Great Falls Park

I went to hiking at the Great Falls park in VA yesterday. The nature was beautiful and the river especially was very intreaguing to look at. I took my time studying the rock formation as a result of the river’s flow as well as layers that had stacked over the years of history and I realized how much information rocks can convey through its textures. I might end up making another study for the rocks in the future posts. In today’s post, I did a quick study of the grass area of the park. I was sitting on a bench and saw a car drive by and its wind was causing the leaves to fall right behind the car like it was being chased by the nature.

Paperman

This week I was over at Los Angeles Convention Center running around doing Student Volunteer duty, checking out cool emerging technologies in the Exhibition hall, lining up in a HUGE line for Pixar’s teapot, talking to recruiters at the job fair, and meeting lots of wonderful people who shared common interest in the computer graphics world. The experience was unforgettable, and the amount of information and inspirations that came through this week was simply overwhelming. Amongst the captivating creatives that were spotlights at SIGGRAPH 2012,including ParaNorman, Avengers, Wreck-it Ralph, Brave, and much more, Disney’s short animation Paperman stood out to me as one of the most emotionally charged, visually appealing, and a well crafted piece of motion picture. Without touching on the spoilers of the film, I would like to point out some of its appeals and what I learned from as an artist.

Aesthetically Paperman is simplistic, focusing mostly on large flat shapes and using lighting and blurs to bring focus into the composition. With limited details and color, the film strictly focuses on using the visuals to frame the story. In Disney’s Paperman talk, the creators made a comparison between the 3D films we see today and the traditional 2D approach they used for Paperman. While the 3D movies today have advantage of creating depth and complex settings, it can become so appealing that sometimes the visuals overshadow the story it is trying to tell. I think that is where Paperman really excel. The ratio of visual information and storytelling was just right so that it created a harmony that is best suited for telling Paperman’s story. For me, watching Paperman allowed me to see my role as an artist in a bigger picture. I have always thought that a best design should be so captivating it can stand on its own. While that may be true in many cases, I think it’s important to also consider how one design stands amongst a whole bunch of other designs within a film as a whole, and hit that golden ratio where visuals can most effectively deliver a story.

Another thought I had after seeing Paperman was that portrayal of humanity can be a very strong device to capture the audience’s attentions. Paperman tell a story about how a small decisions can lead to a life changing experience. It’s a theme that is universal and can easily be related with. Even when the character does not exist in the reality, as long as we can see them responding the way we do, showing ranges like curiosity, confusions, determination, and love, they can feel real even on a flat screen. I think that is portion of the reason why many Miyazaki films are also successful. Take Princess Mononoke which illustrates the struggle between polar justices. We can see that both sides of the opposing forces are fighting for what they believe is justice, and neither sides are wrong in their motives. I think simulating a real-life behavior into animated characters adds a layer of depth and helps guide the audience feel engaged in the narrative. It’s definitely something I can explore more as I further myself in character design and storytelling.

Disney’s Paperman will be presented right before Wreck-it Ralph in November and I highly recommend everyone to go see it. It will be an experience to remember!

Silent Amusement

I did this piece recently to aiming to practice drawing nature, lighting, and color. It all started after watching Princess Monoke and I had a huge urge to draw a forest scene. Although I have seen the movie many times I keep coming back to find new things to get inspired by. I was very moved by the complexity of the storyline, the beauty of visual language, and depth of the research and appropriate connection to the old Japanese culture. From type of spoken language to the way clothes were worn in order to reflect maturity, the whole movie was so carefully thought out that I'm in awe with the amount of information that Miyazaki is capable of handling. That man is a true beast. From doing this piece, I got to explore more approaches in drawing the variations in nature. It also took me a little longer than usual because I spent so much time making decisions for subtle color differences in many areas. It really made me realize that the amount of decisions made within a piece is exponentially related to how rendered the piece is.

A Mac girl

From today's drawing. I've definitely been working more into characters and exploring how to combine style and gestures effectively. This piece was done differently from my usual painterly approach, but I like the simplicity and cuteness of the result. Looking forward to exploring more.

Broken Pride

I watched Brave recently and there was a scene that stuck with me. At Merida’s low point, she sits in a cave in the rain and reflects the mess she was in. As opposed to her typical puffy hair, we got to see her hair getting wet in this scene and it’s one of the rare times in the movie where her hair isn’t so flashy and over-powering. Her hair is muggy, stranded, and deformed from its glory. I think Merida’s hair was a great device that reflected her mental state. Good design!

