I updated my reel again!

Yeah I updated the ole' reel again. Put in my blocking pass of my two person dialogue and removed a couple things. Please tell me what you think! You can view it by going to my portfolio page here:

http://grahamross.blogspot.com/

One of the coolest commercials ever...

Seriously....

Great Music Video!

Go check out http://spungella.blogspot.com/ sometime! Lots of great stuff and JD posts often. Check out this gem he just posted!

Updating my reel....

I'm in the process of re-polishing my reel, but for now here's a version of it with a few shots from my thesis film "One Small Step". The reel will be probably be revised again within the next few weeks since I'm still cleaning stuff up. But for now, here ya go!


Graham Ross Reel 1_19_2008 from Graham Ross on Vimeo.

Sketches

I've been trying to push a lot of the shapes of people I've been sketching lately. Caricaturing is a lot harder than it looks! But I'm starting to get some breakthroughs...

In progress...

Here's my first jump into the 11 second club competition for this month. Unfortunately I think I might scrap much of this pass. But I think there's still some interesting stuff in it. More ta come later ;)



UPDATED 1-23-09: Here's my latest iteration. I changed the idea a lot, in order to emphasize the acting rather than the action of the scene. It's not perfect and some of the guy's poses need to be modified because they're not that strong, but it's going in the right direction I think...



UPDATED 1-25-09: Still plugging away at this one. There's some floatyness to his arms...mostly because I'm trying out using IK for the first time. But his emotions are reading a bit better. I might not finish this in time for the competition, but I will finish it for my reel ;)



UPDATED 1-26-09: I'm really enjoying tracking my progress! I flipped it back to stepped to try to resolve some of the acting issues. I think it's looking better. I might just keep going and key it as much as possible. Usually I feel like that creates too much work for myself, but in this case it feels like the right thing to do.




UPDATED 1-27-09: Man I'm cranking away! I'm really enjoying compiling my posts together like this. It's a good way to keep track of my progression. There's a lot that needs to be cleaned up with the hands and the mouth. The girl needs a final "pop" at the end too to draw your eye away from the gesticulations of the dude.

I decided this time to really key the scene as much as possible. Before I've always kind of sculpted the animation from the curves...moving the weights around. I don't know if this is going to make it easier or harder, but right now...it's just feeling right.



UPDATED 1-28-09: I'm kind of experimenting with this one. I'm trying to really get my spacing down in blocking before I move over the splines. I have converted it since posting this video and it seems to be working well, but I think I'll still have to invest a lot of time into making it look less puppet-like.

I should make another update on this later tonight ;)



UPDATED 1-29-09: Moving the splines around a bit. The timing still isn't quite there, but it's coming along. The end just isn't working for me just yet. I think I might go for something more subtle...



UPDATED 1-31-09: Here's my final pass before submission to 11 second club. I think it's a good pass for the time I had, but it still need a lot of work. It's come a hell of a long way though!

The Couch Gag

Guiness Beer Ads...

I was recently pointed to the really inventive ads coming out from Guinness lately. I might post some more later, but for now here's one of my favorites. Surprising where you find inspiration from, eh?

Went to the zoo....

There really is no replacement for drawing and observing from life. But for me, the biggest difficulty is getting caught up in the details. It's hard for me to see the whole pose or the whole image and I'm pretty guilty of noodling.

Bears are hard to draw because a lot of the anatomy is hidden under fur or fat. So you have to look at the whole body as one shape. Needless to say I had a lot of trouble when I went to the zoo a few days ago. I'll have to practice them some more.

I always remind myself that, even if I don't do a ton of good drawings, I should try to learn something from the session. Even if I only learn one tiny thing, it makes it worth the effort.

Thumbnails of Grok

Like I've said before on my blog, I really don't want to spoil my film by putting it up early before it's all nice and polished. However, it doesn't hurt to post up a few bits here and there to show how things are going, right?

Here's some animation thumbnails I used for some of the scenes. Grok's design was a bit hard to get used to. Usually I tried to boil things down to two lines of action on the left and right side of his body. Like a big sacky, but with eyes and arms!

Focusing on how the two lines of action related allowed me to deal with the animation graphically and overcome or work around any technical difficulties.

Did you ever dream of flying?

wingsuit base jumping from Ali on Vimeo.