Mike Luzzi's Sketch Blog

Made with Paper

rikkisimons:

The Master’s Voice

@RikkiSimons: He appears to lure Betty Boops from hiding with his phantom musics and then steals their cigar smoking life juices.

@essrose: How do I get THAT job!

@RikkiSimons: You have to have a skull face.

@essrose: Is that the only requirement?

@RikkiSimons: And you have to live in that city.

@essrose: Where is it? I am willing to relocate.

@RikkiSimons: According to current theory, you would have to fly faster than the speed of light and accelerate past this universe and into another and then another until you find the alternate reality where this city lives.  Unfortunately the momentum of your ship would destroy anything at the destination at which it arrives.

@essrose: So, really, turning my face into a skull is the least of my problems.

@RikkiSimons: Unfortunately.

likesyrup:

Guilherme Marcondes and team.

Teaser for a project I have been lucky enough to have multiple roles on.  Character designer, 2D animator and actor! This was fun, and hopefully there will be more coming soon!

A doodle I made on a chalkboard table at the Olive Tree Cafe at lunch today… nothing like cheap tasty mediterranean food and some Charlie Chaplin

sparklemedia asked: Hi,

how where the characters you design for the british gas campaign animated?
2D or 3D with projected textures?

Thanks

Glenn

All 2D in Photoshop.  Animated entirely in After Effects

somethingsavage asked: hey man, love your work. i was reading about your short short where you mention animating in flash, followed by texturing in AE, could you talk about this more? do you just matte out the textures or is it more than that? also, did you finish that short short?

Hey, Thanks for the positive feedback.  Unfortunately I haven’t been able to make my short short yet, but I have been playing around with techniques on other projects at my day job.  

Basically, I animate in Flash on layers, export the layers as sequences separately and then recombine them in AE.  Once in there, with the layers, there are all kinds of things I try.  Yes, I use the drawn layers as mattes for textures, but I also will sometimes manually animate lots of solids that I mask to create shadows and highlights.  Sometimes I will duplicate layers and mess around with effects on them, offset them, whatever I can to get the desired look.  The textures I use to fill the drawn shapes, I don’t just let them lie flat.  Usually I will track them along, distort them and other stuff to have them correspond properly to the drawn elements they are filling.

I hope this answers your question a bit.  I will post some more stuff soon and describe specifically how I went about accomplishing the effects for each post.

Some concept work for an upcoming project… More to come… soon.

I ran into a friend of mine from college last night and the memories came flooding back.  Here’s a bit of a re-visit of an old character I used to draw.  He was a character alright.

Another Santa I drew in sketchbook pro. This is actually the second one I drew… The first one is lost in the ethos. I drew it, “saved” it and it disappeared. The sketchbook iPad app is nice but kind of buggy.