John-Dowson-Gallery

Commission: Steel Flameblade

2012-02-06T06:46:00.002+01:00

For this commission I had to follow a very precise character description. It was a hard but rewarding task. This is, in brief, the description I had from the client:

Name: Steel Flameblade.

Nature: Half fire demon and half dragon in human form.
Powers: Black magic, fire spells and enchanted sword.

Height: about 6'6", toned physique, light skin.
Hair: black with sideburns, also black.
Face: Strong jaw, slightly pointed chin.
Eyes: Dragon-like (vertical slit pupil and extended firey iris).

Dress/Equipment: He wears mainly red and black, small portions of white interspaced for contrast. The very bottom layer of his outfit is a scalemail, the second layer is cloth, and it's made to mesh with the armor on the front of the legs, upper arms, and chest. This cloth is black on the leg and near the waist, and overlapped by a red tattered "shawl" at the top. The arms are red.
His armor includes steel, clawed gauntlets, shoulderplates (not overly massive), and spiked boots.
He wears a red and black cape, ground length and shoulder width at the top, flared wider at the bottom. It is tattered from many battles. It loops over his collarbones just inside the shoulderplates, and clasps around the neck. Wrapped over his right shoulder/collarbone is a chain. It winds down his right arm, and hangs about an inch down at the wrist, ending in a wicked spike. The chain also binds his sword to his back.

Weapon: He carries a double edged greatsword, very wide and tall like him. I would prefer that the edge was a bit on the more complex/unique side and not completely straight.The sword hangs diagonally across his back. The chain on his right shoulder binds it to his back by wrapping around the blade and then wrapping over his left shoulder to secure it. The blade is made of diamond at its center, the actual edge is made of metal with a very thin silver line at the egde. The sword has no sheath.

Props: He carries a dark book with a silver spine and silver corners. It contains his black spells, and is normally hidden away, but should not be in this case.

Composition: I would prefer him to be drawn at an angle, staring off to the right, so that as much as possible of his face is visible. The chain should be visible on his right arm, the sword be shown as fully as possible and the armor displayed adequately.
Setting: I would like him to be standing on scorched earth, possibly with a mountain in the background. The ground around him maybe revealing a charred skeleton and the smodlering remains of some armor. A tattered flag of some defeated enemy blows in the wind behind him. It's just for effect, no specific symbol required, and feel free to exclude it or hide it as much as you like. The time of day should be approaching sunset.

I also made a version without eyeglow (more close to the description):

Bachelor Project: The Beginning

2011-10-06T01:20:00.002+02:00

Bachelor Project has started. I´ll work on the 2d short movie "The Reward" and we are totally gonna kick asses!
I am going to be both Technical Art Director both Character/Background Designer
I have been doing many character design studies and mood boards drawing (I have painted in PS more in the last 2 weeks that in the last summer I believe, and that is a positive thing). Here are the one I like more:

Self Studies: Physical Subsurface Scattering

2011-09-19T02:36:00.002+02:00

This weekend I tried to learn myself something about Physical Subsurface Scattering.
I found a great tutorial about how to render a glass of milk and I followed it.
It was more complex than the Subsurface Scattering shaders I have been using so far (Fast_Skin and Fast Simple) but in a certain way more logical, as it deal with the real volume of things.
After many attempts, here is my last test, with GI and FG plus 1 area light. Caustics... for no particolar reason... just seem not to be there.
Maybe I have forgot something in the way. I´ll see if I can figure out what.
What matters to me right now is that the milk is scattering light in a nice way :)

Summerworks: Ecorches, with Scott Eaton

2011-09-17T14:02:00.001+02:00

During this summer I studied human anatomy with digital sculptor Scott Eaton. He has a great online course 8 weeks long. By the end of the 8th week you have all the informations to identificate and name all the bones and all the muscles of the body that create surface shape. I can just say it was really great: I learned a lot and I had an awesome time.
Here is a couple of assignments I made during the last weeks of the course. It was mainly working on ecorches; really, a great way to learn anatomy (drawing the muscle structure behind the skin of statues and pictures).

Self Studies: Furry Weekend

2011-09-12T03:16:00.001+02:00

Yo!
I have being messing with fur simulation for a little while this weekend. I wanted to see if it was possible to have animated and controllable fur with ok shadows at reasonable render time. I used Pavel Ledin´s fantastic P_HairTK shader for the fur shading and Maya Hair dynamic curves to style the fur as I wanted (in the second test I placed a UV seam right in the middle to see if this method was a good workaround against Maya Fur tendency to hate UV seams, and it worked great!!!).Render time was 5´per frame in both tests. I´d say it is quite ok :)There are some problems with the flickering of the shadows, but I guess is just a matter of encreasing the softness of the detail shadow maps. Also, in the 1st test the collisions seemed to fail in the moment of the harshest movement. I guess some good old motion blur could hide the problem but I´d like to study more abot Maya Hair´s collision system to avoid similar problems in the future. Beeing still a newbie in the simulation field I am sure I am missing a lot of small details right now, but they say that repetita iuvant, so I am optimistic :).

