The Light Thief Storyboards

Not too long ago, I was approached by USC student Graham Oyoung (whom I had previously done some freelance storyboard work for) about helping out on a project he was working on entitled The Light Thief.  Apparently the team had worked with a couple of other board artist on the project, but they just couldn't quite get the third act to work how they envisioned it.

That's where I came in with this:

Yep.  And they liked it, too.  So much so, in fact, that they asked me to go back to the start and give 'em my interpretation of the whole dang thing!  Unfortunately, I was a bit bogged down with Disney Mobile freelance work (more on that soon, once I can post it) at the time, so I could only do a rough thumbnail pass:

Still, it was a fun project.  Always good to try new things!

Return of the RETAILiation

Hard to believe it's been four (4!) months since I last posted on this blog!  Yikes!  It's with good reason, though.  I've actually been incredibly fortunate with some very exciting freelance gigs that I will hopefully be able to announce and post about in the next few months.  Incredibly rewarding stuff!

I've finally got a spare moment to come up for air, and I was seeing where I left off with my RETAILiation comic.  I stumbled across these old sketches that I never posted, so I figured there's no time like the present to share them with the world!  Enjoy!

Composition Studies - North by Northwest

It has been far too long since I sat down and drew up some composition studies from a well-shot movie!  (Not since the summer of 2011, actually)  Previously, I had done some for the Coen Brothers' version of True Grit and for my favorite Harry Potter movie, Prisoner of Azkaban.  This time around, I watched the classic Hitchcock film North by Northwest.  My new scanner doesn't exactly do subtle too well, but my drawings look something like this...

These were drawn in my huge Moleskine A3 sketchbook.  Sharpie fine point pen to draw everything in, then Prismacolor warm greys (10%, 30%, 60%, occassional 80%).

So much richness in the lighting of these shots that I wasn't able to capture very well with the markers (and the poor scans don't help).  I think I'll try doing these with pencil next time.  Stay tuned...