Ant's drawing blog

Greg.

2015-10-16T06:53:00.000-07:00

Old sketch from an old project that never saw the light of day that I polished up.

Krool

2015-02-18T05:40:00.002-08:00

Dust cloud.

2015-01-19T01:46:00.000-08:00

This was a lot of fun to do....

Hand animated dust cloud for an explosion.

Drink responsibly

2014-03-10T17:48:00.001-07:00

A few boards from the opening shots of a recent project for a well known drinks manufacturer. The director I was working with wanted lots of close-ups of a cocktail being made; ice tumbling into a glass, alcohol being poured etc... lots of drink-porn type shots. Good fun to do, though as usual, I had loads to produce and very little time to.

(Slightly) Gory Boards.

2014-01-23T09:50:00.000-08:00

More storyboards......

Today has been a fun day.

This storyboarding job is pretty epic. I've had to blast through around 100 storyboards over the last week and as a consequence I've had to really speed up production. Not all of them are as polished as these few. I've just finished another section today, and as I knew I was coming to the end I was in the mood to have a pleasant day drawing. I really enjoyed doing these ones, a little gory perhaps, but fun to draw.

Do I need to explain what's going on? The chap in the foreground has been run over - the chap in the background is cleaning brains off the bonnet.

On to the final section tomorrow.

Huh...

2013-12-19T21:06:00.000-08:00

... a mixture of me, Sean Connery and my Dad..... yeah, pleased with how this one turned out. Panel from a recent comic project.

"The Dark Road" Storyboarding.

2013-11-22T04:12:00.001-08:00

So, I've been asked about how I've been putting these storyboards together so rather than posting excerpts and arbitrary boards as I have been doing recently, I thought I'd do a more comprehensive blog post about how I go about it.

I've been working on preproduction for a Noir feature film: gangsters and hit men, car chases and robberies – all that good stuff. So from start to finish:

Script/shotlist. This is what I receive from my client. Sometimes it's a brief description, for example “Shot 30: MCU on Jared, front on, waiting coolly in the driver’s seat. (Camera is peering in through front windscreen)” Sometimes it's a lot more precise, sometimes I'll get a reference photo or a thumbnail included with a quick doodle from the production team when they're wanting something specific.

Next, backgrounds. In most cases I make the backgrounds in 3D. I can get more detailed backgrounds in there and surprisingly it also works out quicker, if there are multiple shots in the same location I can just move the camera around a little bit and tweak the lighting. It's also useful to get the exact shot I'm looking for and gives me a lot more control over the scene. It's essentially a mini set for me to play around with. Also over the course of jobs that I've finished, I've built up an archive of models; items and locations that I can place in the scene. Of course some items still need to be made... such as this moose head from a bar scene in “The Dark Road.” I don't know if I'll ever need to make a moose head again. If I do, well, I've got one now.

Then I simply draw the characters directly into the computer, a few tweaks to the tones and mood lighting for the final polish and it's done.

Why do I use 3D for the backgrounds? Well, I'm working towards combining my animation work and the storyboarding work into animatics next year. I saw this superb work and realised that I'm doing something very similar with my work. If you saw the "Noir" animation I released earlier this year, it's pretty much the same idea; hand-drawn characters over 3D backgrounds.

Finally, here's a quick demo of another shot:

68. TWO SHOT, Jared and Sam in Ryan’s mansion. They have turned the place upside down (piles of smashed junk everywhere), books pulled out of a bookcase (RHS frame). At the back of the shot a large, tall window, with one pane has been smashed (their entry route). To the left Jared (facing away from camera) is searching through items (chucking stuff behind him). Sam is in MCU, LHS frame. He is holding a book, looking at it. The book’s title is ‘The Suicide Club."

I accidentally myself.

2013-11-05T13:41:00.002-08:00

Cowboy.

2013-11-03T09:38:00.002-08:00

More storyboards. A full panel this time. It's a cowboy.

Some characters...

2013-10-23T03:33:00.000-07:00

So I've had to do some quick conversational storyboards for this job, over-the-shoulder shots of characters chatting. Here's three of the main characters in one image..

I'm pleased with the bald geezer in the middle.

More storyboard (excerpts)

2013-10-16T07:29:00.000-07:00

"Julia is looking out of Ryan’s window to car park below."

As you can see.

New Avatar?

2013-10-10T04:59:00.000-07:00

Tempted to use this as a new avatar...

Perhaps not. "Ryan opening flat door to a greasy / sleezy looking landlord" as it says in the script.

3D backgrounds, hand-drawn characters.

2013-10-08T07:57:00.002-07:00

So I'm using a lot of 3D in my work these days. Being able to quickly knock together a set or backgrounds means that I can move cameras around, light the scenes and squeeze a lot of detail in my boards. I've got a steadily growing model archive of props and scenery that I've created for various projects - and anything I don't have, depending on the complexity, doesn't take all that long to build.

