Four Main Characters Down, Turnin' Round.

I'm feeling a lot better about my coloring for this one. I think I've found the ratio of hard outline shadows to soft gradated values.

Cesar is sort of the moral compass of the story. I wanted his character design to reflect a certain meekness to him, something he has to push through in order to reason with Blanco.

More Coloring... More Turnarounds....

OK. I think I know what needs to change. I've had this habit of doing crisp, darker values (look at the far right hand). It's just not gelling with the softer values like I want it to. I think I'll tone that part down to just creases and facial details. Otherwise, I can take the softer values and create them as their own separate layer in Flash (still the solid vector shapes), take that into After Effects, blur it and set the layer as a clipping mask for the main color layer.

Coloring Exercises and Turnarounds.

Trying to get better at coloring. Trying to see how much depth I can add to this character design. Not sure how well adding real textures will look animated. Need to try that next.

Character Studies: Becoming "The Last Mariachi"

So basically I'm designing two characters with the same face. The first guy, this dude, suffers from autism and, because of it, is also mute. Living close to the border in the U.S., he only watches mexican programming, including the news and boxing matches. He's one of those creepy regulars you'd see wandering the mall every day and eating at the same mexican restaurant. This is his first character arch at the beginning of the short. Because of the shooting that he gets caught up in, he goes through serious psychological trama and soon snaps, becoming a robotic, spanish speaking vigilante who is only known as Blanco (The Last Mariachi). It's a touchy thing to bring into an action comedy - autism and PTSD - so I'm trying to approach it as thoughtfully and knowledgeably as possible. There are no direct jokes to make about autism or PTSD, it's just how this guy becomes the protagonist of the story. I want the serious parts to still be serious with a real push in sound design and editing towards the psychological aspect of shock, dissociation, and acute stress response. I'm toying with the idea of changing the entire presentation of the animation when he snaps, too, like switching from video to film. After that, though, it's just a bunch of fart jokes.

Not really.

Piddlin'

Just playing around with coloring. Trying to get better. Not sure if I'll use any of this for the final product, but maybe a kickass poster cover with all the characters on it, like those old 80's movie posters. Yeah......YEAH!

Oh yeah, just revamped the blog, too! Whattaya think?

FINALLY got to a good place with the character design for Blanco. This won't be the final coloring, just a preliminary thing to see what he looks like in color.

The Last Mariachi Coloring Style, Part I

I'm liking the way this is turning out so far. I'm using real textures from ImageAfter.com and warping and shading them to give it that 3D depth. I think if I got a couple colorists in the production, we could streamline this process and make something really pop for cheap.

Mariachi Lineup (Revised)

I'm much happier with this guy. I think the father and son dynamic will work great for this story. I always love going to babynames.com to find names for characters. Time to put some clothes on these fellas.

4th Character Draft

I've never created four main characters that were based around each other before. The most I've done is three. It's been a bit of a challenge, because I want this guy to be thinner and weaker (and somewhat effeminate) but I don't want him to rival the main character. My thinking is this guy is the son of the shorter, older looking guy. I may make the other guy older as well. I have other sketches of him with a thick Old Snake mustache which looks pretty cool. I'll get a lineup up later today. Comments would be appreciated.

More Naked People

I know this is getting weird, but I gotta say, this has been so helpful for me to get the forms down correctly. McDonough was nothing without his clothing, and I really wanted to break away from that. It's also been a challenge trying to create and shape four different main characters around each other. Here are two of the guys in Blanco's mariachi band. I'm still trying to figure out what shape the third guy will be.

Outfitted

Here's a rendered clothing pass I made today. I have the other positions blocked out. Just need to ink them.

New Character Stuff

Way too long since my last post. This last six months have been devoted to finishing McDonough, I've had no time to draw or animate anything else. I just graduated from SCAD and now am looking for work. So for now, I'll be constantly updating my portfolio for Siggraph. Here's a character design I've been working on for a possible new story "The Last Mariachi"



Of course he won't be in his underwear for the final story, but I started thinking it would be good to provide a figure study in the full character sheets of my characters from now on. This helps me better understand hands and feet, which is sort of a new style I'm trying out. I've been taking influence from J. Otto Siebold's work and have wanted to do nubby fingers and a wide, flat crotch for a while now. I know that sounds odd to say, but it's been on my mind. Also I've been trying to define how the neck attaches to the head. I've been doing large-jowled heads for a while now and I've never really had a good idea for how to connect the torso to the head without giving the guy a fat neck. I know it doesn't have to be perfect, but it looked odd when sculpted. So I've been needing to abstract my bodies more to accommodate.