I know, I know – today is Thursday. It’s not actually Tuesday, the day on which I isolate my comments about my short film TIM here on the blog. There was just too much to share on one day this week, so I thought I’d spread it out onto Thursday as well.
We only have 18 days left in our fundraising efforts over on Kickstarter.com, so we can use all the help we can get to spread the word about the cinematic joy my producing partner Brian Joseph Ochab and I are trying to achieve! In my post on Tuesday, I alluded to an ad that we created for Stop Motion Magazine‘s website. I wanted to post that same ad here and encourage you to download it and share it on any website, Facebook page, MySpace, and wherever else you can on the web to help us spread the word!
Click on the image to get a slightly higher resolution version of the ad.
In addition, Brian and I spent some time last week recording a special video update that was also briefly mentioned on Tuesday. So, it is posted here today for your enjoyment! I know it’s hard to believe, but we are completely untrained actors. Colin Firth better watch his back…
It’s Tuesday, so that must mean it’s time to share some more behind-the-scenes tidbits with you about my short animated film TIM. My producing partner, Brian Joseph Ochab, and I were recently discussing the need to have a logo that would appropriately communicate the vibe we are trying to elicit with TIM. It needs to be fun, whimsical, and maintain a creepy Burtonesque vibe that the film itself will have. In essence, something that can be the public face of our project. So, I broke out my sketchbook and started conceptualizing!
When I begin the visual thought process, often a flurry of very loose doodles tumble out of my pencil. My hand just whirls around the paper blorping out whatever it wants in the search for the right idea. You’ve heard of someone’s hand having a mind of its own? Believe me, sometimes it’s a challenge to get my actual mind to coordinate with the hand. My hand can go off on its own like a teenager who is handed the keys to the car for the first time. In this case, the hand was exploring lots of things that just weren’t working. It spent several hours involved in this pursuit until one sketch fell onto the page that caused my actual mind to say “THAT’S IT!”
This is the rough blue sketch of TIM that became an “eureka” moment.
After working out a more detailed pencil drawing, the next step was to create a nicely inked drawing. I do like inking by hand with brush on paper. I bought a really terrific brush pen a year or so ago and use it almost exclusively over my traditional paint brush/bottle of ink. It’s a Japanese brush pen sold by Pentel here in the States, and the ink in the cartridges is a nice solid and permanent black ink. That sucker really holds a point, too. Anyway, enough about my love for my brush pen. I also use permanent black ink pens like Microns or Prismacolor to supplement what the brush pen can’t do.
The fully rendered Timothy Todd as he appears on our “TIM – The Movie” Facebook page.
So, Tim was hand-inked, then scanned into Photoshop for some coloring. In this case, I did a kind of digital airbrushing to bring little Timothy Todd to life. The final art has all kinds of potential applications. We already made it the face of our “TIM – the movie” Facebook page (come join us by clicking here!), he makes an appearance on a coffee mug in a video update we posted on our Kickstarter page, he’s in an ad on Stop Motion Magazine’s website, and he’ll pop up in other places as well. In fact, we believe that a version of this drawing will even be the special limited edition collector’s pin that we are offering as a reward on Kickstarter!
This image may also become a T-shirt down the line. Well, it IS a T-shirt now, but only a one-of-a-kind at the moment. Just this past Saturday, Plaxico the dog featured TIM on his website. (If you’d like to take a look, CLICK HERE!) We’d like to eventually make shirts down the road, but for now am concentrating on trying to actually get the film made! But, if we do make it a shirt, it would likely look something like this…
The “TIM” logo reworked to be a cool white on black graphic!
So there you have it – the anatomy of logo creation. Come back again this THURSDAY where I’ll have a BONUS “Tuesdays with TIM” post for you. There was just too much to cram into one day!
And if you’d like to be a part of our film, come visit us at TIMtheMovie.com for more information!
Welcome to another fine addition to my Tuesdays with TIM posts showing you some of the artwork created in the development of this exciting short film project I’ve been working on with my producing partner Brian Joseph Ochab!
