Environment Mood Studies

Here's a wee update on an environment piece I posted recently. Although I was satisfied with it at the time, my friend and colleague Eduardo Pena encouraged me to take it further. While he liked the initial pic, he suggested trying new lighting scenarios and times of day with the same image. It was great advice and it inspired me to put in a little more work.

Eduardo is a very skilled artist and a very hard worker but most importantly he has a great attitude. Where I might get frustrated he sees every failure or difficulty as an opportunity to learn something. It's an admirable way to look at things, and pretty helpful in a production environment where work is discarded at an alarming rate irrelevant of any small victories you may have had in its creation :P

I have another version underway too, that I will sneak into this post at some point in the future.

The Art of Tintin hits shelves!

I believe today is the official release of this new tome from Weta.

Several hundred pages packed with conceptual design, production art, CG look development and beauty renders of the final 3D assets. My friend and colleague Chris Guise has spent months on the layout and design of this book and it looks really great. When I first started at Weta some three and a half years ago, design was winding down on Tintin. I was lucky to sneak in on the last few weeks of work and broke my teeth on character and environment designs for none other than Mr Steven Spielberg. Luckily, several of these novice pieces made the cut and snuck into the book. Of course they were my very first pieces ever done in a production environment and they are over 3 years old, but I will still proudly splash them all over the blog very soon.

To celebrate and promote the release Chris Guise is doing a signing at the Weta Cave tomorrow - Saturday, October 15 - from Noon - 2pm. He will be joined by the lovable Frank Victoria. 

Chris is also doing another signing at the Weta Cave in Auckland on Sunday 16 October from 11am.

If you want to check out the work of the artists involved (before you see the book) then it contains most of the artists in my friends links on the sidebar.

Weta Cave Wellington
Weta Cave Auckland

Ambush

Another little environment pic I did. In retrospect, I'm sure it was at least partly inspired by the wonderful 'Game of Thrones' series starring Sean Bean. Although I never looked to it for reference, there's a scene in there where Jamie Lannister (the Kingslayer) waits for Ned Stark outside of what might have been a brothel? I wont spoil the exchange that happens between them in case you havn't seen it yet, but it's a great scene.

I'm a big fan of the series (A Song of Ice and Fire). I began reading George R R Martin when the first book came out and I was stoked to see it realised so well. I'm pretty excited to see the next series of the show. My only complaint about the show is how fast it moves. Obviously you have to make sacrifices and changes to make compelling viewing, but I felt a little that you lost sense of the size of the world. Logistics and travel times are a big issue in medieval times and in the interest of pacing that was often ignored, though it has a big effect on the course of events. I'd be happy to watch 15 or so episodes per book to get a little more detail in there. But if all I can complain about is that it's not long enough, then you know you have a fantastic show :)

Enough fanboy geek ranting, here's the pic: