SPONSORED MESSAGE: 19 Kids & Counting

what watching television does to my sketchbook

BONUS:  Cropped & mirrored versions of the illustration above:

Happy Easter Monday?

© 2014 Mark Phillips

Drawings Inspired by Eleuthera

When you wait until your early 30's to enjoy some snorkeling, it affects your creative output. 

© 2014 Mark Phillips

© 2014 Mark Phillips

© 2014 Mark Phillips

tweet tweet... Happy Friday!

Weeknight Sketchin'

BEEN BUSY.

2013: A Visual Approximation

UGH.  What a year.  2013 was back-to-back busy.  I've got two exciting projects waiting for release in some shape or form which have been hard not to spoil too much.
The first is a stop-motion music video for Locksley which I finished almost a year ago.  It has been kept from release for various reasons which should be resolving themselves sooner than later.  It's a piece I'm very proud of and hope to share with you soon!  It was done on the cheap with the help of some friends and is just waiting for some eyeballs to see it.
My other project from last year was animating & designing for the feature film Lucky Stiff which is currently somewhere between done and being released... that's about all I know.  It was a great project to be a part of and I got to work along side the excellent Emily Hubley who taught me a lot about focusing what I need to communicate visually.  Don't worry!  I still snuck a nipple in there somewhere.

Background for Last Days of Coney Island by Ralph Bakshi

Currently I'm working as an animator on Ralph Bakshi's Last Days of Coney Island.  To me it's what my years of animating have been building towards and it's been a crazy & rewarding experience so far.  It's all paper & pencil & X-sheets and my ten-year-old self couldn't be happier, minus the math.  Updates to follow in some capacity!  At the very least a drawing or two...

Rockin' the New Sketchbook

Something I doodled up on Sunday night.  It's good to be home.

PEMDAS: The Process, Part I

I've recently posted some pre-production goodness over on my site for my TED-Ed animated short, PEMDAS or How To Defeat a Dragon with Math (YouTube).  I wanted to take some time in this blog to walk thru how I go about making a project for TED-Ed from start to finish.  It may not be the model way to do things but it gets the job done, son!  Overall the whole process from pre-production to final posting takes anywhere between a month and a month and a half.

To get things started, TED sends me an audio file -- sometimes of my choosing, sometimes not -- and from there I begin listening to it over and over annnnd over.  I'll listen to it while I'm on the train, in the shower, grocery shoppin, etc etc so I can start brainstorming ideas & listening for workable rhythms in the narration.  I rarely cut up the audio, to whatever benefit or downsides that may provide.  Mainly I don't do it because I'd rather present the material as how it may play out in someone's head during a lecture.  Plus I don't need it to be any longer than it already is, I have a lot of ground to cover in a short time.  Initially, I start sorting out what could make for funny sight gags and what the characters might look like.

And then I let my brain crap all over my notebook for a few days, like this.

The scribble at the bottom eventually became the last shot in the animation of the desert.

First dragon drawings

Working out how I wanted to represent the musketeers

Fleshing out the dragon, if time permitted I was originally aiming to make him much more complicated.

More musketeer work where I decided on making parentheses 'just arms'

BONUS: Brain Crap isn't just for math design, here's an elephant from my last TED-Ed short.

Ahhh... wasn't that refreshing to get that all out?  I'm always jealous of some of my artist friends who keep amazingly well-kept sketchbooks full of beautiful drawings and proportion studies.  Mine looks like a four-year-old's with randomly fleshed-out drawings peppered in...

Due to the compressed nature of my TED-Ed productions (i.e. just me & producer) I usually start on storyboarding before or during initial character design, so my animatics typically end up looking nothing like the final product.  Certain parts will get chopped up, reworked or removed altogether.  This is true of all my TED-Ed projects but especially this latest one, with a much higher concentration of character interactions and backgrounds than my first two, which had long spans of charts and text animation.