This last pic is a test I made with final gather. ... meh...25 hours for a single frame does not seem an economic solution to me. Especially if then odd stripes are starting to appear all over the place for no particoular reason.
Well then, no more final gather with fur for now.

Sketching around

2011-07-05T03:33:00.005+02:00

Summerholidays!!!
Nice weather, freetime, watermelons, swimmingpools, running and sketching around.

I also started Scott Eaton's anatomy course on line :)

Self Studies: Hair

2011-06-20T16:54:00.008+02:00

Finally I had some time to try Maya Hair and Maya Fur systems for a couple of days.
I am still pretty clumsy at hair simulation, but I think I found a practical workflow that is not too bad. I will practice more in the next months.´

2nd Year Showreel

2011-06-14T03:34:00.003+02:00

Music: Dante´s theme, from Full Metal Alchemist Original Soundtrack 2. Also known as the "howohowowowowhowoweeoww song", :D lol.

End of the 2nd Year Exam

2011-06-14T03:03:00.009+02:00

Yo people. It is exam time.
We had the possibility to choose between 2 assignment: one with focus on background painting and one with focus on digital scultping of a character.
I have chosen the 2nd assignment, the sculpting one. I wanted to produce a still that looked as close as possible (for my current skills) to one of those great National Geographic´s documentaries about wild life. I have never sculpted an animal with the intention to make the output look as believable as possible.
Here it is what I have to do.

Exam CGA09 spring 2011
Time given: 5 days.
Materials provided for the exam:
• Lowpoly 3D character (chameleon) including UV layout
• 2 background photographs you can choose from. You can reframe the picture.
• 3D scenes with camera set up for the 2 backgrounds
• Folder structure

Focus on concept/ modelling/ texturing and integration of the 3D character
• Research + Concept (paint-over)
• Document your time management, write an intention and a conclusion
• Pose + stage the character in the environment, make a grey-shaded turnaround
• Sculpt details (Mudbox/ZBrush), distortion of the character allowed; grey-shaded turnaround
• Texture, shade, light, render the character
• Compositing of the 3D character into the background with either PS, AE or Fusion
• Treat the assignment as if it would be for an animation scene

This is the mesh we where given.

And this is the photograph I have chosen between the possible 2.

This was my main reference picture

This is the concept I made during the first day

Here is the turnaround of the sculpted mesh, while the final picture, well, you can see it above :)
All the digital sculpting was done in Zbrush 4, as well as texturing. Even if tose of us us who have chosen to focus on the chreature will be graded only for the work done on the chameleon mesh, in the end I finished to change the BG also, because it was not helping the composition at all. Some work on the tree branch was done using CrazyBump.
Lighting was done in Maya 2011 while compositing (and some relighting) in Fusion 6. Overall it was a lot of work and no sleep, but, hey, it was great fun! :)

Digital painting, with Anne Laure

2011-06-14T02:37:00.008+02:00

After the Commercial Project and right before the 2nd Year final exam week, we had a sweet week of digital painting.
Our teacher, excellent Franch matte painter Anne Laure, taught us a lot about colors and background painting.

The week was short and we had to focus on a few assignment. Right now I feel like showing the 2nd one only, because is the one I completed the most.
There are some changes I still would like to do. The clouds need to be finished and the sea needs to be defrozen ( :) I don´t know how it happened but it look unaturally iced).

This is another picture I made during the week, as a personal project. Anne was so kind to give me feedback on the picture.
It is not complete at all, but I would like to keep it as a reference for a possible future piece. I wanted to do something classical.

Commercial Project

2011-06-14T01:18:00.013+02:00

The last part of the 2nd year at the Animation Workshop was all about the Commercial Project.

The Commercial Project is a five weeks long group work (the teams count approximately 6-8 students each) which consists into the preparation of a 20´animation short that will become part of “social advertising” campaign for an external organization.
This year client was the Danish Animal Welfare Society “Dyrenes Beskyttelse” and the theme of the campaign was the welfare of pigs and minks raised respectively for meat and fur and the promotion of biological meat with the “Dyrenes Beskyttelse” logo.
In the production of the commercial I covered the role of Art Director.
During the project I was lucky enough to have the chance to design, model, sculpt and textured both characters in the short. I made the camera projection in the last shot (the supermarket), I prepared the value script and the color script for the short and made sure all the background material that was designed by my teammates was consistent with the director´s view.
In the end I managed to do also a little of compositing.

