Holiday Card 2011

Last chance to get a final blog post in this year.

Here is this year's Ghostbot Holiday card I was lucky enough to get to design. Alan Lau had the awesome idea for a robot that looked like a tree. I loved that concept and had fun trying to bring it off successfully.



Below are the color rough and some really rough early concepts:

Party in the CIA

Here's another Ghostbot project I was lucky enough to work on as Art Director:



I had a lot of fun on this one. It was my first collaboration with the extremely talented Ghostbot director, Roque Ballesteros. He was great to work for and gave me a lot of room to play with the look of the Backgrounds and Color. Roque pointed me towards Saul Bass, Kuntzel and Deygas'"Catch Me If You Can" title sequence, and the incredible Lou Romano. I added my own love of Charlie Harper and Bob Staake, and we were off developing the video late last year. Early on, with just those references and the song lyrics, but no board yet, I came up with this:



I also roughed these out around the same time:




Roque was such a fan of the ideas in these roughs that he retooled some of the scenes to allow for these moments. I was very pleased with the "kaleidoscope" scene of the car zooming off.

Thanks for taking a look!

Dolby Audio Commercial

Hello all. Another post that drafts off what Ghostbot has been posting.



So this video was produced about a year ago at Ghostbot. Alan Lau directed. I Art Directed the piece. It was a ton of fun and one of the first big projects I worked on at Ghostbot, where I could show off some of what I could do with color/design and composting. The first stage was pitching Dolby on the concept, so based off Alan's script for the spot, I created these frames with help from Alan Lau and Brad Rau on the character and shot selection.



The blue palette was inspired by the Dolby marketing style, but we began to worry that all blue would be a little too monotonous. So I worked up a few more color panels once the boards were underway. I liked this one, with the more stylized clouds but we ended up going with more recognizable cloud shapes in the final.



Here are the ones we submitted:


Client liked the new palette direction, so we were off to the races. I did a color script as I went along to try and keep track of how the BGs should be colored. I designed all the BGs and did all the AE composting as well as a smattering of Maya animation and Apple Motion Particles (Fish and Bubbles). As you can see, the color concepts were nearly identical to the final frames.



It was a blast and I loved getting to work with such a talented crew. Ghostbot brought the serious animation chops, including hiring Adam Phillips to animate the heavy fx scenes. I can't wait to do more!

Roshambo!

Not a lot of new posts this year on Line Shape Color... been busy with a big project at work (I know! Who doesn't have a big project at work-- NO EXUSES!!!) To tide you over until I can talk about that, I figured I show this newly posted video from Ghostbot.

This advert is for one of Ghostbot's properties "ROSHAMBO!". It was smacked together last year, right before Comic Con and was directed by the mad-genius, Alan Lau. I did most of the background designs, tiny bit of animation, and all the compositing. Here it is, I hope you like: