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.