Downtown

Travisty's Beard Launched!

A couple of months ago I had a conversation with Kendal Cronkhite (Production Designer for Madagascar 1&2) and Shannon Jeffries (Art Director for Madagascar 1&2) about how we can share and improve our artistic skills outside of work. So we came up with an idea to create a collaborative blog with all artists from the Art Department here at PDI/DreamWorks to draw and paint to a certain topic that would be picked every month.


The Blog is called "Travisty's Beard"
Topic for november was "What's in Travisty's Beard"

Now follow the blog and spread the news! :)

This is my contribution
What's in Travisty's Beard?

A bunch of art addicted lice....

Motion Farm - vimeo channel

I created a vimeo channel with my favorite films I've found on the net.
I'll be updating it frequently so feel free to subscribe. If you wanna suggest something cool just post the link in the shout box in the right hand column of the site. Click on the banner to watch my channel.

25th World Wide SketchCrawl

Today was the 5th anniversary of SketchCrawl. A beautiful day in San Francisco. Lots of people, awesome location, great crawl.


We sketched a little bit at the meeting point at Buena Yerba in front of the SF MOMA before we went to check out the Maurice Sendak exhibit at the Contemporary Jewish Museum.
After that we went back to the Buena Yerba Gardens until the end of the crawl. Congrats Enrico for the 5th year anniversary!

These are my sketches from today.


You can check out the San Francisco results here.

Merry Madagascar

"Merry Madagascar" was aired yesterday at 8pm on NBC. It was the first project I worked on at PDI/DreamWorks. I updated the Gallery on my website with some of the work I've done for the show. It was a great pleasure to work with production designer James Wilson.

Two color keys that I painted for the show. Visit my website for more.

Bird Watcher

I went to "APE" last Saturday. It was great to meet fellow bloggers in person.
I bought an awesome snow owl paper sculpt from Brittney Lee. I'm glad that it was still there since I was aiming for it the day before.

Here is an after work doodle...

The Village

Continuing my series of paintings I started a while ago...

Landscape Painting with Huihan Liu

I went to a landscape painting workshop of Huihan Liu with my colleagues from work last Saturday. It was actually my first time doing landscape painting and my second time using oils.
It was a bit windy and cold but I had tons of fun and I'm looking forward to do it again sometime!


Here are the two paintings I painted that day.

Video Team Master Award!

Big news! It's a follow up on the post below.
We actually won the Video Team Master Award in the Secret Agent Challenge at CGTalk with our entry "Agent Omicron"!
Yay! We are super excited!

Check out the winning entries here.

Agent Omicron

I was working with two co-workers Nico Sanghrajka, Kory Heinzen and my bro on the secret agent team animation challenge over at cgtalk.

Kory Heinzen
Modeling
Texturing
Editing
Compositing

Goro Fujita
Character Design
Animation
Shading
Lighting & Rendering
Credits

Nico Sanghrajka
Pipeline Development
Rigging TD
Additional Modeling

Ryosuke Fujita
Original Soundtrack

I had a great time to work in such a strong team!
This is the result:

Agent Omicron

Aging International Superstar Steve Camembert stars in the 80's classic Japanese spy show "Agent Omicron"
While not popular outside Japan at the time, the show has gained cult status in the United States and Germany.
The Fans or "Cronys", as they call themselves are drawn to its campy fun and exploration of almost precient Sci-fi concepts. The ethics of cloning, genetic manipulation, nanotechnology and robot/human hybrid rights were common themes featured on the show.
An other star of the show was Japanese American actress Aiko Givewell. She played Omicrons Techy sidekick and had quite a following among the younger male audience. in the second last season her character in the series greatest twists, turned sides and became the main antagonist.
After the cancellation of Agent Omicron Ms. Givewell stared in a very short lived spinoff.
The last stand out cast member was Thud Thompson. He was a Worlds Strongest Man Champion from Sweden. He dreamed of being the Swedish Arnold Schwarzenegger. Agent Omicron was his only acting job.

One other contributing factor of the alure of the show was the mystery surrounding the death of its star. Steve Camembert killed while filming a spectacular stunt for the series final episode.
An early edit of the show was said to have put together but it was never aired. For the "Cronys" finding this episode is the holy grail.
In early 2008 it was rumored that Michael Bay was in talks to tale Agent Omicron to the big screen. He was quoted saying that he wasn't interested in making another stupid Japanese movie for kids. So for now Agent Omicron and his crew of super spies will only live on in decaying VHS tapes and Youtube...

The Making Of....



When The challenge first started we were all full of enthusiasm.
Our idea was to create an intro sequence for a fake TV series that we called "Agent Omicron".
In that sequence we would show a bunch of scenes out of the Agent Omicron Episodes. You can see in our color keys, what kind of shots we had in mind. Soon we realized that modeling and rendering whole environments with effects like rain would be too much work since we all have a full time job and could only work in the evenings and weekends. So we decided to use simple shapes and motion graphics for most of the backgrounds instead. While Kory was starting working on the animatic in After Effects I was doing test animations with Nico's rig. As soon as we had the first 15 seconds of the animatic, I sent it to my brother with a bunch of notes about what kind of music we had in mind.
When I finished animating a run cycle and the jumping action sequence of the spy, Kory's After Effects file got corrupt and he lost a huge chunk of his work.

We were doomed....the whole enthusiasm was gone and it was hard for us to keep going. For the longest time the only one that was working on the project was my brother in Japan. He finished his part fairly quickly and we got the final soundtrack a couple of weeks ago. Nico was not available for 6 weeks and the hope of being able to finish was almost gone.
A week before the deadline I talked to Kory if he is still planning to finish it and he said "YES". So we took advantage of the labor day weekend and started working hardcore. At that time our third character "Thud Thompson" wasn't even modeled yet. That's how hopeless the situation was. 70% of what you are going to see was done within 3 fairly long days. We basically skipped the animatic stage and went straight to final. I animated, lit, and rendered 48 seconds that weekend while Nico was updating the rigs on the fly, fixing skinning problems, modeling and rigging the car etc. Kory was modeling "Thud" and working with the rendered footage I provided. The intro sequence was done by thursday and luckily the deadline got extended so we had enough time to work on the 30sec Trailer and the making of. My brother arranged his soundtrack and created a jazzy version for the making of part. We had tons of fun creating this project and we are also very pleased with the result!
Hope you like it!