Across the coral fields…………..

Destruction  . Early conceptual work for the third act .

]]> http://sim-r.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=600 0 http://sim-r.com/blog/?p=593 http://sim-r.com/blog/?p=593#comments Sat, 27 Apr 2013 03:56:43 +0000 SIM-R http://sim-r.com/blog/?p=593  

Wow – twice in one day . A first !!!

So -  Tron Mai is one of the best story board artists in the industry . His boards reek of pure emotion and heartfelt imagery . There’s a lot of sensitivity to his line work that brings emotion to the characters and the weight , or indeed happiness , of any situation in front of them . Put all of that together and you get powerful story telling .  When we approached this moment in the movie for the first time we were unsure as to what might actually be on the other side of the wall. What creature might come through ? . Tron provided me with line drawings of the family from his boards in the first two paintings and a suggestion of the ground they might be standing on . The rest was open for exploration – but according to the boards and story that they presented the new world was , at that time , to be mysterious . So I kept it mysterious …and moody . The first – I thought it might be a bird of prey .  The second was a suggestion to explore the idea that they may actually be on the jungle floor from the get go . The third – me going for the giant bird moment again .

The movie evolved as all movies do and newer versions of this moment were to be explored and explored again .

Cheers all .

Sometimes on The Croods we would get the chance to design some bizarre / giant plants . I rather enjoy this type of thing . The early version of Grug was designed and modeled by the great Mr T of course and I asked nicely if I could use him for scale …… I did many of these , some of them really weird and odd at different stages of design . These two plants were some of the first I did and much to my suprise  the very first one I did made it into the movie ( lower ) .

Zbrush for both of them .

Cheers all .

An early concept regarding a stand off between Grug and the bear owl

  . The bear owl was designed by Mr T. Noguchi ( master chief of the character and creature world ) . With the model in early production phase , I took the mesh and posed it quickly in zbrush for scale and dimension .  I painted quite heavily into it to bring some aggressive nature to the block in ( while still trying to honor Mister T’s design ) . Other details were then added – fog , debris etc .

]]> http://sim-r.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=583 0 http://sim-r.com/blog/?p=578 http://sim-r.com/blog/?p=578#comments Thu, 18 Apr 2013 23:21:22 +0000 SIM-R http://sim-r.com/blog/?p=578

Grug . Alone .

More Croods . Some  Jungle -ish  type stuff this time  . Early conceptual design .

More early concept work . Organic negatives and positives .

This was my first stab at the jungle madness that was the world of the Croods .  It’s  4 or more years old at this point  . I worked out a lot of compositions in sepia – for me it adds warmth . I bounced in and out of ways of coming up with comps as time went on . Zbrush was used in this one quite a bit and actually convinced me to use it a lot more for BG and moment design . I’ll talk about that a bit in the coming weeks .

Cheers .

]]> http://sim-r.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=551 2 http://sim-r.com/blog/?p=536 http://sim-r.com/blog/?p=536#comments Sun, 24 Mar 2013 20:14:07 +0000 SIM-R http://sim-r.com/blog/?p=536

By now a lot of you will have seen the movie . Those that have not – go see it !

On Croods I worked on ideas and designed a lot of early vis dev and conceptual artwork for many preliminary sequences .

Some are quite similar to how I initially presented them . Others changed and evolved – very like the world of Croods itself . Often my work consisted of tonal images to drive ideas and story sequences through dynamic composition and mood . Sometimes I would get to push the ideas more . Other times, as you will see later , rough sketches would suffice in order to get the discussion going with the directors . The light chase sequence is a good example of this . I did many, many rough tonal images with compositional exploration , discussing possibilities for the vision that Eep would have of the creature moving ahead of her through the darkness .

The important thing to remember about The Croods when looking at any of the artwork is this : Not one single hand is responsible for it . Many hands are . Lots of ideas were invented , changed , visited again, morphed , painted, re-invented and finalized before going back to the drawing board again .

I will say this : I had  fun working on it .

These three images are a glimpse into some of the creativity I was involved with .