I am proud to reveal the trailer for a personal short film that I have been working on in my spare time. It is written, directed and animated by myself so it is taking a while (4 months so far!) but it is a story about family, a journey, adventure and treasures that I really wanted to share.
Also here is a couple of exclusive stills for a sneak peek at some scenes not shown in the trailer. I will keep you posted on updates and the when(if) the film will be released / finished :)
I had a bunch of videos of iconic locations on my iPhone from my travels around the world. I originally thought I could make a short movie out of them but they were very shaky, the handheld type of shots.
So I thought it could work better as a short animation with those videos as the background. Nothing more fun than designing a little monster destroying those cities! Well it was more fun rigging, animating and compositing this little fella in After Effects with the Duik tools. Voila! :)
OK... it has been ages since I last updated this blog :( . No excuses here, but I have really done a lot of travelling. I will try to catch up and have some posts about what I have been up to. First here are some animation snippets for a project that I helped out with.
This was a collaboration with Round3 Creative and my role was specifically to redesign, illustrate and animate the water drops characters to be used in a set of educational animations. You can see below a few examples of the characters that were redesigned for an edgier look.
It was a pleasure to collaborate with the Artistic Manager Alexander Fuchs from the hair and cosmetic brand La Biosthetique. My role was to create and animate the stage visuals for the show FEEL.MOVE.BE.ART, a hair fashion show that pays homage to the youth culture movement that took place in the late 60's in the streets of Paris.
Below are some animated gifs of the visuals crafted in Photoshop and After Effects.
Rainy day in Paris, 1960s
Where is the party at?
You can also view the full video of the show below. A hair-raising visual feast :)
This started as a joke with my mate Okayboss. We were raving about watching Game of Thrones every week and about the upcoming Fifa World Cup in Brazil. After the excitement over the subject matter, we thought - what do you get when you combine the biggest pop culture show of the moment with the world's biggest sporting event? This is the result: an animation piece which was a lot of fun to create in our spare time using the usual adobe creative cloud apps. Welcome to "Reos De Jajaereos" :) Featuring names such as Neymar, Messi, and Ronaldo cast as various members the Houses Stark and Lannister, and cameos from Khal Drogba, Neuer the Wildling and a very special guest from beyond The Wall...
I finally made a little compilation of animations that I have created from the past few years. It's like a mashup of all the little bits and pieces of animations that I had fun crafting at the design studios I was working for and for personal experiments as well. Music is by The Glitch Mob - Warrior Concerto - Free DL. Enjoy!
After the pitch and approval of the concept, the process continued by using the storyboard to create an animatic in sync with the music provided by STUDIO.
Using the footage from the audition of the chosen dancer (talented Michael Marmolejos), I created a quick edit to identify the dance moves that would best fit the concept and the flow of the music.
After that, all the magic is done on the computer. Editing, green screen replacement, colour correction, special effects and frame-by-frame animation took a while but it was great to see the final piece on TV in the end. Happy.
It's amazing now with the project complete http://vimeo.com/89491324, to look at how it all started. Above are some of the initial frames from the pitch document I created. Combine Dance and Paint? It seemed crazy back then.
The Storyboard
Precious storyboard
Everything took shape with planning. A storyboard helps to plan the shots I had in mind and then those drawings are used to create an animatic synced with the music provided.
The Shoot
Cool location for a video shoot with green screen
This is when everything that was planned comes together. Every detail needs to be recorded and I had to direct the shoot from the weird vision I had in my head.
The Animation
My neat workspace
After that, everything was done on my computer. It was hard work and it took a while to do the edit, animation, effects and colour correction, but the result was worth it in the end.
It was indeed an enriching journey by creating this piece in collaboration with the friendly guys from the STUDIO channel.
The Foxtel channel STUDIO invited creatives all over the Australia to submit their ideas for a TV commercial to bring the STUDIO brand to life.
This was the opportunity to pitch a unique concept. My concept combines two unrelated art forms to visually form the STUDIO logo and is one of the three finalists selected to be broadcasted on TV. The development process from the moment of the initial pitch up to the final delivery was a wonderful journey as I was creatively involved in every steps of the way.
Even though my entry was not the winning one, it was an enriching experience to be able to actively contribute to tasks such as drawing up the storyboard, directing the shoot, animating during the post production phase and collaborate with a TV channel crew. I will share some blog posts about the process in the not too distant future.
More about the competition organised by STUDIO and The Loop can be found here. Also there is a behind the scene video below with an interview video of the three finalists including myself. Laughs guaranteed :)
This is the latest short animation I worked on with ZZZ Collective entitled By Airmail.
By Airmail was fully animated in Flash and some additional elements in 3ds Max. Then it was all compiled in After Effects for some special visual treatment.
It was more of an experiment in designing a unique character and then doing the rigging and animation in After Effects. Of course I was tempted to do a lot of effects once I started playing around in AFX.
Ahoy! Happy International Talk Like a Pirate day!
To join in the celebration, I would like to share a little treasure by giving ye all a sneak peek first ever video preview of Team Pok Pok(Dan Adijans and I)'s mobile game, Captain Skyro. Arrrrr! Enjoy!
It was real fun to work on the video preview. It's is still work in progress of the game but we thought that the Talk Like a Pirate day was a good excuse enough to share with the gaming community what we have been up to during our spare time.
First, Dan and I brainstormed a few rough storyboards in terms of the sequence and flow of the screens. We have a solid library of assets now already created for the game. So it was an easier process to grab the graphical and audio elements that we wanted to show and put it in a small video trailer.
The fact that we are at a very advance stage of prototyping, we were eager to record some of the game footage. Then it was a matter of editing and animating, which I have done a lot lately and been enjoying more and more...
In the end, it's not really a proper game trailer, but just a fun little teaser to celebrate Talk Like a Pirate day! Yarrrrr!
You can learn more about Team Pok Pok (made up of Dan and I) here.
We are also honoured to be featured on Kotaku here.
The sketches that worked, were used as a solid base for the general art direction. Still, lots of different styles were quickly experimented with before a rough colour speed painting gave some sense of where the animation could go.
Colour and style treatment experiments
The blueprint sketches were then used as reference to model the characters in 3d space. Low polygon modelling techniques were used due to my limited technical modelling skills. This proved to be much faster to model and rig.
Low poly modelling of the cowboy and dodo models
Wire frames of the models
A rougher stop motion style animation was then also better suited. The time restriction of the competition deadline also contributed to the simpler and more experimental direction of the final animation. More experimentation was then made with the animations in After Effects to get the desired look and feel.
Below are some final screen shots from the short animation.
At first, as usual, a lot of time was spent
sketching and doodling around to look for something that might feel right. It
can sometimes be a long journey of exploring new ideas and combining with old
ones. When presented with the theme referencing the USA, of course the theme of classic western movies came up and out of nowhere cowboy sketches started to pop out.
Cowboy standing out from the crowd
Character taking shape
blueprint for the modelling phase
For a recent project, there were some random dodo doodles flying around but the dodo concept was not used. Then it all kinda merged together: a cowboy who tries to ride a dodo...
Dodo sketches on the fly
Part 2 will show the process of developing the unique visual and animation style for El Dodo Freedom...
