NYC Sketches, Summer Plans, and Film Festival News

NYC was a blast! My first time and possibly my shortest vacation ever (I was only there for 2.5 days) but it was enough to conjure up these sketches below. (The first one however is from May, drawn at the Pasadena Huntington Gardens, but I thought it’d fit the series here.)

To start of the trip, I drew some clouds in the plane, and thought a lot about ideas for my story “Dandelions.” Think of it as concept art for it, if you may.

And then, New York City…

The New York experience wasn’t even barely the tip of the iceberg, but it was still well worth doing. I stayed mostly in Manhattan and Brooklyn and traveled alone this time, and while it gives one a lot of freedom, it can sometimes be rather isolating. First of I gotta thank Lisa King of KidsFilmFest for not only selecting my film to be part of the festival this year, but also for putting me on a nice hotel for 2 nights. Thank you Lisa! Also, everyone that I met was awesome, here’s a quick list: Lisa King, Tomoko Oguchi, Ru Kuwahata, and Annie Poon. Their films are cool and so are they.

What else… oh yeah, the 3600 year old Egyptian relic at Central Park!?! No one ever told me about that, but there it was, Cleopatra’s Needle. I was in awe, and hopefully the sketch shows some of that as well.

Unfortunately, I was too busy being social to sketch people at the festival, but I did get some interesting figures at the Guggenheim. Oh man, Guggenheim! There was a huge Frank Lloyd Wright exhibit there that totally blew my mind. Now I understand why Frank Lloyd Wright is, well, Frank Lloyd Wright.

And who can ignore the Guggenheim’s own collection of precious paintings by the masters! I saw paintings by Picasso, Kandinsky, Gauguin, Cézanne, Degas, Pissarro, Renoir, Vuillard, among others I can’t remember now.

In other news, my film “Her Lion’s Jump” got into Comic Con! And it will screen there twice!! Read all about  it here http://herlionsjump.wordpress.com/. So if you miss it the first time, you can see it the second, or both times! However I will only attend the first screening because on Saturday, July 25th, I’m going up north to Berkeley to see perhaps one of the most influential animation artists in the world, and the most influential artist on my art and career, Hayao Miyazaki. Now now, I know he’ll be at Comic Con and in LA following that, but I these nice numbered tickets and I’d rather see him without worrying about crowds, know what I mean? Besides, my folks live in the Bay Area, so it’s always good to stop and say hi, eat some home cooking… you know what that feels like.

Besides all that craziness, I also took a quick trip to Yosemite, which was awesome, but I think my fiancée did a better job at describing that here on her Yosemite set Flickr page than I ever could.

I plan to get back to “Hockey, Love, and GUTS!!” as soon as I get back to normal, even though normal still means unemployed, but hopefully something will pop up soon that will change that.

Phew! Longest post ever? Maybe…

Ré

One for the Road

I’ll be at the KidsFilmFest http://www.kidsfilmfest.org/films/ in Brooklyn, NYC this weekend! I’ll be back in town on Tuesday, June 16th. Here’s a sketch of Pearl to keep you tuned in until then. The comic is still in B&W mind you, but maybe this will become part of a cover someday…

Ré

Concept Art Portfolio Page Update

Here’s a quick update to my concept art portfolio. Most of the pieces are the same, but I think you’ll all enjoy the slight additions. You know, gotta keep current with the times and things happening… Here’s a glimpse of one of those pages. These are some concept sketches for something that I don’t even know actually got picked up or what. And I’m not one to draw up violence and anger gratuitously, but I guess that’s what I had to do for the job. Luckily, I’ve been catching up on some old anime on the Funimation site, and I gotta admit that I earnestly enjoy Fist of the North Star. So, I guess this was my chance to put my influences to practice. Well, I was really instructed to mimic stereotypical Marvel villains, but once I realized that I really couldn’t pull off copying Jack Kirby, I just decided to draw what raw anger and fury felt for me. After that, I remember the producers and directors saying they were scared of my drawings, but if you had seen the reference material they gave me, I think they were really asking for it… then again, I haven’t been called back to work for them in a while…

Since I mentioned Fist of the North Star, I really should do another “Influences” post, but with so many ahead of that one, if I kept on doing posts like that, this would just turn into another anime fandom site… which to be fair, it partly is. Anyway, I don’t know when I’ll get the chance to let my demons loose like this again, so here’s to loosing ones demons… and letting go a bit too.

Ré

PS: a link to my latest concept art portfolio can be found on the sidebar to your right. I’m thinking of putting some storyboard samples as well soon, so maybe on the next post…

Hockey, Love, & GUTS! – Chapter 2 is here!!!

Wednesday is comics day, so to get right to the point, here’s Chapter 2 of “Hockey, Love, & GUTS!”

Enjoy!

