Previs - the digital revolution

Just a quick note: I just got finished reading an article on VFX Newswire about digital pre-visualization (previs) of movies. This is an excellent story about exactly the kind of work I spend my time doing these days. Namely 3d (and 2d) previsualization.

For our industry it's both an exciting and frightening time, depending on how you look at 3d vs. traditional storyboarding. Read it and take a gaze into the future.

Sketch - my niece eating a piece of cheese

Looks like she's playing a little harmonica. The big hat is bright blue.

Sketch - wife on the phone

I've been experimenting with a really soft graphite pencil (6B) on fairly smooth paper and using a smudge tool for grays. I got a book on this technique, and it's been fun to try out. I've spent the last dozen or more years sketching for fun almost exclusively in ink; it's been a blast to rediscover the pencil lately.

R. Crumb

A friend gave me one of the published Robert Crumb Sketchbooks recently. This one's from around 1990. Man, that guy can draw! There's a wonderful freedom in his sketches, a drive to delineate things witnessed first hand and imagined, fueled by some kind of obsessive compulsion: you get the feeling he can't stop drawing, even if he tried. Painfully funny and honest. Here's a sample of some even more recent sketchbook work (warning, not all of it is safe for viewing at work or around kids). The excitement just oozes from the work, and is guilting me into drawing and sketching more.

Animatics

I've been slowly putting together an on-line sample of an animatic specifically for this web site that won't infringe on anybody's copyrights. It's a short action sequence that I've been chipping away at for a while. Maybe I'll post some of the drawings here in the near future.

In the meantime, I wrote about some of the animatic work I've done and the software I've used in this article: Animatics for Motion Pictures. It's a brief explanation of what an animatic is and how it is used as a tool for a movie director to realize his / her vision before shooting. It was written for Blender3d.org last summer, and so is geared towards the users of Blender3d software. Blender is a wonderful - and powerful - 3d modeling and animation program that is absolutely free for anybody to download and use. I used it for about a year on Spider-Man 2 before switching to LightWave to do 3d animatics. I highly recommend Blender for anybody interested in learning about 3d without having to pay a dime, or put up with irritating 30-day trial periods or watermarks.

Sketching the kid

My 11-year-old son fell asleep in front of the fireplace over the Christmas holiday, so I took the rare occasion of him holding still for more than a minute to sketch him.