The ARMSmasters Project

Wrapping the Characters Up

2012-02-29T13:27:00.006-08:00

First I want to thank everyone for their kind words and acknowledgements regarding the personal losses in my family. I appreciated the private notes and the posts on this blog. Thank you all -so- much.

And a quick post to end the month of Feb. on - Going into March we'll be going into our small workspace and be moving in high gear on finishing up some immediate goals for ARMSmasters. The first major set of goals , as mentioned before, are The Pitch Bible, Kickstarter, Finishing the Animatic (and some rough animation shots) with the greater short is being targeted for this summer.

Recently I sat down and nailed final looks for Caen and Collette. Caen (our current placeholder name for Deacon which itself was a placeholder name) has undergone a really interesting journey that reflects the overall evolution of the story of ARMSmasters. Originally "Deacon" was a rival of Riot's in the military structure they were part of and one of Riot's early motivations was to find out why his friend had betrayed the system they once protected. An earlier character named Iatros fit into this picture as well as a liason for the military organixaton "Deacon" had become part of.

Fast forwarding a bit, as the characters, story and world became more fleshed out so did Deacon, ultimately necessitating a rename and a gradual merger of Iatros and Deacon into a single character who was also made the brother of Aeslyn - granting her additional motivation and turning Riot into an outsider being drawn into this ancient cyclical family conflict revolving around Caen's ambitions to restore his displaced peoples lineage. This reflects back to an even -older- version of the story ... before it was even called ARMSmasters, where the 'Riot' characters rival and main villain was a Beastman fighting for equality for his misused people.

In this sense Caen gradually transformed from a military officer to being a type of warrior prince and a man of noble blood but burning and soon out of control ambition. He's still part of the military structure of the ARMSmasters world but exists socially on a level above most of the other characters. Color wise we'd toyed alot with different versions of the character and played with dominate whites and blue's and golds. For this initial final pass I decided to try a flat base of red's, grey's and golds - Red being a heroic color in Japan and Caen seeing himself as the hero. Now the color scheme might be a little too close to Riot's for my tastes at the moment so more playing around has yet to be done but that we've gotten this far is wonderful and i think we have a good merging of older ideas with Van Andy's passes.

Collette was always more or less firmly good to go from Van Andy's original designs of the young adventurous girl and then Mel's follow up touch ups to make that vision a little more animated So again this final version is a merger of those earlier visions. Ironically Collette has been featured twice in poster format but her full body image had only just now been dealt with and I believe I'm happy.

The addition of these characters rounds out the initial first-stage cast of characters for ARMSmasters. Enough that the Pitch Bible can be completed and a little more but this isn't the -entire- cast by any stretch, not even including characters that are just one offs for a few episodes or stories. Just thinking back over this blog itself we've discussed Sekaida and her Sky Pirates, The High Artificer and Minister Seth, Iatros and Freya and others. Caen himself has a growing list of developing underlings and villains and the unfolding of the big picture is revealing characters from the ancient past and the ultimate future of the setting. But we've got to start somewhere and that somewhere is this base which will carry us far and hopefully into the stages of getting support to actually properly tackle them and their comrades.

Although Caen and Collette are still in flat color stage I've added them into the lineup along with other missing characters to get a good big picture view of everyone's sizes. One notable adjustment is that Braun and Tyr have switched places with Braun being considerably larger now. This is because Braun is now a war-shifter - a type of Beastman that goes from a more human size (around Rune's height) to this giant bruiser somewhere around eight and a half feet tall. Making him larger then Tyr not only reflects the early animatic we did of him and Tyr fighting but gives Tyr more of a visual contrast with him.

Picking Back Up Again

2012-02-22T11:44:00.000-08:00

Hello Crew and Fans!

This month has been a little on the slow side production wise and blog wise due to several major happenings, two of which were back to back deaths in the immediate family of yours truly which impacted non ARMSmasters related production schedules as well as this one. Unexpected happenings can throw things off when you're a big crew but when you're a small house of dedicated friends and partners, a big events can naturally be a major seismic disturbance where the big picture is concerned. As we settle back into normalcy and begin to pick up the pieces and the pace again I thought I would share where we currently stand due to rescheduling needs.

The final animatic for our pilot is still in production. All the voice retakes I feel I need at this time are done and a good chunk of the second half of the animatic is done. For the first half we're just working to make sure it's as exciting as it can be and doubly so for the second.

Because animatic production has slowed down we won't be aiming to have the completed short by Motor City Con and will instead be aiming at summer festivals and following deadlines as well as Kickstarter fund raising and related efforts. Our Pitch Bible is in full production as well as an artbook (more on that to come!)

In early stages is planning for a web comic of a few pages just to add to our arsenal and also to get the idea out there in front of more people. It will serve as an additional prelude. More on -that- later as well. :)

For the most part storyboarding has been my job and fallen to my shoulders with pitching in by Mel Miller and Patrick Stannard and some layouts by Van Andy Prevalus. I thought it'd be good to end this post with some storyboard shots from the work in progress short film.

The central theme of the pilot deals with introducing audiences to the world themes present in ARMSmasters and setting the stage for the characters themselves and the rules of the world that those characters inhabit. It recounts for us the story of Mana - the limitless energy source that is enabling humanity to live in this sort of apex industrial-magical civilization.

The various characters who populate the ARMSmasters universe are given brief moments to shine and create emphasis on what or narrator, Aeslyn, is describing to us as if she's telling the story over a campfire or next to a fireplace. As the story shifts in tone we see the introduction of these characters such as Braun (in human form) and Rune, here getting ready to have a not so peaceful moment. I tend to keep my background layouts fairly rough aside from maybe initial layout passes, to focus on characters but these guys are in a large tavern.

The 'Second Half' of the pilot focuses more centrally on our bounty hunting team of irregulars; Riot, Inari and Tyr, in a sort of 'day in the life' of adventure where we get a closer look at the characters, relationships and challenges these characters encounter in the world of The ARMSmasters Project. This part was particularly engaging and challenging for us to both script and board and we can't wait to share more completed images and shots with you all.

Weapons and Armaments

2012-02-04T00:13:00.000-08:00

Posts are going to be slowish for the next week or so as we get over some hurdles. But here is something to wet your whistle, for the time being.

The eponymous ARMs of the ARMSmasters Project, refers to extremely powerful magic engines, usually weaponized, that amplify the fighting capabilities and magic powers of those who possess them by an exponential amount compared to those who lack them. ARM may also refer to a process by which humanform ARMs are created but more on that later.

It takes a certain level of power to be capable of handling an ARM to begin with - some individuals possess so much raging internal energy that it takes an ARM for them to even effecively use their abilities as they'll break other assorted artifacts.

From the beginning the ARMs were considered central to the story which dealt with the battles and conspiracies enveloping these miniature weapons of war and mass destruction and the technology around them and those able to wield and control them. The general look and feel would guide the development of weapons and gear for the entire series and so the titular ARMs needed to have a very cool look and express themselves properly.

Our main composite guy, Niles, is an outstanding artist in his own right and is particularly talented in technical drawings and designs. Early on he tackled doing weapon designs for the series as an example of creative action-fantasy weapons that could appear and be utilized. Our goal was to actually use limited 3d animation for rigid unliving things like weapons, and to stylize further beyond that as the animation needed.

Riot's own sword, Vermilion, under went several design revisions until we settled on this rough one, based on an early design I had done - affectionately labeled in production notes as Mr. Smackey.

Tyr's hammer, Myllonir (inspired by Thor's hammer Mjolnir but the actual name is a reference to a Capcom game. See if you can figure it out, you purists.. :D)) had a more stable design throughout its journey and is firmly represented in final form now.

More to come very soon!

Fan Art Interlude - KONGOOUU

2012-01-25T20:56:00.000-08:00

It's a real treat for me to receive gift art and interpretations of the characters of ARMSmasters be it from members of our crew deliberately drawing them in their own style - to friends gained across the net. For one it lets me know that these characters are being well received by those who come across them and for another, as an artist, I just love seeing different stylistic takes on our iconics. Kongou in particular is somewhat popular. People just love the bigness and I've been told he's just really fun to draw (despite my own frustrations with him, hah.) So I really love and appreciate those who do draw him and this particular image is just alot of fun. A talented hobbyist by the name of Gary Pope who has a really fun deviant art gallery at http://hulkdaddyg.deviantart.com/ did this image up for me and really digs the character. Thank you!

More updates to come soon, especially after this weekend where we hope to hit some milestones in our development.

Planning the Action

2012-01-16T11:31:00.000-08:00

Well the brief technical delay is over and in the middle of scrambling to regain ground on this project and a couple of others, I wanted to take a brief moment to share some more sketches with you all.

At present, as said before, the first half of the short film is complete in animatic form and now we're able to diligently edit together the second half, work on boards, determine where we need our wonderful actors to do some re-reads or where script rewrites might be necessary and barrel ahead on developing a final schedule. Whew.

