I have been invited by Toon Boom to present Dead Ringo at SIGGRAPH next week. I’ll be there on Tuesday (Aug 7th) at 10AM and 2PM, and again on Wednesday (August 8th) at 1PM.
I’ll be talking about the series, how it came to be, and my work methods in Toon Boom Animate. See you at the LA Convention Centre!
One of the advantages of cleaning up and compositing your own animation, is that the original animation itself can be REALLY rough. Because there is no one working on this after me, my original drawings can be pretty damn ugly as seen in the follwing example…
(Rough animation, followed by finished scene with background and visual effects. Roughed out in Flash, spit, polish and finish in Toon Boom Animate).
More Dead Ringo images are up on the Ringo series tumblr
Images from Dead Ringo continue to be posted (as the animated scenes are completed) on my tumblr.
The series itself is a challenge; 13 x 3 min. episodes (though some are closer to 4 minutes!) with a very limited budget. It is a chance to tell an episodic story over the 13 episodes, and enabling me to do something very stylized, and experiment with our color pallette. Each episode has a different ‘seasonal’ approach to the colors that are used. Episode 5 – ‘Ringo & The Bad Day’ is the ‘Cherry Blossom’ episode…
Storyboard page from our feature film ‘Los Campeones de La Lucha Libre’. Because other studios were involved in the production, the storyboards HAD to be detailed and on-model – especially as we knew some (most!) artists would be skipping the layout stage and working straight from the boards. Here are some more examples:
I personally love boarding as I feel it’s where true animation direction comes from. But right now I am enjoying working a little looser and rougher; because the cartoons we are doing are being produced from within, it means the storyboards become more of a blueprint for ideas, rather than rigid direction. And they don’t have to be consistently on model. Hell, when we work on our own stuff, we don’t even use model sheets.
Here are two examples of rougher boards; Super Computer & Dead Ringo. Note that some of the dialogue has been removed because these are still in production, and we don’t want to give EVERYTHING away! :)
Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai – “a site dedicated to bringing you authentic, translated Japanese ghost stories, kaidan, yokai and yurei, kappa and tengu, and other weird tales.”
Atelier CroMagnon. How cute are these! (and a blog which unfortunately, I can’t understand) *Google-Translated to English HERE*
akaname
bura bura
The Fantastic Shigeru Mizuki English Language Resource Page (Everyone knows I love Gegege No Kitaro)
Flickr set: Pages from a Shigeru Mizuki book that I picked up in Japan.
Of course, all this also serves as inspiration and research for our Dead Ringo series.
Just a reminder that we are continually updating images from the Dead Ringo series here…
http://deadringoseries.tumblr.com/
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