barry g. reynolds

http://www.bazdesigns.blogspot.com/

so , just a tiny sampling of hundreds of final model sheets, original designs and posing that Barry R. has done on Brendan.

Strangely, after two years he's no longer on the project, just floating about the town enjoying the weather and doing awesome charicatures of everyone. His lady friend Audrey is the production co-ordinator for Cartoon Saloons bit of Brendan so he's still flitting about writing love notes and making us all jealous with his new found freedom.
All the same I'm sure we'll tie him down to one of the upcoming projects sharpish.

check out the link above to his blog for more baztastic goodies.

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/

nice photos

adrien took some nice photos of me, paul, nora and ross in our snazzy meeting room downstairs in the production office. I love the projector yokey for checking bgs and stuff on.
We had some images from the viking attack in the background, I guess they are a bit dark.
thats me in the stripey top.

crew photo 2007

A recent photo - still not everyone from the Kilkenny team though...but most of them.













Sadly ,our friends Virginie and long term allrounder Remi Chaye are leaving us this week so its a bit sad all round.

Virginie worked on posing and clean Bgs and a fine job shes done too.


Remi has been Assistant Director, Layout Chief , Layout guy, Storyboarder, and lately Production Manager, hes leaving Brendan now, but will return in June to make a trailer with some of the crew from Brendan for his feature Long Way North which we are developing with him at the moment......

Scary!

Awesome Bg layout by Niklas Anderson, with posing by Barry Reynolds - its one of the very few sequences in perspective - so you know something scary is about to happen here!!!
lovely animation on this sequence coming in from Belgium lately....

aisling on the tower

this sequence is in production in Belgium, right now, some great animation coming from there.
We are recording Aislings song from this sequence around Paddys day with the composer Bruno Coulais , some musicians from Kila and the voice of Aisling, the very young and very talented Christen Mooney. should be a bit of craic.

oak tree

Aisling and Brendan at the base of the oak tree. Posing by Barry Reynolds Bg layout by Telman Morina Painting by Ross (the boss) Stewart

artwork 5

crew photo 1 some people are NOT in this and of course its just the Kilkenny crew...noone here from Belgium or France or Brazil or Hungary!

artwork 4

Aisling, with very very cool shapes and designs in every drawing by Alessandra Sorentino

artwork 3

Very tasteful acting here from Tom Caulfield

artwork 2

heres a very cool piece of action by Alfredo Cassano

new artwork 1

some nifty animation by Lionel Merchand
love them smears

nearly chrimbo

hi there -

long radio silence was because of EXTREME business - its just been mental. But we are winning I guess.
We have been trying to be more organised about getting stuff sent out to the studios overseas in as "bulletproof" a way as possible - makings ure the packs are correct, the posing works, the x-sheets work and all that stuff.
Heres a sketch of me (on the seat with the pen) , Nora (back to us) and Fabian (leaning on the cupboard) by Virginie a new posing artist from from France, we are discussing the sequences that are going to Hungary in January.

Its very hectic, with all the animation and layout and Bgs to look at here, posing to do, aniamtion from Brussels to check, rough composists of posing to check before they go, colour bgs from Spirit in Angouleme to check, and so on. But everyone is working like crazy and its going to be alright on the night I think.

Tootle pip and merry Chrimbo,

T

brussel sprouts

well,

barry ,fabian, jeremy and myself have been in the lovely city of brussels at the lovely studios of Walking the Dog and digital graphics.

Fabs and Barry have been helping teh animators here get into teh pose to pose method that we are using and helping them get on model and all.
Seems to be working and they are a nice bunch to be sure....

the new studio Digital Graphics have is probably the nicests tudio I've ever seen - they even have alittle cinema there - the Ume Brothers are doing some cool work on their ink and paint software and some cool digital effects...

we are all tired now and ready to go home but surely only more work waits us there...

ttfn,
t