Sunday, January 28, 2007

More from storage...

It's been a couple of busy weeks and I've had little time to post as I planned. I started a new job as one of the directors for Marvel's Wolverine and the X-Men working with my friend Boyd Kirkland who is the new producer of this series. Before you ask this is in no way a continuity with X-Men: Evolution and I will NOT be doing the character designs for this show. But I am doing design work for one of the next Marvel direct-to-videos that I cannot reveal the name of because it hasn't been announced yet. So needless to say I'm pretty busy these days.
I'm also still working at trying to get funding for that special project I mentioned in earlier posts (or alluded to since I really didn't give any specifics about it).
Anyway it seems appropo to continue discussing my work with Ralph Bakshi right after my rant about mo-cap and it's relative merrits. Especially since his use of rotoscope and roto-photo seemed to garner the same nasty reaction from the animation community as the recent use of motion capture seems to be getting. Especailly since I found a lot of this stuff in storage recently. I'll skip over the "Hey, Good Lookin'" and the "American Pop" years for now - especially since I hadn't saved anything of value from those films - and skip right to "Fire and Ice".
In Lord of the Rings the rule was to slavishly follow the live-action except for the animation of the faces which were obviously more broadly designed (by Dale Baer) then the live actors. Then on American Pop the rule was to follow the live-action EVEN in the faces which were mostly designed to look almost exactly like the live-actors (by Louise Zingarelli). I can only recall one design that was a little broader than the actor and this was certainly the exception. I often caught flak during AP because I would often push the acting, but that's another story.
On Fire and Ice we given the freedom to use the roto-scope in a more traditional approach (i.e.: like Dsiney) and change timing, play with poses and only use what worked from the live -action as well as having to create better acting than we were given by the live actors.


These are examples of how we had to change faces and proportions of the live action...(yes, that's Ralph standing in the background behind Darkwolf).
These are some of the construction sheets created to show the animators how to alter the actor into Larn.

11 comments:

Peter said...

Hey Mr. Gordon
I am a huge fan of your work and I'm a recent Csun animation grad and I was wondering how one would get in contact with the studio doing "Wolverine and the X-men" concerning an internships? That would be a dream job, Thanks in advance.

Peter Nguyen (ink4884@aol.com)

Anonymous said...

Did the rotoscope save time during the animation process or was it done to get a more realistic look to the animation?

Unknown said...

Tony...Actually both. To find animators that could actually do this level of realistic animation would've been dificult (even Disney knew this) and the budget was miniscule, at best, so there production schedule wasn't very long at all. There's no way this film could've been made without it...by any studio IMO.

Hugo Scapelin said...

Hello, Mr. Gordon

I have fifteen years old and I'm a Brazilian teenager. I just discovered your website in this year, but I know than it's exist since of the year two thousand four, isn't it?. Unhappily, few Brazilian designers know your site, but same so I thank's a lot to you because your page have too much contents than help us (designers and the curious).
My english's writing is terrible, but I hope than you understand at least this.
When I learn to draw like you, I hope to can help you in some important project, all right?

Thank you so much again.

Hugs from a Brazilian boy


Hugo Ferreira

Anonymous said...

any more X-M:E art to be uploaded on your site/Blog?

Anonymous said...

Couldn't there be a better title than "Wolverine and the X-Men"?
Well,... yeah...
Hope there will be a lot of Gambit in there. And hopefully Toad. I love those two.
But I really hope Gambit doesn'T get such a lame haircut this time, then in Evo. Sorry, but. He has always such beautyful hair and in Evo it looks really strange...
Well,...
just wanted to say that...
hope I didn't annoy you too much...
happens quite often...
guess you are busy, so...
bye...

Claw

Jamal O said...

Great post! I dig Bakshi's stuff.

PGMS said...

Please can you give us the name of Teegra rotocast live actress?

PGMS said...

I found this list of live action actors from Fire and Ice in IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085542/fullcredits#cast

Is it correct?
Laurie Lapsenson .... production staff: live action
Michael Molnar .... production staff: live action
Joe Tradii .... production staff: live action

Is Laurie Lapsenson the girl who played Teegra role?

Unknown said...

As listed on IDMB it was indeed Cynthia Leake who played the part of Teegra. Ralph used the actual voices for the actors that performed the roto in almost every case. I think the only actor that was overdubbed was Juliana

PGMS said...

SO she did the voice add gave the body, cool, thanks for the reply Mr.Gordon.