When trying to develop the visual style of TIM in early 2010, we didn’t wish to stray from the visuals of Tim Burton’s creepy animated films. We wanted to channel the look of Burton’s 1982 short Vincent while combining it with the visual sophistication of films like Corpse Bride and Henry Selick’s Coraline. Vincent was in black and white, and had a certain economy of scenery that was inexpensive to produce yet visually compelling. The latter films incorporated color and style to their imagery that just captures the imagination.
A close-up of Timothy Todd from the development painting below.
So, with visions of the macabre dancing in my head, I grabbed my sketchbook and started to draw various scenes based on lines in the script. We chose a couple of them to illustrate, and I got to work on this particular piece.
This is the rough sketch from my sketchbook inspired by a few lines from the script where Timothy Todd can only see ghosts and ghouls when channeling his hero.
Yes, the art below is a genuine old school painting in real life. I created it primarily in watercolor, and incorporated the use of colored pencils just a tad. I really love the watercolor medium, and use it often for my development art on this film. I think the uneven nature of it helps give a certain tactile feeling to each scene, and helps give the viewer a certain uneasiness with the creepy subject matter.
The final watercolor painting of Timothy Todd lost in the world of his imagination.
If you would like to hear Christopher Lee’s narration that goes with this piece, we feature it in our promo film over on Kickstarter. If you watch it long enough, there’s even a quick shot of me working on this very painting. You can go there right now by clicking on www.TIMtheMovie.com.
If you go to Kickstarter, please consider pledging some money to us so that we can actually make this film. We are in our final month of fundraising. I know at the $100 level, one of the things you’ll receive is a special limited edition print of one of my paintings. We have a few to choose from, so the print might even be of this particular painting.
Come back again next Tuesday for more revelations about TIM the movie! And come join the TIM Facebook page by CLICKING HERE!
Last Tuesday I unveiled to you the news about a short animated film I am art directing and co-producing (with my friend Brian Joseph Ochab) called TIM. If you missed that post, you can CLICK HERE to get caught up. The short summary is that it is a parody of Tim Burton’s early stop-motion animated short Vincent in which a little boy named Vincent Malloy tries to emulate his hero, master of the macabre Vincent Price. In TIM, the young Timothy Todd wishes to be just like Tim Burton.
Today’s Tuesdays with TIM features a piece of visual development art I created of the star of my film, Timothy Todd, dressed as his hero, Tim Burton. I believe this is the first version of him in color, and he continues to go through changes as we proceed with developing the film. I painted him with watercolors, and a touch of colored pencil. And no, the website address isn’t on the actual art. We just want folks to be aware of where they can go for more information about the film. (If you click right on the image, it will take you there.)
“He was really quite normal, but longed to be odd…”
The other news since last week is that we now have a special fan page on Facebook for TIM, and it is growing strong! In just a week’s time, almost 1000 of you have “Liked” us! If you would like to get a steady stream of updates on TIM, come join the fan page! Click on www.facebook.com/Timthemovie and you’ll go right there!
And lastly, in order for us to see this film to completion, we need YOUR help! Come check us out on Kickstarter.com to see what kind of neat goodies we are offering you in thanks for your financial support. You can see our Kickstarter promo movie featuring our narrator Christopher Lee by CLICKING HERE!
Come back next Tuesday when I plan to show you more goodies!
Well, here is the last of my 2002 audition pieces to work on Disney’s Gnomeo & Juliet (opening on February 11). Not having seen it myself, I can’t vouch for its content. With all the years it has been in development, one would hope that it is every bit as fun as they are leading you to believe with the advertising. After all, it MUST be good because it had 9 writers – 10 if you count William Shakespeare. (cough cough)
I am glad that it is completely animated though. Early on there was talk of having the gnomes be realistic and set in a live-action world. If they had gone that route, kids would likely run crying in fear of any actual garden gnomes they would encounter in the future. I might even have reacted that way.