Journey

I recently played a game called Journey and my gosh it was stunning! Unlike most of games I normally play, Journey is stripped down to the very core of emotional expression using visual and audio interaction. The game takes its vagueness to advantage, allowing the player to figure out everything from the very beginning and experience the journey up close. I absolutely love the way music and the visuals intertwine in the game as every moments is designed so precisely to accentuate the best experience possible. I’m really looking forward to playing this game again and getting the white robe! I also read that the company (called thatgamecompany) has finally made all 3 games for PSN marking the end of their contract with Sony to produce solely for PSN. Now that they have more freedom, I can’t imagine but to be excited for what comes next. It’d be super cool if their games (like Journey) came to the iOS.

Daily Doodles

I've been trying to get into the habit doodling everyday to keep my hands sharp and also have an excuse to experiment. I started this a few weeks ago and since then I have been posting my daily drawings on tumblr where I use it as kind of a visual diary. Here are some ones I like from the doodle. So far through doing this, I got the chance to experiment and discover a great inking brush, draw stuff I really love but never had the excuse to, and most importantly exploring areas where I need to push further. Right now I'm spending more time with character development. I've just discovered the important role gestures play in the process of creating unique and dynamic silhouettes. This might not be something new to others but it is quite a discovery for me. I'm going to put more time into characters and hopefully find more tricks!

Arrival

 

I discovered that this ink brush I have is very useful. It emulates the bumpiness of lines that is drawn on textured paper, and also leaves a clear solid marks similar to inking in real life. I used this brush in the forest piece I did last week and instead of incorporating into layers of painting, I tested to see how the brush works when used for inking by itself. Here’s my result and I think it turned out okay. I like the brush but I’m not exactly familiar with this method of work and I think there’s more to uncover. More to come!

Intersect

This painting was supposed to be rough color practice but I ended up liking it so I went more in depth. I’ve been noticing the amount of buildings I draw in comparison to organic environments, so I decided to revisit the mother nature.

Ode to the Bouncer

I just started tumblr and that gave me excuse to make updates so I started doodling a lot of pictures. Just kidding, I just graduated and have nothing to do at the moment so I'm just spending more time with my lover art. So anyways, I painted a character named Cherry from a music video called Ode to the Bouncer by Studio Killers, its a super catchy song with awesome sass and perky visuals. If anyone’s interested, all of their songs have great rhythmic dance feel, and their music videos (I think there are only two so far) are very well made. Its worth checking out!

Aerodynamos Teaser

So here's the latest update on my animation thesis Aerodynamos! I finished enough footage to compile into a short teaser for the animation. Here are also some of the updated concept designs including 3d projections and characters. From now until graduation, I will be focusing on the designs for the project instead of production so that I can make improvements on my portfolio. After graduation I'm planning to finish up the rest of the animation so stay tuned!

Self Portrait and Color Study

I've been working on a lot of thesis lately and it was really nice to do something different and refreshing. Fist up is a self portrait I did for MICA senior party's poster. I had fun using a slightly more saturated pallet than my usual style. The second drawing is from a character design class I TA. For yesterday's in-class assignment we exchanged each student's characters and designed environments that are intended to complement the scene, character, and bring sense of narrative interaction. I participated in this assignment and drew a scene from Kate Guthrie's story about a protagonist who lost his memory and tries to put his fragmented memories together by using a psychological therapy machine that allows him to dive into a cyber world of his own mind. With this study, I focused on how to convey mood and tensions through color. I had a lot of fun choosing complementary colors and resolving compositional problems through color intensity and differences. I'll put up the thesis progress in the coming days!

Thesis - Shot 2

Here's my current progress on the thesis. I changed the storyboard a little bit and instead of having the camera do a long spinning descent from the top of the tower into the interior, I decided to just have side scroll to avoid having to deal with too much extra detail. Over all this shot took 11 individual paintings to complete along with a 3D set up. The 2nd shot of the thesis has been by far a big challenge for me because there were so many technical problems along the way. Although at first I thought that this technique was some kind of dream trick that allowed me to do anything I imagined, I soon realized it had limitations. In the beginning I planned to have Tiger's head in the shot and the camera would pan sideways across its head. But I realized that this was almost impractical due to the amount of time it would take me to model a surface for the projection and painting the tiger texture from multiple angles. The ears of the tiger became a big issue because for it to look fully projected as the camera slides across, I would need to break apart the model into smaller parts and draw textures for left side and the right side of the ears, not to mention there are two ears and a whole face to worry about. So the solution I came up with is to get rid of the head all together. Instead, I just had the tiger's body in the shot and thankfully that was manageable. Still, modeling a mock up of a donuts shape and then painting in two sets of textures from different angles was not as easy as I imagined it to be.