Ré

Animation Reel

Here’s my animation reel. Clocking at just a little over a minute, I think it sums up pretty well what I’ve been up to. The clips include work from my short films “The Fox and The Baby” and “Her Lion’s Jump” as well as from freelance work I did for UCLA using the Joe Bruin character that I redesigned just for the spot. Also, there a couple of clips from a commercial for Dodge that I worked on at Stardust Studios – I animated some background characters and assets and assisted lead animator Robin Steele with some inbetweens for the hand drawn animated cars. The song “Now and Then” is by Marcel Camargo and can be downloaded in its entirety here:

http://talesofbanyan.typepad.com/

Enjoy,

Ré

PS: I’ll probably have a better version of the reel available somewhere soon… maybe in as a link url to a quicktime movie… maybe in mpeg 4… that’s maybe less than 60mb so you can download it all you want… maybe…

___________________________________________________________________________________

UPDATE 05/26/2009:

Shot Breakdown List

shot breakdown list page 01

shot breakdown list page 02

_______________________________________________________________________________________

UPDATE 05/19/2009: The car commercial shots on my reel come from this spot here:

http://motionographer.com/theater/dodge-shared-passion/

The team at Stardust Studios on this commercial were lead animator Robin Steele, effects animator Dylan Spears, background characters and lead assistant Régis Camargo (yours truly), scanner and checker Wayne Chang, with compositing by Thomas Horne, CG car animation by John Cherniack, art direction by Jonathan Wu, produced by Steiner Kierce and directed by Brad Tucker. I’m sure I missed someone, but those were the people I worked with. (Though Aaron Clark did some storyboards on it as well, even though I didn’t work with him on this project.)

For all the other works on this reel, check out my YouTube channel and the links section on the sidebar under “My Films.”

HLG – Chapter 2 is now 2 and 3 – also, more sketches, so: Chapter 2 – Preview sketches #2

Ok, so I lied in the previous post. Those sketches are not for chapter 2, but rather 3. But, you know, that’s story. It’s a constantly evolving thing – it’s neither progression, nor regression, but rather, evolution. So, things change, but the good news is that inking for chapter 2 is almost done, so maybe it’ll be posted in another week or so? (Crossing my fingers here…) In the meantime, enjoy these quick sketches of some of the characters that I can guarantee you will show up in chapter 2.

Ré

PS: The reason for the delay isn’t just one but many including the following: unemployment, looking for work as a full time job, cutting a trailer for “Her Lion’s Jump”, cutting an animation reel together, regretting the fact that I haven’t done either of those things already, regretting that I can’t work on HLG any faster than I already am, often wondering if I have so much time how come I can’t produce more work, getting engaged, thinking about the wedding, trying to have a social life, having fun, etc…

HLG – Chapter 2- Preview sketches #1

Yeah, I’m still going at it… albeit slowly. But, no worries, thumbnails for all 18 pages of chapter 2 are done as well as the script. Now it’s just a matter of drawing it out. I’m still making some decisions about the final look to things, even though I learned a lot from doing chapter 1. Had I been doing this on tangible media, then perhaps doing it all in B&W would have been faster, but it seems that I get more mileage done and I’m able to maintain an appealing aesthetic with the gray scale tones. But, if B&W is faster, and I’m able to convey tones solely with that, maybe I’ll switch. Just have to wait and see. I’m sure there will be another preview post like this, and I even thought of posting one of the rough pages for this one, but I thought that might give away too much… maybe?

Well, I’ll try and find a good rough next time. In the meantime, enjoy these sketches of an upcoming character… by the way, Mercedes and Pearl are still alive. Oh no SPOILERS! DA DA DAAAAA…

(Would you really expect otherwise? After all they are the main characters of this story! But these sketches are of neither of them, as you can probably tell… )

Ré

More with Richie Kohan

Here are some more sketches that I’ve done based on Richie’s ideas. It helps keep my color chops in check while learning more, of course. Well, if I can just start doing more environments with a different color scheme, then I’ll feel that I’m moving forward. Either way, it’s fun.

Ré

PS: Previews for Chapter 2 of Hockey, Love, & GUTS! will be coming next. And as I’ve mentioned before I think that’s how I’m gonna post it from now on (previews for a while, and then just the whole chapter). Not only do I think this is better for everyone, but I can prove with my blog stats hiking over 100% when I posted chapter 1 last week, so thank you so much for visiting and reading my comic. It makes all the difference.

Hockey, Love, & GUTS! – Chapter 1 – Pages 8 – 14 – Chapter 1 End

The end of chapter 1 is here. Now I understand this isn’t the best way to read these pages, so as I’ve mentioned before, I’ll build a new page just for this comic with subsequent pages for different chapters. If you stop by the blog and they aren’t there on the sidebar yet, it’s probably because I’m still working on them. I think also from now on, I’ll probably post previews of chapters amongst my other posts, and then just post the whole chapter on a page instead of a few pages on every post. But, this was the beginning of something new for me, so I’m bound to make mistakes. Anyway, enjoy and let me know what you think.

Page 08

Page 09

Page 10

Page 11

Page 12

Page 13

Page 14

Ré

UPDATE: comic pages and chapter pages have been added to the sidebar for easier reading. I suggest opening all the images in tabs and closing them as you read, depending on how your browser selects multiple open tabs. Maybe when chapter 2 is up (when will that be, I wonder…) I’ll find a better way to have the pages be read.

UPDATE 2: Gallery order on the sidebar page for Chapter 1 now fixed. Sorry for those who tried to read it there and were confused, my apologies. But, it’s fixed now, so why not give it another try?

Hockey, Love, & GUTS! – Chapter 1 – Pages 4 – 7

More “Hockey, Love, & GUTS!” for your reading pleasure. Also, bear in mind that, yes, there are inconsistencies here and there in format and overall art, but I’m still experimenting, so maybe once I get the whole of chapter 1 posted, I’ll probably make a blog page for it, that not only will make reading the pages easier, but it will have revised versions of the pages as well. I’m trying to get them out faster, but since I can’t make money from it (yet,) it’s not something I can work on constantly. Regardless, this is definitely a story I want to tell, and not a short one by any measure, so we’re all in for the long haul… but it’s a good haul, trust me.

Ré

Page 04

Page 05

Page 06

Page 07