Mt awesome team mates where:
Bo J. Nielsen (Director), Rune Rask (CG Supervisor ), Oldrich Holy (Pipeline Supervisor), Elisabet Ýr Atladóttir (production Manager), Stine Sæthre (Animation Lead), Keld Nissen (Animator), Christoffer Andersen (Animator)

This is the character design progress of the protagonist character, Karl "Indiana" Jensen.

And this is the tournaround. For this specific turnaround I did the lighting, shading, rendering and compositing myself. I added some SSS but we decided not to use it in the short itself.

This is the value script I worked on during the preproduction phase.

Some color tests for the final look I presented to Bo, out director.

And then Bo said: Blue and Orange! And Blue and Orage was :)

A mixture of the BG plates I prepared for the final comp and some quick compositing reference pics I made for the compositors during the postproduction pahse.

Match Moving, with Leigh Russel

2011-06-14T01:08:00.004+02:00

This is the result of a one week class about matchmoving and HDRI lighting we had right before the end of the 1st semester and the beginnign of Project Q.

Leigh R, our teacher was an extremely good and patient teacher, but, As you can see from the movie above, I´d say the output of this week is the final proof that I will never be a matchmover :)(at least not with the program Matchmover).
However, all the informations about HDRI lighting I got were incredibly useful in the following term.
In the end I can say I am so happy I took this class.

Playing with Fire

2011-05-01T19:31:00.008+02:00

FIIIIIRRREEEEEEEE! BWAHAHAHA ...

Well, yeah... My latest experiments with Maya Dynamics :)
Lately I have been playing with a great Gnomon Tutorial who made me reconsider my opinions about maya fluids.
Right now and all the parameters to set look still very daunting to me and I continue to make a lot of mistakes (as you can see in test 2 I managed to make the fluid container explode), but with time and practice I am confident I will become better at it.

Modelling Showreel

2011-04-29T18:05:00.002+02:00

My modelling showreel (for now :))
Music: Heitor Villa-Lobos, Bachiana brasileira nº 5

Project Q: The Sphynx

2011-04-13T02:13:00.024+02:00

First project of the second semester is over.
I must say I really had a lot of fun.

Here are the videos. Enjoy and watch them in HQ.

Great Animation done by Kristian K. Larsen
on Vimeo.

Turnaround of the Sphynx

Creature Design

Preparatory Sketches

According to Wikipedia "there was a single sphinx in Greek mythology, a unique demon of destruction and bad luck. In Hesiod´s version of the Myth, she was a daughter of Orthus and either Echidna or the Chimera, or perhaps even Ceto; others said she was instead a daughter of Echidna and Typhon. All of these are chthonic figures from the earliest of Greek myths, before the Olympians ruled the Greek pantheon.
It was said in late lore that Hera or Ares sent the Sphinx from her Ethiopian homeland to Thebes in Greece where she asks all passersby the most famous riddle in history: "Which creature in the morning goes on four legs, at mid-day on two, and in the evening upon three, and the more legs it has, the weaker it be?" She strangled and devoured anyone unable to answer. Oedipus solved the riddle by answering: Man—who crawls on all fours as a baby, then walks on two feet as an adult, and then walks with a cane in old age. An allegorical interpretation is also the development of man from a primitive state (four-footed animal), to self-sustained (two-footed) and finally to stable and mature (see tripod). By some accounts (but much more rarely), there was a second riddle: "There are two sisters: one gives birth to the other and she, in turn, gives birth to the first." The answer is "day and night" (both words are feminine in Greek).
Bested at last, the Sphinx then threw herself from her high rock and died. An alternative version tells that she devoured herself".

I wanted to create a more modern version of this creature, but still keep its unicity.
We were not allowed to model wings for our creatures, so I had to do without.
I gave her a big head to rapresent her intelligence. Also, the human face is meant to be an appendice. I imagined it as just a facade for the real monster, an illusion of humanity and civility in a creature who is not human at all.
Since the creature used to strangle and devour her victims I thought it was only right that the real head of the Sphynx should be in the snake tail.

Trailer Project: A Clockwork Orange

2011-01-12T21:31:00.006+01:00

What if A Clockwork Orange would have been a action packed, cliché superheroes movie?
During the first term of the second year at the Animation Workshop, 2nd year students of Animations and Computer Graphic works together on a short trailer.
To each team is assigned a famous movie (in our case was "A Clockwork Orange"). The goal is to re-artdirect a trailer for it, keeping the main storybeats but changing whaterver othe elements we wants in a creative way.
S. Kubric is one of my faved directors, and CO is by far the most original movie about violence I´ve ever seen.
Since would be demented to try to go more original than Kubric, we decided to go completely the opposite way, and make it UNoriginal.
Also, where the original movie doesn´t give a simplistic black and white vision of the world, which is populated by characters equally corrupted and violent, we went for a stereotiped good vs evil vision of the whole story.
And what is more black and white and cliché then a superhero movie with metal tentacles, a crazy doctor and a choir soundtrack?
In the production I covered the role of Technical Art Director. I modeled and rigged the character of Alex (the orange dude) and the metal tentacles, prepared the background projections and worked to make everything fitt well together.
My awesome team members where Karen A. Bennetzen (Production Manager), Pernille Simh (Pipeline Supervisor), Mikkel Friborg (Editor), Stine Sæetre (Animation Supervisor) and the character animators Mikkel M. Elkjær, Aida Slamnjankovic, Ditte Brens-Frandsen.

