Great Modern Story telling-

Guillermo del Toro is the master of story telling. After seeing Hellboy II, I realized one major thing you could see between it and Pan's Labyrinth: if you take away all the sci-fi elements, you have a really great story. His ability, however, to cross over the sci-fi with the actual story elements is more than impressive, it's downright awesome! Just wait till you see the drunken song that Abe Sapen and Hellboy sing over a six pack of Tecate beer! Not to mention the fight scene between Krauss the ghost and Hellboy in the locker room.

Also, as Brian mentioned in the previous post, we've been watching Alfred Hitchcock movies. If we are to meet up and brainstorm, I propose we watch directors like Hitchcock and Guillermo del Torro as we do it. It provides us a great opportunity to sketch as well as observe visual storytelling! I'm thinking we could meet once a week, possible on Tuesday or Saturday depending on your schedules. Any of our houses would be good, but for now we can settle on it through consensus. I have a rough Idea of the pre pro process, and I'd like to give you all a handout with it roughly explaned.

BTW, any of you are welcome to post anything interesting to the group on this blog. It's all of ours!

Model Sheets: Altered, Rescanned and Resized

Brian, here! Today I finished RESCANNING the model sheets and resizing them to a manageable (hopefully E-mailable) zip-file. Of course doing so without adding a few subtle alterations would be a crime. I heeded as many critiques as I could remember and they helped.....A LOT. Sorry, but I was a much younger when I first tackled those drawings (according to AAU improvement time). We can only hope the designs (among other things) will evolve into something that truly reflects our skill levels.

Also, I recently gained access to a 20 film collection of Alfred Hitchcock movies. Raf and I saw "The Lady Vanishes" a few days ago, and it was awe-some! I propose that every meeting (where we have time) might end with a screening of one of these 1+/- hour films. I actually wanted to have a "story meeting" where we could brainstorm on the coolest things that can happen on each shot we're working on. It definitely would help me with the storyboards if I had a whole pile of ideas to choose from, in case my own ideas fail. I don't know if the Hitchcock movies will help, but no jury of Pixar employees would convict me for trying it lol. Furthermore it'll be reeeeally hard to storyboard accurately without some solid layout drawings. We'll work on those soon enough.

L8er!

Drawing Workshop

Summers! What a fine invention that we should never get rid of just because no one farms anymore! Isn't it great? Except for one thing: with a lack of models, we'll probably die! Well, not really, but heres some thing you may like: UC berkely has a Drawing workshop that cost only 4 buck for three hours. You sign a membership(just says you'll follow the rules) and you can draw to your heart content! However, one problem: the classroom can get FULL. 4 bucks for a model? Yes, you can bet the word spreads, and people bring their friends! However, how can you pass it up?

Here's the info:

Art Practice-Kroeber Hall room 365
Friday six o'clock to 9. I think.
Click here and look at area D-5 for the location. It's on the corner of college and bancroft (bancroft only heads west, so you can't go up it to get to campus)

When Dogs Ally (Rat Dogs...)

So, the Rat Dog group finally met. Jimmy and Brian arrived at my house, and we enjoyed some left over pizza and chip before I headed over to pick up Alex on BART. We looked through Jimmy's sketch book and found out he's pretty handy with markers and color. Alex was able to do a drawings that replicated Brain's modeling, which is really good because well need more than one person animating to get this project done.

Brian took the lead and presented our Project, titled "The Scarlet Ninja" and explained his concept of the story as well as the modeling sheets. Most of his story boards followed the script I read, but I think the script I may have is an earlier rewrite. Brian also presented some beat boards he was working on, mostly for practice but they defiantly get across the look and feel of the project.

I'm feeling really optimistic after seeing everyone together. My job, you could say, is to learn about the production process and effectively divided up the tasks into manageable sections. Their will be two part to the actually production process: the stop motion section, which will be hosted at my house, and the vector animation section, which I'm hoping to divided among everyone with a computer and flash (or illustrator.)

To keep Us all coordinated, I'll send out an email packet ASAP with the model sheets, script and story boards as soon as possible. Contact me if you have any questions!