Christmas Stuffing

This is an e-card I made for friends and family this Christmas.

I hope you enjoy.

t.lucas

Quick man

Thought I would do a little bit of painting in photoshop instead of my usual block colour and shading. Also played around with layer masks to get some nice colour effects.

Let me know what you think, I may or may not do some more soon.

t.lucas

Cowboy - Squinty

A nice dramatic closeup of a cowboy character I'm working on.

t.lucas

Quick Cowboy

I like Ponchos.

t.lucas

Ugly Cowboy

Another quick watercolour inspired by my second favorite film genre after Science Fiction, the Spaghetti Western.

I tried to keep this drawing quick and loose and the colours a bit more vibrant than my usual watercolour palette.
Rough out, inking and coloured in around half an hour.

t.lucas

Blade Runner

Another watercolour. This drawing is based on one of my favorite scenes in Blade Runner. Rutger Hauer is certainly one of the best things about the film.

t.lucas

Graduate Showcase 2011

I've just found out that my graduation film has been featured in the "Computer Arts Magazine" Graduate Showcase and and was picked for the Motion and Animation Excellence Award. It is a great honour and very encouraging to have my work shown in such a great magazine! I also had a really heartening comment from the judge for the award, Richard Tilley of "Artillery Ltd".

t.lucas

Back to watercolours.

I've always loved colouring my work with watercolours rather than just digitally. I haven't had much time for personal work lately but I am going to try and dedicate more of my free time to painting.

For now, here is a little sketch I did during my lunch hour and coloured in the evening. It's based on the film "Moon" by Duncan Jones. I hope you enjoy.

t.lucas

(Probably) Final Character design

This is the character as he stands now. I worked through a lot of body shapes but decided on this one as the character is meant to have been on a mission for years and is pretty bored and therefore eats a lot. As for the hair, I originally wanted the character to be entirely bald for ease of animating but decided that the job he does would be fairly stressful and a bald-ing head makes a character look way more stressed.

Any thoughts or comments please don't hesitate to let me know.

Thanks,

t.lucas

Development

I thought I should stay in the habit of scanning and laying up any of my development work, no matter how rough.
I really like where the character is now, I'll get to that in another post. For now here are some of the designs I worked through to get to where I am now.

t.lucas

Project update

Just finalised the script for my new short and am well into the storyboard. Took some time out to colour a rough of the cockpit interior. I'm going with a more graphic look for my backgrounds this time.

t.lucas

An apology.

I'm sorry for the lack of blog posts of late. I have been mulling an idea over in my head for a short project for the  summer. I tried to stay away from Sci fi this time...but failed! Here are some quick ideas for the main character drawn in Flash and some coloured in Photoshop. Sci fi will be completely out of my system after this, I promise!

t.lucas

New Project!

Apologies for the lack of updates lately, I've been pretty busy in the days and have been procrastinating too much in the evenings. I have been musing slowly over an idea for a series of very short films to practice with symboling in Flash, till now the majority of my work in flash has been hand drawn.

For now here are a few images of the possible main character design for the shorts. The character is an member of the army turned test subject. The shorts will revolve around a series of tests and his reactions to them.

More on this project coming soon.

t.lucas

Final Film

I'm allowed to post this now since the Glammies awards premier.
I'm really pleased with the outcome of the film.

I hope you enjoy.

t.lucas


Botanical Nightmare! from Thomas Lucas on Vimeo.

Ultimate Image - Botanical Nightmare!

As part of our Business module this year we had to create an "Ultimate Image". The image is meant to act as self publicity material so had to say something about me as an individual. I opted to make a promotional image for my graduation film, minus text as part of the brief requirements. I wanted to make sure that the poster conveyed my style, but also gave an idea of my influences, such as old Sci Fi movies and their poster designs.

This is the final design.

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Below is a rough, alternate design, I quite like the composition but I felt it more important to obscure the creature than the man in the end.

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Some rough design ides

t.lucas

Almost there!

This film is almost done. Into the final push now. It's 6:00am and I fancied a short break so I knocked this up to illustrate that 6am feeling when you see light outside. Enjoy.

t.lucas

(Also have a film still.)

Finally!

I haven't had much time for updates recently. Been busy cracking on with my graduation film which seems to be going well and on schedule so I don't want to slow down too much.

I do have some stills from a couple of scenes to show as a bit of a teaser however.
I hope you enjoy!

t.lucas

A sketch...

Just another quick sketch for now. I've been working hard on my animation so it's nice to do the odd unrelated sketch every now and then. The film is going well, currently working on one of the biggest and most complex scenes...the time-lapse scene. So many key frames to draw!

Expect a little snippet of animation soon!

t.lucas

Old sea dog!

t.lucas

Scribbley Viking

A very quick sketch of a Viking, now in glorious technicolour.

Apologies for all the unrelated drawings of late. Working hard on my final film but I can't show any progress for a while. Might see a couple of tests up at some point soon... so watch this space.........

Another random drawing

I drew a space man and suddenly it turned into a parallel universe story.

t.lucas

Something different!

I decided to just draw something completely unrelated to my film and this came out. I don't know why he turned into a lumberjack.... subconsciously. I like to think that he is cutting down many trees for us animators to use.

t.lucas

A new shot.

I've recently added a very short shot into the opening of the film. As Ted's buggy crosses the land to the crater it now cuts to the interior of the buggy so that we can see Ted's reaction as he sees the crater for the first time.

I'm open to criticism of the shot, it may not be necessary but I think it adds something to the discovery of the crater. If anybody has any other ideas please let me know.

Thanks

t.lucas

Film Stills

Here are some stills from the film with finished backgrounds. I'm finally happy with the colour design for the backgrounds, I may have to go back to some older backgrounds and adjust them, but obviously it is important.

Updated backgrounds soon. I hope you enjoy and as usual, any constructive criticism would be much appreciated.

t.lucas

New background

I've just finished colouring this background, I'm really pleased with the lighting and shadows here, it's the final shot and spend some time on it. I hope you like it.

t.lucas

Layouts, layouts, layouts...

Hi all.

Apologies for the lack of updates the past week. I've been in full production swing. I'm aiming to have all of my layouts done and a large proportion of keyframes finalised for next Monday to start animating. I'll hopefully start uploading some rough animation soon after that. In the mean time, here are a couple of layouts that I have completed over the past two days.

t.lucas

Shot for when the plant smashes Ted's moon buggy out of the bubble

This is a perspective shot for Ted's climb up the side of the crater, it's extended past 12 field for panning and zooming.

This is after the plant has been killed, Ted and Suzan are making sure that he is dead. I'm hoping that once this image is coloured it will be more clear what is going on.

These are key frames for one of the final shots. I added a blur in to draw focus as Ted raises his gun.