This is a turnaround of my model of Alex/Ultramen (I like the name).
These are the BG I painted in Photoshop for the Trailer Project.
As technical art director, I had to prepare and set all the shots with camera projections in the trailer, but these are the ones I painted personally, while the other pictures where made by the other members of my group.
I´m really glad I had the time to study this great tecnique. Multi camera projections gives great possibilities.

Commission

2011-01-09T04:22:00.002+01:00

I finished my commission I started this summer. During the last semester this piece went through some major rethinking.
I used my Christmas holidays to complete it. I also tryed my best to obtain something decent with the pose and the mood. Hope it reeds :)

Summerworks

2010-06-27T02:01:00.007+02:00

Yo.
I am using part of my free time to work on a old commission I couldn't finish during the spring.
Now I am working on the BG
And there is still a lot to do :)

This is the lineart. If the commissioner is fine with the pose I'll start with the colouring.
The character is Casey Stormwill. I already painted him before in another commission for the same costumer.

Casey is a Hunter in the World of Darkness setting.
Hunter (or imbued) are humans who are given powers by unknown entities to fight the supernatural. Those people will normally proceed to hunt down and take care of evil monsters like vampires.

Hair: medium shade of brown
Skin: light tan.
Eyes: Blue-Grey with a deep, piercing quality too them.
Height: about 6’2
Weights: 185 pounds.

End of the Year Exam

2010-06-16T05:26:00.001+02:00

Is exams time at the Animation Workshop.
This is what we had to do. It was really cool.

1: Present a Showreel of what we did during the year, mainly in the second semester.

2: Work of the 5 days assignment.
Assignment: Choose one of the characters in the following picture, model it in Maya and sculpt it in Mudbox.

The Reference Picture (character design made by John K. Mortenson)

Present to the commission:
- The character sheet.

- A lowpoly mesh, with correct topology.

- A high poly mesh exported from Mudbox back into Maya (about 200.000 polygons).

- (Optional) Rendered images with some simple lighting.
I used a 800.000 polygons mesh with normal maps and baked AO.
Also I made some screenshots of the Mudbox file and made a quick turnaround.

Concept Design, with Peter Chan

2010-06-11T18:12:00.030+02:00

Peter Chan (the concept artist of Grim Fandango,and Brutal Legend).
I mean... wow! :)
Unfortunatly, he has not a website, but onthe link above you can see all the project he worked at.

We had a great time with him. He pushed us a lot and encouraged to give our very best.

At the beginning of the week Peter asked us to create a picture presenting an enviroment, a character and a creature. He wanted to see a "moment", something special that could happen in a movie. He gave each one of us two images from his personal collection of references and images and he told us to go to the library and choose three more pics the we like that could work as reference for the enviroment, the character and the creature. We should than use all those images as aguideline and train to use our cretivity staing inside a given boundary.
The pictures he gave me were a page full of strange metal abstract sculptures, all very thin, and an image of a solidified lava gayser that looked like a grey wing of melted wax.
I figured out a cave-world were the floor are covrered of poisonous gas and all the life exist in the celings. The character is a little flying (15 cm) being made of solidified metal, in some way similar to a insect.
The creatures are huge (20 m diameter), sluggish, disgusting and fat reptilelike giants without legs. From their backbone exudes a glue-like substance that allows them to stick to the celings and hang down from them. The same substance also form their long oily hair.
These monsters are incredibily wise and cunning, but everybody fears them because they tend to eat the peoplethey meet.
Our little protagounist has a very important mission to accomplish, and he needs to know the answer to a riddle. It is a matter of life or deth, so he goes to seek the huge creatures to ask them help. He brings with him a shiny gem of light as a gift hoping the monsters will spare his life after recieving the gift.

Matte Painting, with Daniel Cacouault and Paolo de Lucia

2010-05-30T18:21:00.013+02:00

During the Matte painting week, we had not one, but two great teachers at the same time, both from France: Daniel Cacouault for digital painting and Paolo De Lucia for camera projections.

Daniel Cacouault was my first teacher of digital painting. In one week only he taught me a lot of new things. He is especially good with skyes (he painted the one of "Feel Good Inc.") and gave as incredibily cool lessons on composition, rendering and lighting in Photoshop.

