Category Archive: Motion Comics/Illustrations

Mar
12
2013

MCM: Motion-Comic and Motion-Illustration from around the web

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A post on re-purposing comics and illustration and other art into animation.

Today it’s time for a bunch of new examples of Motion Comics and Motion Illustration techniques that re-purpose art into animation.

Our first example is here for technique. The youth at 826 LA re-told a fellow students story with live 2d cut-out puppets. I post it here, since the technique could easily be used with reproductions of artwork as well. Sort of an analog motion-Comic or motion-illustration production. The students at 826 LA writing center used Tabletop Moviemaking to create…The Fox and the Rabbit.

Next up is the picture book… STEAM TRAIN DREAM TRAIN by Sherri Duskey Rinker & Tom Lichtenheld, published from Chronicle Books. The motiongraphics an animation is simple, but effective as a trailer and also standing on it’s own. See more artwork by Tom Lichtenheld at http://www.tomlichtenheld.com/

Next is a comic trailer for a new horror series Dark Horse Comics presents Lance Henriksen’s To Hell You Ride. Great mix of voice over, music, mood and simple animation. Amazing what you can do with the right ingredients. The artwork is by the incredible Tom Mandrake, see more of his work at http://www.tommandrake.com/.

The next trailer is for Souvenirs de l’empire de l’atome (Memories of the Empire of the Atom) written by Thierry Smolderen with art from Alexandre Clérisse from Dargaud. I love how retro and groovy it is. More art from Alexandre Clérisse HERE

OLTREMAI by Lorenzo Mattotti is a great example of really just a nice slideshow of art, but mixed with the right music it sets the mood of the art right away. The dark fanciful art is really pretty amazing looking. Published by Logos Editions in Italy. See more of the art of Lorenzo Mattotti HERE.

Last is the classic French comic character Lucky Luke in Cavalier Seul. The comic focus on the the thieving Dalton Gang who split up. The trailer is quite elaborate with lots of nice of animation of the original artwork.

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Nov
30
2012

Kid Beowulf Kickstarter Victory and Trilogy Trailer!

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Can’t view the videos, see the full post in your browser HERE.

Alexis Fajardo has just succeeded in raising the money to print his third Graphic Novel: Kid Beowulf and the rise of El Cid! Alexis is one of the most talented artist/writers I have had the honor of working with. The campaign is over, but you can see the Kickstarter page HERE.

AND…with the success of the Kickstarter campaign, Alexis has released the above animated trailer that celebrates his full Graphic Novel series. I am not only excited about my friend succeeding with funding his third book, I am excited to see the video since I helped create it!

More than a year ago we started working on a new trailer for the series that would cover the previous released books: Kid Beowulf and the Blood Bound Oath, Kid Beowulf and the Song of Roland, as well as the upcoming graphic novel Kid Beowulf and the rise of El Cid. We have created a trailer for each of the books, but this one would be both more streamlined and more elaboarate in it’s production. I am quite pleased with how the trailer came out and I hope you enjoy watching it.

The new trailer features…

- The 3D opening from the Song of Roland trailer was re-created, embellished and enhanced.

- The full banner sized digitally colored cover files which were broken down into different layers to allow us to ‘fly’ through them.

- Beowulf’s sword Nagling in CGI with simulated swirling smoke.

Here are the other trailers in reverse, going back in time…

Book 2: Kid Beowulf and the Song of Roland

Book 1: Kid Beowulf and the Blood Bound Oath

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Oct
31
2012

Hellboy: The Fury Motion Comic from Dark Horse Comics

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A post on re-purposing comics and illustration into animation

It’s Halloween and time for something spooky! How about watching a comic?

Dark Horse Comics has been teeming up with the online video station Geek and Sundry to bring serialized motion comics of many of their titles, something I applaud. The videos are far from perfect since they are working with the limitations of adapting the art that was created for the comics, but that is a quality that I really like. There is a wonderful simplicity and creativity about the videos that keeps them tied to their comic book source material. I with more comic companies would promote there titles this way and be able to partner with others who are like minded.

Here is ever popular Hellboy in ‘The Fury’.

Writer: Mike Mignola • Artist: Duncan Fegredo • Colorist: Dave Stewart

Line Producer: Matt Parkinson • Producer: Mike Richardson • Directed by: Erik Bruhwiler

Ep 1

Ep 2

Ep 3

Ep 4

Ep 5

Ep 6

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Sep
17
2012

Awsome Film Animatics and Animated Digital Comic by Ryan Woodward

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A post on re-purposing comics and illustration into animation

An Animatic Story Reel in it’s classic form is a way to pre-visualize a scene from a film or video by filming the storyboards for a production and editing them with temporary voices, sound efx, and music to simulate how the final production will look before spending a lot more money to produce it for real. Over time, digital video technology gave us the power to better simulate the final production.

