A Lass, Poor Yorick!

Here's a Vampirella piece I drew for the Big Wow ComicFest.  The convention will take place from April 18-19 in San Jose.  I'll have a table there, and the original black and white ink artwork of this will be available for auction.

Storyboard to Screen Comparisons

All in one place!  See all my Storyboard to Screen comparison videos right here!

(Click on the bracket icon in the lower right hand corner of each video for the full screen view!)

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow:


Scooby Doo: Mystery Inc. :


Acura RSX Commercial:


Insecticide (video game):


Volkswagen commercial:


Curse of Chucky:

Lets Talk! SILA That's Entertainment Storyboarding Panel Part I

On May 31 2014, I participated in a panel discussion about storyboarding for the Society of Illustrators of Los Angeles at the Victory Theater in Burbank.  Here's part 1 of the talk as captured by Santosh Oommen.

Souvenirs

Well San Diego Comic-Con 2014 has come and gone.  As always, it was a great chance to catch up with some old faces, and meet some new ones.  This year, as I've mentioned earlier in my blog (here and here), I submitted four pieces of artwork for inclusion in the Comic-Con Souvenir Book.  All four of them were accepted, and three of them were run full page!  I had presented abbreviated versions of the art on my blog to maintain the surprise, but now that the book is out, I now present the complete designs for your viewing pleasure (click the image to see it larger):

The fourth image was the Usagi Yojimbo poster I posted earlier on my blog.

Comic-Con!

As I do every year, I will be tabling at Artists Alley at San Diego Comic-Con.  Stop by and visit me at my table DD24 (Artists Alley is close to Hall Entrance G and my table is usually close to an art school that specializes in anatomy).  I will have copies of my book, Professional Storyboarding: Rules of Thumb available, as well as several new prints -- Black Widow (pictured above), Daredevil, Human Torch and Submariner, and a digital painting of some robots.  I will also have a mini sketchbook of robot thumbnail sketches (pictured below).

I'll have most of my regular items for sale and will be doing sketch commissions.  Come on by and say hello!  Look for this banner:

The Secret of Life

Way back in the stone age (the late 1980's), I was out of school and just starting out, looking for some way to break into the big time illustration/cartooning world.  I was sharing an old Victorian with four other roommates in downtown Sacramento and working as a graphic designer for a magazine aimed at horse riders and breeders, and freelancing on the side.

One of my roommates, Larry, was also an aspiring cartoonist (we would both end up working in the games industry at LucasArts Entertainment) and in an effort to inspire/motivate ourselves to come up with cartoons, we used to have a little weekly competition: draw up a cartoon and bring it to the local pub (The Rubicon Brewing Company in this case, just around the corner from the house)-- show up empty handed and you buy the drinks.  If you both have a cartoon, the waitress chooses the best cartoon, the loser buys.

Here's one of the first cartoons I came up with.  I eventually sent it around and was amazed when I got a message relayed to me at work that National Lampoon Magazine wanted to run the cartoon!  This was the first time I had done any work that would be seen outside of the local area, with most of my previous work mostly being local Sacramento businesses and ad agencies.

The cartoon editor, Sam Gross, encouraged me to keep drawing cartoons and submitting and I did, but nothing I sent him seemed to have what he was looking for (a couple of these unused strips would later show up in my self-published comic book "Saturday Nite" years later).  He said none of the strips I sent had that "something" that this strip had.  It took a while for the strip to finally appear in the magazine, but it eventually showed up in the June 1990 issue.  The magazine went under a few years later.

Buy This Book!

I cant believe it!  It's been more than a year since it's release, and though I've made mention of it before, I've never made an "official" blog post about the release of my book Professional Storyboarding: Rules of Thumb, published by Focal Press (a leading publisher of instructional manuals dealing with art and technology).

It is co-authored by Sergio Paez, a storyboard artist who has worked on shows like Clone Wars, and runs the online storyboard community StoryboardArt.org .  He brings his own perspective to the book with years of experience working and teaching in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The book was intended to be a realistic guide to working in the storyboard industry, warts and all.  Aside from covering what you'd expect in a storyboard book --like composition and film grammar, the intention was also to address the differences in the many kinds of storyboarding there are, since "storyboarding" is kind of a blanket term that is used to describe several different jobs that serve very different purposes (depending on the audience --which can be anything from an animator in a foreign country to an account executive to a film crew).  The book features interviews from working storyboard artists (Benton Jew, Josh Sheppard, Sherm Cohen, Jeff Zugale) to get a no-holds barred look at what working in this industry is really like.

