Lost Son - Teaser Trailer

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 :)

Jumpamon

Jumpamon from Brian Neong San on Vimeo.

Happy Easter! Jumpamon is has landed!

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! :)

#monster #illustration #character #design rough #ink #pen #sketch to #aftereffects #ae #animation #2d #2danimation #puppet #rig #duik #mograph #motiondesign #jumpamon

A photo posted by Brian Neong San (@neongsan) on Feb 13, 2015 at 4:55am PST

My new profile video

Celebrity mimic + Levitation photography #keanureeves Epic crossover with @jeremy.ng, visit his instagram page to see the #static version

A video posted by Brian Neong San (@neongsan) on Feb 20, 2015 at 9:10am PST

LoopDeLoop - GO - WIP

Go Go Go

Coming soon! Another LoopDeLoop animation that I have been working on.... The theme is GO!

Love Every Drop

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.

Character Animations - Love Every Drop from Brian Neong San.

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.

Inktober 2014 - mid way

#inktober

I have been participating in the #inktober movement again this year. I am half way through and it is a lot of fun again... Follow me on instagram to see more and for frequent updates!

Create STUDIO - Making Of

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.

Create STUDIO - The Journey

The Pitch

Style frames, Mind maps, Mood boards, Diagrams... 

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.

Happy Halloween 2013

Boo! Scary cave!

Happy Halloween! This is my part of a collaborative Monster Art Show piece made with some good friends. Here is the never ending zoom!

Never ending zoom

The process

By Airmail - Making Of

Here are some development artwork for the animals in the animation short: By Airmail

Jack in da box

Finally, here is an update with some artwork from a R&D piece that Hendrik and I worked on at Soap Creative for the Monster Art Show to celebrate Halloween.

My role as the concept artist/designer was to come up with the character visuals while Hendrik modelled and rigged the character to implement into Unity to work with the Kinect. It was lots of fun as it was more of an experimental interactive piece of art for the opening night of the exhibition.

Digital concept art painting of the character

From basic shapes, to sketches, to finger painting, to a black and white volumetric study

3d model with the textures that I painted over

Here is an actual quick screen recording of the work in progress:

Jack in the Box Kinect Hack from Soap Creative on Vimeo.

Making of El Dodo Freedom - Part 2

Recently completed a short animation for the Annecy Festival 2011 competition:

http://www.youtube.com/user/neongsan#p/u/0/4z-TfoWMShg

Here is part 2 of the making of. Part 1 can be found 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.

Making of El Dodo Freedom - Part 1

Recently completed a short animation for the Annecy Festival 2011 competition:
http://www.youtube.com/user/neongsan#p/u/0/4z-TfoWMShg

Here is the making of.

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...

Rabbit Revenge Concept

Rabbit Revenge is the latest flash game hand crafted by Dan and I. The aim here was to target the mobile platform and bearing that mind, optimization was priority.

Below is the concept art during concept phase where we came up with the simple idea of dragging elements to the stage to alter the journey of our protagonist:

It was a lot of fun to come up with the imaginary world around a magician...

As usual, I start off with lots thumbnail sketches trying different options and refining and the character gets stronger visually and conceptually...

The same process with the other characters to be created.

Rabbit Revenge is nearly complete, so stay tuned for updates!

Street performer

I didn't realize that one of the quick sketch above that I created on sketchoholic actually inspired the idea behind the flash game that Dan and I are currently working on! Well you can see the photoshop digital painting, but you'll have to wait just a tad longer to see the game...