Part of the ARMSmasters premise is a focus on really stylized, hyper fun and high energy action pieces. Each 'episode' would feature a capstone action segment that would be creative, high powered, intense and a showcase moment for characters, story and animators. Powerful, creative and extreme posing would be part of this as well as great choreography and creative scenarios. For the most part the inspiration for this comes more from games and anime then it does how action is often handled in strictly western animated production s- although these days a synthesis of the two aesthetics is more and more apparent in animation as audiences are expecting more out of their shows. In particular for ARMSmasters, study of great japanese animators like Yutaka Nakamura, You Yoshinari, Hironori Tanaka among others who are masters of stylized action, use of camera, timing and tricks to get the most out of limited animation, were all necessary.

Our ideas are to try and capture that same kinetic energy and sense of posing and pacing as seen in great action sequences from classic animes and modern offerings such as what's been done in Capcom's Sengoku Basara offerings or the dynamic action from Full Metal Alchemist. We also strive to pay homage to the great cinematic action adventure games out there such as Devil May Cry and fighting games such as the Street Fighter series or more recently BlazBlue.

The above are some pose studies of Caen - our primary antagonist for the first story arc and an evolved Deacon. Attempting to find a sense of style and energy for him has been quite important as for awhile the leading premise was that he would wield a great double bladed weapon of some sort that could configure itself into different forms. His particular fighting stance and pose direction and silohette would be quite different from Riot's epic swordsman as a result and yet he'd also be able to compete as a swordsman on Riot's own level with the single blade.

Process Image

2012-01-08T10:04:00.000-08:00

At my request, Mel Miller comes to the rescue again and constructs this single image showing our process for the previous poster. I decided to leave the other post up as it has the different stages as separated scanned images but this version with them all together is wonderfully ideal for posting in various places across the net and allows for clearer study of the process. Thanks Mel!

The ARMSmasters Iconics - Process

2012-01-07T05:34:00.001-08:00

Poster 002 of about 4 I want to do (haha, not that I'm trying to run poor Mel into the ground. I've a few of my own underway!) is done! And Mel, once again, did an absolutely -fantastic- job. This poster features the characters I refer to as the Iconics or the Main Characters. They are our center piece gang in a growing cast of characters. They all come from different nationalities, walks of life and creeds and in some cases don't begin on the same side, as the story begins and progresses - but they serve as our anchors and view portals into a world filled with other colorful characters who serve as their peers, allies and foes.

Our plan overall is to produce several prints for promotional purposes, Kickstarter Incentives and to also have as fund raising materials. For Kickstarter one of our incentives will be a choice of a signed print and for that to happen we do need to get a few prints under our belt so as to make the option a fair and viable one. On top of that having these guys to fund raise with is going to be rather helpful and another print or two should do the job.

This was a fantastic piece to work on with Mel and Van Andy. I thought, in addition to posting the Finished Piece, I'd also show stages we went through for this poster. I had been working on a new image that I wanted to use as another print and possibly a cover image or the Pitch Bible and the Artbook. Van Andy made a marvelous rough layout design and submitted it. I bought into the concept almost immediatly and Mel stepped up right away to want to do the finish on it.

From Van Andy's Rough I developed a more finished rough piece which I then took a step further and tied down -almost- to clean up stage. I'm only showing two of my rough passes. I actually did about three of our passes and juggles to find the best poses and positioning of the characters. Riot himself was drawn on a separate piece of paper and went through several revisions at my hands long before Mel received a final rough to take over from.

At that point Mel Miller took my tie down and a clean up pass and then did the color flats and then finally her added touch of lights and shadows and filters which can be seen at the top of this post.

Happy...er..LATE..New Year!

2012-01-04T13:49:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the delay folks! I had intended to do a New Years post and message but a calamity struck yours truly in the form of a hard drive failure right on the cusp of New Years Eve. As we speak I'm working on an older system with Ubuntu installed and I'd frankly just as soon move right to it if it only had Adobe products running for it. Oh well! A new system is en route and although some personal scheduling set backs occurred for ARMSmasters, we're jumping back into production gear this upcoming week. Let's kick this post off with some more neat development art by the mega talented Van-Andy Prevalus.

Some quick things that are underway:

I've begun reconstruction of the series pitch bible and setting document as this year we're going to be hitting the pitch campaign via elements like Kickstarter and other contacts we have.

All of our major voice actors are in and voices are done and ready for editting! Furthermore the first half of our short film has been fully storyboarded and exists in animatic form. This section is the opening narrative done by Aeslyn, voiced by the esteemed Ashley Sahler.

We're in process of timing and editing the second half which features the rest of our wonderful cast and that part is already being storyboarded. Here are some awesome sample boards done by the talented Miss Mel Miller, featuring a segment of that portion of the short film.

It's going to be a blast doing this and sharing the final results with you all. Mel's also been grinding with us and working hard on finishing up the second of our promo pieces that we intend to have ready to sell in print form to campaign and promote this series. The teaser images are rather fun to look upon.

There's so much that I want to share with you all but I'm going to try and tone down the mega-posts and instead get into the habit of doing more frequent smaller posts as we cover more story details and progress on the short film and the series development at large. I hope to be able to give more insight into this process as we continue to move ahead. Can't reveal all that we're doing though! We need to leave some surprises here and there.

Expect more posts soon as we play catch up!

Class Roles - Populating the World

2011-12-24T04:25:00.000-08:00

One of our conceptual goals was to populate this world with individuals as we have several shots that call for crowd scenes with vivid, interesting and colorful characters.

Exploration of this was and is very intriguing as it brought us back to exploring elements of the core foundation of the ARMSmasters world. We knew what inspired the setting and what tropes it drew from but we also need to be able to expound on how those elements fit into ARMSmasters own unique voice and setting.

What was found was that there were in essence three visual guides and principles for how we were going to approach the denizens of the world. Overall ARMSmasters world is a parallel of our own with similar cultural motifs and a sense of racial diversity but there is also a 'core' ARMSmasters setting that sets the stage and establishes the basic tone that the rest of the world emerges out of. This core setting could be best described as a type of idealized future-fantasy European society and we split the denizens based on wealth and position in society.

Poor:
Poorer class characters were intended to have a more rustic frontier look. They would be uncomplicated aside from external gear - a big design trope is to show the materials these characters use to survive - but their garments would by and large be more utilitarian then showy. A type of western, frontier dweller aesthetic is the driving principle here. These are our explorers, miners, people who live on the outskirts and fringe of civilization, settlers and so forth. Belts, zippers, buckles and so forth are also common and part of the visual cues. Tug is a good lower-class character even though in the story he's well off he's just junky. He carries his belonging on his back, is dressed comfortably and loosely without much by way of extra layers. Kongou and Braun also dress more lower class. More simple, utilitarian, bare foot, sandles, etc.

Middle:
Middle class provides the root for what is the driving visual look for ARMSmasters. Here we enter the more future-fantasy realm with a very Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy driven aesthetic. Layered clothers with jackets, gloves, belts, buttons, zippers and the look are common. Large boots, head gear and a fantasy steam-punk look tempered by more high fantasy elements. Knights in armor would exist but the armor would be fancier and larger then life. Outward accessories are less obvious here but the characters tend to be much more colorful. Riot, Colette and Inari are good 'middle class' characters with Inari being more upper middle class. Here we have jackets, gloves, colorful clothes, denim, light armor and light accessories.

Upper/Military:
Upper class and the ruling government and military characters are the ones that veer the closest to, say, Star Wars (prequels in particular) in terms of dress with a dash of Renaissance and Victorian age pomp and circumstance. The guiding visual aesthetic is still very Kingdom Hearts, very Final fantasy, very futuristic fantasy but we have more room here to get elaborate with robes, armor, costuming, accessories, and the like. Of the main casts -finished- designs, Aeslyn straddles the border of middle and upper but sits closer to middle with what we've revealed as this is her adventuring costume. She's sort of the 'I'm a noblewoman pretending to be an adventurer. This is what adventurers wear, right?' in personality as of the start of the story before she gets more experienced. Her brother, Caen (the renamed Deacon), is more military and more refined. Minister Seth is another character who sits in the upper class tier.

Througout this post I've sprinkled some of our designs. We've had different voices take a stab at doing sketches and rough designs. Patrick Stannard, Mel Miller and yours truly, are the ones in this particular post. Mel's designs show a great blend of modern fantasy and more traditional fantasy elements. Patrick brings a Star Wars and steam punk influence to the table. It's good to have different voices speaking when you're questing for populating a world that itself would be diverse and epic in scope. We all tackled a mix of characters so each sheet doesn't represent a single class as much as our thoughts on how different personalities and class levels might represent themselves in our world. Enjoy!

That Needed Sound

2011-12-20T09:05:00.000-08:00

Well the month of December is almost over! Wow. Time has flown. A little less then two weeks remains with this Sunday being Christmas and seven days later we'll be in 2012!