The book is available at Focal Press, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other fine establishments!

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As mentioned before, I'll be part of a panel presented by the Society of Illustrators of Los Angeles.  I'll be bringing along some samples of my work in the form of storyboard-to-film-comparison clips.  Here's a taste:

I'll be slowly releasing these videos right here on my blog over the course of several weeks.  Keep an eye open!

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It's been a very busy year!  Lots of cool projects I've been working on I wish I could tell you about, but one of the things about being a storyboard artist is that you can't always talk about what you're working on until a few years later when the project is done!

We're Talkin' Panels Here

I'll be on a panel about storyboarding for the LA Society of Illustrators at The Victory Theatre Center in Burbank May 31

You Look Marvel-ous!

Here are two more images I created for the San Diego Comic Con 2014 Souvenir Book.  These are cropped, but you can see the full images once the souvenir book is published (I'll post the full images on this blog, whether they're selected for publication in the souvenir book or not).

Oh, Hell!

This is my art submission celebrating the 20th anniversary of Hellboy for Comic Con 2014. This is a cropped version of the art-- the full design (if chosen) will appear in the Comic Con 2014 Souvenir Book.

Extra Texture

Sometimes you look at some old artwork you did, and you think back to the clear idea you had intended, and then see the final product you were able to produce at the time.  Sometimes the gap
between the two versions can get to you.  Such was the case with this piece.  So I dug out the old piece
and added a little extra texcha.  This is really much closer to what I had in mind when I had originally
done the piece five years ago.

Of 'Bots and Bunnies

I've been spending a bit of my extra time drawing robot sketches.  These were done in preparation for a book project I hope to have ready by Comic Con.  More later.

For you comics fans, here's a little drawing I did for for the Stan and Sharon Sakai Benefit Auction.  Stan Sakai, the creator of the comic book Usagi Yojimbo, has had some very tough times recently.  His wife recently acquired a rare debilitating disease.  After an extended stay in the hospital, she is home, but requires 24-hour care.  The cost of the care is more than the Sakai's insurance covers, so The Cartoon Art Professional Society is putting on an  auction to help raise money to offset some of the Sakai's ongoing medical expenses.  Donations can be made here, and the first in a series of benefit auctions will be held beginning March 5 via Ebay under the name "CAPSauction".

Lost LucasArts

I worked on a lot of projects during my time at LucasArts that were announced to the public, but later cancelled or changed before being released.   This has generated some interest from some hardcore LucasArts fans in some of these discarded materials.  Going through my old files, I recently dug up some old animation I did on some of these games.  I put together some of them into a reel, and have included some descriptions of these materials.

1. Herc's Adventures
These are "clean" versions of some of the animation I did for this game.  Sometimes you can't always appreciate the animation as well with all the backgrounds, scrolling and activity going on during gameplay.  Also--especially with sprite-oriented games, sometimes things can be lost in the translation during processing.  These clean versions give you a better look at the original feel of the animation.

By the way, if the flame in the Hades animation looks familiar, it may be because I pretty much used the same animation as when I animated the flames in Ben's motorcycle exhaust in Full Throttle.  That in turn may look familiar because I pretty much copied it frame by frame from the flames from the dragon in Disney's Sleeping Beauty!

2. Full Throttle
Here's a clean version of the run cycle used in a cutscene in Full Throttle where Ben tries to escape from a big ball of flame on an airplane (if I'm remembering correctly)

3. Ghoul Patrol
Raw animation from Ghoul Patrol.

4. Loom
This was animated for a cutscene in the 256 color version of Loom.  I don't remember for sure if this version of the animation appeared in the final version of the released game.

5. The Dig (Brian Moriarity Version)
Here is some animation from the Brian Moriarity version of The Dig.  The first shot is a walk cycle of the creature that is reincarnated for this early version of the skeleton puzzle.  The second shot is a death-by-electrocution animation cutscene of a sea creature.  Somewhere, there exists an animation I did of two of these creatures ripping one of the characters in two.  The third shot is the reincarnation shot of the creature in the skeleton puzzle.