His first assignment was to study a picture and detect the basic planes.

His second assignment was to choose a picture from a give list of images and modifiy it to make it more interesting and appealing.
I choosed a still from the old movie Beowoulf. When I started with the assignment I didn´t know how wild we could go, so I opted for something subtle like changing the weather and some of the far geography and also clearyfing the point of interest of the picture. Also, since Daniel was so good at painting skyes I figured out that I could have good feedback from him (and that was very true indeed).

Paolo De Lucia, (yeah, my same name :)) explained us te technique of camera projection to create a 3D enviroment from photos. It is incredible how nice it works.
In this exercise we used random images we found on the net.

For a single camera projection I used this picture of an old alley:

And this is the resulting render. I changed the lights a little and added a different background:

Figure Drawing and Anathomy, with Glenn Vilppu

2010-05-30T17:32:00.012+02:00

During the 1st week of May the Animation Workshop organized 1 week course of anathomy and figure drawing with Glenn Vilppu as a teacher.
Since I never had a real anathomy class before (only figure drawing) I asked my coordinator to skip the week of "Introduction to 3D animation" (luckily I animated in 3D before) and to partecipate to the class.
I am so glad I had this opportunity. It was really great and I feel I learned more about how to draw the human body in those 6 days then in the last 2 years.
We went through all the basic step of figure drawing: line of action and gesture, overlaps, Cambiaso´s boxes, lights and rendering.
Here is some of the drawings I did during the course:

Biped Project Presentation, with Anna Kubik

2010-04-30T19:50:00.005+02:00

During the last week of the Biped Project (it was a long journey... :D) Anna Kubik came to teach us how to make a proper presentationfor the public, balancing personal style with the standard requirements for a good character progression reel.
I worked with Photoshop and Adobe Premiere using the renders from Maya.
So, here is Thorkild, the frustrated barbarian who wanted to be a wizard instead.
This is the video I showed during the final presentation day.
Music is from Iron Maiden´s Run to the Hills. My classmate Bastian suggested it to me and thought it fitted well to the character.

You can see the HD video on my Vimeo Page clicking on the link on the video.
Thanks again to all the teacher who taught us during this project, Craig Kellman, Damon Bard, Adam Dawhirst and Anna Kubik .

Modelling and 3D Sculpting, with Adam Dewhirst

2010-04-30T19:37:00.005+02:00

3 Great Weeks have just passed.
Adam Dewhirst, the modelling and 3D sculpting teacher, taught us so many cool things I don´t even know how to count them.
I used Maya for the base geometry and for the first time in my life I used a 3d sculpting program for making the details. Mudbox is just so great!
This is my first semi-realistic character. I´m really glad my coordinator and teachers let me go for all those details. It was really fun, even if it required a lot of time (and the armour itself is not sculpted yet in its finest details).
Now, I so much want to finish it and texture it as nicely as possible... :)

You can watch the turnaround in HD on Vimeo following the link ;)

Maquette Sculpting with Damon Bard

2010-04-30T18:38:00.005+02:00

Second week of the Biped Project: It´s Maquettes time!

This is the second character I sculpt here at the school, and this time we had a good lesson about rig building (a thing that lead to my model being finally solid and not wabbly like the last time).

Damon Bard was a great teacher and he taught us some really cool stuff.

In one week time I had time to sculpt only the lower part of the gear, but I feel the model makes sense in this outfit too (still, I hope I´ll have the time to finish the upper armour in the future).

Character Design, with Craig Kellman

2010-03-28T03:48:00.017+02:00

We started a new long project. It will last 5 weeks and it is focused on 3d modelling.
Each one of us is going to design and sculpt a biped humanod creature. No shading, no texture, just modelling and sculpting.
During the first week we started with the character design phase.
Our teacher was Craig Kellman and we could not be more lucky :)
Seriously, he changed my view of the CD process for the best. I hope I'll be able to apply in my next project all the great things I learned from him.

My character is a barbarian, and man if he is a pro at what he does. The name is still to be decided. I'm thinking to something nordic.
The guy was born with a very strong body and great physical skills and everybody in his village advise him to choose the barbarian career. You know, when you are young and you are easily influenced by what other people says... well our hero listened to the town people and become this mighty barbarian. Now he is feared and famous all around the nation. He can crush dragons with is bare hands and he spread death and destruction with his great axe... what a pity that he really would like to be a wizard instead.
Since the beginning he liekd the idea of magic. He liked reading books and he thought that casting lightnings and fire balls was something cool. Maybe he is not the smartest basher of the nation, but boy if he would really like to be a mage. It is just that nobody take him seriously when he try to change job. Wizads do not want to tach him and fighters thinks that it is all a very funny jock, like" Dude, with those muscles, you can't even fit the standard wizard robes, why don't you go slaying some trolls the old way, you know with the axe?..."
Well, this thing doesnt help his mood. He is felling very frustrated at the moment and ironically this makes him go berserker even better, so he bevomes even a better barbarian.

