Creative Explorations Project - Draft 2

 Animatic with some key pose animation.

Concept art for how I will render the piece. I'm looking for a painterly effect for the backgrounds and a cell look for my characters. Still pondering how I will texture this. It's a bit flat.

Same characters, new approach. Why not just dive into how I might introduce my grad film? After receiving crit on my progress I have a lot to think about. So many new story possibilities! But I my main concern right now is tidying up my composition (line of action offender right here) and getting the visual look right for the piece or I'll never stop tweaking.

On a slightly different topic... This has been saving my life recently.
exercises for tendonitis and carpal tunnel
Works great on your poor animating claw hand, wrist and arm.

Inspirational Artist - Chris Appelhans

 "Children have a capacity to handle much ‘darker’ stuff than we give them credit for — as long as the underlying tone of the story is honest and hopeful”

-Chris Appelhans

  Chris Appelhans is an inspirational artist to me because of his use of colour to set the mood of a scene. He works primarily in Photoshop and water colours. He is well known for his conceptual works for Monster House, Coraline, Fantastic Mr.Fox, Princess and the Frog and more. Here are some favourites of mine.

Coraline

Fantastic Mr.Fox

Hotel for Dogs

He has so much more beautiful work. So check out his website for colour scripts, costume, environment and character design, as well as his personal projects.

froghatstudios,

his blog xanga,

a great (and perhaps the only) interview with him guupress

His recurring theme of dark versus light colour palettes will be helpful in creating a look for Sun Dog.

Creative Explorations Project - Rough Concepts

Here's my first draft of my leica.

Please excuse the horrible sound editing. I was forced to use movie maker after Premier corrupted my project.

I had previously created these characters in a series of illustrations, named Sun-Dog.

They have also appeared in another leica reel that followed more closely to the plot of the above images.
here!

Seeing how attached I have become to this concept it will likely become the foundation of my grad film. The plot is more visual at this stage than having any serious depth or back story.  That is my next task. Let the prototyping being!