6. The Dig (Noah Falstein Version)
Here are some walk-cycle animations I did of some creatures for the Noah Falstein version of The Dig. The premise in this version of the game was that the world was inhabited by a dying race of six-limbed creatures.  Because of this, much of the technology could only be operated by the surviving natives, or by the cooperation of two human characters (it was to be a multi-player game.)  The most feared creature in the game was the Terrabat, a creature with a pair of claws and two pairs of wings.  A couple of Terrabat animations are shown here.

I have another reel here of animation from various LucasArts games (as they appear in the released product).  There are also some animations from the Moriarity version of The Dig and a test animation from the unreleased Indiana Jones and the Iron Phoenix.

Happy Holidays from Anson Jew!

Hello, friends!  Have a happy and joyous holiday season!  And a great 2014!

-Anson

Bwahahaha!!

You've Got a Friend ('Til the End) In Me

Last year I drew storyboards for the latest sequel to a popular film franchise. The original film was about a boy named Andy and his relationship to his favorite toy, who is a normal toy, until certain occasions when he decides to come to life.  Of course, I'm talking about..

Here's a little featurette about the making of Curse of Chucky, the straight-to-video 6th sequel in the Child's Play franchise.  Jump to 13:00 so see my storyboards in action on the set. This is one of several featurettes on the DVD/Blu Ray set. There is also a storyboard to film comparison feature on the Blu Ray that features a few of my boards. Warning: many extremely gory spoilers!

Here are a few more boards I did for the film.  Click for for a larger view.

I, Robot!

I love robots.  Here's a little digital painting I made from one of my robot designs.

Man of Steel

I hadn't drawn any superhero stuff in a long time, so for the hell of it, I thought I'd give it a shot. As I was sketching this, I decided to read Action Comics #1 for the very first time (yes, I know...). I was surprised to discover that Superman's first appearance in comics was as much (if not more) about his life as Clark Kent as it was about being Superman. And that his first exploits as the Man of Steel weren't about giant robots or even bank robbers--instead, Superman gets a pardon for a woman put on death row for a murder she didn't commit, takes out a man who was beating his wife, and defies his editor's orders to stir up some dirt in a South American country, and instead goes to Washington DC to take on a crooked lobbyist. An eye-opener!

Season's Greetings! (And Some Fun with Stereoscopy!)

Well, there goes another year!  Hope you all had a good one and I hope you have an even better one in 2013! 

I'm sure you've all noticed that 3D is still big in the movies these days.  Seems like everything is being offered in 3D, or being retrofitted into 3D.

Stereoscopy is a very old technology, and though the particulars have changed and been improved over the years, the basic principles remain the same.

Normally, an image has to be shot with two cameras to create this kind of stereoscopic effect.  I recently figured out a simple way of creating stereoscopic still images from movies that weren't originally shot stereoscopically.  Here are a few images from a couple of my favorite movies in 3D for you to enjoy.  No enhancement or manipulation of the images was involved with this technique.  To view any of these images stereoscopically, stare at one of these pairs of images with your eyes crossed.  At some point, there will appear to be three images.  The center image will appear to be in 3D.  Click on the image to view it larger.

I'm So Board!

I know I sound like a broken record on this blog talking about how busy I've been, but it's true!  The last year and a half has been non-stop for me, and my brain has been too fried to spend a lot of time worrying about this blog.  But I've taken a week off to recharge my batteries, so here's an update:

The History Channel just finished broadcasting it's miniseries "The Men Who Built America".  I did some early pitch boards for an episode about Andrew Carnegie.  Above and below are some samples of boards I drew for this show.

I also worked on a film called "Order of the Seven".  It was to be another take on the Snow White story, with the twist on this film being that it took place in turn of the century China.  It was to have starred Saoirse Ronan (The Lovely Bones), and was to be directed by Michael Gracey.  The film was shut down for various reasons, but here are a few samples of work I did for this show.

During the time I was working on these projects, I was teaching a storyboarding class at Otis School of Design and was helping write a book on storyboarding with Sergio Paez.

Another project I worked on will be a straight-to-video sequel to a very popular horror franchise.  I can't show you any boards for it at this time, but the video will be released around Halloween of 2013.  Here's a little hint on what the project is:

Another film I contributed to earlier this year was a concept pitch for another horror film, this one with vampires.  It's still in the early stages, but from what I understand, it's got the green light.

Most of this year has been working on boards for yet another film pitch, which is top secret for the time being.

Anyways, that's it for now.  I'll try to be a little better about posting updates and artwork in the future.