This is my study for the possible faces of my barbarian. May different possibilities. Craig helped me a lot to push the shapes to the limit.

This is instead a study for the general body shapes.

For the end of the week we had to present a complete character sheet, done in the professional way.

And this is a bigger version of the character in the front view, with all the details in the right places.

Also, this is a character design I did for one of the assignments during the class: three characters, same job but different peronalities.

Lighting & Render, with Oliver Kirchhoff

2010-03-13T20:36:00.003+01:00

We focused on Shaders, Lights and renders for 3 weeks.
It was really awesome.
This was the exercise we had to do:
Texture / Shade / Light and Render an atmospheric 3D environment.
Focus on the interior of the givern “main room”.
Model and texture the forniture and rearrange the room to suit your taste.
The light shall change from a sunny afternoon, sun shining into the living room, into night time (i.e. streetlamps turn on, moonlight, candlelight, electric light inside).
- Shot length: 5-10 sec, time-lapse
- Choose a locked camera angle, no moves.
- No characters in the scene
- Within the scene you can move props around but not the set
- Background (sky) will be done in 2D / Comp
- Programs to use : Maya, Mentalray, Fusion
I had a lot of fun in trying to reproduce a realistic wine bottle.
For the house I took ispiration from the house of Petrarca.
Caustics were not used in this picture because I really needed the render time to be shorter than 2 days.
Also I´m really happy to have learned how great Fusion can handle volume lights :)

Animation Jam, with Jamie Caliri

2010-03-12T21:58:00.014+01:00

Ok, that was one of the coolest stuff I´ve ever done here at the Workshop.
During the class council, the head of the Bachelors came out with the news that 6 animation directors would have come from different parts of the worlds to make animation shorts with us in a week. Basically, an Animation Jam! The 1srt and second year of the Computer Graphic (my department) and Character Animation divided in 6 mixed groups and each one worked to 1 minute of animation on the theme of the "Outsider".

The best part was when the head of the Bachelor told us how the university decided the way to chose who goes in which group...
"We could have made a serious and organized choice based on your talents, or we could have picked randomly... insead we decided to organize a RACE! Next Monday at 8.30 a.m. the school coordinators will be located in different parts of the Campus. The first that reach the right cordinator take the place in the group he wants!. GO!" :D

Well, when I discovered that J. Caliri was one of the directors, I decided with an animator friend of mine to wake up at 6 a.m. and wait in the school pub where the admission to Caliri´s group was programmed :) (some animators directly slept in the room).
Working with Caliri was really a good experience, tough and cool.
I worked on part of the storyboard, in the character design team and in the painting team.
Each scene was first animated on paper and then painted frame by frame with tempera on the walls of the room that was given us by the administration (the funny part is that it was freshly painted white just before we arrived). The canvas were about 50 x 35 cm long most of the time.
We used the software Dragon® for taking the pictures.

The story of "The Outsider" is a dark one.
An army at rest after many cruel battles watchs with indifference as two monks, following an ancient ritual, free a injured war prisoner. An archer of the army, moved by hate and frustration, shots an arrow to kill the man, breaking the tradition. But if the released prisoner die, the one who murdered it will meet the same fate by the hand of his own comrades.

This is what I made in the character design team.

And this is some weapon and prop design.

This is a collage of the storyboard panels I worked at (it was the best part)

And these are the scenes I painted on the walls following the animators´istructions.

The great people I worked with:
Karen A. Bennetzen, Maria B. Kreutzmann, Jonathan Brush, Christian B. Andersen, Esben Jespersen, Bo J. Nielsen, Kenneth Ladekjær, Glenn Lange, Stinna Liholm, Mikkel M. Elkjær, Sandra N. Andersen, Sara Olsen, Lasse Smith, Eva Wallberg and Jamie Caliri.

Storyboard, with Tod Polson

2010-03-03T02:13:00.008+01:00

Exercise 1: In this exercise for the storyboard week we had to work in groups. I worked togwther with Elisabeth and Simon.
The teacher (Tod Polson) wanted us to prepare a storyboard for a 30 second long advertisment of the popsicles (slogan: Popsicle, if it´s Popsicle, it is Possible!). The character design was already done. The setting had to be the moon or the outer space, at least in the mind of the children protagonists.
I worked on the first three scenes, until the jump of the dog.

