Sean Buckelew

Bright Test

2012-01-28T17:11:00.001-08:00

I found a funny export from an earlier test. It was an experiment with having lots of masks, this export ended up looking way better than the final.

Lazy

2012-01-23T00:56:00.000-08:00

Here are some photos of the new movie I'm working on, taken with my phone and then emailed to myself which is probably more work than just exporting an actual image.

Tiny test

2012-01-09T21:20:00.000-08:00

Here's a little test from Ursa "name soon to be changed" Major, which I submitted to its first festival today.

The Jennings Account

2011-12-16T18:06:00.001-08:00

Hopkins & Delaney LLP

2011-12-05T14:16:00.000-08:00

Here's a test for a technique that I'm not going to use on my new film. Well, I still haven't decided.

And some storyboard drawings.

One more strata

2011-10-26T21:31:00.000-07:00

I did a test with toothpaste and it didn't work out very well. I kind of like the stills, here's one.

54

2011-10-12T14:42:00.000-07:00

Here is a first export of the wax cut we did in Eric Dyer's class. It took a couple hours to actually make the wax block, and I melted mine a little too fast to really get anything smooth. Here is the second export

I'd like to try making another that is more in the vein of David Daniels.

Be on the lookout for Chris Sullivan's feature 'Consuming Spirits', soon to be on the festival circuit, and hopefully playing in LA sometime soon. I had the great privilege to work on this movie with Chris for a semester back in Chicago and it is still a huge source of inspiration to me.

Finally, be sure to check out, share and contribute to the Chromazoid kickstarter, an 80-page full color comic being put together by Lale Westvind and with comics by many friends, including frequent collaborator and all-around great dude Ian McDuffie. The video alone is worth a contribution.

53

2011-08-22T17:04:00.001-07:00

52

2011-07-25T17:41:00.001-07:00

The movie is nearly done. I might be doing a Kickstarter to raise money to hire a sound designer, but it would also function as a way to buy DVDs and other memorabilia from the film. Any interest?

Last post before the big move

2011-06-11T16:09:00.000-07:00

This will probably be my last post before I move to LA next week. I also have an imdb page now from working on the movie Darling Companion. Let's just say I made a ton of money on that project and fully expect it to launch me to stardom when it is released.

Let me feel the lack

2011-05-18T14:19:00.000-07:00

I don't have much to report, I'm in the final stretch of the movie (which is three years old as of this week). Michelle started a new tumblr with screencaps from Terrence Malick movies (she appears to be going start to finish on The Thin Red Line right now) that everyone should check out. I've become a big Malick fan in the last year or so and am definitely feverishly anticipating The Tree of Life. Also, we are having our final show at Important Projects before gallery one shuts down and gallery two and three open next Fall (which I will not be part of, but is not to be missed). The show is Wave Int'l on Saturday, May 28th from 6:00pm-9:00pm. Hope to see you there!

A moving box

2011-03-30T18:59:00.002-07:00

News: The second part of the movie is now officially in the can. I'm in a frenzy working on the third and final part because I was accepted to the MFA program in experimental animation at CalArts and will be moving down to LA in the fall. Needless to say, the movie has to be done by then. The drawings below were done on the train to/from my accounting job.

Goodbye Stranger

2011-02-06T13:23:00.000-08:00

Here is a video I just put together with some pencil tests from the movie. It pretty much captures the mood of the whole thing. The intro was beautifully animated by Clara Kim, pictured once again below.

Husbands and Lovers

2011-01-11T23:07:00.000-08:00

If you have one second and a heart, help Amy Lockhart fund her feature film by clicking here. She's giving away some good stuff for different donation amounts.

Snow cycle courtesy of Chris Sullivan

2010-12-07T22:10:00.000-08:00

I think I like this format of posting: a still from a new shot and then whatever sketches I've done in the past few weeks below. I still haven't had a chance to write something about Ottawa, and I probably never will, so my one recommendation is to try to see Phill Mulloy's "Goodbye, Mr. Christie" (which won in the feature film category). One of the most exciting animated films I've seen in a long time, and there is relatively little information about it on the net. There were lots of other great films in the festival too that I imagine will slowly trickle down to youtube, and the festival itself was a lot of fun, I will most definitely be returning next year. My CalArts application has been completed and sent in, which is a nice weight off the shoulders (although it was nice to have a deadline like that, I got a lot done on the movie for the deadline). We are having a show this Saturday at Important Projects with Maren Miller, not to be missed! I also just returned from a great trip to Chicago, where Jason and Joel had a show at the gallery Monument 2, hopefully some photos from the show will go online soon. The highlight of the trip was staying with Clara Kim, an amazing artist/animator/person, be sure to check out her blog/vimeo! She is the subject of the drawing directly below.