2012 promises to be a very exciting and active year for AO Animation Design and The ARMSmasters project in particular. I plan to get us onto Kickstarter in the month of Jan. and there are other things in the works I'm not at liberty to or ready to discuss in detail publically yet. Needless to say 2012 will be the year that this project comes forth in a big way with the previous passage of time being a great learning process. This isnt' to say we won't still be learning things because we have much to learn - but we wouldn't be where we are now if we didn't trust God, and the process. The story wouldn't be where it is, our characters, industry contacts, team members and more, if we had of jumped the gun and made hasty choices.

Stage Zero: So now that we're this far along - lets introduce the short film properly, currently tentatively titled 'Stage Zero'.

Stage Zero is the prelude teaser film for ARMSmasters and serves as the introduction to the world. Told through the eyes of the lead heroine, Aeslyn, Stage Zero recounts, in brief, the history of the world of Gaia and capstones it with an adventure undertaken by thre eof the other heroic characters: Riot, Inari and Tyr, as an introduction to the type of adventures that occur in the ARMSmasters world.

It is our goal to have Stage Zero debut at the Motor City Comic Con in 2012, and furthermore target film festivals in the last half of 2012 and additional promotional events. It will be submitted to film festivals, development groups, investors and distribution partners for online viewing and will lead into a longer term episodic web series.

Voice Actors:
I can proudly say: We have all four voice actors needed for our script. We were blessed to make contact with some wonderful professional voice actors who were willing to lend their talents to this project and who believe in our efforts and our characters and furthermore we received contact from a number of different people and actually had the opportuity to have our pick of a growing talent pool of different voices who wanted to be involved and even still want to remain on standby for future voices and additional sounds. Thank you guys!

As to the final four we went with, we hope that their involvement will further their own professional endeavours so please feel free to reach out to them with projects of your own!

Scott Smith - "Riot": Scott Smith was referred to us by Dana Corrigan of Fate Saga, another developing and wonderful action-fantasy series that is progressing quite well. He will be voicing Riot. Scott's voice has wonderful range, humor and energy and we can't wait to start getting some voiced animation posted of Riot. Scott Smith

Ashley Sahler - Aeslyn: Ashley was referred to us by Scott Smith and is another talented voice actress with a wonderful voice, attitude, spirit and work ethic. Ashley tackled Aeslyn for us and brings life to that character. Check out her site and reel at her home page: Ashley Sahler

Shondalia White - Inari: Shondalia White is an amazing talent with her creative energy and wonderful spirit in a number of different creative projects from improv work to live performance to her voice over work. She brings amazing warmth, energy and experience to this role. Please check her out at: Shondalia Smiles

Diallo Johnson - Tyr: A great guy with a powerful voice, amazing sense of humor and great musical talent as well, we were extremely fortunate and blessed to have Diallo join us and bring Tyr's subtle nuances and sense of humor to life. Tyr is a very fun and popular character and we're looking forward to seeing him come alive under Diallo's care on this and future projects. Take a listen for yourself at his site: Voice of Truth

By the first part of next week we should have all of our voices. As for the other parts of pre production - stay tuned as this post has gone on for long enough. :)

Pre Production Afoot!

2011-12-09T15:18:00.000-08:00

One of the thrilling parts about bringing this world to life has been the new contacts and relationships being built and new opportunities that have begun to emerge. We've made contact with some amazing talent that reached out to us with interest in helping us to bring this animation to life and it's a great feeling and a great sense of progression and momentum to actually begin to -hear- the characters come to life as well as see them in motion. Animation as a medium is audio as well as visual and finding the right voices to fit our characters and taking on the role of director has been a fantastic learning process.

Right now we have all four major characters cast with some of the voice actors in the process of recording their lines even as this post is being done. Others will likely get theirs down around the end of the holiday season but by the start of 2012 we should have not only the script fully done but be on our way to a working animatic and with rough animation also in progress. Times are looking good and we're very excited.

In the meantime pre-production and final artistic efforts remain in progress! We're busy bringing additional life to the world and those within it while also gleaning further insight about our characters in the process. While we're at it I thought I'd post up some additional line work by our awesome Mel Miller as well as some updated production sheets. Thanks for coming through!

Poster 002 Line Art Finished

2011-11-30T21:51:00.000-08:00

Wonderful work by our Mel Miller once again. I'll let the image speak for itself. It's great being able to collaborate with such wonderful people as we prepare content for Kickstarter, Convention appearances and more. Thank you team!

Remastered Aeslyn and Other Assortments

2011-11-28T18:13:00.001-08:00

We have MUCH on our plate where development of this short film is concerned. :) I want to continue to use the blog to not only share details about the world but to chronicle our film making efforts. Soon we're going to be counting down to getting onto Kickstarter this coming Jan. and we've got alot to be excited about but alot that's also going to exhaust us between this and our 'day' jobs.

The checklist for pre production is extensive but underway. Our world calls for denizens to populate it. Citizens, thugs, evidence of the myth, magic and mystery and so forth. Patrick Stannard sent me a batch of amazing visual development sketches over the weekend. The above are some of my favorites and reflect some of the world direction for ARMS.

Because we de-aged Aeslyn I decided to try and tackle close ups of her face again reflective of the new direction and the costume change. I'd like to think I had some marginal success in brightening her up some while also keeping the basic structure and design we settled on long ago. She looks a little crazed in one or two of these shots but expressive range is good as it gives a sense for how flexible the features are and Aeslyn is a very classic, classy, iconic 'look so knowing how she emotes is important.

More to come soon!

Work In Progress

2011-11-16T09:52:00.000-08:00

We're moving along at a brisk pace now. Voice Actors, Scripts, and final phase character and concept art are all under way. It's been great fun and energizing as it goes a long way towards making the project more alive.

This post is just a brief one. we're working on another poster print and I have plans for additional promo art beyond that which I'll be tackling. The esteemed Mel Miller will be applying her polish to this and the rest of the poster in due time.

In other news I'm very proud to hear that Fate Saga, one of our peers projects has been picked up for online distribution. Congratulations to Dana and her crew! This is exactly the sort of thing that we're aiming for with ARMs and it's nice to know that the process works and good work can get recognized. Check out Fate Saga at http://fatesagathesis.blogspot.com/

Stay tuned for website updates in a major way!

Color Lineups Continued!

2011-11-07T13:49:00.000-08:00

It's refreshing and energizing to be able to maintain this momentum and push ahead towards creating the short film. I'm very pleased to finally get final lines and designs for these guys. If you've been following this blog since we opened it up and have seen our posting of design progressions then you should see the 'story' that has been told regarding the crafting and creation of the ARMSmasters world.

Kongou I wrestled with for awhile because I wanted to make sure I wasn't settling - and so I went back and forth over tweaking his proportions, playing with his costume and face, even trying a beard out. In the end I altered his face only just a little (hard to tell here I know but it'll be more evident in the headshots relevant to his older head shots.) and kept his proportions the same. People have such a positive and amusing reaction to Kongou so there ended up being really no need to change his size and shape. Instead we incorporated some designs that were done before regarding his arm guards and popped the colors a little bit more and now I can safely say he's quite cool and quite finished.

Tyr and Riot may have been done before but we decided I needed to do a tiedown pass of my own just to make sure they were stylistically all on point. Riot I ended up doing little change to. On his back his the holster that Vermilion, his ArM, will be slipped into when he's carrying it. I brought his head size down -just- a touch from the last pass. Not to much. His proportions are still in line with the Final Fantasy iconic look.

Same with Tyr. Minimum changes just a pass to add my own line art touches so that we weren't losing anything in translation although the earlier post Mel did of Tyr shows just how on target she was in doing clean up on my lines and even this new pass is still reflective of her efforts. Finally Braun. Braun's proportions were altered in that the rough flats of him mainly had his feet too oversized and some costume elements I didn't care for. His feet are still massive but not nearly as they were. His nose is more leonine like now and he's fully shaded giving a sense of his form.

Ironically this is basically a line up with the drawings at the size they were relative to each other. The above image is the one with them scaled and Aeslyn added for reference. Tyr and Braun are both actually significantly taller then Riot and Kongou larger still so his head size is relative to their own but for this 'presentation pass' we don't want the pages to have huge negative space to deal with.

Refreshing Momentum

2011-10-31T12:33:00.000-07:00

The wonderful Mel Miller has once more touched my line art with her magic and we have a final color pass on Rune, an updated Inari, reflecting her new position in the updated story as manager and owner of the trouble shooting bounty hunting team; Team Arcadia, - an updated Aeslyn who is younger now then her original version being 17ish to 18ish here. and a new addition to the lineup, Tug - a Junkyard Mechanic who is one of the supporting cast members, a member off the Veilfolk (a broad category that includes all of the hidden 'magical' races in the world - elves, dwarves, giants etc.) and old partner of Tyr. Currently he is the chief mechanic of Odyssey - the rival guild to Team Arcadia and the current top ranking guild - basically a group of celebrity soldiers. It was pointed out to me that Tug is 'Gut' backwards - so there ya go.

Speaking of that new storyline:

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LOGLINE: A young warrior is challenged to mature from being a reckless thrill seeker to understanding the meanings of true heroism, and while doing so master the secrets of legendary weapons in defense of his war torn world.

