An OCPmovie Thread

ocpmovie

My name is Garrett Gilchrist. I'm a filmmaker and artist.

Here's my DeviantArt.
http://tygerbug.deviantart.com

I specialize in [pen on xerox paper] lineart drawings of real people, faces in particular. Sometimes I stick pretty close to a photo reference and then use that photo as a very rough starting point to color the lineart.



Nepeta from Homestuck.

ocpmovie

Rose from Homestuck.

ocpmovie

Matt Smith, the Eleventh Doctor Who.



Anneke Wills as Polly - 60s Doctor Who companion.

ocpmovie

More Doctor Who ...

[I need to fix the color here, it's too pink.]

ocpmovie

[Everyone but The Doctor is an oooold drawing here.]

ocpmovie

[The Doctor is a bad drawing here; I like everyone else.]

So, yes ...

Doctor Who - Whosprites animation drawings. There are 108 lost episodes of Doctor Who from the 1960s.

I spent over two years creating animatable artwork of every major character from the lost stories, in an attempt to bring them back to life. Over 30 minutes of animation was created along with thousands of drawings.

I'm still hoping to get more animators on the project to handle lip-sync and movement duties (in Final Cut Pro, Premiere, Flash, Anime Studio, etc) so we can finish a full episode.

It looks like this in motion.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvqeixdSSP0

Full Doctor Who gallery:
http://orangecow.org/who-sprites2/1guide/whosprites1.html

ocpmovie

My current project is a webcomic called The Chosen Ones. It's based on a series of two and a half screenplays I wrote beginning in 2005, intending it as an animated series concept. Realizing that this was actually a major project for me and that I should put it out there in some form, I've started creating it as a webcomic, with 20 pages done since November.

The comics are here, but I'll post at least a few of them in this thread.
http://orangecow.org/thechosenones


As I said, I specialize in lineart of faces. I haven't done much comic book style sequential art, and human bodies are something I need to master as well. I just don't have the life drawing experience, I think, to really do solid 3D human forms well. So this is something I'm working on with this comic. I sometimes use Poser to plan out the poses, as well as photo reference, and I also use Poser for 3D elements in the backgrounds.

Everything I draw is drawn on xerox paper with normal Staedler pigment pens [and Sharpies, sometimes], and then scanned. Color is done in Photoshop. I don't use a tablet. I bought a Wacom once and just couldn't get the hang of it- and didn't feel like I had the time to learn how to draw again from scratch. I'm all right at drawing with the mouse actually, here on my eight year old Mac, running Photoshop CS2. The bodies and hair for all the Doctor Who characters are drawn with the mouse, and I've even been known to do basic research and roughing-out of faces with the mouse, though this is rare and always augmented with basic pencil sketching on paper.

ocpmovie

Another style of Homestuck fanart.

ocpmovie

More Homestuck:

ocpmovie

And another style of Homestuck fanart ... this time a pixel-based NepetaQuest!

earthwormadam

Your stuff is nice and clean but also kinda stiff. Most of these look quite flat, though I think it's the coloring and shading thats doing that. Get a little more adventurous with your coloring cause there's a dodge/burn look to some of the portraits. Also line width! Some of it comes off as nonsensical, like that first one with the claws. There is no rhyme or reason to which lines are getting thicker or thinner lines.

Clearly you have a good grasp on rendering the anatomy of faces from reference, but I think drawing more from life would help these appear more as 3D shapes and less like flat sketches.

But anyways, that video is pretty neat and it doesn't even fall into the terrible animated storyboard type of classification so many animations like these do. It must have been a daunting amount of work!

EDIT: Crap you posted a crapload while I was typing. Your cartoony stuff is great and I really hope you get a chance to draw some bodies and learn the human form as a whole, as you have a lot of potential.

ocpmovie

EDIT: Thanks for the crits! Definitely food for thought and I agree with you.

I definitely need more life drawing and knowledge of bodies, because I'm sort of winging it there. The varying line width is evidence of an unsure mind, I think, being unused to drawing bodies, frankly. I add a thicker line around everything later in Photoshop, generally, so it's not always clear when I'm drawing on the page what it's going to look like as far as thickness.

I agree that the portraits look flat, and that without the coloring they don't always hold up as well. I actually do use Dodge/Burn a lot. I've sort of gathered that's a dirty word somehow ....

