My Deepest Apologies....

HI everyone, it’s been a long time since I’ve posted, so much for my one a week promise. I think I’ll try and do two posts a month for now. Thanks to everyone for the positive feedback on my showreel. I appreciate it deeply. Before I go on, I just want to take this opportunity (seriously) to apologize to my friends, family, LAS class mates and tutors, National Gallery Administrators, bloggers and anyone who has shown interest or helped me for the past year, for not finishing my final project in time for the gallery screening. I really feel like I’ve let a lot of people down
including myself. After my trip to Marrakech (a wonderful trip which was made special by my lady, I definitely owe her a big apology) I fell into a slump and managed to pick myself up out of it 3 weeks later. I have no excuses; I got in my own way. So I promise no matter what, I’ll continue to work on the final, gallery or no gallery, till it’s done. I have given up the right to quit. Once again people….I’m sorry. I won’t let you or myself down again.

Following are some of the things I’ve been up to for the last few weeks, some seen, some unseen.
















Test Composite from Libra Bear Vids and Vimeo.

Character Design.
I wish I could have pushed some of the design a bit more, made the characters a bit more larger than life. I feel they’re a bit bland. I also think the cupid character doesn’t feel like he belongs to the same world. I like my take on Father Time the original God of Death. My first design of him was very Zeus-ish with wings. It’s only after I did some more research on him, I decided to make him a little darker. The stick of his scythe is based on the shape of the staff Moses holds in Prince of Egypt. The blade and the white bandage is a tip of the hat (or rip off, you decide LOL) to Bleach. The show is about death Gods so I thought hey, why not use that with my death god. Father time definitely went through a long design process and set the tone for the rest of the characters. I’ll post the variations later. One thing I hate with him is the model of his wings. They look very flat and dead so after I did the model I drew some thumbnails of how I want his wings to look and feel. The model won’t be so rigid. Venus I find, is really hard to keep on model. I still really struggle to draw her. I tried to look at actresses with square faces, Selma Hayek, Angelina Jolie, Minnie Driver to name a few. Her eyebrows are far too thick. I only noticed it when I cleaned her up. In the film, I’ll make them thinner. I wasn’t sure what colour to do her hair, at first it was to be blonde, but I thought that was too typical. My class mate Nick Hanks told me I should make it Ginger and showed quite a few paintings of Venus with ginger hair. The most significant being The Birth of Venus by Botticelli.
Cupid is based on a statue I saw in the V&A museum. I’ll post it next time. Being the god of erotic love, I wanted him to be a bit spoilt, and almost evil. It’s strange, every time I’ve shown the animatic, people always comment on cupid. He doesn’t even do anything. A bit like Boba Fett in Star Wars. He’s so popular but he only has 10mins of footage in the first trilogy (come on, to be an animator you have to be a bit of a geek)

Backgrounds.
This is something I’m really gonna compromise on. I’m designing them as I go along. I wanted the backgrounds to have a painterly feel to it, a bit like Studio Ghibli, but I can’t paint like that, and If I could, it would take far too much time. This film will definitely skip clean up stage. I wanted to really push the backgrounds. I went around London and took loads of pictures, anything that looked Grecian. Then take elements of the photos and fuse it into my picture. My understanding of perspective is very poor ( I learnt how to draw watching cartoons and reading comics, I’ve skipped a lot of the basics so I’m trying to atone for my sins now) The environment will be quite misty and clouds will be moving at different speeds along with mist. The colour versions are just tests.

Video
This is just a test to see what the final composite might look like. The clouds will be different and cupid will have hair. Might blur the image a bit more to soften it.

Generally the Art direction is all over the place, but I’m learning a lot, which is the main thing I guess

And that’s it for now. I’ll try and post more in two weeks.

And Again….
Wes

PS Just started a new blog, Just for showreels librabearshowreels.blogspot.com.