Ballet

Had a chance to do some quick sketching of ballet recently. Man do I love to study ballet, it is as if it was made to be studied by animators. Or, perhaps animators were made to study ballet. Who knows?

I can remember being home sick as a kid and watching/studying ballet on video tape with our jog huttle VCR. I would obviously have a sketchbook in hand but I would also sit there with a china marker marking the screen up. I would either trace a pose and then the next major pose to see how they related or I would frame by frame say the hips to discover the spacing of the ups and downs. Drawing ballet has always been akin to figure drawing for me. I am never satisfied with what I have drawn while in the moment. It takes me being seperarted by a day or two too appreciate any success I may have had. God has truly created a marvel in the human body... it is sublime beauty and unattainable. I look forward to animating ballet some day!

Adam and Dog screening

We just did our first public screening of Adam and Dog and it was such a wonderful experience to be able to share this labor of love with a little broader audience.  I am adding this little post because I am well aware ther has been a lack of information on the film after the trailer debuted and it won the Annie.  The film is still running the festival circuit and cannot be posted online until it has completed its festival run. At that time I am will have more to share about it. I may be able to post some pencil tests and other things before that time but for now I have this cool poster above. And below I have a picture of the happiest crew in the world!

(left to right: Mario Furmanczyk, Jennifer Hager, Minkyu Lee, Myself, Glen Keane, and Ethan Metzger)

SCN 10 FINAL snake from handdrawn on Vimeo.

Here is another little thing I animated for Pepper Films. It was a fruit loops commercial featuring this new character.This is the original version before the agency changed it, which I like better.

Matt Williames from handdrawn on Vimeo.


The ol' updated reel. Just to keep the blog alive. Yep, as yeh can see I have delved into the CG world. A necessary thing these days I am affraid. Fortunately I am blessed to be doing both 2D and CG at work, so gotta be thankful for that!

Adam and Dog

It is my great great pleasure to share the trailer of a short film I am so proud to have been apart of: Adam and Dog. The film was directed and concieved by the extremely talented Minkyu Lee. It is up for an Annie Nomination for best short film. This film, to me, is what I got into the film industry to do and quite honestly I haven't worked on anything anywhere near this good. In the future I plan to post more about it but consider this a teaser post for now :) Enjoy, and vote for Adam and Dog!

Secrets of the Masters : The Wu Sisters

So I can finally show some animation I did at on this short! This short was a real pleasure to work on, partly due to the generosity of Mr. Ken Duncan giving me a lot of control over these characters. I wasn't a lead but I kinda felt like one in terms of having ownership and a definite opinion about the characters. It was good casting for me. Plus I only focused on the Wu sisters, which was fine by me because before we started I wanted to do those characters anyway! Unfortunately in terms of the story the characters aren't terrible textured or dimensional. But that left it up to us to try and add as much as we could with what we had to work with.

My general idea about them was to base them on ballet dancers. I had other acting ideas about them but there was really no where to put the ideas in the context of this story. The director wanted something slightly sexy as well, and being cats I could see how that would fit. But mostly I saw them as really graceful beings. But I wanted a flip side and stark contrast in that when they fought all of the sofistication and poise you once saw was gone and they became more primal. They're eyes changed to cat slit eyes and they're general graphic shape changed as well.

These aren't all of the shots I did but it is most of them. Quite a few of these got cut from the film unfortunately. I was slated to do a lot more acting but I got so front loaded with the action stuff that there was no way for me to get it all done in time. Fortunately the talented Mr. Jared Beckstrand did a lot of the acting shots as well as Mr. Ken Duncan.

Hope you enjoy these. It was a real pleasure to work on!

WOLVERINE

I've been lovin' me some Wolverine! Not much, just a reason to post something on the blog. When all you do is work on things you can't show it can be tough to keep a blog alive. Been having fun with this though, no great ambitions with it. Just having fun, trying to get better at drawing. These drawings are only a few days old, so if the disappear suddenly it's because they turned to crap overnight. Which tends to happen ;) I hope all 3 of you enjoy!