A Ballerina

She likes to dance and act,

and here, she's acting like a drama queen.

But if you met her out of stage, you'd like her.

She's a lovely chubby lady.

PS. Feliz navidad folks!! ;)

Lava Man

He's like a lava titan... All evil and doom...

inside a cheezy gothic-intended frame...

Trying to put his best face for the photo...

It'd be a funny thing to have actually happenning...

Dead Indeed

He's like an Igor-like vampiresque crazy scientist lab helper.

I did this last year.

It was just my hands doodling around

with the ink pen and some watercolors...

Merry-Happy Halloweenzmas, I guess! :)

An Alarmed Duo

Oh yes, they are, and very.

Through their minds

there's a: -"Holly cow!"-

This is a color trial for a scene.

Red hue for the comming danger.

The Gunis

This character lives in a little planet

somewhere out there in space.

He's a funny thing to watch,

and his planet has lots of sweet little bugs

and probably other kind of animals as well.

He was the base for Twitchy,

another character I did for Sarah.

But this one intended to be for flash.

There are also some other creatures

floating around the design.

They were movements, I think.

Planned movements I wanted Guni to have.

Squishy The Caterpillar

I did this design for Sarah.

And she modeled it in 3D.

I'm so excited! xD

Yeah

I think she's thinking that. A sarcastic "Yeah, sure."

I did this today, enjoy for the first time ever something fresh from the oven!

And she... She's probably...

the crazy teenager sister of some poor playful kid.

For her, playful means annoying.

Or the babysitter.

Or not. Maybe she's not that...

And her sarcastic "yeah" is actually for an annoying guy her age.

Who knows.

Maybe you.

Maybe you know :)

She's got tentacles

I'll start posting some drawings I've done with ballpoint pen.

-The incident where she got tentacles-

It was "bring your pet to work" day in the genetics lab where she works, and someone happened to have an octopus as a pet. The octopus, without anyone noticing, contaminated a glass with water. That glass contained the water they were gonna use for a genetic experiment, in an experimental genetic machine. When they began the experiment, she fell inside the machine, accidentally, trying to save her chocolate milk from falling down, and got changed into this...

There she is, sad, depressed, and down, being told things can't be fixed. Her arms and legs won't ever change, and she's starting to think she'll loose her dream job. Not to mention the world, which may have issues accepting differences, like civilization usually has. She felt lost.

But she doesn't have that long face anymore. She smiles every day, now even more than she did before, because now everybody at work admires her. She's an amazing multi-task employee that gets 4 times more work done than anyone else in the whole place! And she gets paid for it ;)

There's a kid in the tree in our backyard

And he comes out and says hi when you get close.

Pirate

I got new markers. I did this to use them. And some other stuff you'll see around later.

He's probably having a conversation with someone that's trying to convince him that there's a treasure somewhere in the island. And he, of course, it's not believing it.

The Giant Red Pea Plant

A crazy experiment with the acrylics.

The Peas are maybe magic. Probably they mutated because of a crazy nuclear explosion. Maybe... maybe they are red because the ground was filled with villager's blood... from some battle... like in those bloody awesome animes I sometimes see based on old time japanese or chinese eras. And the plant drank the blood, and the peas are red now. Or maybe... maybe a pea plant and a strawberry one got together, loved each other very very much... and then one day... the red peas were born! Yai!

Tree and Mushrooms

One day... I was messing around with the paint... And I did layers over layers of things I did not like over things I liked a little more, each time, until I ended up with this... which I liked more than any other layer. So I left it there.

I can imagine little blue creatures coming out of those mushrooms, poping from behing the branches of the tree, saying hi to anyone who sees this image. Can you see that happening?

Goodbye Sushi

I'm doing the storyboard for the short.
We had to color some of the panels to start settling the colors for some of the scenes. It's being a lot of fun. The scene has to have a sad feeling, but still not that dark. The little light spots I added are to give the audience the hint of hope fot this couple to be together. I'm looking forward to start.

The Butler

Now he has awesome hair and different clothes.
Wonder what he's up to now?

Annoyed

Mph!

Song Face

He's probably thinking, "-Yai! Stars!!"
He floats in space.

Mom, a giant Muffin is destroying our building!