Some of the best examples I have seen have been produced by animator and storyboard artist Ryan Woodward (ryanwoodwardart.com) who has since done a beautiful animated short as well as a comic book which is heavily animated and can only be seen on a tablet computer like an iPad. All amazing stuff.

I really love his Spiderman movie Animatics especially.

WHOOPS, I didn’t realize that you could not embed the animatic video and so there is nothing posted yet, but  click here to see the samples cause there really really awesome! Really! I hope I can get permission to embed the video at a later date, but for now go to the link for the video.

Mr. Woodward also had a this animatic/book trailer for ‘The Loch’ for Penny Farthing Press adapting the artwork of Courtney Huddleston and Johnny Beware. More on this book can be found HERE.

The Loch – Animatic from Ryan J Woodward on Vimeo.

Mr Woodward also has created an amazing new type of comic book, designed from the start to have the the panels you read come to alive with full animation as well as the techniques used in his animatics, but only read on a tablet computer like the iPad. While the term Motion Comic has been used for taking an existing comic book or graphic novel and animating it for video playback with added music and voice, this one might be more true to the naming since it’s a comic you read and the motion is part of that experience. Can’t wait to try the app sometime.

BUY the IPAD APP HERE 

Bottom of the Ninth trailer from Ryan J Woodward on Vimeo.

/p

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Sep
11
2012

Motion Comic Magic – book trailers from around the web

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A post on re-purposing comics and illustration into animation

I am behind on updating my blog with the latest with my art and teaching and all, but here is a Motion Comic Magic post on trailers for books and comic books to tide you over.

A ‘Motion Comic’ (or ‘motion illustration’) is re-purposing the artwork into animation, in this case to promote the books that are the source of the art work. The term ‘Motion Comic’ has morphed a bit for some as comic book looking art with simple animation, but for me it’s always been about re-purposing material and not creating it just for animation. It’s sort of like a visual audio book.

Book trailers have become more frequently used by interdependent publishers as well as some of the large European companies as well as, but since even the simplest trailer takes time/money to put together they are still not as common. It’s sad we don’t see more since a well thought out trailer can help get the idea of the book across fast and from anywhere there is the Internet available. Of course for transparency sake, I have made a few book trailers and so I am biased.  One of trailers below go beyond just re-purposing the art from the source, but were neat and so I wanted to post them anyways.

First off is a nice simple trailer for the webcomic/comic Sailor Twain, by Mark Siegel. It’s published by First-Second Books. READ the web version here.

Next up is Bottomless Belly Button by Dash Shaw and published by Fantagraphics. This is not re-purposing the art from the book, but it is animated by the author so I give it a big thumbs up and included it in this post anyways. Find out more HERE.

The classic YA novel, ‘A Wrinkle in Time: The Graphic Novel’ by Madeleine L’Engle; adapted and illustrated by Hope Larson.

Last, but not least for this post is a trailer for an artbook featuring the work of aviation artist,  Lucio Perinotto. This trailer does a nice job of adding some animation to the artists paintings of classic planes. This is from the French publisher Paquet, find out more HERE.

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Jul
21
2012

Motion Comic and Illustration book trailers

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It’s been a while since I posted some book trailers that use Motion Comic and Motion Illustration techniques (Animation made by re-purposing art from comics, illustrations, fine art, etc), so here are a few I have found on my explorations on the Internet.

A post on re-purposing comics and illustration into animation

The first trailer is for Liesl and Po, which takes charcoal drawings by artists Kei Acedera and maps them to 3D geometry in the open-source Blender 3D to impressive effect. Animation by Exit Left studio.

Next is a trailer for the BD album “WW2.2., l’autre guerre mondiale” from French language Dargaud with art by Hervé Boivin and Eric Henninot. Really well created trailer with some very nice art.

 The Germans aim to take Paris. Emptied of its occupants, the city is defended by small groups of French soldiers … One of them, commanded by Sergeant Miller, will play a decisive role in the coming battle, the first turn of the war that will be the battle of Paris….

This begins the first volume of WW.2.2 with a prologue that introduces the idea around which to build this unusual cartoon: a man tells how, in November 1939, he killed Adolf Hitler …

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Jun
30
2012

Video: inkDrinkDraw Comic-Jam at the 3rd Thursday at the Cartoon Art Museum

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This is the first ever video taken of a comic jam for inkDrinkDraw. George Webber took the time-lapse video and photos with his iPhone and I assembled them in Adobe After Effects. I am pretty pleased at how it came out.

What do you think, do you want to see more videos like this one?

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May
18
2012

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

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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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