Roseline

Break achieved!

Woo Roseline and I finally had time to take a break.... actually no we didn't have time and now I'm working 3 times as hard to catch up... freelancing sucks.

Anywho I'm jumping the gun a bit. Before I left I hammered out this animation for loopdeloop in about 3 hours



Basically I had finished packing and I had a spare few hours and the deadline was that night so I came up with this short. The theme was 'spooky' and this is something that really bugs me(scares the crap out of me) when in a horror/suspense film a character walks backwards down a dark corridor.

"I KNOW SOMETHING IS GOING TO JUMP OUT JUST DO IT ALL READY!!"

I hand drew all the animation frames and background in separate layers on my scribble pad (10x15cm white pad). The wall was a google image search wall. I scanned and cleaned the drawings and set them up in photoshop and then brought them into toonboom animate. I also for the first time imported the images and vectorised them and I was very surprised by how clean toonboom handled that. Once I timed out the animation I added some after effects gloss to punch a little more mood into the animation. I then hit my 'Existence' sound folder for the sound track.

Next months loopdeloop theme is 'Condoms' to tie in with World Aids Day on December 1st. I'm wondering what to do with that one haha

The day after I made this loop Roseline and I were on a boat headed to the WA holiday island Rottnest. Named after these guys who inhabit the island which they thought to be rats ('Ratnest')



These bros aren't rats though. They are quokkas and they are so gentle and innocent. I've never met such a mellow wild animal before. They were very cool

Also what was cool was how beautiful the beaches were.



Our beaches in WA are really something special. It's only when I go away and visit say Hobart with it's dirt grey sand and ice waters or St Kilda in Melbourne with it's polluted smelly waters and beaches that I realise how lucky we are over here... although I should point out the first day we were there all the beaches were locked down due to a shark attack and we had shark hunting helicopters flying all over the island.. SO THERE'S THAT...haha

What was great was we hired bikes (as there are very few cars on the island) and rode around the whole island. I haven't been on a bike in years and boyyy it took some getting used to and awww man there were some hurt muscles that haven't been used in years. It was good to feel that pain again since the last few years I've been trapped trying to make this animation thing work. Roseline has done a better job at keeping her fitness up (she killed me on the bikes) and I only seem to get a good walk in every now and then. A lot of my friends do the gym thing but that isn't for me. I definitely have to work and keep up my fitness though. I've been having the worst kind of trouble with my back over the last few years and honestly once your back goes animation is the hardest thing in the world.

Well enough old man Merks gripes. While I was over there I found some time to get some drawings in. I posted a bunch of these on my twitter (facebook and g+ as well) via my xperia play smart phone which was a new fun experience. My younger self loves all this new technology. I'd love to travel back and show the super mario world game that awed me as a kid that I can now play on my portable phone I carry in my pocket. I did at one stage flirt with being a purist, antitech, prefer it all original person but seriously this stuff is amazing. Take a smart phone, how many minds, how much history, evolution and genius is behind the technology it floors me.

Enough with the words here's some of the pictures I drew



I wanted to do more studies of the environment but I was enjoying just being there. Roseline has done a whole bunch of great ones and a lot of the time I just loved watching her work


This was her late at night doing a water colour pass on a sketch she had done.

I wanted to loosen up my drawing arm and draw some full scenes. I only drew 2 pictures but I'm pretty pleased with them.



I drew that last mountain scene picture at the dome cafe on the last day we were there. 2 cups of coffee (you can see some coffee stains at the bottom) and a whole bunch of time to spend on it. I thought of it as a platform game and just started from the bottom left and worked up.

and one last scribble featuring the Bacon Bros


Well the rest was great and as soon as we returned home we had work phone calls and emails immediately to take care of. It's good to be a busy freelancer I guess but dang that Quokka life looks appealing.

My wonderful news

So I've been holding onto this news for over a week now, it has to do with me and this girl called Roseline Lau

She has been a friend.


An inspiration and a motivation.


Caring and the sometimes sharing (haha).


My travelling companion to have adventures with,


and the best person to face troubles with.

We have seen a lot together and we have achieved a lot together.


So last week I proposed to my beautiful girlfriend of 6 years and she said "mmhmmm" and I said "sorry, what?" and she said "YES!!!".

