Thursday 5 November 2009

Skulls Galore!

Skulls from Christopher Wright on Vimeo.

Here's a little something that I might end up using on a new version of my website as buttons (if I can learn how to do that) just imagine hovering the mouse over a skull and it animating in the way you see in the video. They were based off of some sketches (if I have time I'll put up the original drawing) I had done back in uni and since I had a lack of inspiration the other night I thought I'd see if I could reproduce them and then add some life to the lot of them.

Trunk have put up a few of the pieces that I worked on this past year and a bit about what I actually did on each, so take a look at them, enjoy!

1. Whistleless (Extract) - animation, composition, design.
2. Big School (Titles) - animated doodles and typography.
3. Major Lazer (Music Video) - rotoscoped monster tongue, matte work, animated bats.
4. The World's … And Me (Series 3) - background elements and men in suits animation.

Sunday 13 September 2009

Found stuck in trees...

...birds with antlers often find difficulty with the branches.

There's nothing we can do but if you feel it might help visit this new and exciting blog... http://birdantlers.blogspot.com/

Even if you only look at the images then at least you will feel some sort of achievement.

And that's what counts.

Friday 7 August 2009

As seen on DA

EDIT 2: Here it is, I've actually done a few more frames now so the bending down and back up looks a bit smoother, also did some work on a wobbly-armed robot and just about to do a sneaky sasquatch who might lose his hair.!

Alien Exit - WIP from Christopher Wright on Vimeo.


I have now worked on several projects at Trunk in London, expanded my portfolio, including a short film using potato print textures, Show Me Show Me for Cbeebies and a music video for Wave Machines' "I Go I Go I Go" and integrated nicely into their small core team.
A few months ago I was offered a job as technician/animator for Trunk and since the short film was completed about a fortnight back I've been helping out with a variety of tasks, including backing up the countless projects and organising their archived material as well as doing odd animations for other projects.
Last week for example I traced, cut and folded six lots of 'Trunk' from card for a little stop motion piece we might be doing and also made some Vegas style lights flash and chase each other for a Channel 4 documentary series.

At the cinema I've seen the latest Harry Potter (IMAX), Transformers 2, Moon, The Hangover, I Love You Man, Bolt 3D, Monster Vs Aliens 3D, Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Watchmen (IMAX) and Star Trek. There's probably a couple more but can't recall them right now, I want to see Star Trek again but at the IMAX this time and Harry Potter would be great to watch twice on the big screen too.

Thanks to the wonders of eBay I have now been the proud owner of a PS3 since April and have ten games to go with it including the fantastic LittleBigPlanet, Guitar Hero III and Motorstorm Pacific Rift. The games all look fantastic and having an HD screen for my computer makes them appear even better.

EDIT: That video's framerate is clearly not right and since the tentacles took so long to do I'll upload it to Vimeo in a bit, stay tuned!

Until next time!

Wednesday 15 July 2009

Oh (Hell)boy!

It's been quite a while since I last posted anything on here and having drawn this version of Hellboy after seeing the various interpretations of different superhero costumes at Project Rooftop and I love Mike Mignola's artwork so much (I wish I could work with shadow like he does!) The other bits and pieces are the initial gun sketch and the original left hand, the BPRD symbol and a skull thrown in at the end for good measure!

Recently I've not had so much time for my own work as we've been very busy at Trunk finishing Siri Melchior's latest children's short film 'Flojtelos/Whistleless', as well as a party for showing the latest showreel and a couple of never before seen animations, also caught up with a few ex-NSAD people at the NUCA animation graduate screening held in the Framestore basement.

A few weeks ago I got to see the first episode of Show Me Show Me, a new Cbeebies show that I worked on (at a BBC screening), animating the title sequence, five short story segments, nine 'wipes' and the credits, it was really great seeing it all put together and meeting all the other people who had worked on the live action side of things; it has been on since 6th July and if you missed it then catch up on the iPlayer!

Now I'm continuing on at Trunk helping out on the more technical side but still animating too - a new title sequence is a future possibility, I also hope to do more of my own animated and illustrated work.

Tuesday 9 June 2009

CHUCK

My quick little sketch for tonight is of Chuck (right) and his best bearded friend Morgan!
Chuck is an hilarious, geek-spy show with a cool cast and soundtrack, check it out if you haven't done so already, (Season 2 began on Virgin tonight).

Thursday 4 June 2009

Close Covers of the Book Kind



Back in February I made some Saul Bass inspired posters which were in part as a reaction to seeing Spacesick's "I Can Read Movies" fake book covers, and shortly after then Olly Moss and others made imagined Video Game book covers. A couple of nights ago I went back to my posters and after a quick look for a book cover image I augmented it with a few of my images and a new one for Close Encounters (above) which admittedly I've not seen but quite like the imagery of the rock formation and the lit up like Christmas spaceship. The Jurassic Park one is a bit simple and didn't change the look of the original book scan, but the Memento one is a bit more like a gritty poster in my mind.


Friday 22 May 2009

The Menagerie of the Bizarre.



A while back Bianca and I went to London Zoo as you might have read when she blogged about it here - Bianca's Blog. I made a couple of drawings the animals, including some monkeys, a fish, a tiny emu, an iguana and some birds. Afterward we sat in the park next to the zoo and did some more little sketches as well as of some random made up creatures including this odd little creature.



More recently on a few of my commutes to Trunk I've been sketching out a couple of dragon like creatures. The first one was based more on the iguana that I had from the zoo and originally was only going to have fore-arms and tail but then I made it a bit less tadpole-like! I also tried out a few eye types. I was really pleased with the roughly sketched out dragon-lizard which I think worked well because of the way the head is pointing backwards like a cat or dog. The other page came from starting to draw a skull-type object and that evolved into a tribesman who worshiped dragons, and these are the symbols that represent the giant beasts in their temples.

Tuesday 7 April 2009

Saturday 4 April 2009

Bouncy, bouncy!



Here's the start of something I've been working on to keep on learning Flash as I've picked up the basics better now at Trunk then I had done before. It's Fat Wolverine bouncing towards the screen, I first did the yellow outline, then added the blue, I'll keep on at it when I have the time free, but I'm pretty pleased with the movement and I didn't even look at reference of animated bouncing balls!

NB: Blogger seems to have squashed the video so I'll render out another version soon, but you get the idea, at the end it's just the outline and yellow on white is hard to see - he stops, looks about then jumps off again, in case you couldn't make it out.

Saturday 21 March 2009

Sackmonsterboyskineface!

Where The Wild Things Are inspired sketches.

Sackboys - How many can you name?

Seabird monster + observer.

Train people.

Saturday 14 March 2009

Monsterskine

Bianca bought me a moleskine sketchbook which I have been drawing in with my new mechanical pencil on my commuting to work.
Click the images to see larger versions of them.

(If anyone can show me how to do the show/hide/read more thing in blogger so I don't have one post covering the whole front page I would be grateful, I found some tutorials but this layout seems to be missing certain lines of code and I can't locate where it should go in to work properly.)

A tentacled lizard creature.

Sea Creatures and a tiny diver.

City monster destroying + a clawed monster diagram.

Evolution of the creature?


Wednesday 11 March 2009

Trundling along!

Animation

Here is a short preview (without sound) of the sixth segment of my ongoing adaptation of Tom Gauld's 'War'. It was actually made back in December of last year and unfortunately due to working at Trunk amongst other things I simply haven't done any more work on that project since this was rendered out of AfterEffects.



Hopefully once I put some more effort into it and complete it I can then contact Cabanon Press (Tom Gauld/Simone Lia's company) about showing them and perhaps persuading them to finance more little bits, maybe even the Guardian newspaper would like them for their website as his one panel comics appear in their Saturday Review every week; a simple animation of each one would be a nice weekly task.

Films

In the past couple of weeks I have seen four different films at the cinema,
- The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button
- Slumdog Millionaire
- Bolt 3D
- Watchmen (IMAX)

They were all really enjoyable in thoroughly different ways, Button being a slow but intriguing story that was slightly hampered by a plot-telling device, that interrupted the flow for a minor story thread, but the performance capture used to make Brad Pitt age backwards is truly incredible and he plays the character from the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story very convincingly.