Cradle to the Rave

2010-11-04T12:29:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to finish up a bunch of shit before I head down to LA for an info session at Calarts. I wanted to write something about Ottawa, but it will have to wait. I haven't been drawing too much because I'm not including any drawings in my portfolio, so it's been almost all animation lately.

Endless Summer part one

2010-09-17T15:24:00.000-07:00

This post has a lot of different things. First, we are having a show tomorrow at Important Projects tomorrow, the show is called Losers and features the work of Chicago artist Michael Hunter. Not to be missed. The first video above is a pencil test from the most recent shot in the second act of Ursa Major, I started it yesterday and just finished it (except clean up and color). The second video is my new reel, but really is just a selection of my favorite shots from act I. Finally, below are two drawings I've done recently. I haven't had as much time to draw lately, mostly doing animation and work for money work.

Scotch Tape

2010-08-22T18:03:00.000-07:00

Couple new drawings from the last few weeks, a new shot and a video made with Kevin. Clara and I will be returning to our drawing challenges soon. I'm back to animating again!

I love you, love me!

2010-07-26T10:57:00.000-07:00

CSSSA is in full swing once again, and I've had the nice opportunity to sit in on a couple of Steve Brown's figure drawing classes. Hopefully I'll get to attend a couple more before the session is over. The film has taken a backseat to almost everything else, but I'm hoping for an explosion of productivity when I get back to Oakland. We are also having a show at our space Important Projects with work by Michelle Ceja on Saturday, August 7th. I'm going to have to race back up from LA to make the opening, but will be there.

Clara Kim and I have been trying to give each other small drawing assignments, for the sake of motivation and fun. The first one was just a still life, the second was a chair, and the third is going to be a self portrait.

Terminally Chill part two

2010-06-20T14:50:00.000-07:00

I just finished teaching an animation class at Oakland International High School and now I'm back to working on act two.

Done and Done (and I mean done)!

2010-04-29T22:34:00.000-07:00

I'm not done with the actual movie, but I'm done animating the first act, which is about half way through the whole movie. I also determined that I finished more during the year after graduating than I did while working on it in school so that's good for my peace of mind.

Why does nature vie with itself, the land contend with the sea?

2010-04-13T12:00:00.000-07:00

Hello I'm almost done with the first part of my movie. I've been trying to tighten it up, so right now it runs at about 9:00, and 15:00 with the storyboards of the rest. Still need to get stuff done faster! I'm thinking about putting together a 2010 demo reel as a little preview of some of the actual animation I've been doing lately.

Also, if you dear reader live in the California bay area, we are having an opening this Saturday, April 17th at our attic gallery space Important Projects in Oakland. The show is called "Two Nudes" with work by photographer Craig Doty.

Oh!

2010-03-04T19:50:00.000-08:00

My freelance web design work has been picking up a little bit lately, so my animation has slowed down a little, but I just now finally finished this shot that I'd been putting off for a long time. I think the song describes the mood of the movie pretty well.

The night should be a time of peace and tranquility.

2010-01-09T15:58:00.000-08:00

I keep complaining with every post that the movie is coming along really slowly, but this week I've had a revelation. I think what happened was that, while I was working on the movie at school, I was subconsciously avoiding all of the shots that would necessitate a lot of drawings (not necessarily the ones that were less complicated). Now as the first act of the movie is wrapping up, I've had to go in and finish all of those shots, like the shot with the bear lifting up the paper that I posted an image from last time. It only took two days to animate that shot, but it ended up being around 200 drawings with fairly complicated lighting (at least relative to the rest of the movie) and ended up taking about three weeks to color. Sometimes I wish that I had not decided to color everything in this movie by hand, and I get nostalgic for the days of working on Mt. Olympus, but I think that it would be an entirely different movie if it were done with digital color. I think about the texture of "Tale of Tales" by Yuri Norstein and "The Man Who Planted Trees" by Frederic Bach and how much those movies would be different if they were realized differently. I think about "The Man Who Planted Trees" sometimes also when I get anxious about how much time it is taking to complete this movie. It took Bach 5 years and he had an assistant inbetweening all of his drawings and it was 24 minutes long. Anyway, here are some new drawings. Ernest and I decided we were both going to try to post on our blogs every week from now on. It seems we didn't mean the first week (we spoke more than a week ago), but definitely from now on (probably).

Slow

2009-12-21T12:53:00.000-08:00

Ursa Major is chugging along extremely slowly. I want to put up more of the work I've been doing on it, but I don't want to spoil anything. Here are two new screenshots from shots I've been working on over the last couple weeks. In the time it took me to animate the bear alone at the table, I've read about 3/4 of Crime and Punishment, which is just to say that it took me a long time.