So no longer is Roseline my girlfriend of 6 years, she is now my fiancée and I couldn't be happier

bed hair

I woke up the other day with mad scientist bed hair. I took a photo of myself to send to Roseline but it was all blurry. So I thought I'd do another painting experiment.


I don't feel I captured the expression that well but this is my first go at doing a digital portrait and for my first go I'm pretty happy with it. Nice and crazy.

Roseline and I had a 'discussion' about what I wrote in my last post and I thought I should expand on that. If you're working on a style based show then you got to keep within the design guidelines, I think when you start out you should test the fences a bit and push the design but once you're in the thick of production you shouldn't make it hard on the people above you. It will be a waste of everyone's time if you have to redo stuff. It can be hard and not that clear to work out what those boundaries are. I usually try to work out where the show is drawing inspiration from and have some of those artbooks around as a guide but even that isn't always a great idea. At the end of the day you're part of the team and you don't want to be a stubborn jerk, as that wont inspire anything great and will just cause friction.  Best to be positive and always put in that little bit extra effort.

Ok enough of that stuff. I'm trying to get my motivation up to start something a little bigger. I still need to produce one more film by the end of the year.

My greatest present!



So this is most likely the best present I have ever been given! Look at that smile on my face.

This was created and water colour painted by the very talented Roseline for my 30th birthday and I couldn't be happier.

The picture is made up of all our characters. LB and the Doll from the film we launched on my birhtday 'Porcelain', there's some jelly babies there, Faust and the robot from my webcomic, Roseline's Spooky Doll Kids, Cat and Rabbit, Waffle, Space Monkey, Mr Gough, Dash and Rush ahhh sooo good!!!!

Thankyou so much Rose! Love you heaps!!!


With socks on her arms

Well Roseline turned up the other day looking very cool. She was sporting her new driving look to keep the sun off her arms and hands.



Basically it's a knee high sock that she has converted to be her arm protectors. The heal of the sock is now where the elbow is so it fits quite snug and comfortable on the arm. Rose also bought some funky blue driving gloves that match the arm protectors.

I thought this looked great so I drew a picture of her ready to fight awesome crime. Which I think is the real purpose for the look.



Criminals beware!

Roseline's Model Making Class

Roseline has been taking a model making class for the last three weeks at FTI. I got to drop by the last two weeks and had some time to do some new drawings.

It's a 3hr class which is quite long and in the first one I went along to the students were continuing to model their characters in plasticine based on their drawings. During this class I showed them my latest showreel and talked about both Roseline's and my experience working in animation.



While I was there I practiced drawing 'Ultimate Fighting Champ'. He is basically made up of super poses and crazy facial expressions. Speaking about UFC, that 'Waffle' film gave me a chance to experiment with the animation process I'm thinking of using.

After that class both Roseline and I noticed the students had flew through creating their models. Since there was two classes left I came up with an idea of getting the students to create drawings from their models. I remembered a post John K did about drawing from toys and drawing using construction so Rose and I based the class exercise around that.



What was good about this class is it gave me some time to practice drawing with construction. I got to practice on Roseline's 'Taboo' from 'Spooky Doll Kids' that she brought along to show the class. This is a really tough exercise that I need to definitely practice more if I'm ever to leave flash and get into proper 2d animation.

After the students finished drawing a front, 3/4 and profile version of their characters we got them to switch models and hand over the turnarounds they drew. They then had to draw various different character expressions using the model and the turnarounds provided. I thought this was a good to show of the importance of model sheets, getting them used to drawing other peoples characters and dealing with other people drawing their characters.

Roseline will be going in by herself next week and will get the class to produce some stopmotion animations. Hope I get to see some of the results!

One of the students (Andrew-Buckley) gave me a link to his films on New Grounds. They're pretty good, really great timing and very cinematic. That class is pretty talented and I'm looking forward to seeing their final films.

Leaving Mt Stuart to Launceston

Well it has been a few months since leaving Hobart and I am slowly finding time to sort through my photos and digitally tweak them.

This is the last photo I took of Elizabeth street. Roseline and I used to walk down here all the time to buy our groceries, noodles, subway, coffees, muffins and other pastries. This photo was taken on the bus just as we were leaving for Launceston.

