neosdimospargas animated cartoon: September 2008

Book Review: A Bug's Life: The Art and Making of an Epic of Miniature Proportions

This is a gigantic book. It is actually quite difficult to shoot the video of me flipping the huge landscape pages.

This book is a delight to read, just like the first Toy Story art book. It's filled with great stories from the production floor, tons of storyboards, pastel drawings, movie stills, concept art, character design and inspiration.

The focus of the book, other than the art, is on the story aspect, the function behind the form. Explanation in details were given on why things happen, why characters behave like who they are and how they evolve, in terms of design.

Too many books out there are just compilation of great art pieces with nothing to say about it. This book is different. This book made me feel. And that's what's set this book and the Toy Story art book apart from all other art books. It's the emotional connection that's almost impossible to create just by art itself, story is needed.

Visit the link beside to read more reviews on Amazon. If you buy from the link, I get a little commission that helps me get more art books for review.

Country-specific Amazon links for this book:
Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.fr | Amazon.de

The Making of F1 Infographics 2008

The Singapore F1 night race is finally over. Over the past few days, The New Paper has been publishing some infographics as coverage for the event. Here's a look at the making of one we've published. Putting together an F1 graphics with so much detail requires great team effort.

This is a huge collaboration effort of 4 artists, Chng Choon Hiong, Kelvin Chan and Fadzil Hamzah aka Fuzz. Chng did the caricature for Lewis Hamilton in the middle. Fuzz provided the 3D racetrack. I modeled and rendered the F1 car. The whole thing was then laid out by Kelvin.

It's not easy to come up with a fresh concept for F1. As you can see from my collection of F1 infographics, from newspagedesigner.com, most of the ideas have already been used before: racetrack, pit crew, moves, and car designs. Ours is a combination of pit crew, racetrack and the drivers' race suit.

This is the wireframe of the McLaren MP4-23. I spent about 2-3 weeks modeling it.

I've only the blueprint from the top, and even that's a photo of an illustration from the wall at the McLaren press conference. For side profile, I had to rely on photos sourced from Flickr.com. Much of the modeling is done by moving the vertices around in 3D with reference to photos. Eye modeling.

At the start of the project, I was actually modeling the Ferrari car. But it became increasingly difficult to do so because of the lack of reference photos. I just couldn't see the form and detail behind the wheels. It didn't help that I don't have the blueprints for the Ferrari 2008 car too.

Luckily, supervisor Hup just came back from a McLaren press conference with tons of close-up high resolution photos. Meanwhile, I received information that there's a McLaren displayed at Paragon shopping centre. And so I went down and took another ton of photos for the McLaren MP4-23.

After that, it's the 2-3 weeks of modeling. It was long because that was on top of other daily work.

Here's the render without the official sponsor logos on the car body. I have no idea why but it seems that we don't have copyright to display the official logos. That sounds pretty silly, I know.

Here you see Kelvin doing some research. We had some F1 magazines and guide books. They provided us with information on the pit crew and graphics on how the cars tackle turns and overtaking.

Kelvin had brought his toy model to pose as the pit crew. The model was was fitted with a generic orange uniform. 18 photos were taken, one for each crew.

After the photo shoot, the tedious process of laying out the whole infographics began. The whole project was concluded within an amazing 2 days, excluding the weeks that I spent modeling.

There are some more photos from the Making of F1 Infographics on my Flickr photos set, and the tons of McLaren reference photos.

Book Review: Alchemy of Mirrormask

This book contains a stunning collection of collages by Dave Mckean. Every piece of collage is showcase of creativity and fantasy. The pages are visually saturated from the cover to the last page, a feast for the eyes.

The premise of the book is on the production of the movie Mirrormask. It talks about the production of the movie exclusively. Very little is mentioned about the story, which is not a problem if you have watched the movie.

The thing with collages is, they are typically filled with great textures. This book is no different. It is through the textures of these collages that give this book so much depth.

I felt there could have been more write up on the making of the movie. But this book is essentially 5 stars for the art displayed.

Book Review: The Art of Spirited Away

The copy I'm reviewing is a Chinese version. The English version from VIZ Media Publishing is essentially the similar in content. Some of the English versions end with movie scripts, some don't.

As usual, there are lots of beautiful sketches on character design and concept art for the environment. They are all painted in traditional media. The bath house on one full page on its own is just breathtaking. There are only a handful of movie stills. Captions below the sketches describe the scene and ideas behind.

At the end of the book are is a short write up on how they used computers to composite some of their cel animation onto the big screen.

I like the movie very much and this book is a perfect complement to it. If you collect Studio Ghibli movie art books, there's no reason not to add this to your collection.

Note that there's another book called Spirited Away Picture Book. It's essentially the movie published as a book. It comprises only off movie stills and the story is written for kids. I actually made the mistake of buying that book before The Art of Spirited Away, which is the real art book.

PS - Oh, the soundtrack for the movie is simply fantastic. One of my all time favourites as well.

If you like this book, you might also want to check out the other art-of books I have reviewed for Studio Ghibli's movies.

Book Review: Princess Mononoke

Technically, the title of the book should be Princess Mononoke The Art and Making of Japan's Most Popular Film of All Time.

The poems right at the beginning sets the mood immediately: This is going to be a magical film.

This book is generous with concept art, movie stills, paintings, storyboards, layout drawings and a few computer animation tutorials. They are presented chronologically based on the progress of the movie. Captions for the art pieces explain the scenes instead of the concept behind it. In a way, they help relate back to the film.

The environment paintings are fantastic. The richness in details tries, successfully, in creating a world that looks as if it really exist. There's a certain sense of peace in each of them. Character designs are done in water colour, and a delight to look at.

The 3 computer graphics tutorials covers the making of 3D images, multilayer compositing and digital painting. The technology behind the movie's creation process is explained clearly.

This version of book I'm reviewing is published by Miramax Books, Hyperion in 1999. It's pretty much out of print and hard to find. So if you can locate it, you should really buy it. Fans will be jealous of you.

If you like this book, you might also want to check out the other art-of books I have reviewed for Studio Ghibli's movies.

Calling All Inkers & Colorists

My colleague Kelvin Chan, aka rocketraygun on deviantart, is looking for inkers and colorists for his latest web comic, JOE.

In his exact words:

"Hi all,
I've started on my new comic project called JOE.
The first pages are up on the left, do check it out. Its a collaboration with Thomas Romeo from Glasgow.
We're looking for an inker and a colorist to complete the team. The ink styles we're looking for should be more Kevin Knowlan and Bryan Hitch (The Ultimates). Colours will be more like The Ultimates and Hellboy."

Also check out his previous web comic called Razor Falls

Book Review: The Art of Fullmetal Alchemist

This VIZ Media version is a simple hard covered book that reads from right to left, just like how you would read a manga. It features original illustrations from Hiromu Arakawa.

This art pieces are from the manga series instead of the TV series. The collection starts from 2001 to 2003. At the end of the book are character designs for the PS2 game Hagane no Renkinjutshi: Tobenai Tenshi (Fullmetal Alchemist and the Broken Angel).

There are lots of full page illustrations, most of which look like chapter splash pages except they are coloured in traditional media. There's no description for the characters, or for that fact, description for anything. However, there are some short captions at the bottom of each page as the artist reflects on the panel. This book is all about art.

This is the manga art book. Fans of the anime might want to get the anime art book instead.

By the way, I've never read the manga. But the anime is one of my all time favourite.