SYNOPSIS: The group of hunters known as Team Arcadia have seen better days. As a business they are perpetually under funded, in debt and bottom rung in a competitive system that pits them against more powerful groups for high paying troubleshooting jobs and prestige. They are often their own worst enemy with the thrill seeking, reckless and often times disasterous antics of their newest member, 'Riot', being one of the biggest culprits. Riot racks up high damage insurance costs that overshadow their exploits and earnings. All of this seems poised to change when one of their biggest debt holders conscripts them to peform a mission that could catapult their status higher and wipe the slate clean of many of their dets. This mission is to escort a beautiful noblewoman from her native home back to their own city. By accepting the job they are soon catapulted into a world of ancient mysteries, grand conspiracy and legendary magic and technology that concerns the very origin of their civilization and its ultimate destiny.

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The above is the work in progress synopsis and logline for the revised and stronger ARMSmasters story treatment. (The story and character page has not yet been revised to reflect this yet but it will be.)

This past August and Sept. I had a great opportunity to really dive into the meat of the original plot and get some really great feedback and critique on where we were going. Inspiration struck and after some development a new framework began to make itself known to us, leading to changes in the character lineup and our long term vision for ARMSmasters.

In other news the first and second passes on the short film script are finally complete and I couldn't be more pleased. They need a little more needling but by the end of this week we will have something that we can confidently begin storyboarding even if there are some minor dialog adjustments going forward.

Thanks for your continued support! I can never stop saying or stressing that enough.

Eureka 7 Style

2011-10-21T20:22:00.000-07:00

Earlier on this blog I had posted a WIP of ARMSmasters as if it were a music video or an opening from an anime. At first I was doing so using a piece called Period which was used for Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood but I decided to use Sakura— NIRGILIS from Eureka 7's fourth opening because I felt that it conveyed the mood for ARMSmasters initial flavor and story better. It's fast paced, bouncy, epic, adventerous and catchy.

This isn't the full opening and I may not get around to finishing this as we're concentrating on the actually short film instead of just a trailer or opening now but this is enough. This whole thing is a combo of new and old storyboards and repurposed shots and scenes. Its worth posting as it gives a good sense of where I was going with the older storyboards until this new direction was realized and it conveys a strong 'ARMSmaster' style but in the end it's mostly intended as practice and more content that is part of the entire development arsenal. The title sequence and ending are missing from this but a good portion was filled in.

Coming Back To Life

2011-10-12T14:49:00.000-07:00

Well it's been an interesting 6 weeks or so! Yours truly, the blogmeister and project lead for ARMSmasters, was bitten by a venomous spider which in turn led to -another- deep set infection which in turn lead to an 11 day stay at a local hospital!

So, needless to say matters ground to a halt on this project and a number of others. As of today I'm back in the land of the living but still with medication to be taking and orders to be off work (though being primarily a freelancer I can 'play' with those orders just a little bit...)

So in the meantime some of our larger ARMSmasters plans have been impacted and thrown off schedule due to the basic inability to get some things done but now that wellness is returning and life is beginning to clank forward once again, we will be once more tackling the development of this project and world and moving ahead towards our animation goals.

As a teaser for this, here are some additional concept art sketches of the Ministry Member, Seth, one of the secondary support characters for the larger story. These were done by Patrick Stannard.

A Quick Check Up

2011-09-29T21:00:00.000-07:00

Wow it has been an interesting past two weeks.

This blog has been quiet as yours truly, the blog master, has been suffering from quite the serious reaction to a very venomous spider bite and follow up infection in my leg that has kept me nearly bed ridden and in excruiating pain that is only just now starting to subside. Not fun let me tell you.

Obviously this blog is not for yours truly to bemoan his personal trials but as the blog master, being down for count for so long (and not out of the woods yet) means this blog was left high and dry for a number of days and it will be a few more days yet before I'm ready to spend protracted time compiling assets and information. For now just enjoy this brief interlude and also this speed paint that was sent in by Patrick Stannard, some time ago, of some concept work of one of our WIP characters, Seth.

Thanks for your patience!

A New Chapter

2011-09-15T11:00:00.000-07:00

In hindsight, giving the previous post a 'part 1' tag wasn't really necessary as in terms of looking back over how we got to where we are I've basically said everything I want to say. Now it's about moving ahead and what's changing!

The principle adjustment creatively lies in the stronger story concept that has risen up out of a real critical overview and analysis of what we had going on and what would make for stronger story telling and a more appealing pitch. Because ARMSmasters is being so hand crafted it was very pliable and adjustable when scrutiny revealed possible flaws in our approach to the writing we just had to be willing to make the changes and to be flexible. I'll be saving the details on the revised story for another post so as to save on 'vast wall of text' but gradually the blog will be updated to reflect it. (Notably in the Bio and Story pages)

A heavier focus on war, many of the characters being older and more seasoned and some with heavy back stories and a heavier world scenario caused the light heartedness, humor and adventure to be buried under the surface. We wanted a thrilling action adventure with stylistic combat sequences but the characters needed room to grow and we also needed a stronger connection with audiences, to keep bringing them back for more.

Ultimately one of the solutions we reached was to solidify the age of several of the main characters as younger then they were currently being written and less competent compared to what they would become. Riot, Aeslyn and Inari in particular were the targets of this. Riot was already a sort of nebulous 'youthful hero' character and, as mentioned, was modeled more after seasoned heroic characters like Han Solo over Luke Skywalker. Placing him on the cusp of adult hood, at around 18 or so made him prone to more mistakes, more reckless, a source of more trouble for his friends and enemies. His visual design needed no real tweaking for that and had been nailed.

Aeslyn, on the other hand, ended up getting alot of consideration both in her role in the plot and her look We received alot of positive pop for her current look but as a character she was developing to much towards being a flawless heroine. She was smart, savvy, sophisticated, beautiful, self aware, and confident etc, etc, but we need to be able to watch her become that and see her forged into this force. Making her younger removed some of that and made her more accessible and vulnerable. The visual design adjustments warmed her up as well. At 17, versus twenty something plus, she's slimmer, more adventurous and ready to continue blossoming into something more. Her costume change is reflective of this while still being in the vein of the direction we went with before. It's younger and less 'Project Runway' Her facial features need no major revision. The tendency is to draw her with narrow eyes but larger eyes grant her considerable more youth while still enabling her to maintain the more narrow eyed focused look.

Inari was always the 'big sister' of the group and so her age was brought down to 20, making her older then Riot but not so much older she wasn't relatable as the 'older sister'. A design lean towards a more modern fantasy firmly pushed her out of the gypsy dancer design she'd been sporting for a long time and finally solidified her into her current role as the manager for Brave Legendra's bounty hunting exploits (more on that in another post) Again abit more adventurous, tomboyish,, competent.

Being more supporting characters who serve different roles, Tyr, Rune and Kongou are untouched in age and Colette was always young but now she's less the 'odd man out' even though she remains the youngest. We'll touch more on them all and particulars of the new story outline as well as Deacon in a followup post. The above image features roughs for Rune's final look along with a redesign for Tug the Mechanic who is in a different role now as well and shows the early phases of the final lineup as we begin locking the last of the characters in.

A Retrospective - Part I

2011-09-14T23:52:00.000-07:00

Hey gang! Thanks for hanging out with us again. It's been a little over a week since our last post and as we finish up some things and head full bore into the fall I thought a brief synopsis and retrospective of where ARMSmasters is and has come from is in order. It's been a really amazing year so far. The sketch at the beginning of this post is one of the earliest development sketches of ARMSmasters that I have in my possession, dating way back when. A very proto-form version when the story wasn't called ARMSmasters and had a more high fantasy bend with an eye towards western fantasy then the current 'hybrid' version being developed. Proto-Riot, who I believe was named 'Zion' or 'Rhys' at the time, Aeslyn, a proto-Rune who is more wizard like, Inari and finally Tyr.

And again, Zion - my proto-Riot from even before the Senior Thesis. Sometimes named Zion, sometimes named Dyne. The name Riot was actually attached to the character that would later become Rune. Again reflecting the more western high fantasy bend at that point in time.

This past Feb. Alpha Omega turned 1 year old. Alpha Omega Animation (AOA) was founded by yours truly back in 2010 as organized post from which to pursue steady professional work as well as a launch pad for developing intellectual properties both in house and with clients. I had several guys come on board behind me, lending their talents and resources to help push AOA from vision to reality and we decided in late February in 2010 to select a property to put weight behind to show our collective talents as part of our reel creation. The property selected was ARMSmasters. Prior to that ARMSmasters had seen some development by yours truly and in a very proto-form was even looked at and received some critical feedback on from Heather Kenyon, a major mover in the field of animation development but it was really still basically just out of 'Senior Thesis' stage.