Before leaving we of course had to clean the unit and organise sending our 7-8 months collected stuff back home to Perth. This was hell stressful. We were cleaning the unit right up until we had to jump in a taxi to go catch our bus. Oh and the people who were meant to pick up our luggage decided that they weren't going to show up at the arranged time and were planning on getting there after we were supposed to be on the bus. We called them up and they made some excuse that they called us and left a message, which was a lie since Roseline's phone doesn't record messages and there were no missed calls. Good news is after I said to them directly "I don't like being lied to" they made sure that they were there before we had to catch our taxi.

I will miss that place. It was a beautiful home that overlooked the city, it was close enough that we never needed a car, it had a lot of space and character. Roseline and I have many good memories there such as eating noodle soup and watching 'Ulysses 31'.




We booked a room at the 'Penny Royal' in Launceston. It's quite a quaint little hotel with its European design. The rooms were all named and ours happened to be called 'Elizabeth'. We thought of this as a good omen (we would question this later in Melbourne) as Roseline created a little rabbit character called 'Elizabeth' .

I found out that my parents had stayed at this hotel and they told us that we had to check out a miniature museum that they had. We were later told at the reception that since the hotel was being managed by a Sydney company, the bosses over there did the numbers and decided to close it. It's always sad to hear that.


The taxi driver who took us from the bus station to the hotel told us that we had to check out the Cataract Gorge. Giving us very loose instructions on how to get there we decided to walk there after we dropped off our luggage at the hotel. He told us that there was a restaurant in the middle of the park so we thought it would be a nice place to have dinner. Due to the crazy rushing around we did that day, getting ready to leave and the lack of sleep from worrying, we hadn't eaten anything and we were super tired. So we weren't prepared for the 2hour aimless wandering we had to do before we reached the Gorge, and then to find out that the restaurant was booked. I was grumpy as hell and just wanted to go home, Roseline however was in awe by the gorge (which in hindsight was very pretty) and managed to take a few nice pictures even with me grumbling and hurrying her along.




Launceston was really quite an interesting city. Polar opposite to Hobart, which was like a quaint country town. It seemed to have something of a Melbourne vibe to it. There were these two interesting bits of graffiti I came across as we were walking around the town that I liked.




In the Launceston central park there were monkeys. Japanese monkeys. I thought this was pretty crazy. When we had our lunch these monkeys were running around crazy, but when we went up to photograph them they were sitting still and just sleeping. Dam monkeys.

There's also a monkey bank. People seem to throw money into the moat in the monkey cage. I can't see that as wise investing but Roseline says I'm not very good with that sort of stuff anyway.

The park was quite nice, very green and it had a lot of old sculptures and water fountains. There was an art gallery on the edge of the park that had a lot of woodcrafts in it. Probably a couple of rain forests used to produce the work, but really interesting stuff. I liked the business card holders.


One of the highlights of our trip back home to Perth was our visit to the radio museum. This was actually in the Launceston park and we were a little hesitant to go into the building but the two people looking after the museum were so friendly and they really enjoyed showing us all these wonderful old radios. I did a great job at photographing everything out of focus. Hopefully Roseline took a few good ones that she will put up soon. What was really interesting is that the radio station is still running and it is apparently in the Guinness book of records for the longest running radio station. Pretty good for a community radio station.


The final place we saw was the umbrella factory. Roseline wanted to visit this place as she wanted a locally made parasol to take home. When we arrived there we found out it was no longer a working factory, they only had a small display of antique umbrellas and when Roseline asked where one of the parasols that was available to buy was from the lady answered, "It was probably made in China". It was priceless to see Roseline screw up her nose when she said that. Now that was a photo opportunity missed haha.

Well this ends the Launceston part of Roseline and my journey back home. Next up we go to Davenport.

Oh if you haven't read it already Roseline did a nice post about a trip we did in Hobart.

Valentines from Roseline

Roseline made me this wonderful card that I had to share.




I didn't really capture it, but those strings go from the paper crane's beak to the hearts on the other side. I really loved this as a piece of art. It would make a great cover for the 'Sadako' story.

The card is also complimented with some wonderful "Cat and Rabbit". (We hope to start doing more with those characters this year.)

I really love the paper cranes Roseline makes for me. I always look forward to the next birthday, christmas or valentines day. This is one of the earlier cranes Roseline made for me and another fantastic piece of art.