It comes in especially handy if there's more than one shot that needs to be drawn for a scene, I can move the camera, render another background off and then get the characters drawn in over the top as shown here.

Moose

2013-10-01T07:05:00.000-07:00

More storyboarding. This time, a detail from a scene in a bar. Look carefully and there's a moosehead on the wall in the background.

Stripe up.

2013-09-30T06:58:00.001-07:00

Board 62. Slashed with a blade.

Something nasty is happening in this car. Close-up from the Storyboarding job I'm working on at the moment. Spent far too long doing this one, but enjoyed it and treated it as a warm-up for the remainder of these boards.

I expect I'll post a few more as the job goes on, there's tons of them to do.

2013-08-10T15:33:00.000-07:00

"Noir" Shot 28, animated process.

2012-11-30T00:20:00.003-08:00

Following on from my blogpost here: here's each stage of shot 28 animated; line work through to the final version for the final "Noir" animation.

Interesting? I don't know. But to reiterate, it took me hours! Hours, for less than two seconds on screen so milking it for 50 seconds seemed appropriate.

The final animation (along with the other 30 odd scenes) should be out over the next couple of weeks.

12+ hours....

2012-11-21T07:23:00.001-08:00

A rare blog from me to show off some process work from a recent project. This is one scene of an animation, which took me around 12 hours or so to finish.

Hand-drawn animation, man. A crazy way to spend your time.

12 hours for less than three seconds on screen. But, sometimes that's what it takes. There's a bit more in the final shot - this is just a chap falling over after being stabbed in the belly, a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment - so presented here to show the various stages (not including roughs and storyboards) of line work, to colour flats, to shadows and highlights and the final details. So here's shot number 28 (of 33 different shots) broken down for your viewing pleasure. After 12 hours, I insist you drink it in!

Concept work...

2012-05-04T17:21:00.001-07:00

Think I'm going to put tonight down as a fun evening. First character design for a film I'm concepting, and got several more to do over the next couple of weeks. Kind of wish I hadn't of stuck that border in there but fairly happy with it nonetheless.

Pencils> Pen & Ink>Actual Paint>Photoshop.

Storyboard panel.

2011-11-21T21:15:00.001-08:00

A nice panel from a storyboard for an animation project I've been working on. Spent a little too long on this particular shot, so thought she could do with being shown elsewhere. I don't know if the storyboards will ever see the light of day.

Odd things

2011-09-29T10:36:00.000-07:00

I normally just post drawings on the blog, but I had a chuckle this evening over a couple of pictures and stories that I saw on I09 featuring Nic Cage and John Travolta. One of the oddest-but-could-conceivably-be-true- stories I've seen since the Scarlett Johansson is a clone story broke. (see here for details on that one)

Start here: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Original-1860s-AMBROTYPE-John-TRAVOLTA-Time-Traveler-/160614928241?pt=Art_Photo_Images&hash=item2565654f71#ht_1681wt_1123

Then go and read the article on I09 here: http://io9.com/5845103/

And finally http://io9.com/5841112/was-nicolas-cage-a-vampire-during-the-civil-war-this-1000000-photograph-holds-the-answers Which was a story I had missed, so I'd had a giggling fit when I saw the photo. Thing is, the more you look at it the more plausible it seems to be. In a more interesting world, that is.

.

An Angry Pig

2011-09-23T17:22:00.000-07:00

Speaking of Back&Beyond

2011-07-25T19:07:00.000-07:00

There's an event happening on 26th June at the Novel Cafe in Lancaster. A Story forum, organised by Back and Beyond's Moll Baxter as a fundraiser for printing costs. To quote Moll from her blog "Gorgeous venue, cracking line-up, worthy cause…"

Back and Beyond

2011-07-25T18:42:00.000-07:00

So hopefully people have seen, and hopefully picked up a copy from many different locations around Lancaster and Morecambe, but Back and Beyond, a new arts magazine for the area has come out over the last couple of weeks. I'm on the editorial team, along with Si Hawksworth and Phil McMillian (from Fold Design), Mollie Baxter and Mick Murphy, and after the best part of a year, issue one is out! And it looks the business as well. If you don't manage to get an actual real-life paper copy, there's another version that's made of 1's and 0's which doesn't exist; here: http://backandbeyond.org/index.html

I also had three illustrations featured in there:

The first as a general Lancaster themed illustration (featured here), the second and third to accompany a couple of poems from inside.

Back and Beyond around the web:

The main website: http://backandbeyond.org/index.html
Moll's blog: http://www.molliebaxter.com/backbeyond-issue-1-out-now
and the printers blog, http://blog.newspaperclub.com/ who will be featuring us at some point.

Twitter:

Phil McMillian: @folddesignuk
Mollie Baxter: @MollBaxter

Recent Commission

2011-07-21T08:50:00.000-07:00

Not posted much for a while but I've finished a few things off recently so I'll have to get them blogged very soon. Until then, here's an early sketch from a panel of a recent commission that went down very well with the client. (Note: it featured lots of dead frogs.)