Terminally Chill

2009-12-15T22:49:00.001-08:00

You may notice in this post that I have switched over to a new sketchbook. First, Moleskine seems to have changed their paper for some reason, where before it had a little bit of resistance to water color, but you could definitely work it in to interesting effect, now it is treated in a weirder way and water-based material looks like shit on it. I had also been interested in working looser and a little bigger since I started reading the Walt Stanchfield "Drawn to Life" books. While I disagree with a lot of his Disney influenced philosophy on what the content of animations should be, I think he does have insightful things to say about the sorts of observational drawings that actually help you with your animation, that is, looser, gestural drawings based more on volume than on line technique, anatomy, rendering, etc. I've tried to start incorporating those ideas into this new sketchbook, with its cheap paper, and not worry as much about composing aesthetically appealing spreads (getting out from under the influence of the Chris Ware/James Jean type sketchbooks). I sometimes find myself thinking while I'm drawing whether this sketch will be blog-worthy or not, which is pretty absurd. Oh, wait, shit.

Hella Tight

2009-10-27T11:04:00.000-07:00

It's almost Halloween! These are on our front stairs.

No new drawings today, but I had Joanna take some photos with skype of my new studio room at my newish place in Oakland.

I also uploaded a short video to youtube with some pencil tests leading up to the finished version of a shot from Ursa Major (I've since gone back and done some alteration to some of the finished colors though, so it's not really the finished shot in the video).

Ghost of Michael Jackson

2009-09-28T15:15:00.000-07:00

Corny Cole visited CSSSA for a day and I did these two drawings in the twenty minutes or so I was drawing. It was fun though, drawing standing up on crappy animation paper can be sort of liberating, maybe. Also, some new sketchbook drawings.

Color and Backgrounds

2009-09-02T15:51:00.001-07:00

Color script, color studies and finished background paintings for the part of the movie I'm working on now. I am officially fully set up and have begun scanning right now, right this second! I am also now officially a resident of Oakland.

Cynthia

2009-08-23T23:17:00.000-07:00

Kevin and I just made this, and another short, My Dinner With Andrax. We might be making another, hopefully with a little bit more thought put into it. I'm about to move and get my whole animation setup together very soon, which includes a scanner, so stay tuned.

two months of drawings

2009-07-14T16:35:00.001-07:00

Life in Valencia is so exciting! Seriously though, CSSSA just started, and that is good. Here are some sketches from the last two months or so. I'll write more later!

Done with college!

2009-05-14T10:13:00.000-07:00

Yes, It's true. I am graduating from SAIC this Saturday and then driving across the country, back to California. I am nowhere near finished with Ursa Major, but I am continuing to work on it, even now, TODAY! Hopefully I'll have all of act one, about eight or nine minutes, done by the end of the summer. and I can put an actual excerpt or something online. Speaking of online, I redesigned my website, too. It's a little less fun, I suppose, trying to be more professional. Soon I'll have a better computer operation going on at home and will be better about keeping up-to-date with everything.

In other news, both of the screenings that I've been involved with went really well, especially the last night of time arts. I was lucky enough to go to every time arts screening over the past week, which was a lot of fun. Thanks to everyone who came to Time arts and the 4D show at my apartment.

Also, here are a couple of drawings from my sketchbook.

Reel

2009-05-04T10:00:00.000-07:00

I burned my final DVD last night and am graduating in less than two weeks. I'm also in the middle of redesigning my website, but I decided to upload my new reel today. Thanks to everyone who came to "4D2", it was lots of fun. More soon.

Deckelew and Bensley Animation Screening

2009-04-16T08:25:00.000-07:00

Deckelew and Bensley present

4D2
an animation screening on
Friday, April 24th
featuring movies by

Gwyneth Anderson
Sean Buckelew
Steve Emmons
Lauren Gregory
Clara Kim
Ernest Kim
Alex Lake
Jared Larson
Scott Mihalik
Lale Westvind

doors open at 7:00, show starts at 8:30
Deckelew and Bensley Gallery
1753 West Chicago Avenue, Floor 2
Chicago, Il 60622

please come!

Ursa Major

2009-03-25T09:27:00.000-07:00

Sorry it has been so long since I've written, this has been an extremely busy semester for me. So first, I am going to be in two screenings this Spring, showing a rough cut of the first act of the bear movie in both. The first is "4D2" on April 24th at Deckelew and Bensley Gallery ("my apartment", as some call it) and the second as part of the BFA/MFA Time Arts program at the Gene Siskel Film Center in early May (haven't been assigned a day yet). Also, I got hired as a TA at CSSSA, the Calarts pre-college program, so I'm going to be in LA for part of the summer. More soon, and here are some stills from new shots.

O, Cold

2009-01-24T09:19:00.000-08:00

There's the dentist comic I mentioned last post. I kind of want to color it, maybe, but I don't think I'll get around to it. I also kind of want to start doing comics again. My winter figure class ended on Thursday, and here are some of the drawings from the last couple days (except the self-portrait, that was from last semester, but never got scanned). Back to the bear movie for me now!

