A Crooked Sixpence

Newish reel

2008-10-24T13:21:00.002-07:00

I am going to cut together an even newer reel with stuff from Peanuts and Sideshow Christmas. Till then, here's my demo from June 2008:

Studio B

2008-07-22T15:33:00.002-07:00

So I'm working at the B.

...

¡self-promotion!

2008-07-10T13:33:00.003-07:00

Hey world,

PBS has finally started airing the show I was working on at Atomic. There are a few "teaser" clips up on youtube now. One of the clips contains my entire sequence from one episode!
I'm not sure who did the first scene or the end where they're tied up. I know Sean did the title clip with the radios and the wrench.
Everything from 0:25 ("Fidel, get back to work") up till 2:26 (where Stash tackles the guys) is my animation.

Watch:

Addendum

2008-04-25T16:13:00.002-07:00

If you found this blog through my business card or resume. You should probably have a look at my new reel. I'm not allowed to post the new one on the internet yet, because it contains unaired footage. But I can give a copy on DVD to any potential employer. If you'd like to see my new reel (as of April 2008) then email me at

chuck_cch
at
hotmail
dot
com

Old Reel

2008-04-15T00:28:00.002-07:00

It's job hunting time again. And that means I really should be updating my blog more. I can't post my new reel from my work at Atomic Cartoons until the show airs on TV, but I do have my Gradshow reel from 2007:

I'll also put up my Gradshow portfolio, since I should have posted that back when it was new. Actual new stuff will start appearing here later.

No progress to report, but here's something.

2007-04-18T14:16:00.000-07:00

Know what I do when I sit down to a computer that's not mine? I hit PASTE and see what the last person left in the clipboard. Usually there's nothing or like one word. Sometimes it's an image.
Today it was:

This type of puppet humour is still HUGE with both kids and adults in Latin America, by the way.

...

take three

2007-04-03T10:43:00.000-07:00

Colours changed.

him too.

2007-04-02T14:26:00.002-07:00

She's going on the gradpage

2007-04-02T10:19:00.000-07:00

Очень интересная статья!

2007-03-19T12:15:00.000-07:00

Well I'll be a son of a bitch ... read this here article!
Not that this kind of thing was ever uncommon in animation. But still, interesting to see such examples.

Value sketch

2007-03-07T15:21:00.000-08:00

Layout for Craig's class. Tone. Colour to follow.

¡¡Big phone dump!!

2007-02-27T14:33:00.000-08:00

I've finally managed to get cell phone pics off my phone and onto the porn machine. Some of these are quite old.

From last semester:

Cap crowd at Two Parrots.

Sonja is known to snatch and hoard shiny objects, like watches and eyeballs.

Tall Sean gets his Wolverine on.

From around Christmas:

St. Paul's hospital on Burrard was covered with stars. Each one had the name of a donor on it. You make a bigger donation, you get a bigger star.

Don't know whose donation earned them the comet.

Then a giant jellyfish attacked.

The photos don't do it justice. This was one bigass tree full of lights.

From downtown:
Someone left carnations for this ATM.

INUKSHUK DESTROY BEACH!

INUKSHUK TRIUMPHANT!

These buttons are funny to me. Three guesses why.

It was weird to see BC Place without the roof. I've grown up here all my life. It's like seeing one of the mountains disappear.
Same thing snapped from across the water near Basic Inquiry.

From school:

Having a -- no, I won't say it.

Saw this in the parking lot. Had some difficulty figuring out how it happened.

One animation frame, stolen from the shpoops's desk: Notice what Corey concentrates on in his second pass ...

Sean with a topknot!

Corey with ... yeah.

A find.

2007-02-26T22:22:00.000-08:00

This is cooler than you. So is this. Watch and be inspired.

Corey's Karmic Come-uppance.

2007-02-25T17:09:00.000-08:00

Some time ago, Corey had to go shoot off his mouth about how cool it would be to be Spider-Man ... AND pilot a Gundam. And we laughed. Oh, how we laughed.

Ah, but the perfectly calibrated, ineffably precise Clockwork of the Universe always balances itself out. You just can't put that kind of thought out there without some dire consequences. Something hideous and abominable. You, Corey, wished for something that SHOULD NOT BE.

What am I talking about? This! And THIS!

Oh you may blame the Japanese, Corey. But I blame YOU.

Let this be a lesson to us all.

(Special thanks to Kadi and Kelvin of the first years class for finding these clips.)