Here are a few select storyboards and screenshots to compare storyboard vs. the final product:

My original design for the imperial senate.  The robot things were ... just that.  Overall, it looked too small and confined for me in the end.

The final design for the senate.  I added a truck with the words spelled out to better flow with the narration and changed the robot things to Star Wars® trash can droids for ease of animation.  Plus -- the guy was making a Star Wars reference and I needed to give it some sort of acknowledgement.  EXTRA NERD BONUS: The Imperial Senate has imperial units of measurement worked into its design. 

This was the animatic's original "Happy Ever After" shot... I had no idea how I was going to represent the Land of Pi design-wise and didn't have it down solid until about 10 days before final delivery.  So instead I had numbers and balloons.  Creativity.

The original "PEMDAS! There's another spot!" ... I wasn't really sure who I wanted to have yelling that line out so I just made a generic person.  The mouth was fun to draw.

This was the way I originally intended to show the musketeers riding their steeds toward the dragon.  After I got around to designing the horses, everything looked too jumbled up and busy so I went with the following design instead... 

The final version of the musketeers riding their steeds.

Finally, we come to the storyboard that eventually became the first image of this blog post.  This went through a few different changes, from the phone yelling to a wanted poster to a Street Fighter-style VS. screen to the musketeers sliding down a fire pole onto their horses.  Sometimes it's better just to keep it simple.

.... to be continued!



TOMORROW:  What Was I Animating 10 Years Ago?

MONDAY:  The Animatic! 

NEXT WEEK:  The Process, Part II  

More TED-Ed in the Works

... this time with more topical!

*bonus

Witch Time

Something I doodled for a friend the other day, I think I was subconsciously channeling a dog from a Don Bluth movie but I can't remember which.  Ah well.

New[t]

www.newtgingricherotica.com

Bahck to Blahging

Here we are, almost five months after my last post and what do I have to show for it?  Welcome back to the Marked Animation blog, where I'll return to form posting updates and all that related internet whatnot.  I've also neglected my Twitter recently, something I'm still not sure if I'll get back to doing any time soon.  While I do appreciate it for its networking capabilities and ease of communication, honestly I feel it's just one more thing to worry about in life that's already full of things to worry about.

What I have been up to lately is heading up a few freelance projects which I'll be addressing more in upcoming posts.  

I've been working with a good variety of Wacom products recently, like the still-kinda-brand-new Inkling and the Cintiq.  

If you're looking for something that will revolutionize your sketchbook, don't buy the Inkling -- at least not yet.

There are plenty of things I like about the Inkling, but none of them make me want to use it on a daily basis.  The overall layout of the packaging is great, everything you need is stored in a flip-open carrier that can fit easily into a pencil case.  The easy import of drawings into Photoshop or Illustrator is also a great plus, especially if you're not generally happy with the vector-tracing features in Illustrator.  Lines come in with nice weight variation and ready to edit, bezier-style.  You can also separate your sketches into layers and make adjustments accordingly, a great feature that gives you a lot more flexibility.  

However, there are some issues that Wacom needs to address in the Inkling's design and technology to make it must-have hardware for everyday artisting.  After a couple of weeks of regular wear-and-tear from living inside of a backpack pocket, my Inkling pen no longer wanted to stay inside of its slot.  It hangs loosely inside but no longer "clicks" into place on the spring, meaning that it won't properly charge while plugged in.  To relieve this, I put some electrical tape and a penny over the slot to keep the pen in place.  

Inkling closed.

Inkling open!

I think the technology behind the Inkling is a cool idea that's not quite where it needs to be yet.  While it works great for rough sketches and concepting, the line registration is generally not as accurate as I'd like even when working in ideal conditions.  Drawings can become muddled over minute variables like whether or not you're drawing on your lap or a table and wrinkles that come with physically drawing on paper which seem to interfere with the device's precision.  If you avoid adding too much detail to the image these issues aren't as noticeable, but for someone like me who likes to pile on the crosshatching and body hair, having to adjust or add in those elements separately seems like an unnecessary extra step.   The Inkling works great as a first step to design; a fast way to put your ideas to paper digitally... but ultimately I don't think it's worth the price or time yet.  Here are some side-by-side comparisons of actual drawings (left) vs. Inkling's import (right):

This is probably the best of the bunch, and the loose sketching lends itself well to the Inkling's strengths.