This crane is for that day where I can't take it anymore. Something like my phoenix paper crane. Never really come close to using it, but it's always good to know I have an extra 1up.

Well it's only 8 months and 26 days till my next scheduled crane.

Interviews

Both Roseline and I have done some interviews about working on the TV series "Dogstar"

you can find Roseline's interview here
and mine here

Check out my long, long hair. Also despite that being a picture of 'Dash Dashing' in the background, that is a scene from 'Porcelain'.

On other news, Richard (The Toonerfish) has been kidnapped by the evil Viscount Marko. I shall try to launch a rescue opperation but it doesn't look likely that I will succeed. So this may be farewell to Knight Richard.

Yeah I'm playing Knighthood on Facebook. It's pretty funny. Here's a picture that I did of Cat as a evil knight.


EDIT: Well my rescue mission just got Jamie captured. DAM YOU MARKO!!! (check out his blog)

Roseline going to work



I just bought myself a small digital camera. I've always loved these things but I dont care too much about high end photography. I like just shooting wastefully and then seeing what turns up rather than spending ages focusing and compositing a shot and then it not turning out what I want it to look like.

Off to Tasmania!

Okay this may be my last post for a few weeks as Roseline and I are moving to Tasmania to work on an animated series. Employed animators again we'll be.

I really wanted to have a Vicious and Faust comic done before I left expecially since there are only 3 issues left to do. Oh well hopefully I'll get on to it as soon as I'm settled.
Also I've been doing a bit of work with these two characters. The amazing Porcelain film is needing to be completed so they are high priority at the moment.

Well so long for now,

Tim

Updates

Shucks howdy, how y'all doing? I hope you are all well and I hope you are digging the new look.

So on thy right you have a whole new set of pretty buttons. The film ones take you to the Youtube where you can watch the full films. It be great if you could rate the films and if you are feeling even more awesome scratch on down a comment in the comment box. There are a few more films left to upload so I suggest you subscribe to me.

Now for the even newer and cooler thing is my brand spankin new account with "Web Comics Nation". You can now read the entire "Kinetic" and my "Cat and Rabbit" comic in a much easier way. You may have been wondering where your latest "Vicious and Faust" comic is. Well since setting up this new account I've started "Vicious and Faust" back at issue 1 this means there will be no new comic until the 10th of March. Sorry about this but it gives me more time to work on "Porcelain" and you will appreciate it more on that website than here on this blog.

So Youtube for films, Webcomicsnation for comics what's this blogspot account for? Well since "Porcelain" will start becoming more digital again I'll be posting updates on that. This site will also serve as a link to those other 2 accounts and hopefully I can post some behind the scenes stuff here.

Ok let us know what you think about the blogs new look and since I ask for so much, here's a breakdown of "Vicious and Faust" issue 15. From the pencil rough, to the colouring and finally the glossy effects that were done in flash 8. If you want to know how I did it ask away.



lata
Tim

Porcelain progress and Comic stuff

Well I've just finished the first half of the animation (YAY!) it still needs to be cleaned up, put into flash and then composited but it is a huge milestone.

Well (as the photo illustrates) Roseline is on the job with the cleanup. We are hoping to finish all the animation by the 12th of Febuary and that's looking quite promising.



Other news. Roseline and I traveled around checking the stores stocking our comics. They have done such a great job displaying them and supporting us. Thanks heaps, also thanks to Michael for delivering the comics.

It was excellent to see that a few of our comics have sold aswell. Roseline even sold out at one of the places.

If you want to check it out, the stores you will find the comics at are:
Quality Comics
Planet Books
and Oxford books


Here's Roseline checking the display at Oxford

Also this blog will be getting 2 regular updates a week. The first is on the Saturday when I will post a new Vicious and Faust comic the second will be on the Tuesday when I will upload one of my short animations to Youtube.

So stay tuned!

To Roseline, From Roseline

Maybe it is the new year, or maybe the weather but I find myself feeling very nostalgic.

So today I thought I'd share with you all some very, very special personal drawings. These drawings are all about 3-1 year(s) old and they go right back to when Roseline and I first started going out.
There's a personal story behind every drawing and each drawing is filled with much love.
(To Roseline)

(From Roseline)




Thankyou Roseline for all the wonderful memories, the laughs,
the adventures and the friendship. 2007 I know will bring us more