David Hall's Alice Boards

Thad K. has been nice enough to assemble a .zip file of some incredible Alice in Wonderland storyboards. Go check it out and leave him some love. Thanks Thad!

Eric Tan's WALL E Posters

These are great. You can buy them here for $165 each. Eric is extremely talented - check out his blog here. (He's also got Indiana Jones posters in the same style! Old school indy, not refrigerator-monkey-alien-Indy.)



I'm off to the Sketchcrawl up by Crissy Field and Fort Point. Hope it's nice and cool up there...

Kung Fu Panda, 2D style.

If you've seen the film, you were likely impressed by the incredible 2D opening for Kung Fu Panda done by James Baxter. If you'd like to watch a streaming version of the opening, click here. For all you animation nuts out there, Kevin Koch of the Synchrolux blog has been kind enough to create a quicktime file that you can frame-by-frame through.

When this animation first came up on screen it basically took my breath away. I haven't seen something handdrawn that looked this great in quite a long time. The closest thing would probably be the animated bits in Enchanted, (also by James Baxter), but those had the classic Disney look to them and the KFP opening is something completely different. It feels a bit like anime, a bit like Sin City, and a bit like some crazy Chinese graphic novel written by a Disney animator. Absolutely beautiful design, textures, animation, and hilarious writing.

Anyone have any knowledge about the actual production process involved with this project? I'm gonna go ahead and say it looks like full hand drawn animation that was then brought into photoshop and painted frame by frame. Though there are some bits that could possibly be toon shaded 3D work. And other stuff looks like plain old Flash or After Effects cutout style.

You may also notice that in the "Art of" book there are a bunch of unused designs for Tai Lung's army. I'm happy to see that they ended up here in the opening sequence because the designs carry over so well in this 2D style. Also, the book has the storyboards for this entire sequence - they are quite faithful to the final movie.

I have assembled 30 or so still shots from the opening, quite fun to look at. The opening goes so fast (but what a glorious 2 minutes and 28 seconds) that the still frames really let you absorb the design. Enjoy:

Edit: The end credits, produced by Shine and Baxter, are available here. They're great as well!

(They use the flag as a wipe for the next shot - how cool is that??)

(Awesome character designs by Nico Marlet here.)

(Maybe you should chew...ON MY FIST!)

(I love this frame.)

(Look! The bodies make faces!)

(Nice clouds and color!)

Ahhh, great stuff. Rumor has it that there is a 2D Kung Fu Panda short in the works at Baxter's studio. We'll see when the DVD is released.

John K Lesson - Constructing Bugs

John K just posted an awesome lesson on constructing Bugs Bunny. Here's the original image:



And my attempt:


The test:

Wow! I thought I was doing so much better! And the one you see above is after I enlarged/moved the dogs head so I could compare it better. Things I did wrong:

1. Proportions - Bugs' neck and body are too long. Dog's head was drawn way too small.

2. Angles/Direction - Bugs's ears and neck are pointing the wrong way. Dog's cheeks are funny.

There's probably a lot more wrong with it...what a great exercise! I gotta do this every day.

Adventures of Mark Twain Clip

As I was surfing through Digg today, I came across this clip from The Adventures of Mark Twain...a Will Vinton claymation film from the 80's. One of my professors from RIT, Tom Gasek, worked on this film back in the day. This particular clip always freaked me out and is definitely worth a watch.



Definitely not for little kids! You would never see something this interesting and frightening in an animated film today. Thanks for doing something different, Will Vinton! The surprising part is that this clip has over 655,000 hits, 5,000 comments, and has been favorited almost 10,000 times. Who knew this film was so popular?

Monster House: Expressions

I just found this little booklet from Siggraph of how they created the mo-cap expressions in Monster House. It is very interesting because they include preliminary drawings (which I had no idea they even did!) and then in between they show the actors and then the final CGI. I have removed the actors so that you can see the direct comparison between drawing and CG recreation.

Here we have the scary neighbor Steve Buscemi character:



I actually think this might be the most succesful of the three characters they show. Though they do miss out on the exagerration of the mouth in the second two images...and check out the eyes in the middle one! He's much more menacing when we see more of the whites of his eyes. (Also, this drawing is the image they chose as the cover to this little booklet - NOT the CG version.)



Above is the boring girl character. They took some decent (yet rather subtle) expressions and toned them down until she looks like a zombie. She was definitely the one character in the film that I wished had more life to her. Again, check out the eyes - the same problem that plagued the Polar Express. (Ward Jenkins had a great post where he went back and fixed some of the frames from that film in Photoshop. What a difference! Are you listening, Zemeckis/Disney?)



And here is the token obnoxious friend, possibly the worst of the three. Though it does look like something went to the bathroom on his head, at least he doesn't look evil.

I'll be honest, I really liked Monster House for what it was. I would have loved to see it fully animated rather than Mo-Cap, but that wasn't my call. It's definitely a step in the right direction from Polar Express, but let's hope they keep refining and improving those expressions! Now, I wonder what it's Oscar chances are...

Puss in Boots

Here's a painting I did for my mom for her birthday. The two cats are based on her own kitties.