The Animator's Eye frames

We interrupt your regularly scheduled blog, The Storyteller's Log: Storyweaving, The New Way to See Your Story Structure, to bring you this important message. In a couple of months, I'll be finishing up storyboarding on Dreamwork's The Dragons of Berk TV series. 

I had a professor of film audio at Pratt and he gave us some very important advice. He told us that if you're not working, your job for 40 hours a week is to look for work. The other thing that he told us is to ALWAYS KEEP YOUR PORTFOLIO UP TO DATE. This is especially true when you still are working. Be prepared.

So following his advice, I'm presenting frames from my animated short. They're from my book, The Animator's Eye: Adding Life to Animation with Timing, Layout, Design, Color and Sound. It's published by Focal Press. It's a silent film in the sense that there's no dialogue. It has a wonderful music score by film composer Hans Karl. J.D. Stewart provided audio production services. Bryan Cox and Chris Siemasko added the special effects for the transformation and the ending shot. My son Ryan did the film editing. 

This film was completed using TVPaint software on a 21inch Wacom Cintiq tablet. Final assembly was completed in Final Cut Pro 7. The storyboards were completed on sticky notes and scanned. ArtRage Studio Pro was used to paint the color scripts based on the storyboard images.

 Need to score? Hans Karl Music

The idea for the film evolved over many versions. The idea was to make a story that was a metaphor of the process of capturing an idea and bringing it to life. This is probably one of the most inventive uses of the classic animation exercises bring a flour sack to life. I used two of my characters that I had already created- Iggy, the impulsive pig and Scared Bunny.

Enjoy (Click to Enlarge)

Cropping to improve composition

The other day I posted this painting, completed with Art Rage Studio, and suggested it might be improved by cropping, so I decide to try it. Right now the foreground shadow and the sitting man pull your eye to the edges of the picture. There's no clear focal point.

By cropping the composition is improved with better balance and a clear focal point with the girl on the blanket. She's also the area of greatest contrast in the picture. If you squint your eyes you can see this. Remember- design, design, design!

I wonder what she's reading...

Artrage makes painting easy

The first two images here were painted on site with acrylic on canvas. I had wanted to paint more realistically however at the time I really didn't understand the components of color- hue, saturation and value. They were completed when I was in college. What I like about these is their spontaneity and aliveness. They feel psychedelic which is fun.

 (CLICK TO ENLARGE)

Artrage studio http://www.artrage.com/artrage-studio.html is a really cool inexpensive painting software. It lets you take a photo and "paint" over it. It picks up the colors automatically. (if you choose to do that.) It has a wide range of brushes and variations. What I love is how it teaches you about color. We don't see what we think we see. You can see some results below which were all based off of photos. 

This last one took about an hour. It would have taken me days to paint this traditionally. Looking at it again, I feel it lacks a clear focal point I might have been stronger to move the group on the right to a more centered position or remove them and make the girl on the foreground blanket the focal point.