At any rate, here is my final submission for your perusal. It’s a watercolored piece inspired by the first drawing I posted on Monday. I expanded that idea of the “bent over” lawn ornaments to epic proportions by making a Braveheart gag out of it.
Nothing puts a cold fear into the hearts of the opposition like teddy bear underwear.
Thanks for checking out my Gnomeo & Juliet inspired art this week. While these proposed pieces didn’t land me a job on the film back then, they were fun to come up with. And I’ve managed to work on a few fun things since then in the world of animation.
When I lived in Greenville, South Carolina back in the mid-1990s, this one house near downtown was just COVERED in lawn ornaments. In particular, they had soooo many whirly-gig type devices that made their whole property look as though it was in constant motion. You know what I mean, right? They had anything that had a moving part when the wind blew. That was in my mind when I drew this next piece for submission to the Gnomeo & Juliet team back in 2002.
I thought of a wooden duck that had propellers for wings like you see on those whirly-gigs. If the Montagues and Capulets were in full blown fighting mode, why not have an air force of gnomes riding on the backs of these devices? If the wind was low, they could attempt to keep themselves afloat by blowing on the propellers!
Come back again tomorrow for a final look at my 2002 Gnomeo & Juliet development art submissions!
I mentioned yesterday that the upcoming Disney release of Gnomeo & Juliet was ultimately created up in Canada and was NOT the product of Disney Feature Animation down here in Burbank, CA. I was never privy to the big business branches of the studio, nor was I really all that interested in those decisions. I was just the little guy trying to scratch my name in the tree trunk.
I would imagine that part of the reason Gnomeo moved out of house was due in part to the fact that it was being developed right at the time that the studio was laying off half of its workers that was documented so well in the film Dream On Silly Dreamer. That’s about the time I was laid off, too. Not long after, Disney’s corporate management was having its own disagreements with Pixar, and had started to develop a version of Toy Story 3 apart from Pixar in the building where they had been developing Gnomeo. Those were dark days indeed.
In honor of those dark days, here’s a bleak piece I submitted back then. Somehow the thought that the deep feelings a ceramic gnome would have in losing a dear friend (that just so happened to be a ceramic lawn deer) made me laugh. Twisted? Perhaps.
Whether you are on the side of the Montagues or Capulets, you can’t help but shed a tear at the agony of this scene.
Come back again tomorrow to see TWO more Gnomeo inspired gag drawings from my archives!
Back in 2002, Disney Animation Studios began to develop a film about lawn ornaments based on William Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet called Gnomeo & Juliet. It only had a few people doing some visual development and storyboards as they tried to explore this idea that I heard had been brought to Disney by Elton “Lion King” John.
Gnomeo seemed to be one of those pictures that was a little under the radar with not many in the studio showing interest in working on it yet. I saw it as a possibility for a lot of comedy which was right up my alley! Maybe it would be a way for a young eager Disney employee to get his foot in the door of actual production work. So, with the encouragement of the acting producer in those early days, I started submitting some gag drawings hoping to get on the film.
The idea of lawn ornaments from rival yards in a feud with each other just rang a bell in my head for some reason. I knew yards that had been chock full of ridiculous sculptures and whirly-bobs. So much humor could be derived from the drama of warring “families” combined with the crazy decorative contraptions coming to life.
With Gnomeo & Juliet opening Friday, February 11, I thought I’d share a few of my 2002 gag proposals with you that still make me smile. I’ll post something new each day this week up to Friday. I never did get invited to work on the film, but then again, Disney didn’t actually end up making it in-house either. It was shelved for a few years, then resurrected up in a studio in Canada.
This is the first of many pieces I submitted (created with pencil and Photoshop). It was also the first piece of art I did that was hung on a development board in the hallways of Disney. That alone was unbelievably encouraging.
Remember those lawn ornaments that looked like a girl bending over? Thought it was ripe for comedy with these nervous garden gnomes.
Come back again tomorrow to see another of my Gnomeo & Juliet submissions!