Twenty-oh-nine

2009-01-15T09:15:00.000-08:00

Sup dudes, I'm back in Chicago, about halfway through my winter session figure drawing class. I've been pretty busy between class and painting backgrounds at night, but I finally had a chance yesterday to scan some recent drawings. I'd like to post some of my bigger drawings, but I don't have a camera, so it'll have to wait until I'm putting together my demo reel/internship portfolio stuff in feb/march. I recently made a one page comic about my dentist, the first comic I've done in over a year. It's not totally done, but I'll put it up when it is.

Also, if you haven't seen The Wrestler, you should (it's really good).

Moominland Midwinter

2008-12-19T19:35:00.001-08:00

Fall semester is over after a really intense last two weeks. The bear movie is really slow-going, and it will be a long time before I really can show anything from it other than little clips like this. I am going to be showing however much I have done of the first act at the Time Arts event in May at the Gene Siskel Film Center. More on that later though. Here are a couple of sketches from the last couple months. I'm taking a winter figure drawing course, which I think will be a nice way to recharge my animation battery.

Happy Halloween

2008-11-01T13:18:00.000-07:00

I hope everyone had a nice Halloween. I am in crunch time right now with the semester drawing to a close and two papers due in the next week! I also recently got to see Don Hertzfeldt and Bill Plimpton talk (at separate events), which was fun, but I'll talk about that later. I don't know why these drawings scanned so weird, but I kind of like it.

Bearadise Lost

2008-10-19T17:11:00.000-07:00

It's been a busy last couple of weeks for me with midterms and all. Things are coming along swimmingly on the bear movie, but it's going a lot slower than I could have expected. Even though I am working harder on it than I was on Olympus, the turnaround time on shots is about five times as long, so I have less to show for the work. In other news, I got to see Nina Paley's feature "Sita Sings the Blues" last night as part of the Chicago International Film Festival. I thought it was really good, and I was pleasantly surprised by how little the tweened segments bugged me (I liked them, in fact). If you get a chance, it is definitely worth a watch! Here's a little thumbnail plan for the 30th shot in the movie and a self-portrait I did the other day.

Chicago Primer, October Screamer

2008-10-02T16:12:00.000-07:00

I skipped a week! The animation has been keeping me pretty busy and I have been drawing very little in my sketchbook. First off, my roommate Joel Dean is having an opening tomorrow at Thrones gallery in the west loop of Chicago, so everyone should come (check Joel's site for more info). I am also going to be in a screening on Sunday. Here is the info for that:

CHICAGO PRIMER, OCTOBER SCREAMER
An Selected Introduction to Chicago Animators

Sunday, October 5th
At The Nightingale (1084 N. Milwaukee)
Two Screenings: 2:00 and 6:00 pm
$5 suggested donation

Chicago is proud to boast an active community of diverse animation artists working in traditional and experimental modes. This program highlights some of the area's younger animators, all whose individual styles create starkly imaginative and visual other worlds. In order to gear up for Halloween, we have chosen some of the quirkiest, quietest, and creepiest short work to stimulate your amygdala region.

Program Details:
ERRATA by Alexander Stewart (2005, 6:30, 16 mm)
LILLY by Jodie Mack (16 mm, 6:00, 16 mm)
IN THE FOREST by Yoonah Nam (2008, 2:51, mini-dv)
BIRDCATCHER by Chris Hefner (2006, 7:30, mini-dv)
AND THE BIRDS FLEW FROM THE TREES by Sean Buckelew (2008, 2:00, mini-dv)
TEAR BRICK by Seungwon Lee (2006, 6:00, mini-dv)
TREPAN HOLE by Andy Cahill (2008, mini-dv)
FLUTE BABIES by Gretta Johnson (2008, 4:25, mini-dv)
THE UGLY TURKEY by David Essman (2008, 4:00, mini-dv)

If you can stop by, that would be great. Also, the work that I did for Chris Sullivan's feature Consuming Spirits was screening on Monday at the Gene Siskel theater, which was exciting. To knock me back down to size, Mt. Olympus was rejected from the Chicago Underground Film Festival, the first festival I've ever submitted to! Woe is me, here are some drawings. I need to get better at photographing figure drawings.

Dare to be wise!

2008-09-18T16:13:00.001-07:00

I've been reading Schiller's "Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man" this week. It seems more relevant than Kant, or at least it is written with more feeling. I've been having an incredibly busy week. I finished animating and cleaning up a sequence that was about 80 or so drawings and it is taking way longer than I expected to color it with colored pencil. I guess it will maybe equal out with Olympus just because once it's colored and composited, it will be totally done, no endless refinement! So I decided not to scan any drawings from my sketchbook and save it up to have a decent post for next week. These are some figure drawings from the last two weeks or so. Also, there is a show tomorrow night at my apartment gallery, Deckelew and Bensley. It's our first solo show, so come by if you're in the area.