Senseless ideas I had stored in old notebooks have started taking shape thanks to the pitching assignment. This is another one. I re-used the image from the concepts I made for visual story telling back in term 1... Added some phrases... And now I feel I could do this one day too.

How to Make a Cake

Oh well, this idea was a fun one to think of.

We needed to come out with 3 ideas for a pitching presentation. I'm sure I want to make the film "Free Sushi", but I still needed 2 ideas for that presentation thing. Anyway, this was the poster I came out with for the second idea. And I think It has potential, but way too many characters for now. My last year film had 2 characters. And I know 2 is enough. Gladly, I was not the only one thinking that. So It stays on the ideas shelf.

The story It's basically just all this characters dancing ballet Swan's Lake style, as cheezy and gracefully as dancing ingredients could dance, putting together all the necessary ingredients to make a cake. I was chatting with a couple classmates, and they apported a couple interesting ingredients to the mix, like a piece of chocolate taking over everyone's attention, and a sneaky marijuana leaf (I'm so inluding the leaf!). I'm making this comedy some day, it's gonna be awesome, hilarious and with lots of sweet semineutral tones! as soon as my skills grow enough to do it, I'll start to work on it!. I can also imagine it for a 10 minute film. Not the 2 minutes limit I'm having now. And it could grow more if I want it. Yeah, it may look too big now, but hey, I don't have to pay to imagine! ;)

Winged

Left one's a tattoo, right one's real.

Sushi And Pam

The scribble I named "The rain brought a fish" evolved to this.
Now they both have names and a story to play. And they're gonna keep me busy.

I decided to take animation out of the 3 branches, and this pair's gonna be my final.

The Blast Light: Cups

The Blast Light: Cups is a project made by a team formed by EBM students Bo Gembarsky, Daisy Ozga, Amanda Magalhaes, Michael Oulton and Martin Havey.

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A little about the project:

The beggining
It all began when Amanda saw "Cups" when we were recording the voices for it, and she thought she had to do something with it. So this all happened thanks to her.

The story
She wanted to use it to help BC Children's Hospital, since the animated short was about a friendship between two kids, and one of them has a cancer. We got together a couple times to talk about how things would be done and were the project would go to. At first, her EBM team recorded interviews at various locations from the people involved in the project "Cups": VFS DIP instructor Jim Inkster, VFS Graduate and Sound Designer Moises Torres, and from me, as well as BC Children's Hospital Director of Communications Stephen Forgacs, to grab some information about what kids with cancer have to go through and the stress it involves for their families and friends.

The experience
It was all very unreal, because "Cups", which did have a message, but was only gonna be used as a part of my portfolio, got to serve a little purpouse out there. And I not only got to meet Amanda's awesome team, formed by great optimistic people and real hardworkers, but I got to visit BC Childrens Hospital, where I learned a lot about children with cancer and their situation. Cups probably didn't really help on anything actually... but I did learn a lot and I hope at least I helped pass a little knowledge about this children's situation to others. Right now I can't do much, but I have the hopes that this is gonna reach the hands and hearts of those who can actually make a difference.

The culmination
The filming part was finished, but the project remained at a standstill for a while because a couple people involved in the project dropped off from the program for personal reasons, and then the pieces were picked up again by other students so that the project could finally reach an end. The final piece would be released in youtube on October 19, 2010.

Squid Girl

I did quite a bunch of concept art to reach this drawing... It's still feeling like it lacks a soul...
But hey, I got a part of the container done! :)
She needs a story.
I was thinking on having a child version of her to be the friend of the girl with the umbrella and the fish... and John and his helium-filled fluffy cat :) I did a model of her in 3D. For an assignment. But 3D's another story ;)

The rain brought a fish

I fell in love with this scribble.

The Cute Smile

All the above are pencil scribles I painted with watercolors and when dry,
I used prismacolors.

Pilot

Watercolors. No pencil outline nor planification.

Bee Girl

She's the queen of a honey-bee comb.

Muffin Crushing City

Blue haired girl and octopus, WIP#2

Work in progress #2

Blue haired girl and octopus, WIP

Maybe the octopus is a zombie
and is sucking her brains up.
Maybe it's her pet.
Maybe they're friends.
Maybe it's made of plastic...
Maybe fabric,
and is a toy or a hat,
maybe not
Maybe she was swiming
one sunny day
maybe it was rainy
and the octopus got
stucked on her head
and her dad was close by
and took a picture of her
Maybe he thought it was funny
or cute or mean or gross...
Or just...
maybe not.

