Colour Studies and Exploration

I went through a whole lot of exploration of colour before I deciding on the colour styling for my film. Ultimately, I thought it would be best to stick to jewel tones and warmer shades, without straying too far towards a "cartoony" colour palette.

I started with the colour bars, making sure to cover the few variations I thought might be appropriate for this film at each approximate time of day. After building up the colour studies I weighed in on what I thought would be most effective for the content of each individual scene. Most of my opinions on those little decisions changed when I put my choices together, side by side.

Below you can see my working colour palette for the film. Kozak Mating Dance is ending up with much more red in it that I had set out thinking it would. I'm very glad I did this work, if only to have had the good sense to remove the whole "evening" palette from consideration. I think I've hit on something that works! As you can see, the workflow test scene a couple posts down is from the first colour section, in the top left corner.

Animating Dance

Animating dance has been a truly challenging, engaging, and rewarding experience for me. Never before have I felt this level of appreciation, consideration of, and care for what I am animating. I wish I had better words for communicating what this is like. Now, if only I wasn't on the 200 drawing a day diet (which is meatier than it sounds) I could really get in to breaking down the movement and caricaturing it for animation!

Thesis Film Test Scene

Our most recent milestone deadline asked for by the school was to work an entire scene through our pipeline. I definitely have some opinions about what I still would like to change in this scene! Still, I do feel it was important to see what sort of quality I can churn out under the time restrictions I've set for myself for this project.

Merry Christmas!

My Christmas card from this year - happy holidays, everybody!


CHRISTMAS BREAKFAST SPECIAL!
Why yes, those ARE scrambled eggs with food colouring! The drinks are eggnog lattes, made with an ethiopian ground and sprinkled with cocoa. My favourite part of breakfast - Ms. Ecks gingerbread men! Faces and boots drawn on with my precious Wilton Foodwriter. Nothing fancy about the toast but a spread of raspberry jam and cream cheese with a side of apples at least keeps the colour scheme!

BG test

Not sure where I'm going with this whole "art direction" thing, but I'm steadily chipping away at it.

Royal Winter Fair '09 Horses

My best pieces from the fair today. There are horses in my thesis film so I really did my best to learn to like drawing them.

Pivoting Stencil

"Stars whose explosive deaths spread complex atoms..."

Heavily inspired by complex binary networks.