Exercise 2: In the second part of the week we analized the H.P. Lovecraft short story "The Hound".
The teacher asked us to individuate the main storybeats.
We changed the groups (this time I worked together with Pernille, Tommy, Benny and Ole)and each one of us made a single grayscale thumbnail for three storybeats each.
We decided to turn the character to foxes (as the villian is a sort of "hound" and foxes are scared of them).
This is some character design I did for the project. Eventually it wasn´t used, but I still kinda like it.

This is the scene where the protagonists and his friend St. John arrive to the cursed chusrch in Holland for the first time.

This scene is near the end of the story, when the protagonists, now alone, comes back to the church in a fit of madness to try to stop the curse he received when he stole a jade amulet from the tomb of the hound.

One of the last storybeats: the protagonist faces the horrorific vision of the hound in his tomb and looses his mind.

Then we had to storyboard one of the storybeats we made. I chose the first one, when the protagonist and St. John arrive to the church in search of the tomb of a legendary graverobber, and inside it they discover a shining jade amulet. They steal it and, while they are going away they hear the distant baying of a hound... frm then on all things start to go bad.

Layout, with Uri Kranot

2010-03-03T00:34:00.014+01:00

The layout weak was a cool experience.

Exercise 1: Bonnie and Clyde were killed on May 23, 1934, on a desolate road near their hideout in Louisiana .The couple appeared in daylight in an Ford and were shot by a posse of four Texas officers and two Louisiana officers

Design the layout of the mastershot picture in grayscale of the scene of the death of Bonnie and Clyde. The moment to rapresent is the cease fire immediatly after the ambush, when the two outlaws are already dead. Use pencils and paper only.

Exercise 2: Following the storyboard of episode one of the animated series of Batman, prepare the complete layout of a single scene, dividing it in camera movement and background layout.

Exercise 3: Prepare a complete layout for an animation of a running dog and then divide it in background, middle layer and foreground and compose the scene in After Effect. Focus on rapresenting a smooth camera movement.

"Architecture", with Guillermo Yanguez

2010-03-02T23:40:00.011+01:00

Exercise 1: Analyse the plant, sketch the division in simple solid forms and in planes and trace the path followed by the visitor of the selected building (in my case Palladio´s Villa Rotonda, that is also relatively close to my hometown in Italy :) ).

Exercise 2: Prepare a simple model of the selected building (in 3D or with real cartboard) and light it to depict a afternoon-like , a dramatic and a hazy-like atmosphere.

Exercise 3: Rapresent the myth of Sisyphus through an image of the selected building.

In my case I decided to move the building from the Renaissance age to the ´900. The building is perfectly inscribed in a semisphere in the same way that Sisyphus is trapped in a endless loop, so I thought to trasform the villa in a prison that is not possible to leave. The building is perfectly inscribed in a semisphere, and
I rendered many pictures of my 3D model of Villa Rotonda from different point of views and I composed them together in photoshop, taking ispiration from the Cubists painters, from Balla and Zaha Hadid´s painting. My idea was to create a deformed spherical space, where light and time are compressed in a way that the outside of the building is contained in the inside.
The sphere itself is shaded and its shading rapresent the different phase of the days, from dawn to night. The light shining from the hole in the center (the highlight of the sphere) is not related to the surrounding lighting to symbolize the relativity of time.

The second image rapresent, how an ipotetical Sisyphus, trapped inside the deformed space-prison of Villa Rotonda would perceive the enviroment.

Colour Theory, with Lawrence Marwit

2010-03-02T22:52:00.018+01:00

In the second week of the new term we started to speak about colours with our teacher of design, Lawrence.

Our teacher wanted us to learn the theory and practice with acrilic painting, instead of using photoshop or painter. It was a nice choice as I feel that now I understand much better the process of colouring.
Still, the class was really really hard for me. Hopefully there will be more occasion to delve into this fascinating subject in the next months.

1st exercise: copy with acrilic colours a classical landscape painting (chosen from a list provided by the teacher) focusing on the accuracy of the reproduced colours.

2nd Exercise: Design and paint with acrilic a coloured illustration from a scene of either The Little Mermaid either Little Red Riding Hood or Frankenstein. The picture must depict an outdoor scene. Focus on the gradients and on the stacking of the colours. I decided to go for LRRH. It was a hard task and I made many mistakes during the painting phase. The teacher gave us the permission to correct and refine the image with photoshop after the end of the class. I´m still working on the pic in the free time.

Concept Design II, with Lawrence Marwit

2010-01-11T00:51:00.005+01:00

In the first week of the second semester we continued the study of Concept Design with Lawrence, our teacher of design, focusing on the design elements of Form, Space and Texture.

1st exercise (form): draw an abstract picture of a form rapresenting the idea of "victory". Grayscale and rendered with pencil to define the volume.

2nd exercise (space): draw a picture on the theme "Giant monster attacks ancient Rome". Grayscale and rendered with pencil to define the sence of space.

