Libearian - Teaser #1

I'm working on a short film idea at the moment that I came up with almost 5 years ago. It's evolved in my head a lot since then and I've finally (almost) pinned down the designs and the basic story points. I'm not going to be putting up too much development work for this one but I will be posting teaser images and stills.

Tom

As promised!

As promised, here is a quick animation test for the current character designs I have, to make sure they are ok to animate with.

It's a little rough around the edges but I'm quite happy with the way the characters move. It was really nice doing a bit of hand drawn animation again too!

I hope you like the characters and please contact me if you have any constructive criticism.

Cheers,

Tom

Cleaned up development sketch

I've been doing some development for a new short idea recently. A lot of the stuff is ridiculously rough but I will still put up a selection of the better (more visible) sketches. I will also be doing coloured and cleaned up versions of my favorites every now and then. I'm also working on a few animation tests to make sure the designs hold up and move ok, so watch out for them, hopefully soon.

Anyway, first cleaned up sketch. Now!

Tom

New idea

Doing a bit of personal work at the moment. Here's a little snippet for now. I don't know if you can tell what the project is about from such a subtle image. I'm hoping to be able to give a good bit of time to this idea in my evenings so there should be regular(ish) posts starting now.

Tom

Lunch dood-le - Space Guy

Been revisiting an old film idea recently, so this lunch doodle is of the main character from that film. Trying to take the style in a different direction and stick to around two or three colours and shades.

Hope you like it and please let me know what you think.

Tom

Short film idea

Very much a work in progress. Trying to work things out in my head for the moment. I wanted to come up with an idea where I can really convey the moods and emotions of the characters through the animation without the characters physically being too complicated.

I've also been working on a background style for the short. Here is one of the experiments I'm almost happy with. It still needs a bit of work.

(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

Noir Concept

This is just a very quick, rough idea of the style I have in mind for my next project.

I am in two minds still about whether to go for black and white or subtle use of colour. Clearly more development is needed but I wanted to get this idea out of my system so I can push it forward.

Thanks

lucas. t

Next big project!

I've been mulling an idea around my head for the past couple of weeks for my next project. I have been very interested lately in detective stories and thrillers, particularly noir stories. I have begun preliminary research and done some sketches in the style I had in mind. I wanted to move to more simple characters, and focus more on the mood and body language of the characters. I also want my next film to be more filmic, utilising more backgrounds and a full narrative. Despite this, charcter interaction will still be a big focus, only not to the extent of my current project.

For the moment, here are some of the images I found during my research. These are just a few of the classic shots from films such as "The Maltese Falcon" (1941) I have already found some inspiration for the story and shots and hope to move this forward during the summer months.

lucas. t