Well AOA debuted formally at The Motor City Comic Con with great enthusiasm from team members and people who dropped by our table and ARMSmasters was playing in full color and we received considerable positive pop for it. We had banged out that teaser in just under 90 days with most of the team juggling full time jobs or freelance and ARMSmasters still being roughly developed on a basic plot level. What we were doing was of inspiration to ourselves and our colleagues and former classmates but I knew we were going to be pushing it even higher then that and the first seeds of really developing it into a franchise were already in motion.

In late May, early June, AOA was joined by recent CCS grads and friends who were interested in seeing ARMSMasters grow and an opportunity to send it along with an important mentor and contact of ours out west for additional critical review arose. Between June and the end of July we banged out, with the additional team members, additional artwork and further cleaned up the animation and gave it additional polish that the previous small team did not have time to pull off for Motor City Comic Con. The additional tie down and professional polish really catapulted the teaser to new heights while the added creative juice and interest began to bring forth new ideas and to actually develop ARMSmasters as a world and a story that needed to be told. Ironically when our contact at Disney XD was able to look at our printed material more time was spent talking about the concept, the story, the art and presentation then anything else and the animated trailer didn't even get viewed...but the feedback was enormously useful and really set us on the path of developing something great.

And here we have Riot in his 'Dyne' phase - again still in the more high fantasy model of development as I use the art to break up the wall of text.

Fast forwarding to today - its been an interesting road but mostly good. Starting with almost nothing but an idea and an ambition we've developed a world, characters and personality that has turned heads despite being on the block a short space of time. Our various team members have been blessed with full time work, relocating, and projects of their own and have moved in and out of heavy development as permitted by time commitments and just basic logistics but nobody has lost their drive to see this through and we've learned alot and matured as individuals and as story tellers by going through this process. I myself have been on no less then three feature film productions, worked in education and youth mentorship and carried several major freelance projects (including one right now) that has required me to learn new meanings to time management - something I'm still working on (does anyone ever master it? Let me know please!) I can proudly say that so far development on ARMSmasters has resulted in a slew of characters and artwork, promotional artwork, a website, an animated teaser, several animatics and this blog, a facebook page and a teaser pitch bible which has done much to summarize our goals for the right people.

Our participation in the Pitch Party enabled us to get our foot in the door at a major network and that has led to forged relationships and a willingness to see what we have to offer and other eyes willing to look at what we are doing.

It also led to a critical examining of where ARMSmasters was and where it was going. Although, for reasons of NDA and protection, I have not fully disclosed the ARMSmasters storyline and treatment on this blog the full progression of the story and the development of it as an entire arc has been foremost in our minds and an ongoing process. A real critical examination of the story and our own potential as creatives caused a serious rethinking and retrospective on what we were doing and how we were telling the tale. Even the simple fact of understanding the needs of target networks, target audiences an dour own goals began to cause us to give what we were doing and saying a close eye.

Here we have the Armsmasters crew a little closer to their more modern incarnation albiet minus Collette, who was an addition much later. This was circa the original Senior Thesis and I've pretty much blatantly ripped off/been inspired by an image done by Lesean Thomas of a Thundercat revival premise - in fact he favorited this image on deviant art to my lasting embaressment as I look at it now. The style was veering towards more 'anime' inspired at this point. Check out that hair on Riot! - still not named Riot at this time though. I'd say I'm embarrassed to repost some of these old images but there is merit in looking back at where things have come and publically acknowledging growth.

At any rate, this examination, retrospective and critical feedback analysis was well timed because it enabled us to begin a process of revision that has now led to what will ultimately be the final pitch for ARMSmasters, a much stronger story and a much more informed direction for the property. While this has set back the dates and goals I had in mind for it (I had originally wanted us to be on Kickstarter this fall.) it has instead given us something to look forward to and a concrete direction for development for the rest of 2011 an for 2012 including convention seasons, getting the property infront of the right people and working on the pilot in earnest. In the near future the blog will be updated and revised to reflect the new story direction and I will outline our goals so stay tuned!

Kongou Will Eat You

2011-09-06T00:27:00.000-07:00

Just a quick post of an image recently done that I am donating for another project but that will be using some studio characters. This is a clean up from a storyboard drawing and I don't think I've ever drawn Kongou looking meaner then this. He's not -exactly- on model here but I also have not posted the new updates to his character yet. A larger post featuring these updates and direction changes is forth coming. Hope all is well with everyone elses projects and expect another followup post soon!

Better Late Then Never

2011-08-29T21:16:00.001-07:00

Hey bloggers and others following our production blog!

This post is abit late as I try to at least do posts within a weeks time but circumstances don't always allow for that.

Right now we're up to several things on the ARMSmasters side as several major changes and edits are occurring that are driving the story development. Soon I will be sharing peeks at our developing Series Bible and discussing more about Kickstarter as well as other opportunities that have come up.

In the meantime I'd like to share some sketches. The first one up top is a rough in progress design for part of what I intend as a larger print to accompany the one done for the Pitch Party and to also serve as the cover for our production/series Bible. Beneath that is early designs concerning some slight reworking of Aeslyn. The present finished look will still be utilized but further development of plot and premise has necessitated continued exploration of her character. It's good that we are in a stage where story development is as pliable as it is but more on that in another post.

Stay tuned!

Riot Completed

2011-08-20T16:34:00.000-07:00

For now at least!

Further down this page you will see that around the Pitch Party event we back engineered a Riot design we were very satisfied with from the poster we put up for the Pitch Party. Well after we got some additional free time we re visited him to finalize him and come up with the Riot that I am most pleased with. Once again this is Mel Miller's excellent clean up and color process at work over my original line roughs. I made some minor tweaks from the version posted further below including a slight proportion change but for the most part this is the Riot that's going to carry matters for the near future. I'm very happy with the look. It is both familiar and iconic while also being uniquely ARMSmasters and that is part of the design sensibility driving the main characters.

Brief Break in Transmissions

2011-08-12T18:35:00.001-07:00

The Blogmaster (yours truly) has been sidetracked a little by some freelance work but rest assured there is more content and progression on the way. In the meantime I thought I would share this wonderfully bestial surprise I got in email from our very own Patrick Stannard who did some speed painting practice utilizing our beastman Braun as a subject matter. Simply awesome. An awesome image from an awesome artist and just in time to celebrate us recently passing the 4000 hits mark! Patrick has recently relocated to Texas where he works at Powerhouse Animation Studio but he is still very much a part of the ARMSmasters development process and team.

In the meantime we have more to look forward to and hopefully interesting news to share very soon. Stay tuned!.

Tyr vs Braun 2.0

2011-08-03T14:28:00.000-07:00

Well as summer winds into its last half those available of our little crew and myself are continuing to push our hand crafting of ARMSmasters. Once again we've gotten excellent feedback on it and this time from some pretty important individuals. I won't drop names or groups just yet as we're still talking but I'm very proud to say that ARMSmasters is garnering attention and looking to have a very fruitful end of summer and first part of the fall.

As part of our endeavors our move on designing the full pilot episode and short film is under way and I want to share a working animatic from a sequence that's intended to be part of the pilot story and at the very least featured partially in trailer format. Some time back I posted a work in progress of a duel between Tyr and Braun and went over how that sequence evolved. Recently we reboarded the scene, utilizing some reference from other action sequences and pushing our own imagination to try and get a strong feel for how the timing of something like this might play out. The end result you can see for yourself! I'm quite pleased with this and believe we can spring board into something very nice.

One of our main goals is to start showcasing strong character interactions in our artwork and animations and this is a step towards that. I've included a few pages as well but not all as it was a lengthy set of boards. You can see some of my chicken scratch notes and schizophrenic board style here. I've pretty much decided I like boarding horizontally ala the eastern style and also went widescreen as I think it gives it a much more cinematic flair and grants more room to move the characters around.

Tyr ultimately is attempting to distract Braun and keep him busy as the other hero characters present are working to enter a ruined temple. What awaits them inside is part of another sequence we are working on. Outside in the ruined city and mountainous region, Tyr and Braun engage in a fierce one on one fight. We wanted to show the difference in their movements and behavior patterns with Braun's aggressiveness and his superiority in hand to hand close combat on full throttle.

This is a little more aggressive then our second pass where they were more evenly matched throughout the fight but here some danger is more evident for the first half. We swing back to Tyr recovering and then taking it to Braun full steam and there becomes no question of his ability to hold his own. The results of the final strike are left deliberately ambiguous though it seems Tyr has turned the tide in his favor as from here we cut to the temple interior - to be shown another time.

Thanks for checking it out!

Rune the Trickster

2011-07-28T13:15:00.001-07:00

Hey gang!

Wow, poor Rune! We started this blog back in Feb and we're just now getting to a post concerning our gunslinger, half-fae, trickster magician...and he's a really fun character and one alot of people have resonated with when seeing his proto designs and hearing about him!

Rune was developed from the very beginning from the sort of anime-western style epic gun slinger. Justice from Afro Samurai and Gene Starwind from Cowboy Bebop were early visual designs that were very inspiring along with the Gunner class from Dungeon Fighter online. The earliest Rune versions (before he was called Rune no less..) were much more scarecrow like in build and harkened a little to closely to Justice. Immediate follow up designs began to quickly draw him into his own realm. The concept of making him half-fae also came about, tying him deeply to his magic on a personal level and to the story of there being a hidden world on the other side of 'The Veil' in the ARMSmasters setting.