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Another thing I had trouble with is the discontinuous work flow. So far my workflow for projections have been 1) building a primary 3D set up from a sketch, 2) drawing in basic forms to fill the environment, 3) camera test, 4) painting in final details, 5) repeat 3-5 until everything is filled. This allows me to make sure each projections works properly but since I had to paint in everything by parts, keeping the color work together as a whole was a challenge. This shot took me almost 2 weeks and it probably took too long considering the amount of time I have left to finish this project. So far I would like to have at least 1 shot a week. I have around 23 shots total so I might be in a bit of trouble if I want to get this done by May. I'm just hoping that some shots wont take as long and that I would get faster. If worst comes worst, I may have to cut down a few shots and make a shorter animation. I hope I won't have to do that. Crossing fingers.

LAIKA works

Here are the links to the LAIKA commercial works I did over the summer. The clients include: Toys R Rus, Honda, and Orville Redenbucker. I was working as a concept artist making characters, environments, set designs, layouts, and colors. Unfortunately I cannot show the raw drawings I did at LAIKA but here are the final products!

LAIKA - Toys R Rus Big Book from William Niu on Vimeo.

LAIKA - Toys R Rus EX from William Niu on Vimeo.

LAIKA - Toys R Rus BCSE from William Niu on Vimeo.

LAIKA - Honda Pilot from William Niu on Vimeo.

LAIKA - Orville Redenbacher Adios Trans Fat from William Niu on Vimeo.

LAIKA - Orville Redenbucker Whole Grain from William Niu on Vimeo.

Thesis - Panoramic Shot

Now that storyboarding and a whole bunch of pre-production designs for my thesis have been solidified, I can finally painting in finished backgrounds! It has been so long since I worked on anything finished so this was such a great feeling. This is a panoramic shot that is going to be the first establishing shot for the whole animation. I'm going to camera project this image to emphasize depth and see how it looks. Over the winter break I'm going to be working on more finished backgrounds in order to catch up on my thesis. Its going to be fun!

Thesis Progress

So here's my progress of the thesis so far. Instead of 20-30 sec animation as I initially planned, I will be extending the time to a minute long short animation about two rollerblade kids racing each other in a 3D city. As I have mentioned before, I will be using camera projection technique for the background city and then go over on top in 2D for the character animation. Here I have a primary animatics, camera projection test (for full rotation camera angles), shot study, and then character sheet. At this point I'm close to having all the pieces I need for start painting in the backgrounds which is going to be fun and finally doing something fully rendered. In the coming weeks, I'd like to have a more realized animatics as well as character sheets. I will be attending CTN expo this week and I'm super pumped!

Preparing for Thesis

For my senior thesis, I am planning to make an animated short which incorporates 2D painted background projected onto 3D space. I think this would be a great way to present my environmental paintings and after doing some quick experiments, I'm pretty exited for its potential. I did these to get the hang of the process. After some trial and error, I feel like I'm finally at the starting line. More to come for sure!

Aqua City

Here's finally something I spend time on outside of work recently. I really wanted to mess with color and be aware of how lighting affects it so I picked to do a city with loads of colors. Tekkon inspiration all the way across the sky.

Animated doodle

I've been wanting to make drawings outside of work lately and also been feeling slacking off with animation so I tried to get back to it with this short sequence. I was originally doodling some random action scene and thought it might be fun to make it in animation.

Bangs Bean Booble

Its been so long since I made an update. I'm currently interning at LAIKA in Portland, OR as concept artist and the work has been taking most of my time. I manage to slip in a quick drawing here that started off as random geometric shapes which then was interpreted into this drawing. Since most art I make at work have constraints in response to different needs, I wanted to do something I miss; painting for myself. I was definitely thinking James Jean as I was drawing. I wanted to play with soft gradient feel combined with painterly rendering. It was fun :)