, flat, "modern" kind of background design.
And finally, finishing the in-class assignments early + messing around with crazy cool Photoshop brushes = "Fester A Go Go."
Blah. I know this stuff isn't that exciting, but I just don't have a lot to post at the moment. I'm busy working on the actual cartoons.
This drawing might be familiar to Fester Fans.... It's the usual 'Fester's house' establishing shot, only now I've finally created a daytime version. Now I won't have to keep using that awful attempt at a pre-sunrise version, seen in Fester's Nephew and Fester Goes Fishing.
And during the final class, we were told to do a night-time version of one of our paintings, so I did this:
So now I have a daytime version, a night-time version... and if I REALLY need it, that stupid early-morning version. During the course, the teacher gave us a bunch of really cool Photoshop brushes, which seemed like they might be good for imitating that early Hanna-Barbera look...
The drawing itself was done in about 30 seconds, so obviously it sucks, but I'm pretty happy with the colours and textures. I really want to do a cartoon with more of this abstract, flat, "modern" kind of background design.
And finally, finishing the in-class assignments early + messing around with crazy cool Photoshop brushes = "Fester A Go Go."
Blah. I know this stuff isn't that exciting, but I just don't have a lot to post at the moment. I'm busy working on the actual cartoons.
четвер, 4 серпня 2011 р.
I'd been meaning to check out this anime film for a while. I had heard a lot of good things about it, especially from the Anipages Daily blog (one of the best animation blogs out there, and the few that has intelligent, rational discussions about anime). I finally got around to watching it last night, and I was completely blown away.
I was expecting it to be a pretty bizarre experience just from the title, but I really didn't know anything about the plot. I assumed it was a heavy, serious psychological piece with a slow pace, with maybe one or two cool sequences. I definitely wasn't expecting it to be so fun. The animation was phenomenal. Just about every shot had some kind of hilarious character distortion in it, which is so rare in Japanese animation. The sheer amount of imagination on display was awe-inspiring. The variety of visual styles somehow managed to avoid feeling contrived, and actually gave a deeper sense of the characters' emotional states.
The story and its structure were just as original as every other aspect of the film, but I can't say too much about that without spoiling some of it. The "throw-anything-in" directorial style might not be to everybody's taste, but personally I'd been waiting to see a movie like this-- that felt like it was jam-packed with a little bit of everything-- for a long time.
I'm still in shock from seeing it. Maybe I should have waited a couple of days before writing this so I could say something more objective about the movie. But I just couldn't contain my enthusiasm. Right now, it's definitely my favourite anime film, as well as one of my favourite films of any kind. It's a tragedy that it doesn't have any official English release, and the only way to see it is to either watch a blurry online video (as I did) or get a bootleg DVD (which I probably will as well, just so I can own it in some form).
If you haven't seen Mind Game yet, do it as soon as possible. It's a potentially life-changing movie. I can't tell how yet, but it will definitely affect my own work in some way.
But then again, I also re-watched Wayne's World recently, and that's still one of my all-time favourite movies, so what do I know.
I was expecting it to be a pretty bizarre experience just from the title, but I really didn't know anything about the plot. I assumed it was a heavy, serious psychological piece with a slow pace, with maybe one or two cool sequences. I definitely wasn't expecting it to be so fun. The animation was phenomenal. Just about every shot had some kind of hilarious character distortion in it, which is so rare in Japanese animation. The sheer amount of imagination on display was awe-inspiring. The variety of visual styles somehow managed to avoid feeling contrived, and actually gave a deeper sense of the characters' emotional states.
The story and its structure were just as original as every other aspect of the film, but I can't say too much about that without spoiling some of it. The "throw-anything-in" directorial style might not be to everybody's taste, but personally I'd been waiting to see a movie like this-- that felt like it was jam-packed with a little bit of everything-- for a long time.
I'm still in shock from seeing it. Maybe I should have waited a couple of days before writing this so I could say something more objective about the movie. But I just couldn't contain my enthusiasm. Right now, it's definitely my favourite anime film, as well as one of my favourite films of any kind. It's a tragedy that it doesn't have any official English release, and the only way to see it is to either watch a blurry online video (as I did) or get a bootleg DVD (which I probably will as well, just so I can own it in some form).
If you haven't seen Mind Game yet, do it as soon as possible. It's a potentially life-changing movie. I can't tell how yet, but it will definitely affect my own work in some way.
But then again, I also re-watched Wayne's World recently, and that's still one of my all-time favourite movies, so what do I know.
неділя, 31 липня 2011 р.
These are mostly pictures I put up on the Fester Fish Facebook page, one at a time. Here they are all together, so you can see Fester's evolution.
