Category Archive: artist

May
18
2012

Motion Comic Magic- ‘HellBoy: the Fury’ motion comic

A post on re-purposing comics and illustration into animation

I just saw this posted at BackFromTheDepths.com and had to post it here at MotionComicMagic.com. It’s a Motion Comic using art of Mike Mignola and Duncan Fegredo.

War ensues between the forces of good and evil as Hellboy finally confronts the Queen of Blood one on one, setting the stage for a new chapter in Hellboy’s life! Mike Mignola and Duncan Fegredo conclude an epic collaboration that began in Hellboy: Darkness Calls!

I am really impressed with the animation in “HellBoy: the Fury” (from Dark Horse Comics) the motion is very believable and fluid and still is true to the original art it is created from. They also do some neat work with translating the art into 3D to have the drawing shift in perspective. The voices are fine, but I suspect that they might disappoint some especially compared to other HellBoy animation that uses the actors from the live-action movies to reprieve their roles.

One thing I have been thinking about in motion comics is what source artwork seems to work the best for them. The best examples of Motion Comics to me are still the ‘Watchmen’ and ‘Batman: Black and White’ titles that were released from DC Comics and work really well AND use fairly stylized flat comic art. My feeling (at the time of this writing) is that more flat and/or stylize work allows for more opportunities at creating motion from existing artwork. That is not to say it can’t be done with more realistic/3D looking artwork, but might be harder to make it work it move with out using 3D mapping and other tricks that might take it too far from the core of what a Motion Comic is: taking existing comic artwork and bringing it to life.

It will be interesting to see how the fan community reacts to the HellBoy Motion Comic. I find some people are very negative about Motion Comics, comparing them with other types of animation and expecting them to be what they are not. Motion Comics’ strength lies in the fact that it uses the original comic stories and art making it the Comic Book equivalent to Audio Books. It does not replace the actual comic, but allows you a new way to enjoy it.

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May
10
2012

New Art! Tribute to Mobius

by Brian

mobius tribute Click here to see a bigger image at Flickr.com

I have been a big fan of the master French comic artist Mobius (aka Jean Giraud) since my college days where I was inspired by his style, technique and color use. With his recent passing I thought I would, like so many around the world, draw a tribute to the master.

My piece is based on Mobius 1985 “Starwatcher II” which many have been doing their version of in the last few years. To read more I would recommend the Tumbler Blog ‘Quenched Consciousness’ which has been my favorite place to follow the work of Mobius.

Visit the official Mobius website http://www.moebius.fr/

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Apr
29
2012

2012-5-26 Mini-Comic day at the Cartoon Art Museum – Saturday May 26

by Brian

I am helping to organize a special inkDrinkDraw San Francisco event on Saturday May 26, 2012, Mini-Comic Day. The event is FREE and open to anyone interested in joining us.

WHEN: Saturday May 26, 2012 – 11am to 5:30pm
WHERE: The Cartoon Art Museum Bookstore
655 Mission St. San Francisco, CA 94105
(between 3rd street and New Montgomery St., two blocks from Montgomery St. BART) (415) CAR-TOON – http://www.cartoonart.org

COST: FREE!

DETAILS: Mini-Comic Day at the Cartoon Art Museum Bookstore
For the May inkDrinkDraw we will return to the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco for
Mini-Comic Day. Come join us and take the challenge to create and publish your own Mini-Comic with your fellow artists in a day or less. Paper, pens, pencils, and long neck stapler will be provided as well as printed templates to help make your book and there are two copy shops in walking
distance to make copies to trade and share with your fellow creators. (Sorry, you will have to pay for your own copies.)

From the official
site http://www.minicomics.org :
“On Mini-Comics Day, participating cartoonists from around the world will write, draw, and print copies of a mini-comic, completing the entire process from start to finish in a day or less. Anyone in the world can participate. Mini-comics have been democratizing the art of
making comic books since the 70?s or earlier… with the popularization of photocopiers, it became apparent that anyone with an inclination and some spare change could print a little comic book. Wildly varying in both form and content, mini-comics are a wonderful synthesis of cartooning and hand-made art objects.

Guidelines: To participate, create a mini-comic from start to finish on May 26th, 2012 (including writing, drawing and printing it). You can make your mini-comic by yourself or with other artists.
…” (visit the official site for more guidelines for the event)

So, come on down, grab a seat and make a comic. And don’t be shy about bringing down your mini-comics you have all ready made too!

The Two Copy Shops nearby are:

Copy Central 22 3rd street, San Francisco, CA 0.1 mi W (415) 882-7377 ? · copycentral.com - 12:00 PM to 6:00 PM

Fed-Ex Kinkos – need to verify location do to wonky web listings.

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Apr
26
2012

Jeffery Brown’s ‘Darth Vader and Son’ book trailer and CAM exhibit

by Brian

Cartoonist Jeffery Brown (jeffreybrowncomics.com) has a new book called Darth Vader and Son, which the trailer above promotes. I wanted to post the trailer here at MotionComicMagic.com since it’s a great example of taking existing art from a book and re-purposes it for animation, plus it’s really cool.

