PhilippeJones.com

Week of Sketches 05/20-26

Phil — Mon, 27 May 2013 19:16:06 +0000

Abstract, acrylic on watercolour paper

Portraits; pencil, ballpoint pen, and ink

Logo exploration; pencil, marker, and ink

Exploration, pencil and ink

Week of Sketches 05/13-19

Phil — Wed, 22 May 2013 02:54:00 +0000

More like weak of sketches. What a shameful display.

Exploration, Blender

Exploration, pencil and ink

Exploration, Blender

Week of Sketches 05/06-12

Phil — Mon, 13 May 2013 02:58:02 +0000

Missed a day this week. Was working damn hard that day I missed, though!

Exploration, ink

Logo exploration, pencil

Self portrait, ink and watercolour

Exploration, ink

Exploraton, pencil and ink

Comic strip; pencil, ink, and Photoshop

Week of Sketches 05/01-05

Phil — Mon, 06 May 2013 16:59:49 +0000

I’ve start doing daily sketches, and I’ll be collecting them in weeks on here. I’ve defined a sketch loosely as being any practice for any creative skills, as long as it’s independent of any ongoing project. A sketch can later evolve into a project, of course. Greeting and celebration cards do fall under the category of sketches, as does gift art.

Here’s week one!

Self portrait, ink, Photoshop

Study, pencil

Study, Photoshop

Practice, Blender

Birthday card, ink and marker

Exploration, ink

Snix Poster

Phil — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 18:42:39 +0000

Cinemassacre is releasing an old series of movies. I painted this yesterday after watching part 2. The movies are old and low quality and have so many flaws, but there’s so much potential, and that’s often enough for me.

Sketch: Hallowe’en Costume

Phil — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 05:28:09 +0000

My hurriedly thrown together costume for this year, a post-apocalyptic survivor. The costume was comprised of a bunch of things I wear or use regularly, plus some rags and a gas mask. Not visible in the drawing is the red cross on the black bag. Also, the rag on my wrist had teddy bears on it and, in the story for the costume, is the remains of my dead child’s pyjamas.

This is the Quarmby Lab

Phil — Sat, 27 Oct 2012 21:44:29 +0000

Lynne from the Quarmby Lab at SFU asked me to create this animation as a promotional video for her lab. She wanted something different from the usual short student and teacher interviews found in academic promotional videos. Inspired by Gorillaz music videos, I proposed animated students in a live-action lab. Lynne was sold.

The first step was laying out the footage I needed. Not being able to fly out to Vancouver myself, Lynne took some walk-through videos of the lab for me. From that footage I plotted out the lab and the shots needed. Lynne then got Hans Goksoyr, a filmographer at SFU, to shoot the footage. Lynne recorded an early version of the voice-over and I edited the lab footage together with some aerial footage to create the working composition.

The next step was to animate the students, which I drew from reference shots Lynne took of the students doing various things in the lab. I then motion tracked them into the footage and animated various masks and effects to make them fit better.

Finally, I colour corrected each scene and inserted the final narration.

Post Mortem: This is the Quarmby Lab

Phil — Sat, 27 Oct 2012 20:06:01 +0000

For the past two months I’ve been working primarily on an animation for the Quarmby Lab. It’s finally finished and ready to share. As expected I learned a great deal working on this project. I used Flash for the animation and After Effects for the editing, motion tracking and compositing. I used to think Flash was decent for animation, but I now realize it’s bad at everything it does. The vector line optimization on the brush tool can give a great feel for static drawings, but when tracing over lines for classic animation, it makes a smooth transition impossible. For any further animation projects I’ll hopefully be able to get a copy of Toon Boom’s Animate Pro. After Effects on the other hand was quite a pleasure to work with. Scenes with many characters would get fairly bogged down if I didn’t hide the characters I wasn’t working with, even after doubling my RAM, but otherwise it ran well enough. The few videos I’ve edited have always been fun to do, and this was no exception. I even managed to make a trick edit which changes the actual space and defies physics. See if you can spot it! Directing a shoot without having ever even stepped foot on location was interesting, too. I got all the shots I wanted, but there were some subtleties I would have had more control over had I been there in person. The motion tracking worked out well except when the markers were obscured, naturally. In those cases I basically animated it frame by frame. All the characters were drawn from reference photos, meaning this was great practice in creating cartoon representations of people. Now I’m inclined more than ever to work on a Nihilist Dominos animated spinoff. I’d probably make the locations in 3D with painterly textures, and insert the flat characters into the space. You can read about the process involved here.

Sketch: Desert Wanderer

Phil — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 05:19:01 +0000

To L: Firebenders!

Phil — Sun, 22 Jul 2012 04:58:34 +0000

I hear a banging sound over the music coming through my headphones, so I remove them. The sound doesn’t repeat, so I replace my headphones. About a minute later, I hear something again. This time it’s you, talking about not letting something fall on you. I rush to the bedroom to find out what’s going on. You’re sitting up in bed, still saying “Phil, don’t let it fall on me!” in a gradually more worried and frustrated tone. “Let what fall on you?” “That!” “What, Laura?” “That, right there!” you insist, pointing up, near the lamp in the middle of the ceiling. “Laura, you’re dreaming.” “No! I’m not! The other fire bender told me that the thing… was-” My mouth drops in amazement, and I stare at you, speechless. “What?!” you ask. “I’m not dreaming! Your sister just told me that-” “Is my sister a fire bender?” I ask excitedly. “No… I don’t think so.” “Who’s ‘the other fire bender’?” “I… don’t know,” you ponder a moment, then come to a realization, “…I was dreaming that part. But not when your sister was here.” Another moment. “Or maybe I was… I dunno.” And with that, you slumped over and went back to sleep.