I started a new job this past week at one of the two start up companies formed from the Ensemble closure: Robot Entertainment.
The other is Bonfire Studios.
There are tons of talented people at both studios, so wish us the best of luck in future projects!
Here’s a rough logo I animated for WAC-E Animation Studios.
24fps (shot on ones)
running time approx. 10 seconds
This is still a WIP due to the cleanup and color stages.
You can check out a larger version here.
The premise behind NEXT was essentially a fight scene between Super and Baddy, something that I could animate quickly, and leave in the rough stage. With that in mind, I pretty much knew the end result would lack quite a bit of luster: sound, cleanup, color, layout drawings to name a few. But, I’ve been content with that decision allowing me to do exactly what I wanted and needed: to finish.
I came up with the idea of the fight sequence the week that Ensemble’s closure was announced in September. I thought that I wanted to “wow” potential employers when they visit my website. Having the video be on the home page making that the first thing people saw. I was pretty ambitious and wanted to get the animation finished ASAP. Over the next few days I drew large extreme drawings for Super and thumbnails for Baddy for only the fight. (I’ll scan those drawings and post them at a later date.) Utilizing timing charts, I got a rough idea about the timing of the entire animation and each individual action that was going to take place.
After about a week of working on my extreme and thumbnail drawings I was ready to animate, or so I thought. I naively told coworkers that I would finish the animation over the weekend. Lofty goals for someone that had only done a few hand drawn animations over the past three years. When that weekend hit I, for some foolish reason, essentially redrew my extremes starting to tie down the drawings. At the time I thought it would be a good idea to have cleaner extremes and work with rough inbetweens. Needless to say, I wasted my time that weekend and accomplished nothing.
Somewhere between that weekend in September and January, I drew Super’s extremes into the computer. That would be the last time I touched the short until January.
So, fast forward a few months to January, and I finally start animating full-time, on average 6-7 hours a day four days a week. For the fourth time, I redrew my Super extremes, and drew my Baddy extremes into the computer. From there, I pretty much ignored my timing charts and animated straight ahead (within the extreme poses). For the most part I knew where I was going, but that didn’t stop larger or smaller drawings from cropping up: straight ahead animation can be tricky.
Somewhere along the line, I realized that the short needed a little story. Animating a fight scene that has no purpose to it can only be so fulfilling; so, I can only imagine how boring it would be to watch the fight without even an inkling of story or characters. Initially, I was going to have the fight scene loop: Baddy would get vaporized into some sort of smoke cloud, reform, and it would start all over again. Though this was in the planning from the start, I hadn’t actually thought about how I would animate the smoke. Since I don’t consider myself an amazing effects animator, I promptly ditched the smoke idea. This is where I came up with the idea for Super to say “Next!” at the end of the fight.
My mind started rolling, and I came up with an idea of fallen enemies in the background. But, I didn’t want to do a background layout drawing. Then the line formed (pun intended) for the first shot. A bunch of baddies waiting in line to get a crack at Super. It was a gamble: pay some cashola, and if you beat Super, you reap the huge rewards. Then Wes Boddie, a brilliant story man who always comes through, thought of the end where all the Baddies scatter after they witness the biggest baddest being vaporized with ease. But there’s still one left peeing his pants, while the booth attendant motions; insinuating that he’s next to fight.
About a month and a half later, I’m done. The drawings are terribly crude, there is no sound or layout drawings, but I want to move on. I set a finite goal with what I consider smart limitations, and I feel as though I accomplished everything I set out to do. As unpolished as this short is I feel happy knowing that it’s complete. I hope you enjoy my little rough animation!
Here are some specs:
12fps (shot on ones)
580×247 highest resolution
running time 1m26s
Visit my website, chuck-o-rama to see the full resolution version!
Halo Wars really is quite a spectacular RTS game. First and foremost: the game was made solely for the Xbox 360 console and controller. Some may question whether or not this was a good decision and if the RTS will hold up without a mouse and keyboard. I can easily assure everyone that Halo Wars will dazzle you with how easy the control scheme is to grasp and use in large battle epic warfare. The controls are simple and intuitive allowing for split second instinctual decisions to be made quickly. They are not laborious controls, but uncomplicated by design. Which will leave you wondering why no other console RTS made inherently mouse and keyboard tasks so basic to accomplish with a controller. All console RTS games will copy the Halo Wars control scheme for years. It’s The Matrix of the console RTS scene.
Like any good Halo game, the core gameplay is extremely combat oriented. Players of any skill and caliber will be able to field an army, starting fast paced battles almost instantaneously. How you manage that army and react to your opponent is part of the strategic nature of any good RTS. The supply gathering is simple allowing for more devotion to the all encompassing stellar combat. Create a supply pad at your base to generate supplies; then supplies will be shipped in from the Spirit of Fire (your command ship orbiting the planet). This allows for minimal interaction with “supply gathering”; something that becomes a chore and distraction from what is really on the Halo players’ mind: high impact warfare, of which Halo Wars has plenty.
The game oozes Halo in a beautiful fashion. As an artist (and having worked on the game) I can say with full confidence that Halo Wars is an amazing piece of art. To put it simply, the game is gorgeous. The art will tell your eyes, to tell your mouth, to drool. A grunt feels like a grunt, and an elite is an elite, and the Spartans will live up to the reputation bestowed upon it by the famous Master Chief. Everything looks, moves, sounds, and feels like their counterparts in other Halo games; it perfectly matches and fits within the universe. If you’ve never played a Halo game, then Halo Wars would be the perfect starting point setting 20 years before the events in the first game, Halo: Combat Evolved. The story is amazing and excellently well told. I envision many sleepless nights for excited anxious gamers. Playing through the stellar campaign missions, pushing forward wanting to see what happens next in the storyline.
