DeSeve

The villain of the story. He's an escaped convict who just carjacked a Ferrari when he's introduced. Originally he was going to have a nice, sleek Brooks Brothers/Armani/super-rich suit on and then slowly it's revealed that he's an escaped criminal (via his orange jumpsuit underneath the clothing). But that was another one of my bad ideas (i.e., I think I'm being smart but I'm really not). So right up front, it's very clear that he's an escapee: the oversized cuffs on his wrists. A bit of trivia is that this character was originally going to be used for a short film I was trying to write back in 2006, titled "Jail Bait," about a prisoner-cop chase on a prison bus, set in the 1920s (go back and look at my early 2007 posts). But it couldn't work out because it was (a) another confined-area story--i'd just worked on Road Test, where everything takes place in a car (b) ironically, the more I scaled back the story, the more difficult it got (c) the logistics were a nightmare---Ok, so does the windows of the prisoner transportation bus have iron bars on them? Why can't he escape out the driver's window of the car? How many prisoners are on the bus? What's stopping them from killing the warden that's driving the bus? and so on.

Mr. Dot v2.0

Check out the NEW Mr. Dot (the road test instructor from the first short film). The pencil drawing and character design is by Matt Jenkins.

ToonBoom vs Flash drawing

I decided to put up a side-by-side comparison, ToonBoom Digital vs. Flash. The reason I made the switch is because the drawing engine in TB is worlds better than Flash's (and if this ends up as a quote on ToonBoom's site, I'm suing). Usually in Flash, when I draw an object, I get a wonky sorta line with the brush tool. I have to resort to smoothing and kerning the lines. It's lots of nips and tucks and it slows me down. In TB you just draw an image and it appears as you drew it, no extra chunks on your lines.

That's the main reason I bought it; I still intend on compositing in After Effects. The learning curve for ToonBoom (or what I needed to know) was a little steep, to be honest and I'm not really a fan of the program's cute little interface/buttons that requires you to do three steps for what would have taken 1 in Flash. But it's the drawing engine that really matters.

ABOVE: A quick Brush drawing of Gabe with the Brush tool in ToonBoom. No smoothing or kerning or any of that involved..

BELOW: The same drawing traced over in Adobe Flash with the program's Brush, no smoothing or kerning involved, just a first rough pass.

...so it begins.

Just got ToonBoom Digital on Friday, educated myself over the weekend and now I'm starting to animate. Here's a shot of Gabe (miffed school bus driver) and DeSeve (angry contortionist).

SMASH IT UP

So here's the Universal car (probably the majority of the cars during the DrawBridge sequence, just with different colors). Obviously the hero vehicles are the Segway, School bus and Ferarrari.






I've been having fun smashing up the car.

Gone in 60 seconds...

At the orders of Sir Michael Carlo I, here's the first minute of the first draft of Road Rage. I completed the entire animatic back in August and I'm still fine-tuning it. In fact...there's an extra 20 seconds of footage that belong in here, a little more build-up involving the villain of the story that the main character, Gabe, accidently gets into a fender-bender with. But anyway, I thought I'd share this with you. There's no sound, and the Quicktime export frame rate is a little messed up so there might be one or two cuts that go by too fast.


Road Rage Animatic, Minute One. from matthew on Vimeo.

BRIDGING THE GAP.

...I always wanted to write that.

The making of...a drawbridge. Probably one of the easiest things in MAYA because it's just Polygonal cubes that I'm combining. The drawbridge is the climax of "Road Rage," where all story elements come together and ironically, break apart. Imagine a bunch of cars tumbling and sliding off the bridge, along with a gasoline truck and you'll get a sense of how chaotic things will get!

Below: A little Joel Silver-esque imagery of showing the same take from multiple angles...yes, that's a school bus attempting to make a jump

Flock Off tidbit..

FLOCK OFF, the one minute gross out short film I made in May 2007, will be part of Spike & Mike's Twisted Animation Festival schedule 2008-2009. Which is cool, considering that I've always wanted to get a film into Spike & Mike. It recently screened at Comic-Con in July along with other funny shorts...

Let's go for a spin

I'm still getting used to drawing these two characters (which, if you are just joining this blog, were designed by Matt Jenkins ). Also I am not positive if this sequence will be in the final film. I thought it would be fun if the crook and the cop get into a fistfight on a segway, utterly straight-faced :) Then again if I even have a prayer of gettin this baby out by summer of 2009....

Size-up

I'm still debating on whether or not Officer Dot (right) should have the beard he sported in Road Test.