I wish I could do a lot more videos like that, as a LOT of faces are done and animated, and took over a week per character to create, and it's a huge waste to not animate lots with them, but I have so many projects on the go that some get neglected .... and Doctor Who fans haven't been as interested as I had hoped. I really wanted other people to do the lip-sync and movement, as that's not even my strong suit.

What would you suggest I do differently in the coloring of the portraits? More varying tones with the lighting? I don't vary the tones obviously, and that's from wanting everything to be clean for animation, but in portraits it's something I really need to learn. I barely even think about lighting at all.

I have four different Youtube channels. I guess I'll talk a little about them.

To start with, here's some art which I did:



The Thief and the Cobbler is probably my favorite animated film. Sadly, it was never completed as intended. Directed by the legendary Richard Williams [Who Framed Roger Rabbit?], it was intended as his masterpiece, and he spent 25 years and millions of dollars of his own money on the film. Finally, with the success of Roger Rabbit, Warner Brothers gave him the funding to properly produce the film .... but then got cold feet, feeling it was too artsty and uncommercial. They were also concerned about Disney's Aladdin, which was clearly inspired by The Thief and featured some of the same animators.

Warners dumped the movie, and eventually fragments of the film were used in a terrible movie called Arabian Knight, or The Princess and the Cobbler. Disney purposely bought this, and made it worse- essentially an MST3K version making fun of what was intended as Williams' masterpiece. This is the only version available today, officially.

I restored the film as intended, as the "Recobbled Cut." I transferred 35mm film and lots of rare video elements and put together something approximating what Richard Williams had in mind.

I continue to run a video and file archive dedicated to the work of this great animator.
http://youtube.com/thethiefarchive

Since it's Christmas, also check out his wonderful version of A Christmas Carol!

ocpmovie

Here's a typical run of strips from The Chosen Ones ...

ocpmovie

ocpmovie

ocpmovie

Skipping ahead a bit, here's another couple of Chosen Ones strips.

ocpmovie

ocpmovie

Another Youtube channel of mine is MontyPythoNET, home to all kinds of Monty Python rarities, including every episode of Eric Idle's Rutland Weekend Television, and episodes of At Last the 1948 Show [with John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Marty Feldman and Tim Brooke-Taylor].

http://youtube.com/montypythonet

I used to run a Python fansite when I was 15, and still collect rarities these 15 years later.

ocpmovie

My secondary Youtube channel is:

http://youtube.com/ocpmovie2

Lots of unusual things here- any rarities or fan projects I've collected or created.

Most famous by far is this ...

Star Wars: Deleted Magic (Revisited)
Lost scenes. Rare footage. A look behind the scenes at the editing secrets of Star Wars. "The greatest Star Wars documentary ever." - Clive Young, Fancinema Today & Homemade Hollywood (book)



http://www.youtube.com/user/ocpmovie2#grid/user/5BDBC890F84A79A8

This was a big hit on the 'net back in 2005, and was revisited in 2009. A very detailed look behind the scenes at how messy the making of Star Wars was, and how it was famously saved in the editing room, it inspired two unofficial followups by another editor- Building Empire and Returning to Jedi, both also on Youtube from jambedavdar.

ocpmovie

Also at Ocpmovie2:



http://www.youtube.com/user/ocpmovie2#grid/user/47410B1DC5FAFA1D

The Bonzo Dog Band: Talking Pictures ... a compilation and restoration of very rare video of the musical comedy mayhem of the Bonzo Dog [Doo Dah Band]. Playing 20s jazz for the acid 60s, the group appeared with both Monty Python and the Beatles.



There's other stuff at Ocpmovie2 as well, like an amusingly bad 80s movie, Voyage of the Rock Aliens, and my MST3K style commentary on an amusingly bad movie, Starcrash.

ocpmovie

My main Youtube channel is:
http://www.youtube.com/ocpmovie

... which has more Doctor Who animation as well as a half-completed version of my low budget feature film Shamelessly, based on a famous green comic book superheroine.

Playlist:
http://www.youtube.com/user/ocpmovie#grid/user/172CBF96ED1C2449





Fun fact [?]: There's actually a version of Spider-man 3 you can buy which has a clip of our Spidey actor on it, and a short, slightly embarrassing interview with me on it. The 3-disc Target exclusive has a short section on fanfilms, and there we are ....

ocpmovie

More Doctor Who. Some of these drawings are very old .... I like posting them only because they're posters ... I need to make some better posters with newer material ....