¿oɹəɹqɯos ɐ uɪ xəɹ-ʇ uɯɐppoɓ ʎɯ s,əɹəɥʍ 'əsɹəʌɪun os

First pass colour. Incomplete.

2007-02-21T17:12:00.000-08:00

'mo keep working on this. Shirt could be a completely different colour. Still some unblended spots on the Big Guy's hand. And the shadows on the hand could probably be darker. White for highlights on buddy's clothes -- bad choice?
Don't know ... isn't this kind of bright lighting supposed to make stuff go all chiaroscuro? Could use any input.

A streak of BAD LUCK feels like ...

2007-02-20T16:45:00.000-08:00

Ever have one of THOSE days?
The truth is the universe doesn't really get up every morning just to spend the day screwing you over, though it may seem like that sometimes. Like the other day, when I --

Hey!

-- was driving down--

HEY! LISTEN!

oh... it's you. The Voices.
What do you want?

Why does it look all cleaned up instead of sketchy?

Because I cleaned it up in photoshop.

Hmm ... 'da hell's the point of that?

I'm going to colour it.

Hah! You never finish that kind of thing!

I'm GOING. TO. COLOUR. IT.

Suuure you are.

That's it. I'm drowning you out with music.

You do that. We'll still be waiting.

(this is the music)
A coloured version of this illustration is on the way. I mean it.

Just because you're paranoid ..

2007-02-13T16:27:00.000-08:00

... don't mean they're not after you.

Do you ever get the feeling you're being watched?

Yeah. That's ME. Sketching that ugly-ass grill of yours.
I'd like to take this into Photoshop and pretty it up, but there's a class using the lab right now and my computer at home has died (of natural causes). Later, kids.

Look what I found!

2007-02-10T21:13:00.000-08:00

Your intrepid protagonist has been wasting time on Youtube again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3B89sFNH8Y

Illo 2-2: There's money to be made in the Starving Arts.

2007-01-23T15:22:00.000-08:00

3:30 PM ... If this were last term, this would count as on time.

You know you've arrived when you're doing your starving in a prestigious gallery.

Whatshisface

2007-01-18T18:13:00.000-08:00

Yep. That's the sumbitch.
That shirt, I really do own. It means I'm a geek who reads comics on the internet. Madass props if you can spot the reference.

Late, I know. Maybe I'll colour it.

Another late illo, plus I had a sombrero.

2006-12-02T19:53:00.000-08:00

¡¡HALLOWE'EN!!

It's ... some kind of werewolf. You weren't a party to the conversation that led to this, so ... never mind.

I had a sombrero, briefly. The woman who lived downstairs in my friend's duplex was throwing it away so I asked for it. The thing was HUGE. Like three feet across. No fancy designs on it, no patterns or anything, just plain straw. But it was made of a pretty sturdy type of straw which held its shape but had just enough give in it for the brim to kind of flop and bounce when you walked. It forced you to walk with a kind of cartoony slouch, which made the hat bounce even better. And the middle part of the hat was two feet high, at least. It was an amazing piece of headwear. I used to wear it when we'd all go drinking at the beach at Garry Point. People loved the thing. Nothing cracks up drunken teenagers like an equally drunk kid in an enormous Speedy Gonzales hat.

There was this guy who lived in my old friend Paul's neighbourhood, who'd walk around talking to himself and eating lawn mushrooms. Pretty lucky not to have been poisoned. Well, maybe he had been poisoned and it had made him crazy. But you'd have to be messed up already to eat random mushrooms off the ground. Kind of a chicken-and-egg conundrum, there. We called him the Mushroom Man. He lived with his mother, who was also crazy. She'd squat on the sidewalk outside their house staring out at traffic. And I mean like *squat*. Not a tasteful, Spider-Man kind of squat, where you're sitting on the balls of your feet with your bum resting on your heels and your knees pointing out in a spring-ready pose; I mean a knees-toward-the-sky, ass-toward-the-pavement, Turkish Toilet Position, SQUAT squat.
Sometimes, the Mushroom Man would be out there too, leaning against a telephone pole. Sometimes you'd see him come out and bring his mom a bag of chips from the store. I don't know if he ever shared his lawn mushrooms with her, though.

Once, I left my huge sombrero at Paul's place. Big mistake. His mom was cleaning up and found the thing in her living room. She didn't even bother to ask Paul about it; just put it out with the trash. Paul broke the news to me at school. What a shame.
It was about a week later, as I was walking up Paul's street, that I saw the Mushroom Man and his mother on the sidewalk, staring out at traffic in their usual way. He was leaning on a telephone pole, and she was squatting with her arms around her knees. And on her head was my sombrero.

