I am still exploring designs for my next film.  Two posts ago I posted some work of what I was thinking would be the main character.  I am try to design her as well as some others, unlike The Lift I intend to have many more characters and dialogue.

This summer I vowed to go Life Drawing at least once a week.  I need to bone up on my skills before I start my next film.  I hope to be posting the results as I go along :D

When I was at C2E2 last month some of the artist alley people as well as I were approached about doing an card illustration for a Charity Event in Chicago.  The event is called The Treasure Chest of Art.  Here are my submissions.

First off as always its always been a while since I last posted. This time its because I have another site, thelift.kohrtoons.com which features my latest film “The Lift”. Its currently seeing some festival action and I am crossing my fingers for more. Check it out at one of those venues or you can purchase your copy from the site.

Secondly I am starting to work out ideas for my next film which I am planing to start in January 2011. Here are some concepts in order of creation. Currently I am favoring the bottom most design.

This week I am posting a much earlier shot from my film ‘The Lift’. In this shot the main character is leaving for work, or what ever she does. As you saw from one of the other later shots I posted she doesn’t make it to where she was going.

Something I haven’t really talked about yet, and I am always asked, is when will it be finished. I am looking to complete this film in early 2010, actually the end of January. I am attempting to submit this film to Annecy which is apparently celebrating its 50th anniversary. If you are interested I took some pictures when I was there in 2003 (Annecy Animation Festival Pictures).

Enjoy!

I am posting this new video on my blog a little late this time, a week late actually. I forgot to do this last week, though I did get it up on Youtube and Vimeo. This week I won’t be doing a video as its a holiday in the US.

Shot 51, what you see below is the shot immediately after last weeks, the girl gets pulled down the sewer drain and transported to another world.

Other than that I think I am pretty set on the new title of the film “The Lift”, as my sister Emma says “Once and Never Again” sounded lame. I think i agree.

I have recently setup 2 channels, one on Vimeo and another on Youtube which I will update every Tuesday with new shots from my film.

YouTube Kohrtoons Studio Channel
Vimeo Kohrtoons Studio Channel

This week I created an almost 7 minute tutorial showing my process of developing a shot from the animatic to the final video. I demonstrated how I use Flash to create the animation and color the frames, Blender to generate the 3D scenes and After Effects for composting.

On another note the film is currently called “Once and Never Again” though I am considering changing it to “The Lift”. The premise of the film is an elevator experience gone wrong, a cautionary tale about holding the elevator door for people (though you wouldn’t know it from this shot :P)

I recently downloaded the latest drawing app available for the iPhone.  I have not been a huge fan of the others as they never felt quite right.  Autodesk seems to have offered up something truly good, Autodesk Sketchbook Mobile.

The main difference I felt between Autodesk’s offering and Brushes was that Sketchbook lacked the ‘vector-esc’ functionality which brushes relies on and instead implemented a system where the data is all bitmap.  Brushes uses XML data to draw, though it works well it doesn’t feel all that natural or responsive.  Also Sketchbook carried over its rather intuitive tool set from its desktop offering Sketchbook Pro.  Over all Sketch book is a really solid offering and definitely worth the $2.99 cost.

Check out the painting I did in Sketchbook Mobile (click to view the full res).

Ever heard of the 11 Second Club? If you are an animator you should have.  Its a website where an audio clip is posted on the first of the month, usually something from an old movie.  Then those who choose to participate have about 30 days to complete their interpretation of the animation.

I decided to submit this past month.  Below is my submission for August.  If you can’t tell the clip was hand drawn, in flash.

We all know that the bane of web design is IE 6. I stumbled on this really awesome site this morning.
Kronenberg.org

They have an IE 6 emulation that runs via Wine. Wine is a software that allows for Windows emulation with out having a full install of windows. I tried it out for a minute and its pretty awesome. I know people are straying away from IE 6 but this is perfect for any mac designer who needs to check IE 6 out, you should also have IE 7 on another boot of windows, but in windows its really tough to run more than one version of IE reliably. I will definitely be using this app a lot!