Full Doctor Who gallery:
http://orangecow.org/who-sprites2/1guide/whosprites1.html
http://orangecow.org/who-sprites2/1guide/

ocpmovie

ocpmovie

This is one of my favorite Doctor Who pieces - Agamemnon from The Myth Makers. So few photos survive from this story, and none of the reference I used was actually from Doctor Who - I used an episode of The Saint and the film Carry On Cleo to see the [correct] costume clearly and in color.

The face was traditionally drawn but everything else was done with the mouse in Photoshop. I finished him for animation ... like most of these characters I drew 30 or more alternate heads, so that he can talk and emote. But I've still never animated anything with him. =(



Reference photo.

ocpmovie

Doctor Who again- Sara Kingdom from The Daleks' Master Plan. The body was textured and rendered in Poser, and then traced over and fixed in Photoshop. The face was traditionally drawn.

ocpmovie

ocpmovie

ocpmovie

ocpmovie

Body textured and rendered in Poser, and then fixed and outlined in Photoshop. Face [and many animated alternate faces!] traditionally drawn.

And boy, the hair needs to be darker. I used to have a crappy CRT monitor. Things look different now.

Reference:

ocpmovie

Alternate:


Again, body textured and rendered in Poser, then fixed, reworked, and outlined in Photoshop. The Poser renders were rather poor.

ocpmovie

This is 100% mouse-drawn, with a few photos as the basis.

ocpmovie

A rough body was rendered in Poser, but as a young man wearing an all-white suit. I redrew it in Photoshop to be a much older man, with a different body shape and with specific patterns on the suit.

Reference:

ocpmovie

Again, the blacks need to be blacker! Damn my old monitor!

The body is loosely based on several very poor photographs and several very poor Poser renders and took a long time to get into shape. This face animates really well, with a massive amount of alternates drawn ... yet, like dozens of other finished characters, I've never done anything with it!

ocpmovie

Another Susan, and I might stop posting Doctor Who now.

Although at the moment I do have lineart done for pinups of Lalla Ward, and of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

ocpmovie

This is a Kanaya, from Homestuck, that I did the other day.



Everything is traditionally drawn lineart [face and head drawn on different sheets of xerox paper], based fairly loosely on a photo, which then was a starting point for coloring.

winter_combat_knight

ocpmovie wrote: »

Body textured and rendered in Poser, and then fixed and outlined in Photoshop. Face [and many animated alternate faces!] traditionally drawn.

I like this one!!!
My only problem is the hair looks a little too over complicated compared to her body.
Overall I like this thread.

bombardier

Ok, just stop posting right there.

1. You don't need to make a new post for each individual piece.
2. Please select a few pieces you want to show off and get crits and feedback on. Overwhelming us with a hundred pieces is going to end in only blanket advice at best and disinterest at worst.
3. Try and resize these. They are even too large for me, and I'm running at 1920x1200 resolution. A good maximum would be 600 pixels in either direction. You can link to large versions.

As for feedback, overall you need to step away from the airbrush colouring. It does not jive at all with the harsh lineart you've put down. Try and colour with harder edges and focus more on the planes of your object with maybe a few different values of a colour, rather than trying to make every transition smooth. The way things are coloured flatten out your drawings considerably and the airbrush look just screams amateur work since most people new to colouring default to it for some reason.

Mustang

Bombs wrote:

the airbrush look just screams amateur work since most people new to colouring default to it for some reason.

This^


Also this looks like you shopped in the shoes from a photograph and it looks really bad against the rest of the image.

Stupid Mr Whoopsie Name

Holy Cats, you're the one who put together the Recobbled edit of The Thief and the Cobbler?! That too is my favorite animated movie, and knowing you did that, I can forgive your terrible opinions of TRON: Legacy

Fugitive

Also I'm going to say that you should stop tracing 90% of your work, because it isn't going to help you in any meaningful way in the long haul, and only leads to your drawings looking like 3 different pieces cobbled together (the traced head, the Poser-rendered body, and whatever wasn't in the original picture that you decided to draw on top of it).

ocpmovie

I never trace the faces. I've got the photos up on the screen and I'm looking at them, but I'm not tracing. I think they would lose their cartoony quality if I did, and be too stiff.

I do use a simple 4x4 grid system to keep track of proportions, if I'm doing something where the proportions have to be right.

The only things that have any tracing would be the Doctor Who bodies done from Poser renders in Photoshop, and the hair of the Doctor Who characters.

The heads do need to be drawn at a higher quality level to work as animated closeups.