-Work in progress-

Sunset

Acrylics.
It's ok to be a 3rd try with real paint.

Beer Haired Girl, color variations

I guess the beer was replaced by fruit smoothies.

Beer Haired Girl

A friend once told me my hair was the color of the beer.
I always remembered it.
So it started with beer hair and I added lots of sweets.
I like sweets.
I think this would have been my other me
if I had been in the movie Coraline.
Made with Photoshop.

How to Make an Animated Film (Flash film, 2010)

(Flash, 2010)

This is my flash film, made at VFS during a year in the Classical animation program.
The whole thing developed in less than a month.

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A little about the project:

The idea took a while to settle for a couple reasons... but it was so long, that I ended up leaving too little time for it's execution in the end. So, the character was built in 5 days, and animated in 2.

Sound design
I tried recording the voices by myself but the files had too much noise on them. DIP instructor Jim Inkster helped me record everything again, in a noise isolated room. He also helped me with the final editing of the audio. I wanted elevator music for it.
I used my voice for it, because I was running out of time, and because I thought it was the best thing to do since, from the beggining, it was my inner dialogue what was going on.

Story
I was gonna make a film about cute tiny bugs from a ficticious planet habitated by cute child-like creatures called "Gunis". The story had no ending... nor story... It was gonna be like a little documentary. And... nothing really interesting nor fun happened at all. Thinking about a climax for that story, I scribbled a storyboard with this idea on a couple pages in my sketchpad.
For "How to make an animated film", it is actually me having an inner dialogue and scolding myself, what brought to those papers the storyboard. I showed it to some classmates, and they found it amusing, so I showed it to our flash instructor, Edwin Poon. He told me to do this idea instead.
The initial storyboard is longer and the story changed a little for it's final version. A day before the deadline, I realized I wasn't gonna finish everything on time, so I re-built the structure of the story. The original one had a single and longer dialogue. This one is divided in 5 different blocks, and each block contains a fragment of the original dialogue. And although the story was altered, the main idea remained, but the changes made the message stronger.

Art Direction

I was gonna use different colors for the clothes, eyes, and hair, of the character, but using different hues of the same color was the less distracting thing to do. I tried using different blues, yellows, browns and other colors. I liked it best in pink.
I also wanted to use soft colors for the environment, and make it a room or office or park... but since it was inner dialogue, I thought a plain texture worked out the best. Also, no other color than a dark one was good to make the character pop out in screen as I wanted. If I was gonna use soft colors for the background, I would have needed to use darker ones for the character. And I wanted her to look girly, cute, adorable, funny and delicate. Darker colors would have done any of those words become an opposite.
To make everything blend in properly, I used a soft-yellow highly-transparent screen over the whole film.

Cups (Classical Animation, 2010)

I did this video as my final project during a year at VFS in the Classical Animation program.
The whole project was done in 5 months from the planification until it's very end.

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A little about the film

The sound
Thanks to Moises Torres (Sound Designer), the sound ended up as expected. I asked for his help since the beggining of the project, and he helped me out picking up songs, mixing them all to fit the animation, and to record and fit the voices as well.

The voices
Me and my friend Jenn Jackson (Animator) recorded our voices for the characters.
I'm the girl's and she's the boy's. We used a voice alteration device.

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How one does an animation:

It all begins when some braincells pass electric impulses to each other,
Lots of ideas start coming out and the animator puts them into lots of papers,
written or drawn, then rewritten and redrawn, time and time again, until once,
the animator starts to love one of his ideas very very very much...
and, adding a lot of heart, paper, sweat, tears, blood, efforts, flowers, colors, stars,
and as much time as the animator could possibly afford to give to the project...
An animation is born.
And dear reader, I hope you enjoy this one I bring to you :)

Futuristic Art-Noveau City

For background design. The lineart.



Watercolor painting made thinking on the rather old-dusty-doomed feeling I wanted for the design of the city.

Car in the Shower

This is being used as the logo for a small car-wash business.

Spaced Out

Mermaid

Prismacolors.

The Cigarette

I'm totally against smoking. I think is dumb. Yeah. I did a dumb drawing there.