So Princess and the Frog had it's wide release this past Friday. Right now it sits at just over $27 million. Amanda and I had a really great experience working on the film. We were only working on it for about 3 months over the summer at Yowza Animation, wish it could have lasted longer but we came on really close to the end of the production.
We both learned a lot from doing clean-up. It was kind of a void that we never really went over at school but I'm a lot more comfortable with it now. Even when it comes to animation, I think we picked up a few things here and there that will help us down the road.

Left to Right: Pierre Chiasson, Boris Maras, Claude Chiasson, Amanda Zima, and Roger Chiasson

In total, we worked on about 7 scenes in the movie.Ranging from doing a lot of clean-up inbetweens and breakdowns to scenes that only needed a few clean-up inbetweens. It was fun when we split up scenes and got to collaborate with some Sheridan grads Matt Kalinauskas, Mario Richard and Nick Watson. When the DVD comes out I want to screencap the scenes we worked on and post those too.

Left to Right: Amanda Zima, John Musker, Boris Maras, and Ron Clements

Yeah, so hopefully we can do this again. It was a pleasure working with everyone and there's some extremely talented people working there. I think the movie looks gorgeous. Ron, John, everyone at Disney,and everyone from the partner studios did a marvelous job! Congrats everybody!

Now it's back to working on my graduate short film. It's coming along, I want to get stuff up on the blog soon but more importantly I have to finish some work before the winter break.

So the film is going well I suppose. My new leica is done and it's at a manageable length now. I think it's looking better, but we need a new version for Dec 14th for another screening coming up. So I'll probably post that version instead of the one I have right now.

In the meantime these are some life drawings from the past few classes.

Our leica's were screened at school today, so I guess I'll finally post it on here. I had a small film blog up until now, but I'll keep it here instead, now that it's out in the open anyway. Hopefully this week I'll be doing some workbooks, layouts, and more design work. Unless I end up changing some things in my story here and there. Any feedback on my film so far is appreciated, it'd be good to know if people who haven't seen it find everything clear.

More elephants!

So Amanda and I went to the zoo again yesterday with Ben and Chris. Wasn't as rusty this time around so I did a bit better. The new polar bear exhibit is a lot nicer than it used to be too. They have a pretty big underwater viewing area now, it was awesome being so close to them while they were play-fighting underwater.

Everything below is from life except the elephant in colour. I'm trying to figure out how to anthropomorphize them and make them animatable and expressive.

Also, I should have mentioned that the hunter isn't related to my film. He shan't be hunting elephants anytime soon.

I'm learning to draw elephants, so I found a bunch of pictures online and drew from them. Can you guess what my 4th year film will be about?

Amanda and I have started going to the mall and zoo more, now that school is closing in on us.
I've also decided on an idea for my 4th year film that I'm getting excited about, it's a brand spanking new fresh-outta-my-head idea so I haven't done any drawing for it yet. Soon though...sooon.
Meanwhile here are some more zoo/cafe sketches... Again.

These are some subway sketches and a few misc sketches from a while ago. I do have a few new things for my 4th year film though, but my idea and stuff might change so I'll hold off on those for now. I also put up some screencaps of scenes that I animated for our 3rd year film Hogwild.
Looking back at these scenes now I can really tell how awful my clean-up was, especially because it was so rushed. Amanda and I have been doing some clean-up for Princess and the Frog for the past couple months and I think we've both improved a lot.

And hopefully every week.