Beasty Priesty

Carrot

Buddah

Last year I worked with my pals at Asterisk Animation on a documentary about the Buddha for PBS.
Mostly I did monsters and demons (of course).
Please note - I didn't design anything here.
The design was by Marina, a lovely Croatian.
Lots of talented folks worked on it and you can see my bits below, or wait until April 7th when you can watch it on the telly.

Carolyn Green did the stuff from 2:41 and then I linked it my my section from 3:37 - 4:28.
I also did the compositing from 4:37 and designed the short sequence from 5:00.


In this clip, I the compositing and all the demons to 1:07.
I also composited this beautiful scene at 2:47.
The scene was a collaboration between several of us, and I was particularly pleased with the birds I created.

This is a guy

FART

Remember This?!!

Boxhead and Roundhead Competition 2010

K. At

Head In Jar

Flah

Apologies to Norman

Who outside of Australia knows Norman Lindsay?
Norman was a sometimes controversial Australian artist.
He painted, created etchings, sculpted and was also a cartoonist.
He wrote and illustrated a single children's book called The Magic Pudding.
It's the very Australian equivalent of something like Winnie-The-Pooh.
Several years ago a collection of dunderheaded simpletons got together to make an animated feature out of this classic book and produced exactly the kind of pap that you can easily imagine dunderheaded simpletons producing.
The book is full of well established, well designed characters ripe for animating.
There's a simple, fun story that's broken up into four chapters (or slices as they're called in the book).
All the elements are sitting there.
All it needed was a strong hand to guide it through.
But it didn't get that.
The film stinks.
They took the amazing, AMAZING drawings and make kaka from it.
Anyway. I'm sure I've bitched about this film before on here.
I have scanned a small handful of the illustrations below.
I present them to the world and offer an apology to Norman Lindsay.
Show your friends and tell everyone to buy the book from somewhere.

The fellow on the left is the main character - Bunyip Bluegum.
The guy in the top hat is his conservative uncle, Uncle Wattleberry.
They're both koalas.
A bunyip is a mythical Aboriginal creature and both bluegum and wattleberry are trees.

Bunyip and Wattleberry share this little house.
Bunyip is prompted to leave the house because he's tired of finding his uncles whiskers in the soup.



Bunyip leaves home and meets Bill Barnacle and Sam Sawnoff (the penguin).
The have a magic pudding.
Using a magic trick the pudding can be whatever pudding you like - steak and kidney, rum raisin. Anything.
You cut a slice an it grows back.
The pudding is called Albert and he's a very, very bad mannered rude feller.
Bill and Sam are constantly on patrol because puddin' thieves are always trying to steal Albert.
Bunyip rallies his new friends and they form the Puddin' Eaters Appreciation Society (or something like it).

Each chapter revolves around the puddin' theives trying to steal the puddin' and the puddin' owners retrieving it.
Here, the thieves start a fire and get the heroes to come help them while someone makes off with Albert.

This is Albert standing up in his bowl.
A terrific design.
There's been some horseplay and Sam has accidentally shoved Bill's face into the pudding.

One thing the book is full of is FIGHTING!
Here, the heroes pummel the thieves.

Here, Bill and Sam tell the story of how they found the puddin'.
In short, they were shipwrecked (they were both sailors) on an iceberg with the ships cook.
As they got thinner, he got fatter.
They discovered Curry and Rice (the name of the cook) was surviving on the Albert and wasn't sharing a crumb of it.
They throw him off the iceberg to his death (yeah!).


The fellow that Bill is shouting at is an echidna, although they call him a hedgehog here.

A big blustery rooster that is surprisingly like Foghorn Leghorn in his dialogue.

A smarty pants kookaburra.

In the third chapter they come across a market gardener - a dog called Benjamen Brandisnap.
He joins the society of puddin' owners and helps them through the last chapter and a half.

Below is my favorite drawing in the whole book.
I love it.
In the end, after all the fights (including a punch up at the end of a court scene) they all go live in a tree together.
Note that Albert is sulking in his puddin' paddock.

Tauranga

Hey there NZ.
Someone from Tauranga has been visiting my blog regularly.
I wonder who you are.
I know nothing of Tauranga other than it's the town that Wal Footrot plays rugby for.
Anyone wanna put their hand up?

FU

Onionhead

Here's some ancient stuff (remember this Lee?).
About a billion years ago I was playing with this character called Onionhead.
The film Edward Scissorhands was very popular a few years previous.
It's about a sweet, innocent character who was built by a kindly inventor who dies before he can finish building him.
I stole from that and created this character who'd lived a similar existence, but instead of living a life of sweetness and innocence, he's a naughty, violent, unpredictable wild child.
I did a follow up to this one with much, MUCH better drawings called Onionhead on Holidays but they're all in a shed in Australia which makes them hard to scan.
Anyone who's familiar with my work can glance at this and see that I've been redoing the same stuff over and over and over again since high school.
I photocopied a couple of hundred of these little books and as far as I know this is the only one left.

From Brigham Young U - UPDATED

Well this is the first time in a long time that I'm doing some writing on the blog.
Some months ago Kelly T. Loosli of Brigham Young University in Utah emailed me asking for my Boxhead & Roundhead compilation DVD.
In return he promised to send me some of the work his students have been working on.
A quick Google reveals that the work from Brigham Young is getting attention from the big boys studios in the west, and it's easy to see why.
Although they all suffer from the kind of things all student films are prone to, almost all of them were of a very high technical standard.
Mostly they were the kind of cute, punchline cartoon that Pixar has been making for years.
This is what I watched:
Las Pinatas - a gag filled film about two "alive" piniatas. The rendering was great and the bull pinata was a lovely goofy design.
Faux Paw - A public service thing about being safe on the internet that combined 2D and 3D.
Der Ostwind - A black and white film about Germany during the war that combined live action and 3D to create a kind of nice, stylised "Sky Captain" variation.
Noggin - A film with a great idea but not such great execution. It was about a collection of characters who have their faces in their chests who harass a fellow built like a normal human with the head on top.
Turtles - Very Pixaresque film about battling turtles. Fun enough stuff.
Petshop - A chinchilla vies for attention. This film had the most interesting design.
Pajama Gladiator - This is Brigham Young most successful short, I think. It's won a bunch of awards and whatnot but I have to admit it's not the kind of thing I much like.
Kites - a reasonably sweet story about a kid dealing with the passing of his father.

Lots of fine, crowd pleasing stuff.
These kids, if they hustle, should have long careers in commercial 3D animation, although it would be great to see some more sophisticated storytelling and less obvious design and animation fostered in these talented students.
I'm sure they have it in them.

UPDATE
Shortly after reading this, Kelly send me some links to prove that his students most definitely have an independent streak.
http://sketchadventure.blogspot.com/
http://jake-paperlife.blogspot.com/
http://gardenturtle.blogspot.com/
All these blogs are full of terrific illustrations, conceptual work, doodles etc further bolstering these students ultimate employability.

Plonking Along

A Present From Lisa

My pal Lisa really is a terrifically talented woman and has been for the 15 odd years I've known her.
She's beautiful and amazing and we thank her for this lovely present.

An Alice Repost

These are ancient, and unfortunately only very small old jpgs of very large images.
With Tim Burtons Alice in Wonderland being released soon, I thought it worth posting them again.
Sigh...I wish they were bigger and better quality.

Anyway.
These are college illustrations.
I set the story in a hospital.
The Cheshire Cat was a vast obese thing.

The March Hare and the Mad Hatter were in the looney bin.

the Caterpillar was based on an interview I saw with the dying writer, Dennis Potter.

Deedle

Industry Parasite