Gaul Warrior - Turn Around and Head Shots

According to a reliable historian the Roman army faced an invasion from the Gauls in 390 BC (I think, I need to check my research). Anyway the Gauls came over the Snow covered Alps. In order to throw the usually calm, cool and collected Romans off their game the Gauls played the berserkers and in high style. They were either naked or half-naked (since this is a kid's show you can guess which version I'm going with), they shaved half their head and dyed the remaining hair white and painted their faces blue. Then to top it off they rode their shields down the slopes, into battle, waving their swords over their heads and screaming wildly. The Gauls won the battle and went on to sack the city of Rome - one of the few times in history the actual city was taken. 

So here is the preliminary turnaround of these guys. In the previous post I have a pencil test of one jumping onto his shield and shushing downhill. Next I'll take the character design and convert it to a broken apart symbol library in Flash and use the pencil test as a template for his animation. I'll post that when I get some of it done. 

Here's a close up detail of the heads. 

Pencil Test: Half-Naked Snowboarder

 

Here's a pencil test for an animation of an ancient Gaul warrior. He's jumping on his shield and snowboarding down a mountain and into battle against the Romans. There will be others joining him. I'm going to pencil test about three or four then create the actual animation in Flash. From there I can reproduce them and have a full-fledged army of ancient, half-naked, berserking snowboarders.

The pencil test is done in actual pencil and in Flash with a Wacom. The main key frames I did on my light table with pencil then scanned them into Flash. From there I did the inbetweens and tweaked it for a while. Any of you animators out there feel free to make some suggestions.

The Kneelsun Kids

Here are preliminary/discovery sketches of two stop-motion characters. They are two alien kids who sit in front of the television set and make funny comments between segments of the show. They inadvertently help to introduce a new segment or tie up a finished one. 

The older sibling is Arbed. I've got the basic body structure but still not sure about the hair.

Next is her little brother Eel.

 

 Maybe you can see there is some Chuck Jones influence. In fact I want these two to be very much like the two boys in the Looney Tunes short Zip, Zip Hooray... just an alien stop-mo version of them.

  

Here's some idea/self-direction on how to make the eye pods so they can be more animatable with less construction worries. 

 

Updated Design - Bleeph

Here's "The Bleeph" or as most just call him Bleeph. This is his form for Flash Animation - which will be used in the shorts we are producing before the main film. Here is a link to the preliminary sketches and some more information about the character and his place in The Ultra Galactic Gung-ho Gurus. .http://process742.blogspot.com/2010/04/introducing-characters-blepharon-aka.html

Rough Demo Reel

I've been spending much of my time the last few days updating my resume and demo reel. Here's a rough version of it. I should have more project stuff up in the next day or so.

Updated Design - Fang

This is Brizzle Batterfang - the new version. In the main film she will be in hand puppet form this is the Flash version for a set of shorts we're making to test out the characters and format. To read more about Fang and see here early concept designs go here http://process742.blogspot.com/search/label/Fang .