DISNEY SHORT

I didn't get a chance to post this earlier, but a short I storyboarded on aired on Disney the other day. "THE IMPERFECT DUPLICATES OF DODGER DARE" is a Disney short that was created by Andy Suriano (a CN vet and fellow 'midwesterner'). Luckily someone posted it up on 'YouTube". My section is the montage "date" sequence.

NEW HD CAMERA! WOO-HOO!

Well, I finally bit the bullet and got myself a camera. I got the Canon HV20. It's great so far. Shoots in HD and everything! It looks pretty amazing. See image above.

I shot a stupid little movie in my backyard to practice. I also got myself "FINAL CUT PRO" too, so I was also experimenting with getting something edited in that program. Here's the result. Nothing fancy. But hey, what do you care?!

No Trees Were Harmed...

I've been experimenting at work with an easier and faster way to do traditional animation and I think I've come up with a good option. The test above is an animation I did entirely on a Cintiq using Mirage. I think it looks pretty convincing as graphite. And plus, it was really easy and quick to do. Instant pencil testing. The "YouTube" version is obviously compressed, so here's a larger image so you can get a better look. No more paper. My flipping is done with the arrow keys now!

YUCK!

I just got my first good look at the designs for Michael Bay's "Transformers". What a mess! I'm sure he's got the best in the business, but man did something go wrong. All of them look so busy and void of any personality. The cars and ships they transform into convey more personality and emotion. Where is the eye supposed to look? You can tell that there's some Syd Mead in the designs, but even Syd Mead knew that you had to have a balance of simpilicy and complexity in a good design

Short Concept

I've always wanted to animate something to this particular piece by Ennio Morricone. Just last week, I came up with a little story about a boy on his big wheels. Here's a concept still frame and a bunch of designs of the little boy.

Fun With Brushes

I usually only use Mirage for storyboarding, but for some reason today I started to play around with some fun and experimental brushes. In Mirage when you want to type text, you have to first create a brush and then stamp it down. A very annoying feature, but kind of cool if you actually just draw and paint with it. This image was created entirely with a brush of my initials "KM".