Backgrounds for 'The Turtle and the Monkey'

My student film, 'The Turtle and the Monkey' is 'finished' and in the process of being entered into film festivals. There are still a few things that can use improvement, or that make me cringe while watching it with company. But at some point, you've just got to let your baby go, let it fly off into the sky and proudly see it soar or watch in horror as it crashes to the ground and gets eaten by a cat.

The production process was interesting in that it was backwards when compared to how an animated production would typically be handled. I went into animation without much of an idea about how the environments were going to look, because I couldn't paint or draw environments. I worked on the animation with a general idea of where the character would fit into a shot, but I had to take several basic painting classes to be able to actually do the backgrounds themselves. I feel that I still have a long way to go as a painter, but I don't think these turned out too badly.

Scene1

 

Scene 2

Scrolling background for a long right-to-left walking shot.

Not as long right-to-left walking shot

Scene 3

Scene 4

In the film, there is a cross-dissolve from the shot shown in the top pic to the one at the bottom

Scene 5

Distorted BG to accommodate for a pan from right-to-left.

Process

Corel Painter X was used for both layout and background painting. Because I learned to paint with actual paint, Painter's mixer felt way more natural to me than picking colors out of a swatch in Photoshop.

I started off by exporting a snapshot from Toon Boom Studio that I felt best represented the shot.

I then brought the image into Painter, reduced the characters' layer opacity, and drew the environment, as well as notes and framing information.

Then I painted the backgrounds, giving attention to layer hierarchy for when the artwork was imported into Toon Boom Studio. This was especially important for the shots that involved camera movement. Toon Boom Studio was used for all of the compositing because (1) I didn't know how to use After Effects at this point and (2) the ability to position and move elements in 3D space within Toon Boom is awesome.

Not that I recommend going about a project this way, but if you can't draw/paint environments worth a lick and you're willing to learn, at least you aren't completely dead in the water.

Didn't the first person to run a marathon die afterwards?

Here's a short cycle that I made to test a potential workflow using Flash for an upcoming project. All of the animation was done (slowly) on paper, then scanned and imported into Flash. Cleanup, ink & paint were all handled in Flash.

It's been a while since I last animated with the old paper and lightbox method, and the going was pretty rough. I kept looking around for some magic 'cmd+z' keys to whisk my mistakes away. And you never have to deal with greasy erasers on a wacom. I guess I'm just not old-school in this regard.

Based on the way that the video breaks up when exporting from Flash, I don't think it's the way to go. I've exported this video a number of times and the glitches always appear at some point.

*Update - the blank background of the original video bothered me enough to make me revisit this video and give it some groovy speedlines.

筋肉ハイスクール!!

Here are a couple of characters I designed for an animation exercise that I'm planning. Let's call them 'Ray' and 'Warren'.

I found an incredible compilation of fighting animation by Norio Matsumoto on YouTube and felt compelled to attempt a Japanese style animated fight scene. Ray and Warren are based on a couple of my best friends from high school and a little comic I did back then called 'Kinnick Fighter' - 'Kinnick' being the name of our high school. It was the era when Street Fighter mania was sweeping the world and Dragon Ball Z was the must-see cartoon on Japanese TV (yes, I'm quite old) and I thought it would be fun to draw a comic featuring my group of friends engaging in fisticuffs.

No, I will not post samples from it.

Over the years, I've thought about ways to develop it into a series of some sort, with the slightly altered title Kinniku High School (kinniku is Japanese for 'muscle'). But ultimately, I don't think the world needs yet another teenage fighting series.

I've had to shove the exercise to the back burner for a bit while I deal with other things, but I hope to get it going at some point in the near future. For now, Here are some exploratory sketches that eventually led to the designs you see above.

 

Bulalove

I was thinking recently about how I haven't done much animation containing dialogue. So I set out to remedy that situation. But I couldn't just do any old vanilla 11 Second Club sound byte. Ohhhh no. I needed to stir in some of that Pilipino play-bor.



The bit is from the latest Rex Navarrete comedy album , Live at Cobb's. I actually haven't had bulalo before, but I probably need to get the bulalovin' going on one of these days.

P.A.C. Man

I'm one of those cranky old men who will swear up and down that video games were better twenty years ago then they are today, that today's games lack personality, and that the proliferation of first-person shooters spells the death of gaming. I'm also kind of a hypocrite, whose SNES library is composed of mostly Street Fighter clones.

Anyway, so I came up with an idea for a series of illustrations under the theme of "If classic video games were conceived today". These would be ridiculous pictures that would skewer today's games in all of their testosterone-laden, dude-bro-ness. And Pac-Man would be the first. The problem is, I'm having a really hard time making this idea look unappealing.

PAC-Man 2011 would be a first-person-shooter (of course) starring an unarmed space marine who is trapped aboard a ship infested by deadly ghosts. There are weapons hidden in remote corners of the ship that he can use to fend off the ghosts, but ammo is finite. P.A.C., by the way, would stand for "Paranormal Assault Corps" or "Planetary Assault Corps". I can see a legion of dude-bros lining up outside of their local Gamestops already ...

Fall back, you jive suckas!

I'm somewhat of an overzealous music consumer, so when left to my own devices,  a lot of my ideas end being inspired by random tracks that pop up when I do the good ol' iTunes shuffle. Whenever the song, "Chicago Falcon" by modern-day funk ensemble The Budos Band comes on, it inspires me to try to 'pimp strut' before I realize that I have no idea what a 'pimp strut' is supposed to be. The following walk cycle is my attempt to figure that out:

I've spent the last few years animating The Turtle and the Monkey on twos, and I figured that I needed some practice animating on ones again. It was also refreshing to animate a character who wasn't a monkey or a turtle. The animation is a combination of ones and twos. This cycle went through several revisions and ended up taking longer than I expected. But I'm pretty satisfied with the result.

Orange suit swag

The Turtle and the Monkey

'The Turtle and the Monkey' is my graduation project for the De Anza College animation program. It's an adaptation of a supposedly popular Filipino folk tale. I say supposedly because I had never heard of the story before developing my adaptation of it. Hurray for cultural deprivation!

Production took place over the course of almost three years. I'm the film's director and sole animator. The animation was handled in Toon Boom Studio, while the the backgrounds were done in Corel Painter. Actually, I didn't even know how to paint before starting the production process, so I went straight into line tests and animation while spending a school year taking basic painting classes. I'm better at it, but it's still mostly witchcraft to me. 

A preliminary version was completed in time for the De Anza College Student Film Show in June 2011. I'm still tweaking it for release to film festivals as of November 2011. I'm hoping to have a final version done before the end of the year. 

The following is a trailer I made for the De Anza College version of the film: