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

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…

Dandelions

“Dandelions” is an idea based on “Her Lion’s Jump” that I decided to develop since my friend and music composer Richie Kohan asked me whether I would continue to do more fantasy based stories. My first response was actually “no” since I’m not really interested in having more talking animals in my stories, but the characters in “Her Lion’s Jump” seem to really resonate with people, and all the works that influenced me during the pre-production of the film gave me a wealth of ideas and feelings about childhood feelings and dreams that I decided were worthy of development to say the least.

Now the approach I am taking to “Hockey, Love, & Guts” is very much character and script based, letting the art and the story and the script work simultaneously during development. So, for “Dandelions” I decided to take a purely visual development approach to the idea (even though I already wrote an extensive outline for turning it into a feature film or short series) and to explore it with watercolors. For one, I really miss the medium without ever fully delving myself into it, but having had some experience with acrylic paints and digital media I really wanted to learn more about watercolors because of all the paint media out there, it somehow resonates incredibly deeply with me. Either way, I’m also trying to take a more environment design approach before developing more characters for it, though my natural inclination is to really compose characters, and I already have a few more than the ones featured on the short.

Without getting too specific, “Dandelions” is based on the idea that there is a heaven of dreams and nightmares that orbits the Earth, but is invisible to us. One side is made up of pastures and greenery where dandelions are cultivated containing our dreams. The other is a volcanic landscape where the nightmares reside and erupt from a myriad of volcanoes, hence creating a balance to this heaven. But due to incidents that I won’t get to now, the heaven is turned upside down, and the dandelions fall to the Earth, giving some children a key to this realm. For now that’s all I’m gonna say about it, but you can look forward to more watercolor landscapes in future posts and hopefully figure out more about this story.

Régis

PS: up next… expect some posts about my influences and why they continue to influence me so much.