Of course, it’s always a team effort making something like this, but I took a template provided by Iggy Matthews of Let’s Get Reelz, with voice acting by Christian Basel, and produced a 30 second television spot that will air on Bright House Cable in central Florida for the September 19 debut of the new series of Doctor Who. It’ll air twice, and thousands of people will see my work all at once.
What’s more exciting is that once I got the materials I was able to bang this thing out in just three days start to finish, and that’s in the midst of doing my other work for my science fiction radio station as its station manager and head writer.
It was made to promote the award winning The New MarkWho42, the widely popular Doctor Who themed radio talk show that airs each Wednesday and Friday on Krypton Radio. The New MarkWHO42 is produced by Mark Baumgarten, and features weekly panelists Mark Baumgarten, Patricia Helm, Eduardo M. Freyre, Patrick Hawkins and Christian Basel.
The commercial, produced in full 1080i HD, will air twice this September 19 on Bright House Cable, serving central Florida, in conjunction with the airing of The Magician’s Apprentice, the first episode of the 9th series of Doctor Who, starring Peter Capaldi.
The original spot concept did not include Daleks. That was my idea, and I got some Dalek models, fixed them so they’d look good on HD, rigged them, lit them, animated them, then recomposited the entire spot in After Effects, replacing every single element, but using the original animatic as a guide.
The Dalek voices? Yeah, those were me too.
The ramifications of this are:
I got to do one of those time crunch, “failure is not an option” jobs I used to be known for.
I got to reacquaint myself with Maya, and I’d gotten a bit rusty and hadn’t realized just how rusty – but I’m back up to speed now.
I got to do this for a radio show on my own radio station, and for friends of mine who produce one of our best shows. This will help them sell advertising for their show, which will help not only them, but the station, and then by proxy, me.
I do commissions sometimes. This latest one was done for a new pop media site called Second Geekhood, and the three people depicted are its key players, Kristine Cherry, Dennis Cherry, and Liz Carlie. They wanted something that looked like Drew Struzan’s, but of course they weren’t getting Struzan for anything mere mortals could afford.
Of course it doesn’t compare with the real thing. I’m no Drew Struzan. But I got close enough to make the client happy. I’m sure if I’d been able to spend more time on this, I could have gotten it up there – but you know how it is. Artists never finish their work. They merely relinquish it.
What you see here is about four day’s work, switching back and forth between Corel Painter and Photoshop. I’m sure I can get faster as I do more of these. I sure wish I could get Photoshop’s image control tools and Painter’s natural brushes and materials in one program, but the two of them being able to read Photoshop files is an acceptable substitute for that.
I’m starting to branch out and try new things. Last month I did a design for Debbie Viguie. It’s sort of like ghost writing, but for artists. This one was was Pinkie Pie, dressed as Harley Quinn. It was a lot of fun doing this, and I think I’m going to be doing a few more of these to test the waters. If I can paint them fast enough, there’s money to be made here.
The other one, the Cthulhu shirt, I did in about half a day. It’s a lot faster when you don’t have to worry about being on model for whatever you’re drawing. I had fun working out the lighting effects, and I’m trying to get more comfortable working in color over all, so this was a good exercise.
Every day we assess our world, evaluate the risks to ourselves, and gauge what things to be happy about, what things to be afraid of. We find happiness in too few things, and fear in too many – and what we once feared for good reason, we often never reevaluate and the fear of that thing has hold on us the rest of our lives, often well beyond the point where that fear is useful or justified.
Take a step upward. Get to higher ground. Find the happiness you’ve overlooked. And look downward on what you were once fearful of, and see if you’re still afraid.
I’m an animator too, and here are some samples. Most are Maya, one is in Rhythm & Hues’ “Voodoo” (I worked there for nearly ten years teaching animators) and my demo reel, which predates all that, is in Lightwave.
Recent Comments