OG’s BLOG

Marooned is on its 100th episode, and looking better than ever. As many of you know, my buddy Tom Dell’Aringa writes and draws the strip, and sometimes I go over plotting and story issues with him. I have enjoyed working on the strip with him, watching it mature, and watching Tom get better at drawing and writing it. Most webcomics don’t get to 100 episodes, most don’t even get close. So if you have a moment, pop over to his site, maybe drop him a note of congratulations.

I was also fortunate enough to work on a trailer for the strip with him last year.

I’m not a big fantasy fan in general. However, I do respond well to the Tolkien variety of fantasy. Tolkien told tales set in a lush, imaginative world that was more literate than anything else, and very believable besides. He was a linguist, for heaven’s sake, and an Oxford professor. Such are the things that make a work more than the sum of its parts, and much more than mindless escapism. The themes of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings are those of war and peace, sacrifice and friendship, and of course, the notion that good men can conquer Evil, but only if they rise to the occasion. This is good stuff.

Well, a group of Lord of the Rings fans, having worn their various DVD versions of the film down to the nubs, and impatient waiting for Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movies to arrive, have gotten together and made a fan film based on the additional source material for Lord of the Rings – those notoriously impenetrable appendices at the end of the books. The Hunt For Gollum tells the story of Strider’s search for the little guy, as told by Tolkein, so we know the story is at least solid, part of the LotR canon, and relevant to the overall story.

I know. I say “fan film” and you can feel the puke rising in your throat, can’t you? You’ve seen one too many poorly done parodies, one too many mashups, one too many Scenes From the Movie with Different Music and/or Dialog Added by a Fan. From all appearances, this one seems different. The production values are high, the production design, music, composition, quality of picture. It’s all similar to the films we know and love. How many fan films have you seen that look like this?

I encourage you to go to the Official Hunt for Gollum website and have a look at the trailer, listen to the music. It all looks very promising, and hard to believe this was put together by a bunch of fans with only a budget of £3000. Not bad at all.

The film will debut online for free viewing (!) on May 3, 2009. Man. People keep giving away great films like this for free, how will anyone ever get paid to make a film again!?

Thanks to Tom Dell’Aringa for the tip

Another day, another Legend of Bill cartoon. I inked this one, and the talented Josh Ulrich colored it up nice. Looks like I will be occasionally inking this strip and I may be co-writing with the strip’s extremely talented and far-too-busy creator, David Reddick.

The strip is going places, and getting funner. I hope you pop over and check it out.

I inked today’s episode of David Reddick’s excellent Legendof Bill.  The dude can draw, and he is an absolute machine. I don’t think he even sleeps.

Inking David’s pencils was a real treat, and if things go to plan, we’ll be working together a lot more. I hope so, any way.

So you think you’re a Color Expert? Think your Rods and Cones are up to the challenge? Go take this Color Test, and see how you do!

ZERO is the perfect score. I got a 23 (a little better than average for my age range.) How did you do?

I haven’t been saying much about Moon Town lately because I’ve been pretty much pre-occupied with other things. But I thought maybe it was time to show you a little bit of progress. First, a glimpse of the inks for page one of the graphic novel (above).

And while I’m still pretty certain the film version of Moon Town is not something I should spend all my free time on, the old girl still may have some life left in her yet. Here’s design for the Red Ship, which features in one of the final shots of the trailer:

And, finally, a very small test to see what it would look like to create some of these assets to look like my Quick Sketch -

I do hope you’ll excuse my scattered and somewhat schizophrenic production process. I’m really not sure what to do with Moon Town at the moment. I’m thinking about it all the time, and trying a few things as time allows.

As Shane Acker’s feature film based on his animated short 9 rolls on toward the silver screen, I thought I’d share a conversation I had with him about his short. If you haven’t seen the short, it’s definitely great, and you should check it out.

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The notion is irresistible. An animator, beavering away, alone in a dark bedroom studio. His face is bathed in the light of a computer screen on which is forming the result of a labor of love; a strange tale of ragdolls in a post-apocolyptic wasteland.