If anyone still doesn’t believe me about how great Halo Wars is, then here is a list of great aspects from the game that I haven’t touched upon:
Fantastic Co-op missions up to 2 players,
Skirmish mode versus amazing Ai,
Live multiplayer,
Play as the malevolent Covenant in skirmish and Xbox Live,
more exciting features that I cannot mention!
As stated in the title, if you have a Xbox Live Gold account you can download the demo tomorrow Feb. 5th! So there’s practically no wait for you, go experience a portion of the game for yourself. That will convince anyone of the greatness of Halo Wars.
Here’s a link to some Halo Wars information straight from Xbox.com. Included is a description about the demo and some documentary videos on the game.
Halo Wars | Official Site
Halo Wars | Community Site
Go out and enjoy Halo Wars!
Ensemble Studios’ last day finally arrived, and I was sad to see it come. We were informed early September that the studio would be shuttered after Halo Wars wraps. It was a definite surreal situation: working on a project through “regular” days for the next four months, knowing that it’s completion will ultimately bring about the studio’s closure.
January ushered in a new state of mind. With work tapering off for most, the reality of the situation began to seep in: Ensemble Studios will shut down. It was a sobering time. But Ensemble was not what Microsoft made of it: a closed studio. It was it’s people, it’s projects, and it’s motto.
The people are great, passionate, talented, and fun. It was a pleasure to become a colleague and friend to these amazing individuals. God willing, everyone will go on to do fantastic work, and I wish them all the best of luck doing so.
I only had the pleasure to be apart of two projects: Age of Empires III: The War Chiefs, and Halo Wars. Age of Empires was the bread and butter to the studio and rightfully so. The Age series of games are amongst the highest rated and grossing of all time. Halo Wars will undoubtedly join that lot in the record books. It is a fantastic game and I see it being able to surpass and easily living up to the hype.
Making great games in a great work environment truly was the motto of the studio. This was a remarkable aspect of Ensemble and its managing staff. They laid the ground work for making Ensemble a fun place to work while producing fun and exciting products. I commend them for adhering to the motto when times were wary.
I thank God for my time at Ensemble, and I pray and hope everyone moves on to an equivalent endeavor.
Thanks for the great years Ensemble: the friends, the games, the atmosphere!
I’ll use the city scene twice. Once as an establishing shot, and next when Super flies out of the building to divert the meteor. Here he is flying out.
It’s not exactly a model sheet, just a conceptual guide for me to follow. Which is why I didn’t make it as perfect as possible, leading to inconsistencies between each angle. Nonetheless, I like each one and I’ll bring them together later.
I finished the line drawing for this image roughly a month and a half ago when work started the first of three sets of major crunch. Now, that I’m in the last week of the second leg of crunch, I took some time to scan in and color the drawing. I am certain that my wife is having much more fun at home with the dogs than I am at work. The drawing proves it!
The pizzeria.
The wait.
L’antica Pizzeria da Michele houses the best pizza in the world! Kathleen and I went to Italy on our honeymoon, and, via train, on our way to Sorrento from Rome we had a stop over in Naples. We knew we were going to go to Pizzeria da Michele because of a book Kathleen read not too long before our wedding called Eat, Pray, Love. Here’s an exert from the book:
“. . . before I left Rome he gave me the name of a pizzeria in Naples that I had to try, because, Giovanni informed me, it sold the best pizza in Naples. I found this a wildly exciting prospect, given that the best pizza in Italy is from Naples, and the best pizza in the world is from Italy, which means that this pizzeria must offer . . . I’m almost too superstitious to say it . . . the best pizza in the world? Giovanni passed along the name of the place with such seriousness and intensity, I almost felt I was being inducted into a secret society. He pressed the address into the palm of my hand and said, in gravest confidense, ‘Please go to this pizzeria. Order the margherita pizza with double mozzarella. If you do not eat this pizza when you are in Naples, please lie to me later and tell me that you did.’
So Sofie and I have come to Pizzeria da Michele, and these pies we have just ordered–one for each of us–are making us lose our minds. I love my pizza so much, in fact, that I have come to believe in my delirium that my pizza might actually love me, in return. I am having a relationship with this pizza, almost an affair. Meanwhile, Sofie is practically in tears over hers, she’s having a metaphysical crisis about it, she’s begging me, ‘Why do they even bother trying to make pizza in Stockholm? Why do we even bother eating food at all in Stockholm? . . .
It goes on, but suffice to say Elizabeth Gilbert, the author, is absolutely correct. Pizzeria da Michele offers the BEST pizza in the entire world. So much so, in fact, that if I never eat another pizza again for the rest of my life I will be satisfied. For the margherita double cheese has ruined all other pizza for us, never again will any other pizza leave me appeased. Only feelings of discontent will be had.
A side and funny note: I thought I had tasted the best pizza in the entire world in Rome. No way did I think any other place could top Rome’s pizza. I’m glad to say I was completely wrong! The sad part of this note is that Rome’s pizza was infinitely better than any pizza I had ever tasted up until that point in my life (almost 27 years of eating pizza). So Rome’s pizza trumps anything from anywhere (US included) and Pizzeria da Michele is boundlessly better than Rome’s pizza. Nothing dares to come close. Pizzeria da Michele, I salute you and swoon after your margherita!
Here are some videos of me trying to explain about the pizzeria and the pizza. Take note that the background noise is pretty loud, so you have to listen carefully to what I’m saying. (Recorded 2008 June 4)
