The ol' Imaginary Film

Hello blog! I think it's about time I start filling this section in again about what's been going on now that my website is in a completed state. See it at www.mrseanlane.com!

Also, here's a preview of finished animation for the Imaginary Film short, a sort of music video to a lesser known Blur song:


I will post my concept for this very soon after the jump. I've taken a bit of a break from this short for other projects, but I am dead set on completing this as the animation only gets better (if you're seen the storyboards) as well as more interesting as it goes. There's a great shift in tone that I can't wait to tackle in this piece.

Be sure to click to go to Vimeo to see it at full size!

Healthcare Love Story

Healthcare Love Story from Sean Lane on Vimeo.


Putting up more past animations. This was done a few weeks after the last one I posted, also sometime in 2006. I like the tone of this one, but a lot of the animation gets sort of raggedy on some parts I apparently rushed.

I wish I had kept the backgrounds consistent where they were either scanned and colored beforehand all the way or completely drawn. I guess I wasn't thinking a ton about it.

As far as the character, he doesn't exactly belong in this setting, but he was used for it. It's sort of an everyman 1930s style cartoon character I was using for a while to just mess with animation since it's simplistic. I do have newer art of him in plans to maybe start a comic series with the guy someday, but I doubt I'll be making any shorts involving him for a long time if ever. There's a few other side characters that go with the revamp. I'll probably post the doodles on the blog in the oncoming weeks.

The nurse character was also sort of taken from another comic book concept I have had in my head for five or so years now as a lead character. She's just made into a nurse here. By the time I start getting her created in a comic story fashion, I'm sure she'll look very different. She's already sort of got a much different face. I guess if I ever start making pages, maybe someone will see the similarities.

The doctor... I don't know. I haven't used him before or after since. I am also sort of unsure of what tangent I was going on here with this cartoon, but I liked the tone and that's what I was going for more than everything. I'm sure if I did it all again now, it'd be more impressive and constructed better, but I probably won't go after this same set of characters and plot again. As is, I guess consider it an older experiment.

Ween Bumblebee Pt. 2 Music Video

Ween - Bumblebee Pt. 2 from Sean Lane on Vimeo.


Did this relatively quick in some amount of time for a two week project back in school. I suppose it is a music video for a Ween track, but it's mostly vocals done in a weird yelling and screaming manner, which was the appeal.

I like a lot about this short besides the extremely limited animation, but the stuff you do when you are trying to just quickly finish something and a lot of the backgrounds make me think I should go back to this style of animating one day except maybe a bit more refined.

I see tons of parts I could fix, but I don't know why I should bother since it's done just as dirty as the song, so they suit eachother.

Skullfrogging

So following up on the Halloween digital painting, I went and colored a sketch around the same time of these skull frogs that were in the background. This time, still went completely over the underlying sketch and did not use it for the final piece of art.

Haha, as far as whatever is going on with the picture, I suppose the frog is a magic one and causes hallucinations upon impact with the tongue. Sounds about right.

Enjoy!

Pumpkins 2010

Here's the pumpkins for this year. I didn't carve all of these, I was helped, but all of the patterns are mine. Make a habit every year of making dumb fun pumpkins and then displaying 'em outside on the porch. This year there was a total of six brought for me!

So we've got these blues brothers type ghosts, some angry mushrooms, a vampire ferret, this unhappy worm, a little mouse witch sweeping, and a donkey zombie with a sombrero.

Zombie donkey looked the most amazing from the street.

Happy Halloween!

Here's this digital painting done for Halloween. I was thinking of doing a sort of color over my pencils, but I guess I got carried away and just sort of redid it on top. Really happy with this and my hedgehog wolfman thing.

Here's the pencils:
I changed a few small things because I had actually done this sketch two years ago with some sort of intent to do something, but I forgot. It's fun to notice smalls things in construction and different methods you draw stuff as you advance from drawing more and more over the years.

I've got a new post right here for you.

This was made months back for a forum contest to make the box art for that godawful Dante's Inferno game coming up. I guess this is my take:

And here's the boxed version that will ultimately sell more copies:

Roughs

Hello, I know I said I'd update more often months ago and failed. I've been sort of busy but not actively showing anything, which is bad.

Here's the good part, I'm showing this animatic I've finished for this short "music video" I will finish sometime in the oncoming months. It's for Blur's "Theme from an Imaginary Film" which didn't make it to Parklife.

A friend was telling me showing stuff in progress takes out all of the mystery, but oh well...



It may take a while to load and I hope it's worth it. I'll probably do a few changes on the finished version as I saw things I didn't like so much when visualizing what I would do with the storyboards. I may post some of the original storyboard pages as well, since I cleaned, altered, or cut up a lot of drawings for the animatic.

Time to start on some backgrounds. In the meantime though I may start posting some character concept for this thing as well as a couple of background studies.

This may be a bad idea, but I'm starting by posting some drawings I did in high school. A lot of this stuff shows immaturity apparently, but I often get a kick out of them. I have tons more of this stuff, all done for the most part in spiral lined notebooks, before I started buying proper sketchbooks, which may have been a bad idea. A lot of them are embarrassing or hilariously bad, and I may or may not post more when I gather more confidence, but here's some I still like 5-6 years later.

I'll give you new stuff in the next post, promise!

Most of this junk is just loneliness, as high school tended to be. This guy draped over a bench is inspired from a certain musician I used to listen to and understood all wrong, so it would be ultra obscure to even explain why.

Here's a guy working at a job I never had. It's okay, but I may recycle the idea later into something more grandiose like Winsor McCay may have done.
From what I remember, I did this because I messed up. Just funny looking.
This is kind of a half assed attempt of drawing my what goes on in my head when listening to Goldfrapp's first album, which I often played the year after it came out.
The series below involve this awkwardly designed jester character I would constantly draw. I had all of these great plans to make a comic book about this story I had in mind and the characters revolving around her, but I ultimately shelved it because it was ridiculously ambitious, badly thought through, and naive. Maybe I'll try again some other day when I have a better understanding on what you have to do to make a good involving story. Anyways, this first one kind of sucks, there's a lot of silly anatomical mistakes.
These next two are some of my favorites though. They capture something that's not always easy to do as an artist. I'm not trying to gloat, but I feel good when I look at them, so it must mean something, mistakes included. There was a lot of time spent on these in class when I should have been giving my full attention to learning. I would like to recycle the koala looking character from the first picture for something one day, but his design is too fickle, so I'll have to figure out how to spruce him up and which universe he would actually make sense in. Oh well.

The second one is also Winsor McCay inspired. A lot of my high school work uses elements Winsor McCay used, even though I did not own any Nemo or Winsor McCay collections at the time, mainly because he was not public domain and the Fantagraphics collections were out of the price range of a 16/17 year old with no job or later on minimum wage. I don't think that stuff started being published at a budget until Checker ame along, and now I also have that great Taschen book.

I was enchanted by the movie as a kid though, even though it kind of sucks in terms of writing and some character design, but the animation and atmosphere was top notch, thanks to the meticulous Japanese crew. The rest of that particular influence came from finding one of the Fantagraphics Nemo collections at a book store and deviously flipping through it until I had to leave.

Post Numero Dos minus Uno

I hope I'm doing this right, but here is my first post. Just like every weblog's first post, it will be a throwaway. What I will do here is to show artwork and animation I've done, new and old, for those that may be interested.

Hopefully this will lead to me interacting with other great artists who do these weblog things and having a grand ol' time and whatever that entails.

And here's my throwaway test picture. This was done for a flier, but there is no text. Thanks to "Jaydoubleyou" for the dumb idea.