from the vaults 4

So, skipping several "inbetweens" - (I'll save thsoe for another day) , heres where I was at by the time Barry Reynolds came on to begin working with me on the "final" designs and modelsheets. Barry had been on the orginally "Rebel" trailer team back in 2000 so it was good to have him in at that stage. I think I'd gotten a bit too fussy by this stage and we worked for a long time to pare these designs back down a bit again.
It was a long part of the preproduction ....
These were the designs we submitted for funding in 2004...
some have changed a LOT and others not so much....Nora Twomey cleaned these drawings up and most of them are colured by me, but Stewy coloured the Aidan Running one I think...
Colour and textures are a big part of what makes the designs work - they can seem quite abstract in Black and White I think...

This was the last batch of designs I did on my own -

Barry Reynolds then worked with me starting with these designs at the beginning of preproduction...as I said he had worked on the designs for "rebel" with myself, aidan harte and Ross Stewart, fádó fádó in 1999/2000, and it was a nice cyclical thing to work with him on the final designs and model sheets after all those years....

from the vaults 3

Well, the obvious input next was that I'd gone TOO flat and stylised... so I made the plasticine model in the post below of Aidan , I did ones of Brendan and Aisling too...just to see if we could translate those really flat designs into something capable of more just very limited animation.
It began a journey to the designs in the next post which represent the fianl designs we submitted to as a "Bible" to Eurimage and other funding bodies.
Here are some of the "inbetweens" .... I had some input during this stage from Diane Le Feyer , Matt Whelan and Nora Twomey, Also theres a concept above from this period by Adrien Merigeau , he was an unpaid intern that year - and now he's a Bg supervisor! Anyway these are all my drawings besides his nice blue coloured one of Brendan and Aisling looking at the moth.....
The pages from the real Book of Kells have some of the designs comped into them - this was something I did just to see how well they might fit into that style...and for the craic...
All this work was done as an aside to the main day to day work of commercials and service work in the studio by the way...

From the vaults 2

Well, the Cartoon Movie pitch, went okay but Didier Brunner the french producer really wanted me to push the designs further. I really resisted at first, but then I met up with the director of Kirikou , Michel Ocelot on a trip to Paris and he said more or less the same thing, that the designs were too "Disney" and traditional, that we should really use the chance to do something indepentant to something really different. I knew he was right and I felt kinda sheepish for having resisted Didiers suggestions prior to that. Anyway that night I started sketching something really "flat" trying to push the designs as far as possible into flat style stuff - it was really energising and I really started to feel enthusastic about the "new" project then, even if the first designs were really really pushed! Didier was happy that I was trying something a bit more far out. I was aware the budget would be quite limited so it made a kind of sense to me to push the design , as traditional designs animated on a budget can look really bad. I've discovered its even harder to do something different!

Paring the designs down this much really helped me get a really strong silouhette and shape theory worked out for each character though...

Anyway heres some stuff from the brief experiental period when I went really super-flat with the designs .

from the vaults

I was talking to Alfredo and Alessandra (god I hope I spelt that correctly!) about the character designs and how people were finding the 2d/3d flat style hard to grasp.
I was talking about the journey we took from "Rebel" which was the project Brendan grew out of , which had very Hercules-type soft modeled designs to the flat style we final settled on.

This is something I touched on a little bit in earlier posts....anyway hope its interesting....

I did most of the visual development on the characters over the period 2003 (when we began to rework the project as "Brendan" ) until 2005 when Barry Reynolds came back from his wanderings and made the final designs and model sheets of the main characters with me. He really unified everything , and tied the style together, but at first even he had a hard time getting the flat mediaeval thing in there. Someday I'll have to publish a book of the development art that spans almost 7 years but heres some samples to show the journey....

These are a little embarassing now, but its where I was at in 2003 - These were the first designs of Aisling and Brendan , somewhere between "Rebel" and where we ended up with the "Brendan" style.
Diane Le Feyer , a very talented animator who was in the studio at the time, did some of the Aisling sketchs , but these are basically the reworked designs I did for the Cartoon Movie trailer that year, when we represented the project as a "new" film , seperate to "Rebel".....

Jean Baptiste art

http://www.cfsl.net/?forum=viewtopic.php%3Ft%3D38163

Jean Baptiste van Demme has posted some of his portfolio at this link.
check it out ! classy stuff all around- he even put a few vikings from brendan up there...hmmmm...
anyway JB is leaving us for a while but we've begun developing what may be our first venture into CG with him...so we trust JB will be back....

Aislings Song

So , here are some photos of Christen Mooney - 9 years old and Nora - more years old , recording Aislings song in the sound studio in Dublin.
Unfortunatly Bruno could'nt be there , but we got some good takes and we are looking forward to hearing what he can do with them. His producer Manu was there and felt we got what we needed so hopefully we'll have something soon so our Belgian friends can finish that sequence.

I showed Christen some of the animation that Alessandra had done of Aisling and she got a kick out of it.
Watch out for this young superstar!

tommonablogagog

made myself a sketch blog and all -just for my own stuff....y'know the story....mainly sketches and stuff...those who may be interested will find it here -
http://tommonablogagog.blogspot.com/