SURF'S UP Film Clip

©Columbia Pictures.
By the way, you can view the new second trailer at THIS SITE. Enjoy

Dense Jungle

©2006 Armand Serrano.
I've notice that I've been designing a lot of foliage and organic elements for features in the past six or seven years. As of last month, I'm officially doing visdev on "Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs" for Sony which is slated for 2009. And the first production task I have to do is design two environments heavy on foliage. Why am I not surprised! Anyway, so I've been busy lately with work, at the same time doing the final editing for the music video and finishing up the script for my David and Goliath project on the side. So for now, I'm posting another practice piece which I did last year. I love playing around with foreground elements using them to create another "aspect ratio" for my shot. The intention for this practice is to make the elements graphically designed yet dimentional and not to feel like "cut-outs". Lighting plays a big part as always.

Tonal Sketches for Mulan

©Disney.
My little daughter watches Mulan over and over again and everytime I glance at the TV, I still can't help but watch and enjoy it over again myself. It's such a beautiful movie and brought back a lot of memories and artworks in mind. Seeing some shots that I did, I went through my files and dug up these two artworks what we used to call tonal sketches. Whenever we finished a cleanup layout, we used to include also a smaller composite drawing complete with tonal renderings of both bg and animation pose. This represents how we see the complete layout on the screen and the basis for the background painting. These were done in pencil and grey pantone markers on heavy animation paper ten years ago!