"You're a gazelle"

Smitten Duck

He's finally going to speak to her.  This is the day ...

(click on image to view larger)

heartbreak to follow .

Kung Fu Bunny ?

UPDATE: High-Res. HD Quicktime videos of the opening Dream sequence and the End Credit sequence of KFP have been posted here: The Art of the Title: Kung Fu Panda ------

A quick rough sketch , but I really am just using that as an excuse to direct your attention to this :

http://www.shinestudioclients.com/ShinePress/ShineKungFuPandaMovie.html

"Michael Riley, Shine’s creative director, composed images of traditional Chinese landscapes, calligraphy and 2D character animation set in a 3D landscape all choreographed to the classic Carl Douglas song “Kung Fu Fighting”; remixed by Cee-Lo Green, accompanied by Jack Black.

Riley’s concept included reprising the film’s main characters in original cell animations by finding them hidden in a gigantic Chinese calligraphy character.

This mix of disciplines required a tremendous collaboration between Shine, James Baxter Animation and the DreamWorks Animation team of animators, production designers and directors. "

The hand-drawn character animation in the end-credits was animated at Dreamworks Animation by these animators:

Panda: Gabriele Pennacchioli
Shifu: William Salazar
Tigress: Rodolphe Guenoden
Tai Lung: Philippe Le Brun
Mantis: Ken Morrissey
Viper: Rodolphe Guenoden
Crane: Simon Otto
Oogway: Ken Morrissey
Dad (Duck): Alessandro Carloni
Messenger Goose and Rhino: Pierre Perifel
Monkey: Gabe Hordos

Animation drawing by Gabriele Pennacchioli - 

The movie Kung Fu Panda opens with a brilliant 2D animated sequence (animated by James Baxter Studio)  and is bookended by the end credit sequence (animated by DWA) which reprises the look of the opening 2D dream sequence.   Be sure to click the link above to view the end credit sequence as a high-quality Quicktime. 

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UPDATE:

Bonus !  Now MSN Movies has posted the complete Opening Dream Sequence animated by James Baxter Studios.

Kung Fu Panda Opening Dream Sequence




Dream Sequence Production -

Storyboard and Direction by Jennifer Yuh Nelson

Animation Director - James Baxter
Asst. Animation Director- Chris Sonnenburg

Producer - Hameed Shaukat
General Manager - Kendra Baxter

Key Clean-Up Artist - Helen Michael
Rough In-Betweener/Asst. Clean-Up - Raymond Flores Fabular

Compositors - Jason Brubaker , Erik Tillmans
Color Models - Claire Williams
Ink & Paint - Tina Staples
Line Art Scanner - Marisa Ledina

Accounting- Lauren Matthews-Hill

Suspicion

Who done it ? 

Another digital drawing messing around with TVPaint .  I promise I'm working up to something more substantial,  but from time to time I just have these little sketches that turn out looking pretty nice (to me)  and I have no where else to post them, so they turn up here.

POST-IT drawing

Haven't put up one of these in a while .    Prismacolor, marker, Col-Erase pencil and Liquid Paper™ on  Post-IT™ note.

clowning around

Richard Williams talked to us during the making of "Who Framed Roger Rabbit ?" about his theory of how the classic Disney and Warner Bros. characters were akin to circus Clowns in terms of the design of their costumes and "make up"  (the big noses, eyes, eyebrows, etc.)  That was his theory in designing Roger Rabbit .   I don't know if that's true or not, but I keep drawing these big nose characters and for me they're fun ...

(rough and clean up in TVPaint, drawn on Cintiq tablet.  Click on any image to see it larger. )

Inking tips

Here is a very interesting and useful piece from the Fleischer Studio.  I think I got this from Shane Gline's Cartoon Retro site .  Other than the references to "powdering your cells" (change that to "clean your tablet") this remains a very good guide to dynamic inking, especially as it applies to "inking" on the Intous or Cintiq tablet.   The best Fleischer cartoons always had outstanding inking , with lots of thick and thin line work for emphasis and texture . When I see that work and the great inking in the Disney features I'm just in awe of the artists who were able to produce that level of quality. (If you've ever tried inking on a cel with brush or quill pen you know what I mean)  The new Popeye DVD is coming out soon.  I can hardly wait !

(click on the image to see it larger)

One More TVPaint Cleanup

I had hamster's on my mind today because I have a freelance job designing a hamster (not this one) for an animated show and when I was on break I sketched this one for fun, decided to clean it up , so here's another demo of favorite animation/drawing app, TVPaint.

