Elmer Fudd's Bedroom

I'm trying to fit in doing some work for this layout competition to design Elmer Fudd's Bedroom. The competition is here at Animation Forum. Here is some of my work in progress.  The aim is to do the layout in the style of the classic Looney Tunes . I was hoping to find some great interiors by Maurice Nobel to reference, but instead I found Design For Leaving - 1953 Directed by Bob McKimson.  I'm personally more a fan of his later work with the Pink Panther. Any suggestions for the layout?  anything I should add? Thanks for looking!

Happy first day of Spring!

Today it's official. It's the first day of spring, which means we have all of the sunny warm days of spring and summer to look forward to. Good weather really can make a huge difference in your day. So in honor of spring I changed the blog header to something a little, sunnier. For the next two months I will be mostly shut in a dark room working on animation. I wont get to spend much time enjoying the weather until after May 13 when the Light Thief is done (fingers crossed).
I will however get to go to wonderful Annecy Animation festival this June where I will spend the week camping in the alps, watching the best of what the world's animation industry has to offer and scouting around and hopefully making a few connections. If anyone else is going to Annecy this year and wants to meet up let me know! I'm also in the process of uploading my current show reel so feed back and comments are welcome as always. I still have concept art up for sale over on Esty, and I'm working on an idea for a collaboration for one of the stories. I want word suggestions. Basically, leave a comment with one word. I'll have to come up with a way to use the word in the book. (Please, be more imaginative than cuss words. Everyone thinks of those first  so I know you can do better than that.) The book is a bout birds. So go from there.  Oh and whoever leaves me a word first gets a free piece of concept art based on the word they give me.
 Umm, ok well I think that's mostly it for now. Yay for spring!

Film Reviews: Gasland (dir. Josh Fox)

This week the Oscar nominations were announced for the 83rd Annual Academy Awards. You can see a full list of nominees here. Gasland is nominated in the Best Documentary category. It tackles the issue of natural gas drilling aka fracking within the United States.

I'm also a big Jon Stuart fan, and often watch The Daily Show. This week he welcomed guest T. Boone Pickens, BP Capital Management. I am disappointed in Jon Stuart for continuing the PR myth that Mr. Picken's and the  Picken's Plan are interested in the welfare of the environment and ending our dependency on foreign oil. Picken's blatantly lied on national television to Americans when he said fracking doesn't cause damage to the environment or people's health. I think Stuart has a responsibility as a prominent member of the media to ask hard questions, and he can get away with doing so because of his charming sense of humor.   Stewart asked if the U.S. has been slow to embrace natural gas due to issues of safety, such as the harmful effects of fracking. While there are accusations that fracking contaminates the aquifer, Pickens insisted, "I have never seen that happen. And you're not talking about Ned in the first reader. I've been here. I have fracked 3,000 wells in my life... I've never seen anything damaged."  (Huffington Post) I just think Stuart could have laid into him a lot more.
 Yes America has a foreign oil dependency issue. However, it's not just foreign oil we have a dependency issue with. We have an issue with consuming non-renewable resources and fossil fuels. If congress, corporations and scientists put as much effort into research and development of clean energy (solar, wind, and tidal power) as they put into creating loopholes in the very environmental laws that were created to protect people we could get somewhere. Corporations have all the money, so they can make the rules, or at the very least buy someone who can make the rules.
    The Jon Stuart interview also represents a larger issue of politicians using creative advertising to tap into America's patriotism and interest for creating jobs in a depressed economy, while exploiting natural and human resources causing irreparable damage on the environment.

Red-winged blackbirds are dead at new years. Is fracking to blame? copyright New York Times

There was also a point in Gasland that highlighted some of the dead animals from a fracking sight. It reminded me of a smaller version of the recent events in Arkansas where thousands of birds just fell out of the air and fish went belly up.

Arkansas is a state that has heavy natural gas drilling  (fracking) operations in place. No wonder the official cause of these mass animal deaths is still officially "unknown".  Please,  allow me to clarify,  officials know why these animals all suddenly died, but because dead birds and fish generate bad publicity, someone at the natural gas PR firm has paid big time to keep things hush-hush in the media. But don't let me tell you what to think. Watch Gasland and then remind yourself of the events in Arkansas. Put two and two together for yourself. If you have any other hypotheses, I'd love to hear them.

I haven't yet viewed all the other films nominated for the best documentary academy award, however, in my humble opinion this film does what docu does best: eviscerating real people and the situations they confront in life, looking into the causes of these problems, and starting a conversation. Life is tough, let's talk about it. When we as a people can be satisfied,  being more than mere consumers, and having fewer corporations will begin to lose power over the people. Until then it's in their best interest to keep us consuming, and lying to us.
Gasland gets a 4 out of 5, and I recommend it to everyone who loves to drink fresh water in their own home.

More Effects Concepts

I decided to scan in some of my animation that I've cleaned up already to play around with colors, and methods of painting the effects for this shot. I'm pretty pleased with this scene so far, I think the line tests are showing something promising, with a little more work it will get there. I really like the red one, specifically since in the film the actual colors will be so different, and as always I love deep turquoises with yellows. There are five main beams of light, some with as many as 3 layers of animation. Not all are painted in the concept paintings.

Oh here's a line test of my animation, it's not final yet.  I'm planning on more inbetweens, to smooth out some of the jerkier streams of light, and maybe  complete revision of the one in bottom right hand corner. Any other suggestions to improve on it?

Untitled from rory animates on Vimeo.

New Concept Art for Sing a Little Song- the Book

I've been busy writing stories and working on ideas for the book! Here are the two newest concept paintings for sale over on etsy.  Some of the decisions I've made about the book include making it a collection of character driven short stories  (about seven of them) that more or less all happen in the same imaginary world. The top concept painting is for a story called The Water Bird (working title). While the painting in the middle is a concept from the most developed story to date called The Bird Who Fell in Love With the Whale.  At the moment I think my narwhal looks like an old potato with broom handle stuck in it, I'm developing the illustration digitally ( the bottom illustration is an example of my work in progress) so hopefully other people wont think it looks too terrible. Support my book by buying concept art on  my etsy store. Hey who knows, I could be famous one day, then you could be rich because you knew me when.

work in progress

OK, I have to get back to animating. I have lots of lighting effects to draw before tomorrow morning. Maybe I'll show you a line test....... if you're niiiice.
                                                         

Hand Animation

Finished up the trace on this shot of character animation. It's part of a larger scene, so in the film it will make more sense in context. I have to say hands are really strange things. They are like little characters all in their own right. I've always had trouble, like a lot of artists drawing hands, so I was really excited to approach this particular scene as a challenge.

Hand Trace 02 from rory animates on Vimeo.