3rd exercise (space and texture): draw a picture on the theme "Junkyard Romance". Grayscale and rendered with photoshop to define the sence of space and texture.

Concept Design I, with Lawrence Marwit

2010-01-10T23:05:00.009+01:00

In the first week of Concept Design with our teacher Lawrence Marwit we focused on abstract pictures, to learn about the design elements of Line, Shape and Values.

1st exercise (line): draw an abstract picture using only lines and dots to rapresent the taste of "strawberry icecream".

2nd exercise (shape): draw an abstract picture using black and white solid shapes to best rapresent the taste of "champagne".

3rd exercise (values): draw an abstract picture using grayscale shapes without gradient to best rapresent the feeling of "jazz music".

4th exercise (values): draw an abstract picture using grayscale shapes without gradient to best rapresent the idea of "hell".

End of the Semester Project: Freakshow!

2009-12-28T18:22:00.048+01:00

For the end of the first semester we worked at a 7 weeks long project called Freakshow.

The coordinators asked as to preapre a single picture (1280 x 720) rapresenting a Circus Freak in his a Circus Sideshow.
The character was supposed to be humanoid and biped, and it had to be the focal point of the composition.

Character Design (teachers: Chris Turnham and Kevin Dart)

Concept Design (teachers: Chris Turnham and Kevin Dart)

3D Layout (teacher: Anna Kubic)

Modelling (teacher: Andre Bergs)

Lightening and Texturing (teacher: Anna Kubic)

Character Turnaround (wireframe, shaded and then textured)

Rendering and Compositing (teacher: Anna Kubic)

Week Six and Seven: Basic Rigging with Oliver Kirchoff

2009-12-12T20:11:00.009+01:00

In the first week of rigging the assignment was to model and rig a simple mechanical metal vehicle, just with constrain, parenting and no joints. The video is purely for showing the motion of the car.

In the second week of rigging we started to speak about character rigging. We had to model a simple humanoid and go through all the basic rigging process. We also learned how to set simple controllers for animation and how to set a Reverse Foot.

Here is a simple rigging test:

Week Fourc and Five: Introduction to Maya with Carla Heinzel

2009-12-12T19:55:00.012+01:00

Basic modeling, texturing and lightning in Maya 2009.
The project of the first week was to design a Landscape.
At the time I didn´t know anything about Z-depth, so I had to use Photoshop to add the aerial perspective. This was actually mu first try with a 3D landscape.
Final Image:

WIP pictures:
Maya screenshot

Render

The project of the second week weas to design an indoor enviroment. Even in this case the whole subject was a new thing for me. Hopefully practice and time will make me better :)
The assignment was done in pair with my classmate Benny Mathiesen, who focused more on the character.
Final Images

WIP:

Quick Sketch

Character Design with Julia Bracegirdle

2009-12-12T16:16:00.006+01:00

5 study of Character design with the character of Molly the brave, the evil monster and the little rabbit.

In Vectors

In fantasy RPG style

Patchwork

Paper Texture

Collage

Week 3, with Julia Bracegirdle

2009-11-09T10:35:00.006+01:00

During the 3rd week we focused on character design basics.
We had different assignment, the first was to work with siluettes.

The teacher asked us to design some character with simple recognizable shapes and ten to make a short siluette movie based on the repetition of one or two elementary Danish words, like yes, no or thanks.

Look at all the serious stuff me and my classmate Tommy have done (ok it can seem stupid, but actually it was fun):

Ciao :) Week 1 and 2, with Sunit Parekh

2009-11-08T16:27:00.012+01:00

Hi people! This is my first post in my student blog.

I´ve been working on different things with my class since the beginning of the semester. This was the introduction project I worked at in the first two weeks, together in team with other four classmates (Sara, Pernille, Rune and Ole). The teacher(Sunit Parekh)gave us a line from the Tale of the Fisherman and his Wife written by the Grimm´s Brothers. He asked us to prepare at least 30 seconds of animation loosely inspired by the theme of the fable. This is what we came up with.

The Tucan

The basic idea is still the same, if you wish too much soon or later you´ll pay for your greed. We kept the sea setting but we ereased the character of the wife (but we added a tucan that is so much better).
The protagonist is this improbable shipwrecked survivor guy, who sees in the sky this advertisment about getting stuff delivered for free. ANY kind of stuff... (islands, fridges, houses, palm trees) and well... then there is a tucan.

They were two stressful week. Basically the idea was to put us under pressure and teach us to work together and improvise with the knowledges of the programs we already had (All of this before starting to teach us new stuff). The result was a shameless patchwork of different styles sewed together. The cool thing is that they fit kinda ok :D

This is what we used: Newspaper texture for the weaves Lineart in Photoshop BG colouring in watercolours and cleaned in photoshop Animation in Flash Editing in Premiere