Alot of story changes have taken place as well since we started this blog. A synopsis was taken to a first and second and third draft treatment and now on the fourth draft major plot elements have been adjusted to create more dynamics, more character tension and better plot placement. You really have to keep hammering at these things repeatedly. It's not a 'first thing on your mind and you've got it, sort of thing.'

For our rogue's gallery this has very much been the case. Our heroes are only as good as our villains and as our story fleshed out and characters began to change sides and motivations became clearer, many characters who we thought would be squarely on the side of angels ended up being counted amount the menaces, at least at first. Kongou and Rune were among that, though the storytelling process would serve to wrap them into the main heroic group before all was said and done.

Tim Kafantaris took some of the early Rune designs and began to really play with the overcoat a little bit. At this time the purple was abit deeper and darker then we would end up going with but was based on a brighter more flamboyant look that the character was noted for at that particular moment in time. Tim's creativity and variations on the costume themes and character sheets are wonderful and show great care and thinking being placed on how the character would look and function.

Jon Bowling also tossed some ideas into the ring, going for a more flamboyant and attitude driven Rune with this sketch which was then organically taken and modified even more as Mel Miller placed her signature style onto the character and we ended up with this look which speaks much of his mischief and misdirection. As a character Rune draws heavy influence from Puck from a Midsummer's Nights Dreams and other interpretations.

We will be revisiting and explore final concepts for this character soon including some sketches from Van Andy and Rune's final direction. Until then, that wraps up our 'Banner Seven'!

Forging Ahead

2011-07-24T21:11:00.000-07:00

We've had some productive production meetings and I thought I'd share some things you can look forward to on this blog in the immediate future!

Right now we're heavily in the planning phases of our pilot development and initiating a countdown to doing our Kickstarter Pitch and all that will entail. Some excellent story development has also solidified a few of our final ghostly characters and you'll soon seen posts related to that coming up. Furthermore a few opportunities have arisen that are giving us some concrete goals and directions to move in in regards to the Pitch Bible, Treatment and a chance to actually place ARMSmasters and it's pilot story infront of the proper folk.

Kickstarter's goal is to supply funding to do a 7 to 11 minute animated pilot that will enable us to properly introduce most of the characters, even if it's in cameo form in some cases, and quickly establish the rules of the ARMSmasters world and the characters who will inhabit it. Ultimately the full story involves competing forces aiming to retrieve an Ancient -ArM- from a critical sacred ruin, and the peril that their conflict brings upon themselves. This longer story is meant to be told in the form of several connected short films for multiple forms of distribution.

Soon I'll be posting storyboards and we'll be posting animation tests in order to showcase some of our intentions of utilizing 2d and 3d animation and additional proof of concepts actually showcasing character interaction. A treatment and script are also in development and it should be interesting actually getting a scratch track/table read done and beginning to put some voices to these characters. I'm excited and our team is anxious to move out of the conceptual phase into actually getting some animation done before the summer is out.

We may not be ready to hit some of the cons just yet given the close deadline for the artist allies but this upcoming fall season I have intention to get ARMSmasters up at least at one local con and infront of a larger audience so stay tuned for more information there. Of course all this could radically change depending on feedback and results from Pitch Party related feelers that went out in the aftermath of that very successful run.

Art wise for this post we have a sketch of Riot I recently did as a WIP for a larger piece that I'm working on and some additional character studies of Deacon by Van Andy. Deacon has undergone a radical change in the storyline that will influence his design from here on out but these works are still very valid and figure prominently into our current efforts.

Finally if you're finding your way to this blog due to the recent issue of Animation Magazine, distributed at San Diego Con this past weekend, and hopefully in stores by now as well, welcome! Please feel free to park yourselves here and don't forget to like us and follow us on twitter and facebook!

Model Sheets Found!

2011-07-18T22:50:00.000-07:00

As part of my current push I decided it was time to jump back into model sheets, storyboarding and finalizing the character designs. First up was Riot who actually leaped at us, finally, when in the process of doing the Pitch Party ad! I didn't comment much on this but our chase of Riot had ended and I had found a Riot that was pretty much satisfactory in the form of the one featured for the ARMSmasters pitch entry.

There were still some final tweaks and adjustments to do here but that coupled with a drive to create a presentation form to submit to a party that must remain unnamed for now, led to the creation of this final version of the character that will be represented well in animation. There were some tweaks made to the costume and color. While I liked the white stripe on the vest on the Pitch Party ad I decided to switch back to seeing how it looked in black and opted to go that route for now color wise, knowing we can adjust later if it is seen that white is preferred. Overall I'm very happy with this Riot, especially our personality shots we came up with. Those were roughed by me and final lined by Mel Miller and then flatted by yours truly. A fully shadowed and lit version is on the way.

Along with this I decided to tackle rough, not final line, versions of his side and back view. These are still work in progress images. There are also -minor- tweaks to the front drawing in this rough model sheet, mostly reflecting a slightly smaller collar and baggier pants but for the most part he's just about locked in and this is ready for a final line drawing.

At the same time as working on this I decided to also tackle rough models for Tyr's side and back view. As you've seen elsewhere on this blog, Tyr is pretty much a finished character as well but an opportunity to play with his shapes came along and so we experimented with a few things. Ultimately Tyr is going to remain the same but determining the aesthetics for his side and back view were crucial elements. He's very much like a bodybuilder. He's our Thor and Colossus and so his sculpted figure can really stand out, especially if the anatomy is wrong. Fortunately these roughs are well on their way to being ready for final line with jut a little more anatomy tweaking and work between the two roughs.

Stay tuned for more!

Updates On The Way

2011-07-18T22:41:00.000-07:00

Hah, time can fly when you get busy and wrapped up in things. I had intended for our posting to be less infrequent while on a little bit of a break between jobs but it seems that the past two weeks have been full of obligations coupled with just steady production work on ARMSmasters. The various obligations kept the crew from getting as organized as I would have liked in a timely fashion but now we stand poised to capitalize on several things and move forward. There is much I would like to share on the blog that I am opting to withhold until more concrete results occur but rest assured, things are happening.

Some final bit of information:

On one of our last Pitch Party related notes, we received our judges comments and they varied really wildly. We scored either extremely well or very low depending on who looked at the pitch. This lends considerable insight to whole Pitch Party process and is one of the reasons why I was never really counting on or looking for the judges vote. The judges really judge things based on their personal obligations to their networks and personal experiences and I was given information to let me know that at least a few of them never actually visited this blog/didn't know this existed! 'Contests' like this are challenging and potentially jaded network based animation judges can be a tough sell. It's important to approach things like this with eyes wide open and with realistic expectations and willingness to capitalize on the good points and work with the bad. That said - our overall score was..actually pretty good! The word was, we did pretty well. The Magazine itself should be out by now and will be distributed this week at San Diego Con so there's no telling where we're going to go from here.

Stay tuned to this blog as we begin the catch up process.

Pitch Party Results

2011-07-09T11:19:00.001-07:00

This post is a bit late but only due to some ramp up process and busy work happening with ARMSmasters. :)

Firstly, thanks to everyone who took the time out to vote for us in the Animag Pitch Party. This was the first time we ever participated in something like this and we gleaned alot and have more to reap from having taken part.

That said we unfortunately did not place in any category - but that's only the beginning of news. The rest of the news is that we -did- place in top 11 of the readers vote - beating out another 27 contestants with only 10 ahead of us. This is .. pretty amazing considering that we were submitting an action adventure concept in a market over saturated with quirky humor cartoons. On a public forum like that, we were simply at a disadvantage and yet we still placed -very- high! Judges comments are yet to be delivered to us but will be before the week is out and I expect to glean much from them on how to properly package and present ARMSmasters to animation execs.

Furthermore we caught the eye of some influential people. We were the top pick of one of the judges who participated in the contest -and- don't forget that we are sitll being printed in Animation Magazine's July-August issue which should be in stores this week, if it's not already out. This will also be re-distributed at San Diego Comic Con which means enormous potential for additional viewers and the proper people to lay eyes on what we are doing here with The ARMSmasters Project. In addition to this -another- contact in a place of import is rooting for us and looking out for our best interests. I will say more on that when something more concrete comes up.

My end review of having done this Pitch Party is that it was very worth it. We heard about it at the last second with barely a week and a half to get a pitch together and get it in, along with the money and the end results will far surpass the funds that we put forth to get in.

I also did not speak much on the fuss caused over on Cartoon Brew which some may or may not be aware of. Cartoon Brew's 'Amid' has long had a grudge against Animation Magazine and has, for years, disapproved of the Pitch Party. This year he lashed out once again and some who submitted their ideas were caught in the cross fire. Despite this, common sense and logic has prevailed and I am glad both for how Animation Magazine handled their response to him and also for the end results of the contest.

Stay tuned for more updates as we press on.