Above: This is where it started-- after watching hours of 20s and 30s cartoons in my History of Animation class, I was inspired to make a parody/homage. I quickly decided that the character should be a fish because it seemed like the most illogical choice. These are the very first doodles of Fester, dated October 8 2009. Early story ideas, seen here if you can read my primitive scrawls, include a nutty professor ripoff, and what would eventually become "Fester's Nephew."
Here's another really early sketch from Oct 8 2009, with the first real drawing of Slightly Smaller Fish.
It took me a while to decide whether or not Fester should have a bowtie. I decided not to include it because he was already too similar to Flip the Frog, and a bowtie would've meant another thing I had to draw in every frame. Fester doesn't seem classy enough for a bowtie anyway.
^From October 25 2009. Wow, these are terrible. Fester looks completely deformed. I was really struggling with the concept of doing expressions on him. An early version of the title card is also seen here, as well as some bizarre "fin-leg" things that would've made posing the character way harder.
Oct 27 2009... This is probably the first drawing of "Fester's Goil," eventually named Blottie. All the elements of Fester's design were pretty much set by this point, I just needed to get better at drawing them. I planned to have Joe Rabbit (from my Space Goose series) appear as a friend of Fester's, along with the classy robot from the "Banquet Bust-Up" episode of that cartoon. They may still appear in future episodes.
October 29 2009-- More experimenting with Fester in different poses. I have no idea what the moustachioed Fester in the trench-coat was for, but it makes me giggle. As does the word "moustachioed."
This is another early design of Fester and his girlfriend Blottie, from November 2009. At the time, I was in the middle of making the third Space Goose episode, so if you spot them as background characters in it, this is what they look like.
More early misshapen Festers! In "Fester's Nephew," Fester has a pet man-fish (the opposite of him being a fish-man, I guess). This drawing is the genesis of that gag, although here it's supposed to be Cary Grant. In the final cartoon, it looks more like Jimmy Stewart.
By this point, the design was pretty much set. Fester looks basically like he did in some of the first scenes I animated in "Fester's Nephew." I still had to get better at drawing him though.
Above: This is where it started-- after watching hours of 20s and 30s cartoons in my History of Animation class, I was inspired to make a parody/homage. I quickly decided that the character should be a fish because it seemed like the most illogical choice. These are the very first doodles of Fester, dated October 8 2009. Early story ideas, seen here if you can read my primitive scrawls, include a nutty professor ripoff, and what would eventually become "Fester's Nephew."
Here's another really early sketch from Oct 8 2009, with the first real drawing of Slightly Smaller Fish.
It took me a while to decide whether or not Fester should have a bowtie. I decided not to include it because he was already too similar to Flip the Frog, and a bowtie would've meant another thing I had to draw in every frame. Fester doesn't seem classy enough for a bowtie anyway.
^From October 25 2009. Wow, these are terrible. Fester looks completely deformed. I was really struggling with the concept of doing expressions on him. An early version of the title card is also seen here, as well as some bizarre "fin-leg" things that would've made posing the character way harder.
Oct 27 2009... This is probably the first drawing of "Fester's Goil," eventually named Blottie. All the elements of Fester's design were pretty much set by this point, I just needed to get better at drawing them. I planned to have Joe Rabbit (from my Space Goose series) appear as a friend of Fester's, along with the classy robot from the "Banquet Bust-Up" episode of that cartoon. They may still appear in future episodes.
October 29 2009-- More experimenting with Fester in different poses. I have no idea what the moustachioed Fester in the trench-coat was for, but it makes me giggle. As does the word "moustachioed."
This is another early design of Fester and his girlfriend Blottie, from November 2009. At the time, I was in the middle of making the third Space Goose episode, so if you spot them as background characters in it, this is what they look like.
More early misshapen Festers! In "Fester's Nephew," Fester has a pet man-fish (the opposite of him being a fish-man, I guess). This drawing is the genesis of that gag, although here it's supposed to be Cary Grant. In the final cartoon, it looks more like Jimmy Stewart.
By this point, the design was pretty much set. Fester looks basically like he did in some of the first scenes I animated in "Fester's Nephew." I still had to get better at drawing him though.
понеділок, 11 липня 2011 р.
A few people have been telling me I should make a Facebook page for Fester Fish. So I did.
Here it is.
I hope you "like" it. Ha ha ha! Get it? Cause I mean both click the "like" button AND actually enjoy it? Ha ha ha ha!
...Seriously, hit the "like" button.
Anyway, there will be some good stuff on it that should make it worth the two seconds it takes to click the button. I'll probably post most of said Good Stuff here too, but I think the Facebook newsfeed is more convenient for most people.
Here it is.
I hope you "like" it. Ha ha ha! Get it? Cause I mean both click the "like" button AND actually enjoy it? Ha ha ha ha!
...Seriously, hit the "like" button.
Anyway, there will be some good stuff on it that should make it worth the two seconds it takes to click the button. I'll probably post most of said Good Stuff here too, but I think the Facebook newsfeed is more convenient for most people.
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