More Sketches

Going a Little Squirrelly

When I entered the world of blogging I chose to hide behind an alter-ego; however when I signed up for a second blog to use as my portfolio, blogger linked the two blogs and revealed who I am anyway.  C'est la Vie.

For my blog identity I chose to use the moniker Mr. Nutz, courtesy of a squirrel drawing I did (which can be found already on this portfolio).  I titled the blog Squirrels Gone Wild and would update the main header of the blog with a new drawing.  At the present, my last update on that blog was March 29 2011, which is the day after my daughter was born.  I stopped blogging to cut all distractions (including video games and other recreational activities) out of my life while I finished college.  This was to be temporary, but I still have not gotten into it.

Here are some of the sketches (as well as two cleaned up drawings) of some of the squirrel drawings.  There are a few that did not get used at all.

 

A Frightfully Animated Idea.

When I was much younger, my older brother did a class project for his Humanities course in High School where he made a short film which was a reading of Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven.  We used an older video camera (this was in the 1990's) and did not have a microphone to record sound, so my brother decided to record a dramatic reading of the poem in the schools A/V lab.  Meanwhile at home he and his friend filmed the action in our parents living room while I (being the willing younger sibling) read the poem aloud during filming.

My brother made the creative decision to have the visuals be zany humorous pratfalls to contrast the dramatic reading.  The final project became a cherished memory for me, and the video has sadly become lost to time.

Flash forward years to my own time studying animation in college.  I have an idea to take this beloved memory and turn it into an animated short film... with a team of me and one other person.  Okay, you can stop laughing now.  I was a first year student and had not fully grasped the concept of team work in the industry yet (nor had I thought through the magnitude of undertaking such a massive project solo).  Still the idea had evolved, and I was able to produce some artwork that I am proud of.

A Little Bit More About the Monkey.

My involvement in the monkey project was primarily as the head of the story team.  Had the film progressed at a more rapid pace I would have found myself working on animating the character, but alas this did not come to pass.  Still, while working on the story and helping to find the tone of the film, I also found myself working on concept art for the project as well.  These are some of the examples of the directions that we took.

 

Storyboard - Jumping for Joy

While we were starting to hone in on our story, we looked at the gags and tried to determine what our monkey would be able to use.  There's a guiding principle in animation that Walt Disney called the plausible impossible.  If you do something in a cartoon  that is physically impossible, the audience will believe it to be plausible if there is a degree of truth behind it.  When you ride in an elevator your body does not squish when you start moving up, but you feel like it does, so for a cartoon character it will.

While Wile E. Coyote is not trying to escape the desert, but rather just trying to catch the roadrunner, we suspend disbelief in his unwavering devotion to the ACME company and the equipment he gets from them.  Our monkey Hank, however, is waiting on this island to be picked up, so it would not make sense for him to have ACME crates dropped on the island.  We felt it would be more plausible to have him use items from the island and his space capsule instead.

Storyboard - Eww, Bugs!

At one point these boards were used to introduce the other two monkeys (native to the island) to our audience, but in truth the real heart of this scene is showing that our protagonist monkey (whom we named Hank) was rejecting natural instinct in favor of his more sophisticated training.  We introduced the other two unnamed monkeys earlier, but this was the first time that the audience would see that Hank was aware of the other monkeys.

Storyboard - A New Direction for the Monkey

After our mentor from Disney asked the golden question about the monkey's inability to climb the tree, we looked hard at the story and all the work we had poured into this project, to see what worked.

One of the artists on my team had drawn up boards that had the monkey's attempts to get the bananas thwarted at every turn by an "evil cosmonaut monkey."  This became the spark that lead us to the best solution.  Our monkey was going to be a space chimp whose space capsule landed in the ocean, and floated to the island waiting to be retrieved by NASA.  While waiting our hungry monkey would have his adventure on the island.

The final solution as to why the monkey didn't just climb the tree actually came from an anecdote from one of our CG modelers.  He had worked for a major computer company in their tech support call center.  When people would call in, he would go through his standard procedures to try and diagnose the problems that they were having, and when each question would not help he would dig deeper into his knowledge base to try and find a solution, only to have the customer eventually realize that their computer wasn't even turned on (or plugged in).

He wasn't thinking of the easiest solutions because he had been trained not to.  We figured that a monkey who has lived and trained at NASA all its life would be the same way.

We were watching a lot of Chuck Jones cartoons to inspire us, and I came up with this gag that we really liked.