Bonus: Here is a photo of my sad existence these days. Note: purple sweatpants in foreground. Also note: corner of Jason's painting on thr right above the bookshelf. Also also note: shit everywhere.

"Birds" screening

2008-09-11T18:12:00.001-07:00

I stuck with my weekly update plan! I was going to borrow Joanna's camera to photograph some figure drawings, but I forgot. There's always next week, though. Or I could conceivably update TWICE this week. So anyway, my short from 2006, "And the Birds Flew from the Trees" is being shown as part of an animation screening for Chicago Artists Month on October 5th at The Nightingale, which is at 1084 N. Milwaukee Avenue here in Chicago (so it's kind of in Wicker Park, right near the Division blue line stop). If you can, swing by. I don't know much about the screening just yet, but I'll post as soon as I do. So this image below is a little test I did for how the bear movie might look. I like it a lot, I think the watercolor and colored pencil blend together pretty well, both with color and texture, so I think that is what I'm going to do. Also, some new sketches.

Potential Weekly Update?

2008-09-04T18:30:00.000-07:00

I had an idea in bed this morning that it would be good to try to resolve to make an update on this here blog every week with new drawings. It might light some sort of small internet fire under my ass and motivate me to draw in my sketchbook more. I'll also try to post as much bear stuff as I can without giving too much away. Is it silly that I'm trying not to give too much away, I mean, is there anyone that reads this that I haven't shown the storyboards to? I won't spoil anything right now, though, but here's some stuff.

Next Time On Mt. Olympus and sketches

2008-08-29T15:45:00.001-07:00

Here it is, in all its drawn-with-mouse-shorter-than-I-expected glory! Youtube really made the colors look like shit, too, which is a drag because it's all digital, so you'd think youtube would accept it like a brother. Not so! Anyway, classes have started up here in Chicago once more (for the last time). This semester is going to be very reading intensive for me, with Kant's Critique of Judgment and Paradise Lost on the table this week. Also, I feel like I am shifting back into working on a big animation mode, which has its most negative effects on my sketchbook, which have less actually rendered drawings, more thumbnail composition stuff, and a lot more to-do lists. Here are some sketches from the last couple of weeks.

Next Week, Olympus!

2008-08-20T13:59:00.000-07:00

Hello! Although I haven't done any updating, I've been very busy for the last couple of weeks. I made it back safely from Prague and am now back in my apartment in Chicago. I am about 100 storyboards into the second version of the bear movie, which I am very excited about. I also finished animation for Next Time On Mt. Olympus, but I can't do the sound until the beginning of September, so expect to see that soonish. I have a decent amount of drawings to scan, but won't have a scanner at least for another week. This is sort of a lame entry, but it's all I can do right now!

Grandfather Eyes on youtube

2008-07-29T04:02:00.000-07:00

Here is the finished animatic/animation of Grandfather Eyes that I have been working on for the past few weeks at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. Considering we only had 15 or so actual days in the studio and weren't allowed to work at night, I am pretty happy with how much of the movie is done. I am flying back to California on Friday and get back to Chicago on the August 11th. I am using my final day in the studio to work on Next Time On Mt. Olympus, which is almost done, just needs some tweaks and some sound. Here are two of the last sketches I did in Prague. I like this self-portrait a little more than the last one.

Vienna, Budapest, Bears

2008-07-23T09:08:00.000-07:00

I've been traveling around this past week, and sadly did not have a lot of time for drawing, which might sound sort of stupid, considering I'm on a school trip. Oh well, I've been drawing more bears and trying to do some life drawing. The animation I'm working on here is going decently, I've got a couple of scenes so far and I'm pretty happy with some of them. I'm coming back to the states on August 1st, so the trip is sort of winding to a close. After this trip, I'm going to start working full-time on the bear movie, so there will probably be lots more posts about bears! Also, I really don't like that last self-portrait, I don't know why I scanned it. I did another one the next night and it was equally bad. The lighting in the bathroom is really crappy, which isn't a very good excuse, but it doesn't help much.

Grandfather Eyes drawings

2008-07-08T09:19:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to do some work developing the color in Grandfather Eyes, so here are some color test drawings and a colorscript. I've never actually done a colorscript before and feel like I have failed. I think watercolor is not the ideal medium to do them in, it's not decisive enough. Sadly, I don't have goauche or pastel here. I might do another one for this movie or wait and do a bunch in a different medium for the grizzly bear movie when I get home.