Detailed drawings don't hold up very well.  It's like someone tried to trace your sketch in a moving car.

Again, the overall idea of the image is there, but when you look at details like the collar and face there are discrepancies. 

As sloppy as this sketch is, this import disappointed me.  Even with the loose style you lose what held the original image together.

   

As for the Cintiq, it's the smallest version that Wacom makes and probably not their best but I love it.  There's nothing quite like feeling like you live in the future when you're sitting on the couch next to your girlfriend doing full-color animation on your lap.  Admittedly, the iPad isn't far behind with their upcoming pressure-sensitive stylus coming out in a matter of months and that screen and setup is much better, but for now I'll be more than happy to add my Cintiq to my mobile work station, something I can take with me and animate run cycles like this:

without arms, men are basically scrotums with legs.

Updates Coming Soon

I've been eating, breathing and pooping work lately.  .... freelance!

Updates about everything from work to not-work will get posted on the blahg soon; until then enjoy this handsome sketch.

Some Nudity for Your Tuesdity

I sketched this up in the wee hours of the morning today... my friend Tim Haldeen recently introduced me to the world of .03mm lead size and cross-hatching has never been more addictive.  Maybe it's the animator in me but I love tedious work sometimes.

Looking at it now he looks to me like a strung-out Mark Twain.

Sketch of My Pep-Pep

click to enlarge

I drew this last night while watching crappy TV, just as my father would've wanted.  Miss ya Pops!

Remembering I Can Draw Things...

click to enlarge

Thanks for the ride back to NYC, Locksley!  Time to get back down to business...

BONUS: I drew this on some brown paper during a production meeting today & bumped it up with a few highlights in Photoshap: 

Random Sketches

Hey everyone -- my apologies for not getting to post more lately, things are busy as per usual.  Yesterday I had the pleasure of shooting a stop motion project with a bunch of guys I'd never worked with before in a studio with no AC for 10 hours and it was a blast!  Once the post & audio are finalized I'll have something to show.  I have a lot of work coming up this week with the Brooklyn Film Festival and the CunninLynguists video, so there will be good things coming up.   Until then, enjoy some random drawings I did last week.

Practice Posin'

Pensive Superhero Type

Sometimes you get bored halfway through a drawing and need to mix it up.

Ink Drawings

Lately I've been busier than I'd like to be but I've managed to find a bit of time to keep working with my pen & ink.  I haven't been in a great mood either & that generally comes through in my drawings... maybe next time they'll be smiley-er.

I bought my first pen & inkwell yesterday.

Why it took me this long to drawing in this medium, I have no idea.  I love it.  What was I wasting my time with all of these years?

Bieberesque™ 

I think my linework needs a lot more work.  Going to work on that!  Work.  Also, I've been working on a lot of other things which I'll hopefully be able to post soon.  We'll work it out.  Stay... swooned.

Babyface.

Behind the Scenes: Bounty Storyboards

Here are the original boards I drew up for Bounty back when we started the project.  Some of them are pretty close to how the final turned out while others.... notsomuch.

This part got cut from the final which I was totally fine with.

This section also got cut which I was pretty disappointed about.

Having the chance to animate King Kong and a Godzilla-like monster would've been a lot of fun.

UGH the sumo wrestler was my favorite part and I was super bummed they killed him off.

I was proud of my tiger drawing in the second frame.

The Chilean Miner character eventually got changed over to an MMA wrestler.  'Probably for the best.

I mean c'mon it was going to end with them riding that flying sumo wrestler!  It would've been like poetry but that's life sometimes.