Still working on color studies. This one features just the hero character. I'm liking the vibrant colors, not sure if it fits the film yet.

Style Painting

This image shows a little more progress towards the style I'm going for. It's maybe 80% complete, but I like the energy of it and it finally feels like winter.

Now We're Getting Somewhere!

I feel like I finally found a home in this color palette! An appropriate mix of vibrant and cool. Not perfect yet but getting there.

Poses and Expressions for the Hero Shot

I've worked out some poses and expressions for the hero shot where the boy and dog are playing. I got to use some old reference of Mysti and I playing before she had passed this Summer so I'm happy about that. I'm also pretty happy about the new addition of the scarf, he was just too cold for winter before, now he looks wintery even without the snow!

Always Making Thumbnails!

Every day I'm thumbnailing!

Object Studies

I spent some time more clearly defining some of the objects from the story. The gun feels like a good balance of detail vs. simplicity as well as structure now. I also did some studies of things that will be farther away from the camera but still important.

Scene Studies

This week I made thumbnails of the environments leading up to the gun scene. I'm pretty happy overall, I'm starting to get a feeling like this space actually exists and I can walk around in it in my mind.

Boy and Doggy Studies

This week I've spent my time studying boy and dog interacting poses, and dog behavior specific poses. I'm using my references from my childhood photos and from the dog show that I went to the previous weekend. Coming up with this stuff from imagination just wasn't good enough. We all know what dogs look like and how they act, but I really had to spend some time doing critical analysis of what make the goofy, what makes them cute, how specifically do they carry themselves, so that I could get some more appealing stuff into the dog scenes.

Active Dogs

I jumped on the chance to get a bunch of first hand dog reference this week. My wife and I visited the AKC Dog Agility World Tryouts in Hopkins Minnesota. Handlers and their dogs were competing to become part of a world team that would travel to Europe to face off against other countries. For me, it was a great chance to witness first hand, a bunch of really happy and proud dog owners, interacting with their beloved pets. These people were loving and passionate and very active so it was perfect reference to inspire doggy interacting drawings. To the sketchbooks!

Danger Photo Set

When I need some extra inspiration I always come back to the old photos of my childhood pet Danger. He's the special guy that inspired aspects of my short film and he always gives me the juice to pick up and try harder. Not only are the pics fun to look at, they are also inspiring some much needed poses for the film.

Thumbnail Revisions

Thumbnailing is never done! I spent some time this week figuring out some momentum and motion in some of the scenes.

Depression and Letting Go

The poses this week were to study the emotion of depression, but then also letting go. I thought that depression would be giving up and sitting down, getting as low as possible. Letting go to me meant actually releasing physically, or opening the hands, almost setting free. I also have 3 poses here for the bargaining stage of depression, which to me, meant that he would try to rebuild the snowman.

Pose Studies

These poses explore emotion poses for the opening and ending scenes. In the opening scene he is happy building a snowman, then in the ending scene he interacts with the snowman during his 'bargaining' phase of grief. I'm exploring using the 5 stages of grief to motivate his poses in the ending scene, so far I've got drawings for depression, denial, anger, and bargaining. The next set of acting studies that I'll make will be the 'acceptance' stage of grief, since that is almost another act in this scene I'll focus on those throughout the next week.

Scene Studies

The following drawings were made to study actions in several of the scenes. The first page has drawings of the boy just after he's found the gun and is showing how cool he is by doing some 'gunslinger poses', the second page shows him 'tripping' and losing control of the gun. The third page has Danger bouncing around 'playfully' and then dashing with more 'sharpness'.

Snow Storm Photo Set

A lot of things in Minnesota were canceled today due to extreme weather. I bundled up and got outside right at sunrise to take inspiration pictures and man I'm really happy how they turned out. I'll be borrowing a lot of shapes from the snow drifts and even some color. I like how the morning blues look and even some nice yellows to warm it up. I was glad I took these at sunrise before the sun got too high and the reflected light became blinding making it impossible to take good pics.

Looking at some of the color from my snowstorm pics, it made me think about the overall color of my work for this film, and I decided to put together some other nice winter scene pics that I found on google. This new package of inspiration I think will lead to some more artistic color choices.

3D Previs

I've collected some of the 3D assets that I've used along the way to help with character placement in perspective, scale, and posing. 3D artist Shannon Gilley was kind enough to provide the models and rigs of the characters.

Character Expressions

I feel like this film will live or die by the interactions of the characters, so I spent almost a whole summer in the sketchbook trying and testing all kinds of acting moments with the characters. While a lot of these poses might not make the final film, I learned a lot about what sort of expressions and angles work for what I have in mind.

Thumbnails

I've gone through a bunch of the old sketchbooks looking at all the idea sketches that were made 'just for me' to figure things out, and decided to make a collage showing some of the thumbnail process.

Snow Day Animatic 2/6/14

Snow Day Animatic 2/6/2014 from Jon Dege on Vimeo.

Random Sketches

I'm going through some of the first sketchbooks I started using on this project and found some fun early sketches that haven't made the final cut, but I thought would be neat to share. The first slide is a few turn sheets of the characters at sort of a mid point of design, not final, but not the first drawing either. They were drawn on some different textured paper, with blue pencil, white pencil, and marker. The second slide shows marker sketches from very early in the thought process. They are loose pen and marker drawings where I was mainly thinking about shapes.

Thumbnail Boards and Color Beats

I'm going through some of the preliminary story work and finding some neat stuff that I want to share. These next 3 slides are some of the initial passes of boarding. The first 2 are the thumbnails drawn on dry erase board and quickly tweaked in Photoshop. The last one is a color sequence I had done to try some blues, reds, and purples for different thumbnails of the story as I had seen it at that time.

Storyboards As Of 2/6/2014