Winning the Oil Endgame: Style

Here's some parts and pieces I'm working on for my next animation project, called "Winning the Oil Endgame." It's based on a TED talk of the same name. I motif for the animation will be board games, hodge-podging elements from Risk, Monopoly, and the Game of Life.

A Life Alone Video

A Life Alone from Adam Osgood on Vimeo.

Here's my final video. Hope you like it!

A Life Alone: Sketchbook

Here is a sneak preview from my short animated film, "A Life Alone." The video needs a few tweaks, so come back in a week to see the full animation!

Barbie & Ken

I was grinning ear to ear this afternoon as I was painting Barbie & Ken as well as three children (not pictured). I'm so thrilled that this illustration style & process that I have been developing over the last couple years is so useful in this animation project. I'm also thrilled with how naturally the designs are coming together.

Also, in a testament to simultaneous contrast Barbie is a blonde and her green hair will look very yellow in the context of the scene I'm dropping her in.

Neighborhood Scene Revisited

I started playing with my puppet inside the neighborhood scene and wasn't thrilled with the energy between the two. I decided to add more detail and change some little color aspects. Here you can see a shot that will likely never be in the finished animation, but is more exciting than the actual framing with the tops of the houses cut off!

Also, if you look closely you can tell that I used a funky transparency mask on the clouds so that they look like tissue paper. I hope I can find other places to use this effect, because it looks pretty sweet.

Animation Color Keys

Making major headway on my autobiographical animation. Worked out some of the details in my storyboard and did color keys for the whole thing. I didn't actually HAVE to do this step, but I see professional animation studios doing it and it just looks fun! I feel like I could refine these little drawings and have a storybook. I also feel like this simple retro style would be perfect for the animation all by itself! But the assignment is to do a puppet-show-theater style thing with a shallow depth of field, and that's what I'm going to do!

Also, here's the first set (of the neighborhood from the childhood scene) rigged & lit in After Effects. I tried to make it look like the set it built out of different kinds of paper and painted finishes. The whole thing should end up looking somewhat handmade. If you look at this and the little boy puppet from my last post you can get a pretty good feeling for the look of the film.

Character design.

Dear blog, sorry to have neglected you. I'm in school and it's just a lot of work! I have been creating a lot, check out my little explorations on vimeo.

I'm currently working on a 1-minute animated autobiography. It's going to be Richard Scarry animal-style. This is the puppet I created of me as a little boy. And no, I don't remember being dressed like a hipster BUT that's a real shirt! I wish they made things that awesome now. Capped sleeves, diagonal arrows, great color combo. If I had a time machine I would make go back and get that shirt.

Paul Poiret

This summer I wanted to do a project in acrylic to use up some of the remaining boards I had lying around before I moved to Raleigh. I ended up with 3 paintings based on vintage illustrations from fashion house Poiret. The illustrations date from around 1910 and are done by Paul Iribe & George LePape, who were commissioned over many years to create drawings of the Poiret fashions. This is a topic I touched back in 2006 when I was working on my senior thesis for my BFA in illustration. Similarly, I created 3 illustrations based on the fashion of Poiret. This time, however, it was far more homage because I used the existing compositions & color palettes from the Iribe/LePape images. While I made quite a few changes, the similarities are uncanny. The image below shows my paintings on the right next to their inspirations.

3D

I've been playing around with ZBrush today, getting pumped up for the 3D stuff I'm undoubtedly going to have to do in the coming weeks when classes start. Here's a head I spent a couple hours "sculpting." I haven't figured out out to use more than one object yet, so I wasn't able to use spheres for his eyeballs. Next time!

Gaston

Here's a little painting I did for fun over the past week. It's what I imagine the puppy that I had last summer might look like today. I gave him back to my mother, who is a dog breeder, which hopefully doesn't sound too heartless. He really was the love of my life for the week I had him, but the idea of leaving him in a cage in my apartment during my 9-5 was too much to bear. (how boring!) He ended up going with his puppy brother to a home with two little old ladies that probably give him a whole lot of love. And plenty of cigarettes?

...Anyway I had finished the clothing part and then almost scrapped the painting because I was running out of time (more on that below) but really his face and arms wasn't so hard. I also have been wanting to spray a matte finish on something and then put a high gloss varnish in certain areas on a painting for a while, so this was a good opportunity to test it out. Although you can't see in this digital image AT ALL, I glossed the "smoke" and his eyes and nose. It's a cool effect that I'll use again.

Now the other part is that I'm moving to Raleigh tomorrow to embark on a new adventure: the graduate animation program at North Carolina State University. Wish me luck!