[click any image to see it larger]

Next I drop out the blue underdrawing and this is the final
clean up image on TVPaint , ready to be colored :

I've also been playing around with a freeware app called DELINEATE , which auto-traces bitmap images to vector (SVG)  which can them be opened up in Illustrator for further work as an Illustrator file (and thence imported to Flash).  I'm having pretty good results from DELINEATE as shown in the next two images, showing the drawing above (from TVPaint)  vectorized by DELINEATE and then opened in Illustrator.

(this was auto-traced in Delineate , no further tweaking by me )

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Here's a stab at coloring it , done with TVPaint .

Clean Up with TVPaint

Someone asked about how to get "smooth" clean up lines using an application like TVPaint .  I answered with a little tutorial made from a quick rough sketch of a cartoony cat's head .  This was done on the Cintiq tablet .

I usually start with a "rough" blue pencil from the Sketch Panel , then on a new layer I ink the clean up lines in black . I make sure to take advantage of the rotating "virtual animation disc" in TVPaint to rotate the drawing to the best angle for laying down the clean up lines smoothly and  I use the zoom-in control to get closer in on the part of the drawing I am working on. (see the second image) . 





Finish the black line clean up over top of the blue line underdrawing:




Then drop out the blue line to leave just the clean black lines.




You then have the option of coloring some of the lines a different color from black if you want to by using the Add function in the pen tool . Then add fill color. I've done this one in black & white because it felt sort of like a 30's character with the dot eyes and the pie-cut highlights in the eyes . Not the greatest drawing in the world , but it gives you the idea of what can be accomplished in terms of "smooth" line quality .

Pink Martini

Besotted bun :

One of my favorite bands is Pink Martini.  They've been around for a while, but haven't put out too many CD albums .  Their two CD's  "Sympathique" and "Hang On Little Tomato" are soon to be joined by a new , long awaited CD ,  "Hey, Eugene".  Check 'em out .

"Somewhere between a 1930s Cuban dance orchestra, a classical chamber music ensemble, a Brasilian marching street band and Japanese film noir is the 12-piece Pink Martini."

Contentment

Feeling relaxed, contented, and on top of things again (which is unusual for me lately, but I'm finding my center again). 

so, here 'tis :  a relaxed and contented bunny drawing.

(drawn on Cintiq, TVPaint)

"Give me a BIG Bear growl... scare me !"

Today I had the pleasure of hearing from Rune Bennicke, who's great model sheet of Little Feather (from the never completed "My People's" ) I posted a few weeks ago.   Rune included a couple of copies of clean up model sheets I did for one of the characters he animated in "Brother Bear" ,  Koda's Mom ,  and suggested I post them here.   These sheets are my clean up drawings , attempting to retain the powerful, primal quality in Rune's beautiful rough animation of Koda's Mom.  The idea was to not treat it as simply a "clean up" line in the customary modern sense of  putting down a pretty, closed-off, no gaps line ; rather we tried to take an organic , rougher line approach to keep the big mother bear looking like a true force of nature as in the rough animation.   It was a great assignment and I'm thankful to Rune for trusting me with this character , and also his more comical , anthropomorphic bear character, Tug .

[click the images to  see them a bit larger]

Copyright © Walt Disney Co.

It was a challenge drawing all that fur detail , the overlap, etc., and in most cases each drawing was different , no straight inbetweens ... of course, when it came time to be color-modeled they painted the character really dark for most scenes, so most of that fur detail got lost , but I like to think that the audience "feels" it being there , whether it's immediately obivous or not (  or am I fooling myself and I did a lot of extra work for nothing ... ?  I don't care , it was fun to draw it that way. )

Another raccoon

A face from the past .

This drawing was a request from someone who wanted a drawing of "Meeko" , the raccoon from Disney's Pocahontas, which I worked on as the clean up lead (working with Nik Ranieri who was the supervising animator on Meeko) .  Like almost all of the other drawings I've posted lately ,this was drawn on the Cintiq tablet.

[click on the image to see it larger]

"Meeko"  Copyright © Walt Disney Co.

Begone Dull Care

Crafty looking raccoon. What's he up to ?

Only 100 Pounds To Go

After a brief respite, Self-Portrait week continues here on You're A Gazelle.  Lay off that carrot cake Big Bunny Boy !  (actually, to be totally honest,  I haven't worked out this much in real life ,but other than that the resemblance in profile is remarkable) . 

[as with all the images, Click to View It Larger]