Slumdog
had been hyped up by so many places and when I saw it it had already won several Oscars but I had avoided jumping on the bandwagon and having unrealistic expectations, however in the end I enjoyed it and think that having no real western 'stars' in the entire cast and entirely Indian locations gave it a different feel to many films that Hollywood are used to seeing on screen.

Bolt 3D
was intriguing to me as it was the first Disney film under John Lasseter, responsible for a lot of Pixar's fantastic story-telling and animation, and to see it in 3D was impressive - things have come a long way from when I saw a Michael Jackson space film in Florida when I was 10 and 3D meant things flying out of the screen constantly, in Bolt 3D the technology (now with sleek plastic "sunglasses") was used primarily it seemed to add depth to the world and only once towards the end did something poke your eyes out (incidentally it was a syringe!) Even the trailers for forthcoming releases were in 3D which was something of a novelty and it looks like the vasst majority of animated films from this year on will be in 3D in some way or another, including Monsters Vs. Aliens!

Watchmen at the Bfi IMAX cinema in London was a sold out showing filled with comic geeks and people who were drawn in by the exciting trailer and more adult approach to the superhero genre (can it be classed as a genre, really?). Nevertheless, I have not read the graphic novel/comic/picture book/whatever you call it, and still followed the story well enough and as a special-effects laden film it truly stands up on the big screen (and with IMAX I really mean big when I say it) and in particular Rorshach's mask and Dr Manhattan being amazing feats of CGI helping to build the world, not take you jarringly out of it. I've heard mixed reactions from people who have read the source material but for what it's worth I loved the experience and look forward to seeing it again at some point in the future.

PS: I will scan in some drawings I've made recently in my new moleskine sketchbook, mostly odd looking creatures in pencil.

PPS: I bought an action figure with over 25 points of articulation for £2.99 the other day of Beast from X-Men and plan to do some sort of stop-motion with it inspired by Patrick Boivin's incredible work which I highly recommend you check out.

Monday 23 February 2009

Inspired Posters

Saul Bass (1920 - 1996) had a very recognisable style of design in his many animated title sequences and simple, yet striking, posters. This evening I have designed a few of my own minimalist film posters with his style in mind depicting some of my favourite films as well as one future release.

The first design was an obvious choice if you know anything about my history with cinema, Jurassic Park has influenced me and became a slight obsession in the wake of its release in 1993. The simple white teeth of a dinosaur framing the title, in the hand drawn lettering that made Bass so iconic, over a blood red backdrop.

My next reinterpretation was for Memento, a film that I find simply incredible in it's story-telling and the visual look that Christopher Nolan achieved.
In designing this I went for a monochromatic scheme in keeping with the black and white sequences of the film, I also played with the text a bit more - using the T to extend and subtly becoming the outline to a Polaroid picture (imperative to the main character's existence).

Sunshine
is a fantastic science fiction film by Danny Boyle (director of recent Oscar-heavyweight Slumdog Millionaire) - featuring a limited cast, superbly designed spacecraft/suits and stunning views of our sun. The idea here is simply 'the sun is very big' and to be fair it is possibly the one design that bears some resemblance to its official counterpart.


Originally this was going to be for X-Men but since the character has his own film coming out soon I decided to go with Wolverine for my next effort. Starting with the hair, then the eyebrows I decided to add a question mark over his head - if I had stuck to doing this as an X-Men poster then this would have linked in with the plot revolving around him trying to find out about his lost past - as it is the film will actually reveal his origins, at least within Marvel's film continuity. I kept it in and went with a slightly more varied and what I thought of as a bit of an unusual choice of colour scheme, I guess it was perhaps a reference to the brightly coloured costumes often found in comics but not always in their film adaptations.

The final three are variations on a theme of The Dark Knight, with deep dark blue/purple tones I tried to make the title almost vanish with the background like Batman hiding in the shadows. At first I wanted to keep to just showing the hero but in the end I couldn't resist drawing red scarred lips and that led to straggly green hair framing the poster. I particularly like how the red can be seen coming through the eyes of Batman's silhouette.












In the future maybe I'll mock up some animated title sequences for these films, in the mean time I will continue on with my Trunk internship and sketchbook work.