Some Really Early Character Design Stuff!

The drawings aren't quite perfectly lined up right now for modeling, but I don't think I'm going to be looking at the images directly on an image plane in Maya quite yet, if so I'll probably adjust the drawings a bit.
Anyway, here's the character I'll probably model for my first assignment in Character Design class. He's Gregory Reaper, the 15-year-old son of the Grim Reaper. Is generally a wimpy guy, watches a lot of animé and has a job folding t-shirts at The Gap. When his father gets a cold and has to take a sick day from work, he gives his son the task of arriving to kill an adorable 12-year-old girl. Greg is too nice of a guy to go through with this, so instead he fakes the girl's death, fabric of space and time related hijinks ensue...good times.

Likewise, here's my other character who I'll likely use for my pre-production class. If you have been following this blog you may recognize his design from an earlier post on here (or you can see his progression so far here) and it's one of the ideas I've been thinking of possibly for senior project. I'll have a semester or so to really think on his design so the chances are that he'll go through a few more iterations BUT the Pink Floyd boxers will stay, I will fight to keep them on :P

This unnamed character is a hermit, he lives alone with his spoiled cat (which I think I'll call Vivian) and has been eating a diet of cereal and tuna (which he doubles as cat food) for the past week. His cat hasn't been eating well and he's starting to recollect the time he spent with her. I want to animate his internal monologue like a storybook which becomes more and more like the classic children's book Love You Forever by Robert Munsch. As his story gets more and more sentimental, our main character turns from sympathetic to entirely creepy as we find out that he sang his cat to sleep every night for the last ten years. Ultimately he'll leave the house and put the cat down.

Keep in mind, the idea above is COMPLETELY rough. In the pre-production class we're going to eventually have to start up a production blog for the short, so when I actually settle on an idea, I'll likely move most of the updates to that one.

Had a bit of a busy break, but working on something really awesome

The only problem with working on a legitimate animated show, is that there is very little you are actually allowed to say about it. Since the beginning of January, I've been coming in a couple of days a week working on some work on the upcoming Comedy Central show, Ugly Americans. The show is looking very funny (am I even allowed to say that) and comes from the same folks who created Adult Swim's Superjail and MTV2's Wonder Showzen among other things; namely the Golden Age shorts which were popular at the Ottawa Animation Festival a few years back.

The clips below come from the pilot episode and are embeddable from Comedy Central's website, they should give a good idea of what to expect from the show when it comes in March. If the thumbnail is any indication, this is probably NSFW...



Surprisingly enough, the show is animated entirely in Macromedia Flash MX (yes, a seven year old version of the program) at very high zoom levels in order to really make amends with the weird line smoothing in Flash, I don't really want to go into specifics beyond that but they treat it more or less like a traditional animation program, very little tweening and rigged animation.

Mostly I've been working on the inbetweens but it is really interesting to overhear the meetings that the staff is having a room or so over and I've been hearing bits and pieces of the show off and on and have laughed quite a bit at some of the lines. The show seems to be pretty deadpan, I'm pretty sure I'd watch it even if I haven't done some work on it.

Apart from that, here are some drawings that I've done over the Fall/Spring semester break at Pratt.


This is a little something for April Yim's Palette Town Project collaboration. I'm working on a full piece as well, but this is mostly just a name card.


and this is a new Header for The Movie Watch. The guy on the right is supposed to be Sherlock Holmes, not sure how clear he actually came out...

This Tuesday I'll be back at Pratt and then the following Monday (after Dr. Martin Luther King Day), I'm supposed to come in with three ideas for my senior project short film. I already have two I'm confident in and one I'm not so sure about. As long as we're on the subject, here is a bit of a sketch I did for one of the ideas a couple of months back which will probably end up looking nothing like the actual short