For Shane Acker, that notion isn’t just a romantic idea of what it means to be a modern-day auteur. It’s his reality, and the result is the fantastic animated short “9″.

And to any would-be director dreaming of following in Acker’s footsteps, the dream is big indeed. Because Acker didn’t just finish the film to worldwide acclaim. His film was spotted by the right people in the right festival, and is going on to a greater life than perhaps even he dreamt: a feature film based on the short, with a Hollywood brand name behind it!

That’s what you’re here to read about, isn’t it? Well, Shane Acker took time out from his busy film schedule in Luxembourg to answer our questions about his short and its promising future.

OGDEN: What inspired the story of “9″?

ACKER: Well I knew I wanted to make a non-verbal film, something that would force me to focus on character acting and visual storytelling. For several years I had this idea rolling around in my head of these ragdoll creatures that would scavenge the wasteland of a ruined world, adapting, evolving and finding a way to survive.

I am a huge fan of stop-motion filmmakers like the Brothers Quay, Jan Svankmajer and the Lauenstein Brothers. I love the worlds they create, haunting metaphorical spaces where these little self-contained stories play out. So I took all of these ideas and inspirations and started boarding out the film.

OGDEN: How did you stay focused on it over the 4 years? Were there times you felt like giving it up?

ACKER: I don’t know. I did 2 years of production at school. I was learning Maya, and 3D animation production, so it was exciting and challenging. I spent a great deal of time working on the story and made a really solid story reel.

Because the 3D side of things was moving so slow, I kept noodling and refining the animatic. I think that’s what kept me focused after I started working professionally. I always knew where I was going because I had this blueprint I was working from. About year 3 I was over it. I was starting to freak out a bit, overwhelmed with the feeling it might never get done.

OGDEN: One of the most interesting things about the film is the way the story unspools. At first, you don’t realize what the character is doing, and then at the end, you pay it off. How did you write that?

ACKER: I was inspired by a Moebius comic strip of Arzak, one of his fantasy characters. It was only about 4 pages long and contained no text or dialogue. In the story, Arzak puts himself in grave danger, challenging an enormous creature. A chase ensues and at the last moment when we think Arzak is going to meet his end, a twist happens and we realize that Azrak was leading the creature into a trap all along.

I thought it was a unique way of telling a story, and I wanted to do something like that with 9. Yeah I storyboard and write a lot. It’s a quick and easy way to test out ideas and think through staging.

OGDEN: Did anything influence the look of the short?

ACKER: The paintings of Zdzislaw Beksinski, Street of Crocodiles by the Brothers Quay, ruins of European cities destroyed in WWII, and a film by the Lauenstein Brothers named Balance.

OGDEN: What impact did working at WETA have on the short?

ACKER: I learned a TREMENDOUS amount about character animation while I was at WETA. There were so many amazing artists there. I took a hiatus from production while I was working there. I was so busy and I didn’t want to send over my workstations to New Zealand.

I did show my film to a lot of people for feedback. One of my friends from WETA animated a shot in the film.

OGDEN: What obstacles did you encounter during production, and how did you overcome them?

ACKER: I used Maya for 3D production, Photoshop for 2D art, Premiere for cutting and After Effects for compositing. Over the course of 4 years and different software upgrades you’ll encounter many problems.

I’m not a programming genius so when it came to particles, rigging and dynamics I tried to find simple solutions. I abandoned the idea of using cloth for the characters early, I didn’t want the headache. I would try fancy things for a day or two. If I couldn’t figure it out I’d just “brute force” it to keep the production moving forward. It usually involved me just grabbing points or objects and keyframe animating them, rather than running dynamic sims or particle sims.

But when you think about it, that’s just what stop-motion or 2D animators would do anyway. There is no “sim” to make your pencil draw something breaking, swinging, or blowing in the breeze, so just grab those points and animate it! I did develop a pipeline of rendering my frames as .rla files with z-depth channels and used After Effects depth filter for depth of field and rack focus effects.

OGDEN: How involved is Tim Burton going to be in the film?

ACKER: Tim is great, he’s amazing. He is Executing Producing and I feel very fortunate to have this opportunity to work with him. I am working with an amazing writer, Pamela Pettler, who has written a few films for Tim in the past. The feedback from Tim and the producers has been great and has really helped in shaping the film.

OGDEN: Were you involved with Henry Selick’s production company on this?

ACKER: No, we are partnering with Attitude, an amazing animation studio in Paris.

OGDEN: You must be very excited. What led the production to Luxembourg?

ACKER: Luxembourg? Don’t you know Luxembourg is the epicenter of all things happening in animation? It’s like a new renaissance there. [All of the 3D animation will be done in Luxembourg with Attitude Studio, the 3D house that worked on the gorgeous film Renaissance.]

OGDEN: Talk a bit about how you expanded this short into a feature. Is there a bigger story to tell?

ACKER: We have a kick-ass story to tell. A lot of people scratch their heads and ask how we are going to expand the short into a feature? For me the short was just a small glimpse into a much larger world that I was creating. In the film you’ll begin to see what happened to the inhabitants of that world, how the ragdolls and characters came to be, what this strange device is that they carry and how all these things are inextricably locked in a struggle for the future of the world.

OGDEN: Thanks for talking to us.

ACKER: Zzzzzz..

For more information, check the official Shane Acker site. All imagery from the movie TM and ©2005 Shane Acker. All rights reserved.

On my PROJECTS page, I’ve put up a case study on the third Homegate advert I did last year for Bully Entertainment. You can watch the films and see a bunch of sketches and get some behind-the-scenes info on the case study, but there are also a bunch of fun projects in various stages of completion at the projects page. Feel free to give that a perusal and follow the links wherever they may lead.

I really enjoyed working on these adverts. I hope you enjoy the info and the eyecandy.

Pixar’s next short “Partly Cloudy” will be the directorial debut of Peter Sohn. As a bit of trivia, he’s the guy who provided the voice of Emile in Ratatouille.

There’s a nice big version of the above pic at AICN for those into the eyecandy. Meanwhile, here’s Pixar’s official synopsis of the film:

Everyone knows that the stork delivers babies, but where do the storks get the babies from? The answer lies up in the stratosphere, where cloud people sculpt babies from clouds and bring them to life. Gus, a lonely and insecure grey cloud, is a master at creating “dangerous” babies. Crocodiles, porcupines, rams and more–Gus’s beloved creations are works of art, but more than a handful for his loyal delivery stork partner, Peck. As Gus’s creations become more and more rambunctious, Peck’s job gets harder and harder. How will Peck manage to handle both his hazardous cargo and his friend’s fiery temperament?

Partly Cloudy will be attached to Up which hits theaters on May 29th, 2009.

I hadn’t heard of Scarygirl until yesterday, and I feel so late to the party! Nathan Jerevicius’ Scarygirl centers around the cute but slightly odd little girl who was abandoned late one night and is later found and brought up by a friendly octopus and guided by the mystical rabbit Bunniguru. The world of Scarygirl is a vision filled with psychedelic colors, dreamlike compositions and heartfelt stories that recall fables and folklore from our shared cultural memories and successfully inhabits that elusive territory between hip and cute; between slick and charming. Since its creation in 2001, Scarygirl has developed an underground following of fans throughout the globe through its online comic (although I was unable to find any remnant of this at the time of this writing), numerous limited edition vinyl toys, designer products, and traveling shows(!)

Currently, Jerevicius is busy producing a graphic novel slated for release from Allen and Unwin in October 2009, as well as a Scarygirl feature film in development with Passion Pictures Australia. But while you wait for all that, you can enjoy this online game. Talk about your multimedia superpowerhouse! The website alone is an entertainment destination. This is one to watch.

Thanks to Tronster for the tip…