Leon's Cubes: 2011

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

So Fancy! DevBlog

Hello, fancy people. Speaking of Fancyness, remember my Group Project? We're still working on that. I must say that working on a proper 3D short starting from zero is quite an experience. Getting everything covered - concepts, scripts, cinematography, modeling, rigging, animating, lighting, OH GOD - give you a chill is hard to describe. It may look like an easy task from the outside, but trust me when I say that you can lose a few years of your life due to stress if you don't plan things carefully - especially if you get the burden/bless of being the director.

Pierce the heavens with your drill!
Anyway, I've granted the project his own blog where I regularly post updates and images about its development, so do go and have a look at it. No, seriously, do it.

Sunday, October 23, 2011

So Fancy! Pre-Production

In those days I've been heavily working on some pre-production stuff for an upcoming group project at my University. I called it "So Fancy": it's the story of a young girl that goes into a boutique to buy a pretty dress... but in the end things don't exactly go as you might expect. Here's is the animatic and some rough concepts:




I presented "So Fancy" at the idea pitch and it got chosen! That means I get to direct a group of 6 people including myself and we're getting the chance to make "So Fancy" a full-fledged, one-minute animation. I'm so excited that I already started to fantasize about the praise of animation festivals all around the world.

Sunday, June 12, 2011

Annecy 2011

What a great week! Me, Simone and Tuomo decided to follow our guts and drill trough the English Channel and France (I will have nightmares about rush hour trains for a while now) to get to Annecy Animation Festival - One of the biggest festivals in the world.



The whole experience was just amazing - 3 days of pure animation and brilliant crativity floating trough every hole. I've got the chance to meet artists from Disney, Dreamworks, and Pixar (including Enrico Casarosa which screened the latest, unseed Pixar Short, La Luna, AAAAHHH) and dammit, I can tell you that's some effective way to get motivated.

Can you find Wald... erm, I mean, Leon?

Also, I got drenched the most in my life after rain caught me (and other 1000 people) under the Tour Eiffel, but that's a secondary detail.

Meet the Hoverbob

Summer is starting, exams are over and this means that animators can come to contact with this rare specimen called "free time" once again. Grabbing the chance to work on some personal stuff... this little guy down here, for example, is my frst proper rigging experiment. Controls are simple, but they get the work done. Incredible how only one eye is capable of so much expression...



Saturday, May 7, 2011

Welcome to Leon City...

...Population: me. "Leon City" is a python script I wrote for Maya that lets you generate a cityscape within a few clicks. I'm no cityscapes expert, but I must say the results look pretty good and it got a fairly number of customization choices. I can't believe I am coding my own way to waste time!


You can download the script (it's basically plug and play) here.

Sunday, May 1, 2011

Billy Bob Bros.

Here is my first character animation for a University Assignment, featuring this cute little guy called Billy Bob. The theme of the animation was "I didn't expect that!" - And this is what I came up with, from the top of my nerdyness.



Pretty sure he wasn't expecting that.