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!
A couple of weeks ago I was in some slow traffic on my way to work, when I was startled to see one of my creations giving me the thumbs up on the side of a mini-van that came up alongside of me. It was as if he was saying, “Good job on your driving, Citizen!” I had heard of the Captain Traffic van before, and yet had never seen it for myself. There he was promoting safe driving on a van that was passing me on the right.
Captain Traffic giving his thumbs up approval of my driving while on the 101 freeway in Los Angeles.
Back in 2001, I was working at Walt Disney Feature Animation. One of my friends there, Brett Drogmund, was leaving to form his own company that included a fully legal online traffic school here in California. He and his business partner wanted to have a character that would be the ambassador for the business. Together we created Captain Traffic, and not long afterwards, ComedyTrafficSchool.com was born.
I was fairly new to using Photoshop as an art tool at that time. The Captain was inked by hand, and colored in Photoshop. I was beginning to teach Photoshop to the other artists at Disney by day, and by night I was working on lots of Captain Traffic drawings and other cartoons that you can see on their website only if you are a bad driver and have paid for the course (which is only $13.95 these days!).
Here’s the full drawing of what appears on the side of the ComedyTrafficSchool.com mini van.
If you’d like to see another piece starring Captain Traffic, there’s one on my website that was conceived to be like a comic book cover for Brett’s other website, TrafficSchoolUSA.com where the good Capt. also appears. You can see it by CLICKING HERE!
And if you are on Facebook, Captain Traffic now has his very own fan page which you can see by CLICKING HERE!
So, if you happen to be driving down a freeway in Southern California and you come across Captain Traffic, don’t be startled and swerve into your fellow commuters. But if you do, quickly jot down the phone number from the side of that van. You’re going to need it.
On February 6, 1911, the 40th President of the United States was born. After a career in Hollywood and another in California politics, Ronald Reagan was waxing poetic as he took the highest office in the land in 1981. I was busy learning my multiplication tables and the musical stylings of the flutophone while in the third grade.
Ronald Reagan was the President during much of my childhood. I looked at the office with awe and wonder, and to even a child, this particular President seemed special. Perhaps it was his warm look, and grandfatherly voice that caught my attention, but he also seemed to capture the attention of the grown-ups. When the President was giving a televised speech, we would stop what we were doing and see what he had to tell us. And what he had to tell us was always spoken with such elegance, even if I didn’t understand everything he was talking about.
Some things I understood right away. I remember him talking about Star Wars and thinking that I liked that movie, too. As I grew older and understood more, I remember his speech asking Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall. I was in high school when the space shuttle evaporated before our eyes, and I’ll never forget his touching words that seemed to usher the fallen astronauts to their eternity.
Happy 100th Birthday, President Reagan.
One year my parents let me skip school for the day to see President Reagan give a speech down the street from my father’s office in Bloomfield, New Jersey. He was to speak on the steps of city hall before two giant brass doors that the city had polished up to a shine. Even though I was just a kid, Dad let me go down into the crowd on my own. I scurried through the legs of the adults standing there and found my spot right down front where I took some pictures on my little camera. To this day, that is the only time I have seen a standing President in person, and what an amazing experience for a wide-eyed kid from Jersey.
Years later, when I moved to California, my parents, my sister and I were able to meet President Reagan. At that point it had been made public that he was suffering from the dreaded Alzheimer’s disease, but I saw a news report that said he was still going to his office in Los Angeles every day where he would meet with people. My sister was about to turn 16 having been born the year he first took office. After some correspondence with his staff in which her birthday was mentioned, we were able to visit him in his office in early 1998. The ravages of his infliction were evident that day, but it is a day I will forever hold dear. It was the day I was able to thank him.
I don’t particularly enjoy engaging in political debate. You have your beliefs, I have mine and we deal with them at the polls. Today debate rages amongst the politically minded about his contributions to our country, and yet whenever there is an election, it seems as though candidates from all sides wish to have the association of Ronald Reagan placed upon them. That in and of itself speaks volumes of his legacy, a legacy that began 100 years ago today.
I know the title is corny, but it made you look, didn’t it? I suppose the only thing this critter has in common with his namesake is the feathered fur, which, by the way was completely drawn on a Wacom Cintiq tablet – my first decent digital drawing posted here on the blog!
* No wood (pencil) was harmed in the creation of this drawing, though I can’t say as much for the tree he took that branch from.
For those of you not in the know, a Cintiq is pressure sensitive computer screen on which you can draw with an inkless pen called a “stylus”. Press lightly, your line is thin. Push harder, the line gets thicker. Pretty neat stuff that has been sweeping through the artistic community within the past two years even though these tablets have been around for close to ten years now.
Back when I worked at Disney Feature Animation, Wacom loaned the studio one of their first generation Cintiq tablets. It was housed in my office where many of the artists could come down and give it a try. Most hated it back then, but technology has a way of improving, and some of those guys now not only use one at work, but they’ve bought them for use at home, too.
I’ve been using one at work for a few months now, and had a few minutes of my own time yesterday to play around with doing something more than storyboards on it. Hope you like the results!
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!
For those of you just joining the blog this week, I have been showing you some art each day that I submitted to Disney back in 2002 in an attempt to get on Gnomeo & Juliet as a development artist. I had been working for the Feature Animation division for five years at that point as an in-house instructor of creative computer programs. My background had been as a children’s book illustrator prior to working for them, so I was itchy to get involved once again in creating art.
Today I share with you TWO gag pieces that were more verbal in nature than the others. The first was a quickie just to get out a little Fantasia joke…
Sometimes lawns have ceramic mushrooms decorating them as well. Fantasia’s Hop-Low character makes a cameo in this “Made In China” joke.
….and the second piece plays on the fact that these gnomes are also breakable with Grandpa referencing some dog attack from his past…
Talk about a trick knee!
Just in case you can’t read it, the girl is saying, “Mommy! Mommy! We can hear the ocean in Grandpa’s knee!” Grandpa adds, “That there is from the Great Canine Calamity of ’39.”
Come back again tomorrow to see another Gnomeo piece!
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!
