joelmacmillan.com

Spent the day exploring some Villain concepts for my short. Trying to locked down the personality of the Villain has been more difficult than I’d originally expected. I’m want to build him based on a particular stereotype, however I’m having trouble deciding on just which one to settle on. Relying on a stereotype is important for me, as it’s the quickest way to describe a character in the least amount of time. Choosing a look that’s already familiar to the audience will help avoid lengthy exposition and character development, in a short that’s ‘trying’ to aim for a concise 4 or 5 minute length.

I’ve been maintaining a busy work schedule lately, so I’ve not only neglected my website routines but also lost touch with my daily sketching. It’s been a couple months since I’ve really been able to put pencil to paper, so I took the advantage of the rainy weekend weather, and decided to stay in and catch up on my movies, games and sketching.
Here are a couple sketches that I managed to scan in. As usual, I default to drawing my cowboy character as a warmup… but it’s been so long I needed to draw something familiar to get me back into the swing of things.

I’ve updated my demo reel page. Previously it was a lengthy download to stream in, and really wasn’t ‘web friendly’. So I decided to simply embed a YouTube version of the video, for faster streaming and pretty solid compression.
Please excuse the ‘Google Ad’ pop up, as I’m using some copyrighted music :S… (gotta love Death in Vegas). Advertising is a necessary evil in order for YouTube to pay for the use of copyrighted material.

DemoReel

Final colour BG for Scene 2 of Solar Gas Ad.

So this is what has slowly become of my short film. I’m tossing around the idea of re-engineering it as a commercial advert. This would help reign in the scope and set the pacing of the short.

Here’s a small collection of the WIP’s I’ve been working on.

Another great product from Cincopa Send Files. Cincopa video hosting solution for your website.

Took a break from any animation this weekend, but had some fun doodling up a familiar pose from my favourite little french bulldog Olive. This is a typical view when a certain somedog feels neglected while a certain ‘master’ is relaxing peacefully on the couch.

Pretty well done the rough animation for this scene. I spent the majority of the evening ploughing through the last inbetweens. They may be extremely ‘rough’ inbetweens, but I’m rushing to get through the clean-up/colour phase… assuming my attention span(or motivation) doesn’t wear out.

So I finally broke down and bought a full version of Toon Boom Animation. This is meant to be a fun quick test to start getting my feet wet, and practice my old animation chops. It’s mostly just the keys and breakdowns for now, but as time frees up, I’ll make sure to fill out the rest of the animation. It’s rough, the timing’s a little off, the action’s a bit flourishy… but it was really only intended to get me loosened up. Towards the end of the scene, I felt as though I was getting a handle on the Cintiq interface, and the Tradigital Animation workflow… as a result I think those drawings are the ‘loosest’.