The Lighthouse online!

EDIT: added a quicktime for easy viewing here on the blog. Might switch it to a youtube version to conserve bandwidth, but i prefer the quicktime quality so I'll leave it up a little while. Definitely make sure to check out the festival website and watch some of the other films though!

So, a little over a year ago I finished my thesis film at Sheridan. I held off posting it on my blog since I was submitting it to festivals. Recently it got accepted into a festival which also has an online component though, so it's available on the web for the first time!

http://www.hdfest.com/

It's currently featured on the front page, but it'll continue to be accessible through the animation section as they update the main page with new animated films. I've browsed some of the other films on the site as well, and there's some pretty cool work! You can also see The Terrible Error of the Replacement Mayor, directed by my good friend Nick Thornborrow, which I worked on previous to my thesis film.

It's nice to be able to look back at my film in an objective manner. Having spent so much time on it during school, I always felt that was the hardest part. In retrospect, I see a whole lot of things I would do differently if I were to approach a similar concept today. Most everyone reviewing their past films probably feel this way, so I'm sure a lot of this blog's audience can relate. That said, I wouldn't change anything given the opportunity. There are issues with the structure of the film, but it's very much a polaroid of my life during my last year of college. More than anything, it makes me want to get a new film officially started. I feel like I learned so much both from making The Lighthouse, and all the work I've done since. I'd love to apply all that to a fresh concept.

Anyway, long story short, go to hdfest.com and check it out!

Souvenirs from the Maritimes

I recently took my first trip to eastern Canada, and had a great time. I must say, it's one of the nicest and most accommodating places I've been to for just sitting down with my sketchbook, and doing a bit of painting.

Sarah, driving the two of us down. We ended up driving over 3300km total!

The back of a small autoshop over the St. John river in Perth-Andover, NB.

George's Island, over the water, from the harbour in Halifax.

This is Spook. He was uncharacteristically friendly while we were visiting. I think he liked the idea of being painted.

Peggy's Cove, NS. I'd love to go back for a week or two with the intent of painting the whole village. Every little cottage was so picturesque. I eventually decided on painting the lighthouse, somewhat predictably. It's also pretty iconic of the location, so I didn't feel too guilty.

All in all, a great trip. I wish I had more opportunities to sit down with my paints and get my hands a bit dirty. Maybe I'll try to set aside some time to do some little location studies around Toronto, while the weather is still nice.

back alley

detail:


If you're curious about the finer points of my colors at all, reopen these .jpg's with photoshop and the palette should display a bit more accurately. Seems like browsers are always a little off.

Hoping to share more art from this project eventually, but it'll be a little while before I have some quality photoshop time again... so I thought I'd share this now!

The salty smell of the high seas!

A friend of mine whom I work with, Colin, has a group of students he helps with design on his spare time. He asked me if I wouldn't mind guest critiquing occasionally. Sounded like a good time to me, so I put together a character for the topic they're working on right now. Pirates! Looking forward to seeing what everyone else comes up with. Hopefully I'll have some other designs to share later on, from future topics.

I left my heART in San Francisco

I recently spent a few days in San Francisco. Aside from taking in the sights, looking like a tourist, and seeing some great studios, I managed to squeeze in a little bit of time to paint, too.




Thanks so much to Sarah for pretty much the best birthday present ever. I'm really hoping we'll be back in the bay area sooner rather than later!

Twins!

Warm up sketch! I saw these gentlemen this morning, on my way to work. I'm now on the lookout for a smaller version of myself.

fox & flame 2

Here's the last fox & flame painting, for now. Initially, the roughs were based upon a short story outline I'd written. From there I decided to take a few pieces to finish. I like the approach of the talented guys who post on the Draw Force blog, so the themes of the individual paintings are pretty similar to theirs. In the end I wanted to have two character illustrations, a location, a character posed, and then a showdown between two of the characters. I ended up mixing in a couple secondary characters along the way, since they were pretty prominent in the original story.

I feel like the exercise was successful - I'm pretty happy with the results. I might take another short story or fairy tale and create another set of the same five illustrations at some point.

edit: the image in this post was adjusted for browsing in firefox. After seeing it in safari, it looks almost black. If the colors look too dark, click here for the original values. Most of the images I post seem a little off from the .psd, this time especially.