I never asked for it back.

Belated Illo #? - Frustration

2006-11-24T15:24:00.000-08:00

Got asked this in life drawing. My response was a doodle that became this illustration.

This thing you hu-mons call "KLEE-NUP" confuses and infuraties me!

2006-11-24T10:58:00.000-08:00

I've discovered how useful photoshop is for doing the clean-rough stage for layouts. You can make a perspective guide by putting each vanishing point on its own layer and then drawing radiating lines from it. You drop the opacity of those layers to about 30% so you only see the lines faintly, then do your clean linework with the tablet. This is kind of like how John throws down a bunch of perspective lines and then picks out the building shapes from it.
The best part is that you can use as many points as you like without cluttering your page with lines: You just turn off all the guide layers except the one or two vanishing points you need at a time. Also, you can erase the lines from parts of the image that don't use them, such as when you do an overlay with its own set of points.
Clean up on the top layer, and you're Bob's nephew. Because you can turn off all your roughwork and perspective guides, you end up printing out something that's VERY easy to clean up over:

But because computer lines look like ass, cleanup still needs to be done in pencil. It's not often that I can hold back the caffeine jitters long enough to clean up a whole page, but it eventually happened:

ATTENTION:

2006-11-09T15:59:00.000-08:00

GO SEE BORAT.

Okay?

As you were.

Gluttony.

2006-11-07T12:19:00.000-08:00

What the ...
an on-time illustration?!

Wanted to colour this. Maybe later I'll give it a speed-paint.
Missing illos to follow. Really.

Classmate as an animal

2006-10-30T14:11:00.000-08:00

Late. Very very late.
I will get around to all the illustrations ... eventually.

(et au Pays-Bas, ils donnent à leurs plantes le café)

2006-09-29T15:06:00.000-07:00

Wine. French.
I will not explain.

¿You've never heard of the "Venus of Willendorf"?

2006-09-18T20:33:00.000-07:00

Nekulturny. I blame television.

This is illustration assignment the first -- "ancient".
Ancient beauty standards could be as unrealistic as modern ones...

One of these days I'll learn to colour.
Later.

I LIVE.

2006-08-20T19:20:00.000-07:00

My first post all summer!
And what do I have to show for it? Like three weeks of sketches ... if that. Possible part three of Delaney's favorite maxim might be that if you stop drawing for three months, there's nothing left to see.
Life drawing was difficult to get back into, of course. But I've been doing a lot of that this month and drawings are looking a little better and feeling a lot better. Days with drawing-rhythm are more frequent than before. I might upload some recent nudies later. For now, some random sketchness:

I've been drawing people in the wild again. Haven't done that in yonks.The woman on the right wasn't someone I saw, but a set of random squiggles that turned out to have a shape that could be picked out in darker line and made a figure. Let chaos do the drawing for you? That kind of led to the left-right game (see below).

I like the one above because this guy actually looked like that.

The left-right game! One person draws something with their left hand (or right, if you're lefty) and the other turns it into something coherent using only cleanup in dark lines. Here's a couple that I scribbled and Sonja cleaned up:Miss Bugeyes-Swimcap was lefthanded by Sonja and cleaned up by Our Protagonist; Slouchy Sanchez vice versa.

Another exercise I didn't actually pursue beyond this one doodle was to take a person and try to fit them into the outline of an animal. This dude started as an eagle silhouette. I'd like to see other people's take on this outline "game" thing.And I've also been doodling characters... none of them really animatable, but it keeps the pencil moving. I'm trying to shake off the summer rust in the nine seconds that are left before we go back to school.That's all for now. I'll try and update a few more times before der Tag kommt.

Now with nudity!

2006-04-23T02:04:00.000-07:00

Some lifedrawing. Gonna keep up with this over the summer. Moh is right; a good session can be therapeutic. Had a few bad sessions in a row but came out of that funk eventually. Gonna hit Basic this week. Might see some of you there.

Behold!

2006-04-02T18:43:00.000-07:00

Is it man or machine?
Simply flip your monitor upside-down to see if you guessed right.

Looks like I have a blog now. I'm as surprised as anyone. Drawings will go here. Eventually. Like this one:

Who knows ... Maybe I'll even update this thing once in a while.

uɐɯ :ɹəʍsuɐ