Grandfather Eyes storyboards

2008-07-06T08:12:00.001-07:00

This morning I took a bus to a church that was decorated on the inside thousands of human bones. It's pretty famous, I just forgot what it was called. Apparently people are afraid they might catch the plague from the bones if they check to make sure they are stable. I'm sitting again in my favorite coffee courtyard. I thought I might wait a few days to post these, but decided it didn't really make a difference. These are the rough storyboards for an animation I'm working on right now based on a Czech fairytale called Grandfather Eyes. I am going to put the animatic with some animated scenes on youtube at the end of the month. I was planning on dong these boards on index cards, but they didn't have any at Tesco, the supermarket I go to here. After I finished these, I was inspired and made a lot of revisions to the bear storyboards. I don't think I am going to post those on here until the movie is done, I don't want to spoil anything!

News from the East!

2008-07-05T08:14:00.001-07:00

Hello! I am currently sitting in a courtyard in Prague where there is free wifi. I don't have access to the internet in my room or at school, which is kind of a drag. Here are some sketches from before I left up to now. I haven't been doing as much life drawing here as I would like to, but I expect that to change. The studio portion of the trip started on monday and I have already made a decent amount of progress on a new animation called Grandfather Eyes, based on a Czech fairytale. Sadly, I'm not going to have time to actually finish it before officially starting on my next movie about a grizzly bear, but I hope to get a decent amount of scenes done and put the rough cut on youtube. The character design at the top of this post is from that movie, and I will post the storyboards next time I update.

One more Olympus image

2008-06-11T14:57:00.000-07:00

I sort of feel like maybe I'm posting too many images from this extremely short animation, but here is one more with some of the rough stuff still there!

Sketchbook Drawings

2008-06-09T17:59:00.000-07:00

Here is another image from the Next Time On Mt. Olympus animation. I decided to scan some sketchbook pages that I've done in the last two weeks or so. The first couple of pages were done in Kevin's apartment in New York, where we came up with an idea for my next animation. As you might be able to guess from the drawings, it is partly about a grizzly bear. It is also about a family of three, so that explains some of the other drawings. I've been having a nice time back in California, mostly just relaxing, watching movies and reading. I leave for Prague in about ten days, and I don't know if I will have access to a scanner. I hope I do.

Summer on a roll

2008-06-01T16:02:00.000-07:00

My summer has officially started, so I will tell you my schedule. I'm working on a couple of new things, but I don't have a scanner or final cut, so I don't think I will be able to post any finished things until I get back to Chicago in August. First, Kevin and I have been cooking up a new movie starring a grizzly bear. I have been doing a decent amount of sketches for this new movie, but I am also working on a little sequel to Mt. Olympus called "Next Time on Mt. Olympus". It is super short, and a lot of fun to work on. Here is a little screenshot.

Speaking of Olympus, I just submitted to my first festival, the Chicago Underground Film Festival. I am severely doubtful that it will get into any festivals, but it has been fun making a synopsis and one-sheet and stuff. I am going to Prague in June and will probably have access to a nice scanner there, so I will maybe post some of the bear drawings I've been doing lately.

Making Mt. Olympus pt. 2

2008-05-18T07:45:00.000-07:00

At the end of the summer, Kevin, Michelle and I recorded all the lines in Mt. Olympus in an afternoon and a night. Although we had a pretty good idea of what each character was going to say, we didn’t actually make a script, and when it came to recording, a lot of lines were changed to roll of the tongue smoother. For some lines, we didn’t even have anything written down though, and they were improvised on the spot, including the entire conversation between Hades and Zeus in the middle.
I had begun to visualize some of the sequences before we recorded the voices, but I didn’t sit down and do the full storyboards until I flew back to Chicago.

The actual movie ended up being basically exactly the same as this first animatic, which I will bring up later. I also did little gouache colors for the first couple pages, but stopped, mostly because I didn’t really know what all the background elements were going to be when I started, which I will probably also talk about later.
During the fall semester, I actually was not signed up for any animation classes and instead was taking a painting and illustration class. I did get hired to be an intern with Chris Sullivan, an independent animator (and my teacher for animation 1), working on his feature film Consuming Spirits. At the internship, I did a decent range of assistant work, shading drawings, inbetweening, and animating a couple of shots from storyboards. I figured that there wouldn’t be any homework for the internship, so I could just think about Mt. Olympus as homework. I would go in and work between classes, so I didn’t have a lot of time, and because my card didn’t have access to the room, I would get locked out a lot over the weekend. It also caused me to do sort of so-so job in my painting and illustration classes, and have a generally high stress level all the time. I did get about a third of the animation done, and worked out a decent amount of the elements for the first half that I hadn’t worked out. The semester ended with the release of the trailer on the internet, which is sort of based on the movies Zardoz and Blow Up