What if Darth Vader took an active role in raising his son? In this hilarious and sweet comic reimagining, Darth Vader is a dad like any other—except with all the baggage of being the Dark Lord of the Sith. Celebrated artist Jeffrey Brown’s delightful illustrations give classic Star Wars® moments a fresh twist, presenting the trials and joys of parenting through the lens of a galaxy far, far away. Life lessons include lightsaber batting practice, using the Force to raid the cookie jar, Take Your Child to Work Day on the Death Star (“Er, he looks just like you, Lord Vader!”), and the special bond shared between any father and son.

Jeffrey Brown is the author of numerous graphic novels and comics, including Cat Getting Out of a Bag and Cats Are Weird. A lifelong Star Wars fan, he lives in Chicago with his wife and five-year-old son.

Plus: You can see the artwork for the book at the Cartoon Art Museum this summer (in San Francisco) April 28 – August 5, 2012!

…the 18-piece exhibition Darth Vader and Son, featuring artwork by award-winning cartoonist Jeffrey Brown. This exhibit opens on Saturday, April 28. Brown will sign copies of his book at the Cartoon Art Museum on Thursday, May 17, 2012 from 7:00-9:00pm.

A post on re-purposing comics and illustration into animation

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Mar
02
2012

Motion Comic Magic – Animating children’s drawings “evolution”

by Brian

A post on re-purposing comics and illustration into animation

(via http://blog.sciencefictionbiology.com tweet) My posts here at MotionComicMagic.com are all about re-purposing art created for different purposes into animation. For example: Motion Comics take the art from comic books and repurpose it into animated. Well, this cool example that I am sharing with you today is the same idea, but taking the art of children and animating it to help tell a tale of Evolution. Animator Tyler Rhodes did this with some young artist to great effect.

From scientificamerican.com…

How do you make an authentic evolution animation? Quite simply: you allow it to evolve. Tyler Rhodes, a student in the animation program at Virginia Commonwealth University, wanted to create an animation that wasn’t simply linear, but instead represented the true ‘tree-like’ process of evolution. So he enlisted the help of elementary school students from William Fox Elementary School and the Patrick Henry School of Science & Art, and involved them in a type of game.

“Much like the whispered game “telephone” where one person whispers a message down the line until it’s very different by the end due to small “mutations” along the way, I would create a game of telephone using visual imagery.”
…
He then had various groups of students make copies of this sketch, knowing that the copies would contain subtle differences. The natural variation in the ‘progeny’ created from the first salamander sketch was used to determine the survival of the fittest. Tyler would ‘kill off’ 98% of the organisms and start the process again…

The video below is the final result which is lively and very fresh. The animation is the kids drawings brought into after effects and animated with the puppet tool to great effect. It’s a great example of the animator repurposing the kids art into animation. You can see the kids drawings on the official blog HERE.

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Feb
20
2012

Motion Comics Magic – RigIt character animation script for AFX

by Brian

A post on re-purposing comics and illustration into animation

I have been busy on some projects, but I took a break to try a new script for Adobe After Effects … RigIt. I am always looking for tools that can help an artist animate their artwork whether the artwork is from their comic/illustration or created specifically for a protect. RigIt is a script that can take a bunch of parts that build up a character and use coding to rig them together to allow you to animate it with inverse kinematic. The script is in a Beta Tdest right now so there still might be some bugs, but all-in-all it worked very well. Here is a sample I created in about 2 hours last night (including some trial and error on setting up the figure).

Download the script HERE

RigIt After Effects script test from Brian Kolm on Vimeo.

The script features a window to set the art layers and buttons to set each step of the process. For the final product the script will actually set null objects to control the limbs, but will hide the clutter with the ‘shy’ function which makes the animation space really pleasant to use.

The main hurdle I had was figuring out that you have to place a null object for any parts you don’t want to have as a segment of your figure (for me that was the finger on the hands). Another element that is a bit weird was that you only set the arm and leg on the Left side and then it flips the images and code in the ‘Build’ phase to create the right side. So if your figure has different art for limbs on both sides of the body this could be a problem, but I am guessing you can simply replace/adjust those layers with different artwork before the last step.

In the future I would love to see support for layers that use the Puppet Tool as well as being able to switch which direction the bones work in the middle of an animation.

All in all this has been the easiest character rigging script I have used so far, and it’s only in Beta so it’s not even official done yet. There is a good chance I will be using it on some future projects and I look forward to seeing where it goes from here.

Here is the official video…

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Feb
11
2012

NEW ART! – Warrior

by Brian

A pencil sketch with some digital color.

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Jan
18
2012

Motion Comic Magic – recent comic trailers

by Brian

: A post on re-purposing comics and illustration into animation

A few NEW trailers for publications, with the actual published art brought to life through digital animation. Some are more elaborately done and some are more simple.

BONE: Quest for the Spark BOOK 2 Video