1st Official Movie Poster

Well after 3 years of hard work, lost sleep, hair ripped out of scalps and flirting with insanity, we finished our film last year and have been submitting it to multiple film festivals. It felt fantastic to have finally finished something we put so much into. We were accepted as an official selection of the Santa Cruz Film Festival which was held in May 2011! Stuart and I attended the screening with friends and family which was awsome. We were in a short film catagory with 14 other films for rising star upcoming film makers. After the screening they had all the film makers who were in attendance to come to the front for a Q/A pannel and to talk about our films which was pretty cool. After the screening we were told by many people that they thought our film was one of the best shown and one of the most professional looking pieces!!! It felt great to be accepted to the festival and even better to be considered one of the top films in our catagory. Ill post the trailer for our film soon so stay tuned!

Here We Go Again!

Well then, I took a couple years off the blogging scene because the Blogger server crashed or something and lost all my images on all my posts, and since this was an art blog I got a bit frustrated and swore the whole thing off. Well Here I am again, giving it another shot, tho Im sure no one is paying attention anymore. I am trying to relink all my images from my previous posts and continue forward.

So... as a preliminary "Im Back" post, here are a few drawings I did as character designs for my brother Rhetts story project. I hope you like em and look forward to posting more soon.

Some Color and Texture Magic

Well... as we continue on with our project, we have been tirelessly working on the rigging and weight painting issues while our friend David Rutan has been working on the color and textures for the film. So here are some preliminary color and texture samples of our arena, bull and matador. More soon to come.

Pancho & Villa

The next 2 characters that were in our story were the 2 bull hands named Pancho and Villa. Unfortunately late in the game they found themselves on the cutting room floor. After a lot of effort was spent to develop, model, rig, weight paint and start the facial blendshapes, they ended up getting cut from the story. The story itself was still to long and in an attempt to shorten the film to a more realistic time frame their scenes had to go. With the help of Jeff Jackson and Dave Perry, the storyboarding and 2D animation teachers, we were able to trim the story down to its essential elements. Unfortunately that meant letting go of 2 lovable characters who shared some of our favorite parts of the original story. Our friend Cassia Harries modeled Villa for us with my help in the touch up department, and my co-director Stuart Hallock worked tirelessly modeling Pancho, and we cant forget my good friend Joe Giambrone who also did some final touch up modeling on all our charecters too. It was hard after the time we spent on them but hopefully they will return in a story of their own some day! So here are some preliminary designs and our models. Now a moment of silence for our lost heroes....

Diablo & Belmonte Models

Well here we are back again. The next stage of the film makeing process after the script, character designs and the storyboards are done is to have the modelers take the designs and model the characters in 3D. Here are our finished models of our 2 main characters. First is our fearless matador Ceasar Belmonte which was modeled by our friend Jillian LeNoble. She did a fantastic job. I did a bit of touch up modeling on him to get it just the way I wanted and we love how he came out!

Next is our big Dumb Bull, Diablo Loco. He was modeled by Mike Roberts who is actually the schools modeling teacher! He thought it would be fun to model our funny looking bull so he gladly took on the challenge which we totally apreciated. He also came out great. Thanks Mike!

Diablo Loco Concepts

Our animated short film stars 4 characters so, our fearless matador would be nothing without a fearsome adversary, and it would make for a really short film. So designing our crazy bull was a fun challenge. With a name like Diablo Loco, we had to come up with a bull that could fit the name through his actions but not be obvious from his appearance. He went through many fazes and we had a lot of fun comeing up with the designs. Here is some of the ideas we came up with as we searched for the right design.

"Diablo Loco" The Begining

Well its been a while so I figured it was time post something new. The big project Ive been working on for the last year and a half, is my senior project which is a 3D animated short film called "Diablo Loco". The story revolves around a bull fight with a world famous matador named Caeser Belmonte, and an unpredictable bull named Diablo Loco. This is my big project that will make me and my fellow workhorses rich and famous! Well maybe not rich and famouse but hopefully lead to our first animation jobs. Ive had the idea for a long time, but needed a fellow student with promising talent to help me along the way. My good friend Stuart Hallock came on board with lots of enthusiasm for the project. We started with the over all story concept and began working out the story and script. During this process we also were coming up with concept designs for the 4 charecters. By the end of the Spring semester last year we had our working first draft of a script and rough charecter designs. Stuart has been a great asset to the project as he and I have worked on every aspect of the film-making process. As co-directors, Stuart and I supervised other talents that have lended their help and we will also be the primary animators on the film. So first off Ill show some of the concept drawing I did. These are some of the preliminary roughs which led to our finished design of the matador. Ill continue to post more showing the progression of the film along with other artists contributions. Enjoy.