Shooting Stars

“Shooting Stars” is the name of an idea I’ve been developing for years now. Long before any of my short films or comics actually – I was much more immature then, but maybe that’s a good thing. Now before anyone says anything, I’ll just say that this idea came before “Gurren Lagann” and “Oneechanbara” – if these names mean nothing to you, then great, if not, well take my word for it.

Let me break it down to you: “Shooting Stars” is really supposed to be a parody of all the super sentai shows I watched as a kid (Changeman, Flashman, Jaspion, Jiraya), Silverhawks and Thundercats, and of 1980’s Brazilian television kids programming, which is hard for anyone from outside the country to really know what I’m talking about, but just Google the word “Xuxa” or “Paquitas” and you’ll probably get it right away.

She’s “Star 2″ but somehow the leader of the group…

“Star 3″ is the magic user… though she still carries a gun…

“Star 4″… don’t bring a knife to gun fight, unless that knife is also a gun.

“Star 1″ is the rookie… but also the karate/kung fu master.

“Star 5″ is just trigger happy… a little too trigger happy.

For me, the thing with parody is that for it to work it has to have an amount of homage to the works being parodied. So far I haven’t gone too far beyond the visual development side of things, and I think that’s partly due to the influences it has: it’s all pretty shallow stuff. But, they keep coming back year after year, and I’m always hesitant to draw them again, but once I start I have fun with them and think “I should do something with these characters…” And so I did. So, expect them to come up soon. I won’t tell you how, and I almost feel like this is kind of a spoiler, but I just felt it was about time to let them out.

(As a side note, each took about an hour or two to sketch. Vega is the first I one I started with this past week and they are posted in chronological order -  yet I feel it’s that first one that came out the best… I think I got tighter as I went along, and by the time I got to Zeta, I was being a little too zealous about my lines and tones.)

Of course, expect more to come in the future. If nothing else, drawing them just makes me relax a little about story and just have some fun with character design while learning some painting techniques in the process.

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Getting back into painting… “And I said to him like, whatever…”

It’s been a while, but I just felt the urge to paint again. Chapter 3 of “Hockey, Love, & GUTS!” is taking a little longer to finish and the disappointment of unemployment is only exacerbating that progress. But, it’s getting there, and I’m trying to find ways to keep me motivated to keep writing and drawing. So I decided to take the character of Mercedes into a more colorful realm, trying to maintain the line weight and quality that is so strong in the black and white drawings, while giving some dimension and developing a style that fits with my tastes. Also, lately my blog has gotten quite a lot of views from 9 fans (I’m looking at you “9 Movie Boards”) and that’s gotten my riled up to get back into character concept design. So what better way to practice than to use my own characters.

Character Design is of course as hard to describe as art, so I’m not going to get into definitions here, and only talk about and show what I like, and you’ll probably get a feeling for my tastes. It may come to no surprise that I am a fan of the artists at CAPCOM and SNK. I’ve grown up being flooded with their art work, so it’s hard for me to even think without their influence. Recently though I decided to look at my art books again and do some “art studying.” I’ve noticed that while the Capcom artists differ wildly in style, their line work is still the thing that governs a lot of their color and compositional choices. I think that’s what keeps their illustrations feeling “cartoony” and fun, being very realistic, yet not explicitly. Subtlety is key, and I revel in that.

So expect more to come. These didn’t take that long to do, and hopefully I’ll only get faster at doing them. Well, for one, they help me relax from all the story brainstorming I have to do while drawing panels and pages of the comic. So enjoy the progression below of my thought process and feel free to give me tips on that too.

Rough

Line

1st pass

2nd pass

Final

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SDCC, 9, Her Lion’s Jump, and Miyazaki… oh, and yeah, I’m still working on my comic.

I didn’t plan it that way, but it seems like it’s all happening this week. My short film “Her Lion’s Jump” was selected to screen at Comic Con, which is fantastic, of course, but its screening schedule is right against “the 9 panel” so, I’ll be missing all the audience excitement for that. And I can only imagine it will be intense if the panel at Wondercon was any indication, plus this one has most of the cast, Shane himself, some surprise guests, and heck, it follows the Hayao Miyazaki panel! But, it’s all good, I’ll come prepared. So much so that I’ll be in and out of the Con very quickly, to see the master himself in Berkeley on Saturday. I presume the Miyazaki lecture up north will be more civilized, or maybe just lacking fanboys with 15 part questions… oh wait, I’ll be there! 0~0

Anyway, prior to all this crazyness, I’ll get to watch 9 before all y’all (suckas!) in just a couple of days, and I can’t wait. From what I’ve heard the reviews have been positive, so I’m definitely hyped… well, I have been for the past 3 years since I last worked on it! O_O

As the title of the post says, I’m still working on “Hockey, Love, & GUTS!” but this past month has kept me busy with doing storyboard tests here and there (I can has job nao plz) as well as visiting family that I haven’t seen for years. So, for now, I’ll post some rough previews of Chapter 3 of HLG, and next time I’ll put together some more sketches.

hlg_v01_ch03_p01_roughs_preview.jpg

hlg_v01_ch03_p02_roughs_preview.jpg

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Doin’ it Wright?

Since coming back from NYC, and after having experienced an extensive Frank Lloyd Wright exhibition, I’ve noticed that my figure and life drawing has been greatly affected by Wright’s compositions. The idea of framing models and thinking about compositions even in a figure drawing class had been introduced to me years ago when I took some classes by famed muralist and anatomist John Watkiss. But, I think only now, (almost 10 years later) am I beginning to understand what he was talking about, and I think the Wright exhibition was a catalyst in my understanding of composition, lighting, design, etc…

I know, I’m boasting right? But where else can I be allowed to it if not on my blog. Well, enjoy and come up with your own critiques.

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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…

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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…

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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.

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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!

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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…

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UPDATE 05/26/2009:

Shot Breakdown List

shot breakdown list page 01

shot breakdown list page 02

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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.

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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…