I took three classes to work on the movie during second semester, which ended up working out much better. The only problem was that the movie was in a stage where most of the elements had been worked out and it was more a matter of finishing all the animation than making decisions about how the story worked.
After several experiments, I found a method of animation that worked pretty well for what I wanted the movie to look like. While working on Daily Grind, I was getting frustrated drawing with the mouse instead of a pencil on paper and I felt I didn’t have the same amount of flexibility while animating. On the other hand, while I was working on You Wonder How These Things Begin, I found that I couldn’t quite get the level of finish I wanted compositing the colored pencil drawings in flash. So for Mt. Olympus I decided I would try to get the best of both by animating on paper and then vectorizing the line and coloring in flash. I did this by animating in blue colored pencil, cleaning up in black pen, scanning the drawings as line art and importing into flash with the default “trace bitmap” settings. For the first line that I animated, I made an x-sheet and did all the lip-sync on the drawings. After the first line, I figured out that I could make a rough x-sheet, just to know when to hit certain accents, and then do the lip-sync with a mouse in flash (which is way easier).
I would do little thumbnails for each line to figure out posing and expression and so forth. I think pretty much all of these were done during a non-animation class.
For the music, I got my incredibly talented friend Ian McDuffie, who has done a lot of voice acting in other movies of mine. During the first semester, Ian came up with the Mt. Olympus theme song that plays during the montage of shots at the park. Ian also recorded the song at the end of the movie, improvising a mandolin riff while watching a quicktime export I had. For the song in the submarine, I wanted to get a really cheesy sort of lounge song. It was hard to give direction for this song because I wanted it to be really cheesy, but at the same time, it was going to be in the movie, so I didn’t want it to be shitty and annoying. Jesse Carsten joined in on this song on guitar and bass with Ian on drums. I also recorded all of the sound at Jesse’s apartment, which was a lot of fun, especially when we recorded the rollercoaster sounds using noise-makers we had bought from a party store.
The movie played for the first time at a screening I curated at my apartment, which I think was a huge success. This is a photo of me standing in the main room just before the screening.
I think with any movie, there are regrets afterwards about how you could have handled things differently. For me, I think my biggest problem was not straying at all from what was planned nearly a year earlier. I wanted to have a dialogue heavy movie so I could work on having the characters act, but I think I started to get less creative and more formulaic as the lines went on. I also feel like the movie drags in certain parts that could be fixed if it weren’t for all the dialogue holding it together. I think for my next movie, I will try to spend more time working things out at the beginning, making more clear storyboards and animatics, and then have those critiqued and reworked before I even start to animate. I also think the next one will be slightly smaller in scope (that is to say, it won’t take place at an amusement park), and will have way way less dialogue.
So that’s about it on Mt. Olympus for now. I’m currently in New York, staying with Kevin and beginning to think about the next movie. Until then, I hope everyone enjoys Olympus.

Making Mt. Olympus pt. 1

2008-05-02T12:21:00.000-07:00

Mt. Olympus began for me during the summer of 2007. I had a half-completed hand-drawn animation titled “You Wonder How These Things Begin”, which I was going to take a break from during the summer, as I didn’t have access to the animation equipment I was using at school.

Instead, I was planning on working on comic book pages for my then upcoming show at Swim Café and on another short animation, which I had started during the winter, titled “The Daily Grind”.

I was also living with my brother Kevin and his girlfriend Michelle at a co-op in Berkeley.

One night in early July, Kevin, Michelle and I went to see Pixar’s “Ratatouille” in theaters, and I was particularly enchanted by it. On the walk home from the movie, I declared that we had to think of a new movie right then, and that it had to be our best movie yet. Kevin and Michelle, I believe, were less inspired than I, and the night was winding down when Kevin threw out an idea where Mt. Olympus had been turned into an amusement park, and one of the rides was a rollercoaster that went in through Kronos’ mouth, and comes out his ass.

Around this time, I started taking a class at UC Berkeley on Shakespeare and working two days a week at The Focal Point. Between class, work, writing and drawing comic pages, I didn’t have a lot of free time, but in my sketchbook, the idea of a Mt. Olympus amusement park began to evolve.

Kevin, Michelle and I began to discuss the roles of potential characters within the amusement park, the first being Zeus, park manager, then Aphrodite and Poseidon who were both in love with an unnamed male employee at the park, who later became Greg.

Although it is not all that present in the actual movie, I had in my head a history of the amusement park that is sort of alluded to in several lines. The idea was that, in the beginning, The Mt. Olympus amusement park went through a sort of “golden age”, and was generally regarded as being a good place.

The park then began to fall from grace, like Disneyland or Coney Island, becoming fairly objectionable and disgusting. Frantic to come up with something new and dazzling, Zeus built the Minotaur Hedge Maze attraction.

In his haste, Zeus was less strict with his safety precautions, resulting in the death of several children within the maze, causing it to be torn down, and Zeus was bumped to a subordinate position as the park was taken over by a more corporate enterprise.