Sky Pirates and Rogues

2011-07-06T11:25:00.000-07:00

So let's get back to discussing characters while waiting for the Pitch Party results to be broadcast!

The need to expand our rogue's gallery has led to the creation and the adaptation of some really fun characters. We've already lightly explored this by discussing Deacon and Braun but we haven't fully dived in yet. One thing I want for sure is a fun cast of villains as well as characters who are just in the way, with their own agenda, but can just as easily be allies as well as foes depending on what the particular mission goals are at the time. Out of these characters came our Sky Pirates. The world where ARMsmasters takes place in has a very strong theme of exploration, distance and the sky, which represents freedom. Airships, Sky Fortresses, Floating Continents and so forth are part of the world tone and theme. Sky Pirates are enemies of the current oppressive status quo but they aren't necessarily good guys either. Some real scoundrels exist among them as they value their freedom but willingly shirk the law and sometimes prey upon others.

Sekaida was one of our original dedicated Sky Pirate characters and her background existence was at first tied into Riot in the form of an old partnership and flame that went sour. As I adjusted the timeline of the backstory and brought more characters in, I decided to move Sekaida's backstory and history alongside another character that needed the development; Rune. We'll get more into that when Rune gets his own post but suffice to say there is a deep grudge and a deep seated rivalry between these two roguish characters that drives a significant conflict forward. Sekaida was designed by Mel Miller who approached the character with a strong definition of culture and ethnicity.

Later I requested an addition of more gestural pirate like elements to add some additional flare to her movements and form while keeping the elements we first loved. She's just a fun looking character and we can't wait to more fully explore her motivations and to see her animated. As a character she is going to have to have a very strong personality because her personal magic levels won't be comparable with those characters who wield -ArMs- and yet she will be competitive with them through her resources, wit and intelligence.

This band of rogues are members of Sekaida's crew and thugs who operate, many times without her permission, in the frontier. They're endless trouble for her but also represent quality muscle she uses to her advantage. They are just some of the henchmen under her beck and call. Originally the trio of Gog, Tugger and Hurley, were envisioned as separate bounty hunters alongside two other characters, one who would later become Rune and another we have not introduced yet. This was before Sekaida entered the picture and a desire to fill out a crew of vagabonds was realized and also before Braun was fully realized as well and some shuffling took place with Rune. It's important when coming up with ideas and character designs to not just lock onto the first thing that comes up as newer ideas will make themselves known to you.

Dwight Williamson took an early sketch design I had of Gog and revamped him over a series of sketches and redraws until we ended up with this potential rival for Kongou in terms of sheer size and girth. Tugger and Hurley are also works in progress. With Tugger (sometimes called Tug) we envisioned the driver of a massive steamtank and an expert in demolitions. Hurley was actually, way long ago, a very early proto-Rune As Rune developed into a separate character I opted to keep Hurley along and this worked out nicely as Dwight took his design into a unique direction from Rune and storyline wise, since ultimately Rune and Sekaida would have shared backgrounds and so two gunner characters from the same backdrop could work together.

As a final note, here is a quick sketch, courtesy of Van Andy, of a character to be explored in the future as the cast and world of ARMSmasters develops; Xian. Originally Xian was part of a group that consisted of Tug, Gog and Rune but as the story elements and direction shifted, she got somewhat stashed into the arsenal of characters to revisit at a later date. That date may come sooner rather then later.

Summer Updates

2011-07-01T15:08:00.000-07:00

Well with tonight being the first night in about five months or so that I won't be going in to work a 10 hour shift, I thought I'd celebrate it with an update here on the production blog and a heads up as to what the summer is going to hold for ARMSmasters. I greatly enjoyed my time working on Spy Kids 4 and wouldn't trade it for the world but wow I'm glad for this break!

Waiting's hard but we should know results of the Pitch Party sometime this week, based on the information I've gotten. It's abit hard to guess accurately because we've gotten some conflicting dates in the past but I do believe that the timing is that sometime this week we should know how we did and next week the magazine with the ads themselves are due to be in stores. This makes sense as the third week of July is Comic Con.

Basically we have the possibility of placing in one of three categories. Judges Pick, Editors Pick and Readers Pick. The true prize of the contest lies in the Judges Pick - you get your entry fee returned and an opportunity to pitch, in person, to the judge of your choice. A great opportunity to meet people and get your foot in the door as an aspiring producer and an animator.

The Magazine also awards an Editors Choice which is basically their own opinion about the best submissions. You get an editorial (I believe) written about you but nothing more.

Finally the Readers Choice is an opportunity for visitors to their website to also weigh in. It should be noted that the campaign on this blog and others regarding voting was related to the Readers Choice and a chance to place in there.

In all three categories there is a first, second and third place spot. For us - a best case scenario would obviously be to place in the Judges categories and, hey, even win! Competition is steep but that would be the -best- case scenario.

The second best case scenario would be to at least place in one of the three categories. That lends additional prestige to the project, lets us know on a broader scale what people think about it and gives us additional foot in the door access due to the fact that we placed in such a well known magazine and long running event.

The third best case scenario would be not placing at all and while that would be unfortunate from a competitive perspective it would not actually harm us in any way because we would -still- be printed in the Magazine when it hits stands and is distributed at Comic Con. This issue is one of their most widely read issues and in essence the Pitch Party becomes cheap advertising in a fashion tht normally would be quite expensive. Our ad, alongside the other entries, would have a chance of reaching many eyes we would simply not be able to reach due to the costs of such a print ad or going out to San Diego Comic Con ourselves to do promotion. As to feedback, we have access to members of the Animation Magazine staff who have expressed willingness to offer thoughts and feedback on submissions.

The Pitch Party is just one avenue that we are pursuing. In addition to having our feelers out with other industry contacts who are watching our developments closely, we have plans to jump onto Kickstarter before this summer is done. This period between contract jobs is a period of intense ramp up for ARMSmasters. We'll be aiming for Kickstarter, some additional animation and storyboarding and other artistic endeavors in nailing down the finished character designs. We're also going to be adding some additional crew members soon and expanding our little family. Once the Pitch Party results have come in, we'll be in a good stage to move ahead so continue to stay tuned!

Back To Our Semi-Scheduled Program

2011-06-28T01:10:00.000-07:00

Well voting has ended for the Pitch Party online readers vote as of the 26th. We now will be waiting until around the end of June and first part of July to hear about the results. I'm going to just let it recede from my mind, personally, as it will make the waiting game that much easier. :) In the meantime, many thanks to all of you who elected to vote for us and to promote ARMSmasters. It's my hope that you'll remain with us as we proceed forward with our next phase of plans this summer. There's much work to be done and we've a full plate ahead of us but I'm very pleased and excited as to our prospects and our direction.

One thing that will be done shortly will be an update to the art gallery on this site. We've posted tons and tons of artwork in our various production posts and so some of that will be moved to the art gallery in order to properly archive it.

Our next series of posts will finish off the prior work that's been done on our characters and this blog will also begin to gradually turn its attention towards our needs for getting onto Kickstarter and what sort of incentives we will be offering for donations and just the general focus on moving ahead on our pilot and storyline development.

Thanks for hanging in there with us!

Voting Ends Today!

2011-06-26T07:58:00.000-07:00

As I don't like making posts without some art to accompany them, here have some way-back test concept art of the early ARMSmasters hero-team back during beginning phase development. Alot is unrefined here, notably Aeslyn and a lack of Rune and Colette, but it's fun for us to see how our characters have progressed or, in some cases, just been more solidified into ideas we had from the beginning. Reaching back into these vaults exposes our development process and our growth as artists as no image is perfect but we hope that it helps aspiring artists or people also working on projects to see these WIPs and imperfect pieces.

Today is the last day for online voting for the Pitch Party 2011 by Animation Magazine! I can't say this week hasn't been interesting for us, because it certainly has been! For those of you who found ARMSmasters through the Pitch Party it is my hope that you will stick around with us and continue to keep an eye on our developments. Updates should be coming a little more regularly now that our major feature film project is winding down - at least for a small space of time. During that time we'll be moving ahead on several fronts while also waiting on results from Animag. If, per chance, you've forgotten to vote for us yet you still have this last day! Visit http://www.animationmagazine.net/pitch-party-vote/ and place your vote for your favorite piece. Hopefully that piece/pitch is ours!

http://www.animationmagazine.net/pitch-party-vote/

Thanks for all of your support and well wishes. It really does mean alot and I wish I could address people by name but I know I'll start forgetting folk so just know we do appreciate all comments and thoughts on our progress.

3000 Hits!

2011-06-23T16:23:00.000-07:00

I missed the 2000 hit milestone but I won't miss this one! We've just passed over 3000 hits and no doubt this has been thanks to recent visitors who found their way here by investigating the Pitch Party. Thank you and if you opted to vote for us, thanks again!

In celebration of this, I've decided to post some work in progress art! It's been awhile and soon we're going to jump back into posts that deal with character development and progress on our Kickstarter intentions. We've yet to finish going over our banner seven (that being the group featured up top.) our rogue's gallery and incidental characters.