In his new position, Zeus tries to exercise as much authority as he can, especially over his daughter Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love. Aphrodite is home for the summer from college, and has less involvement in the family operation of running the park. She has also started dating Greg, a young man who lives in the suburb closest to Mt. Olympus and works at the park as a janitor.

Zeus’ design came the quickest as I found the most reference material for him and because the way that I intuitively drew him ended up being the most satisfactory, which was not the case with the other characters.

Zeus’ headband was ultimately changed to not have any design and just be a golden band, which helped a lot with his flexibility while animating.

Aphrodite was by far the hardest character to design, mostly because I have never been all that great at drawing convincing girls, but also because I knew she was going to be played by Michelle, who has a very small cute voice.

These were the first sketches I did of Aphrodite and I really hated them. Because she has so few lines, but plays such a pivotal role in the story, I felt that Aphrodite had to have the most appealing design of any character.

I used the French singer Francoise Hardy as a reference for the next batch of Aphrodite drawings with the one on the far right being my favorite.

I did a couple of other sketches, changing her hair, face shape and dress color, but ended up coming back to the sketch on the other page.

In this sketch, I think I was trying out posing her in “sexy” ways, which I didn’t like. Also in this sketch are the body proportions that I ended up using.

I was slightly torn on Poseidon’s design because his character is supposed to be sort of slick and sharp and probably the most self-conscious about his appearance, but I was looking at a lot of pictures where he was presented as having a sort of coral beard and crown and wavy hair. I never even considered him having normal legs.

I went more with the slick look because it felt more in tune with Poseidon’s character, but I did try to keep some of the coral texture in his slightly phallic crown.

Greg ended up being the character that was by far the most fun and flexible to animate.

This was the very first drawing I did for Greg, probably before we even came up with his name and he was still just the employee that was dating Aphrodite.

These sketches are a little bit closer to what Greg ended up actually looking like.

These poses were also drawn before the dialogue was recorded, so I didn’t know how that line was going to sound. The colored Greg in the top right is the closest to what Greg looked like when he was animated. With a lot of the characters, but Greg especially, I didn’t really know exactly what they looked like until I began to animate them and get more comfortable with how they moved. I made model sheets, but they didn’t really have the right feeling of each character, so I didn’t use them all that much. It probably is a bad idea to begin animating before the characters are all nailed down, but I think it ended up working out okay.

I designed some of the secondary characters a little bit later, once animation had already begun.

Hades was designed to be more of a fuck up than any other gods and was supposed to look like he had let himself go the most.

After doing this sketch, it was pointed out to me that he was falling into “the dude” from the Big Lebowski territory, which was not where I wanted to go.

I came up with this design and layout right before I started to animate him, which was pretty late in production. I think if I could have spent more time on any aspect of the movie, it would have been with Hades. Of course, he is never without his trusted Cerberus.

Although Cerberus is barely in the movie, I had never animated a dog before and had to look at a decent amount of photos, observe dogs in real life, and copy some Muybridge photos to get the moves to look moderately right.

The original idea for Cyclops is that he would not actually be able to talk and would just screech and yell.

I am really glad that we decided to change this, because I still think Cyclops being the only representative from Mt. Olympus on the board of directors and somehow managing to blow his one responsibility of tending the pay toilets and then trying to make up excuses about it really funny. I think it is also safe to say that the visual gag of a really buff guy wearing a tie will never get old.

Last but not least was the design of some of the other employees at the park.

This was the first drawing of an employee wearing one of the god suits, which was to become the butt of many later jokes.

This guy walks by in the foreground while Poseidon and Greg are talking and he was one of the last things added, mostly because Kevin was worried that the Poseidon suit joke wouldn’t make sense without the visual of someone taking off a suit.

He is also designed to look the most like me.

This pretty much brings us to the end of the summer. On the second to last day in California, Kevin, Michelle and I recorded all the dialogue and then I went back to Chicago to start doing full storyboards and animation, but I’ll get to that in the next post!

A video I watched the other day

2008-05-01T09:19:00.000-07:00

So I'm working on three larger posts about Mt. Olympus, but right now I thought I would share this video I watched a couple of days ago.

Ordinarily, I think I have sort of a hard time legitimately watching videos on youtube, especially ones like this that are way, way over ten minutes. I watched this one at school though, while rendering videos and burning DVDs, so there was lots of downtime at the computer. It starts kind of slow, but gets particularly interesting when Brad Bird and Andrew Stanton enter the conversation. Stanton especially has some pretty biting things to say about young animators not being influenced by anything other than older animation. Anyway, watch it if you have time!

New Blog

2008-04-29T14:38:00.000-07:00

Hi! I finally jumped on the blogspot bandwagon. I didn't update the last blog very often, but hopefully this one will be easier to maintain and I'll be more inclined to update. At the very least, I'm putting together a couple of posts with all the artwork for Mt. Olympus, so you can except that soon. I hope you like the new site design too!

love,
sean