Speaking of rogue's gallery, Van Andy continued to develop some ideas for Deacon and has continued to help us push his design. These official military' uniform versions of Deacon are very much in line with our inital directions for the character. Ultimately we're going to slim this silohette down slightly but it bears mention and showcasing here. His attention to detail and expression of Deacon's personality are all professional and amazing.

Finally a recent WIP piece I began featuring the heroines of ARMSmasters. Early indications of Inari's new design are here along with a first shot at Freya, the Airstation Captain, who is featured in certain parts of the storyline and the current fiancee of Tyr. This is a pretty messy image but pretty much indicative of how i first start when I begin sketching out rough ideas. I like working with soft mediums, sketching fast and messy and then dialing back until I get what I feel I'm after.

*edit*

Decided to do another pass on the rough sketch to get Aeslyn and Colette more on model. Plus, alas for Freya, she was making the composition too cluttered and is abit too ghostly and unfinished to go into this piece yet. Also I'd rather this just be the 'adventuring' girls - rather the girls who will consistently or interchangeably actually be involved in the traveling, dungeon exploring, fighting, and so forth.

Thanks for hanging in there. If you haven't voted for us yet, please consider doing so!

http://www.animationmagazine.net/pitch-party-vote/

Animation Magazine Pitch Party Voting

2011-06-20T15:47:00.000-07:00

The Online voting for the Animation Magazine Pitch Party has begun! If you're here on this blog for the first time due to following the links in the Pitch Party ad then welcome! Please browse our blog entries and various sections on this site to learn more about our endeavor, story and production efforts. There's plenty artwork, world info and character development to dive into and we crave feedback! Please feel free to vote for us!

I'm both excited and relieved that things have progressed this far. There are some really cool entries this year! The quality of the submissions just seems to jump up and up each year. The waiting game is pretty difficult to deal with!

http://www.animationmagazine.net/pitch-party-vote/

If you don't vote for The ARMSmasters Project then toss some love to High Speed Waffleman, a submission by one of our ARMSmasters team members!

Either way there are some cool looking entries for this submission and I wish the best to all who are involved. I'll be continuing to make updates throughout the week. Voting will be from now until the 26th so please spread the word. Be blessed!

It's Animation! - Part One

2011-06-18T01:02:00.000-07:00

Alot of this blog has been used to chronicle our character and world development but it should be reminded that the genesis of ARMSmasters was as animation and was for animation and we haven't featured nearly enough of that on this blog! Before we go back to doing character process posts and as we wait for the Pitch Party voting to begin, I thought I'd take some time to embed some of these animations and describe how they came about!

Early on when envisioning concepts for a longer teaser/pilot trailer - we decided that it might be beneficial to actually do 3d mockups of our major locations in order to get high detailed places and be able to quickly and swiftly knock out different shot compositions. Tim Kafantaris took the initiative and put together a mockup based on a concept piece of an old tavern which was, in the early script and Bible Treatments was called The Dragon's Den. What we have here is just a test wireframe pass of this layout with a simple camera move. Elsewhere on the blog is a description of the process Tim used and an image of the layout itself.

Because the new teaser mostly features fully rendered shots I've removed the shots that are still largely flat with the exception of the first CU on Riot's gaze due to the color treatment. As a result some of these re-colors and new clean up passes are no longer featured. This is fine as the shot of Inari, Tyr and Proto-Rune in this piece clip really shows us trying to still find our way with the design and style of the characters and that shot didn't really 'fit' the rest of the short's art direction. Even so I love clean crisp art and color flats and find these shots fun to look at with just their clean lines and colors.

Ah now -this- is pretty fun. I haven't embedded this anywhere publicly outside of my vimeo account but basically this is was the -first- storyboard animatic rough pass I did for a new ARMSmasters themed opening-animation test/animated short back during the early part of the year and before we were all side tracked and swept away by this past 6 month post production effort. The concept here is that i wanted to 'flavor' the animated piece by introducing the characters, each in their own elements, then challenging them with danger, and then having them all come together at the end.

The opening begins with Riot accosted by War Golems then switches to Tyr's workshop where Braun arrives. Then Rune in the Dragon's Den, threatened by Sekaida and her goons and Inari interfering and lastly Colette preparing to enter a wasteland from her airship and Kongou revealing himself in some mysterious location.

The music used as a 'tempo' to try and set an editing pace is Period by Chemistry - and was used in one of the Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood openings. It set a beat and a timing to move the cuts to - buuut the camera work and initial cuts are most certainly in their version 1.0 stage. We never got around to doing an edit of this piece because of other obligations but it was still great to get this far in.

Mel Miller's fantastic clean up linework on one of the shots in the teaser, featuring Tyr doing a major attack. Her linework never ceases to amaze me and this was a challenging cleanup considering Tyr's physique and the masses that have to be kept consistent.

Once shadow treatment was done it was our goal to see what sort of shadow effects and lighting styles we could pull off. Ultimately the realization that the lighting of the scene should dictate the shadows was what we went with as opposed to sticking with a 'hard' shadow style such used in alot of Kawijira's work, or super soft Disney shadowing which wouldn't be appropriate for an action animation.

More to come soon, including rougher animation.

ARMSmasters Project - 2011 Teaser

2011-06-12T17:09:00.000-07:00

This video has been a long time coming! For awhile now we've had videos that showed what our intention was for a finished complete look for ARMSmasters and it was my desire to string these together to create another teaser trailer that featured these most complete and finished looking shots. Well time and circumstance stepped in and I wasn't able to get -every- shot that I wanted done and so as a result I pushed back the creation of this new teaser, and pushed and pushed. Well recent events have lit a fire under me and I decided to just use what I had to create the current edit. While working on it I was again struck by how much artistic talent is available here in southeastern Michigan and the colors and effect treatments were done by people on their own time and with no budget!

This will likely be the last edit that uses the original short footage, excepting a smoothing out of things here or there or an addition if another shot is fnished, but we intend to look forward towards a Pilot Episode teaser, Kickstarter and hopefully results and direction following our participation in the Pitch Party for Animation Magazine. Thanks for continuing to send your support!

*edit*

I need to mention that the music piece is "Nadir's Whale" from the Baten Kaitos soundtrack. It's just a scratch piece to sell a 'mood' for this non-commercial product. Obviously when we go live with a full film it will be with an original score, etc, etc!

Animation Magazine Pitch Party 2011

2011-06-09T05:41:00.000-07:00

Whew! It's been amazingly fun getting this ad together. Now, thanks to our illustrious Mel Miller, the ad is fine lined and colored and we put together a composition for it that I'm extremely proud of. I don't know what may or may not happen with the contest but I'm hoping that someone has an impression made on them. I believe that this ad says everything I intend for it to say; That we have a project with characters who are visually interesting and captivating that readers would want to learn more about, that we, the creators, care about these characters and this world, and that we are interested in telling an exciting and epic character driven adventure. I'm so happy with how the ad turned out visually. This was an amazing process and we're already rearing up to prepare another group promo-shot as we want to have multiple prints available to be part of our large fund raising efforts.

*Snip - EDIT*

Just a quick edit to this post and a note that I've created a temporary website as a gateway to this blog and that the domain name of armsmastersproject.com will now point to that website first. That website is not meant to be complete yet - just a quick pitch and description of the project on one page. Following that, a link will bring viewers here to this production blog for the plethora of images, animation and information we have posted.

Thanks for being a part of this! I'll likely toss another post up when voting begins.

Animation Magazine - Pitch Party

2011-06-02T06:37:00.000-07:00

So this year we're going to be participating in Animation Magazine's yearly Pitch Party submission festival! This is the first year I was even aware of such a thing but this is all fine and good as a year ago I was not in the place I'm at now and neither was ARMSmasters. Much has happened in a years time but I'll save that for another post.

The Pitch Party is an opportunity for animators, designers, writers and artists - like ourselves - to try and present our ideas to a panel of judges who will then vote on their favorite submissions. Their criteria and bar is likely very high and the judges selected will no doubt be judging based on what their particular studios and networks happen to be looking for at that given moment in time - something that fluctuates wildly in the animation business from month to month as execs search for that next big thing. There is also a readers choice and editors choice. The readers choice receives votes online so be sure and stay tuned as I will be most certainly continuing to make people aware of that! (Vote for us plz!) I'm also stoked that one of our partners is entering one of his concepts as well - High Speed Waffle Man! If you don't want to vote for us then at least vote for him. I hope that next year we'll be in a space where we can sponsor submissions from all team members.

The due date is soon and it has been difficult due to finding this out at the last second and working heavy duty post production but an opportunity that cannot be passed up as, perhaps, the greatest aspect of this is the potential exposure. No matter if you win or not, all entries receive a 1/6th page ad entry in Animation World Magazine. A normal ad entry can cost towards $3000.00 - but this contest is affordable for students, newcomers like ourselves and other professionals. This also is motivating us to do a quick overhaul of our presentation here. armsmatersproject.com will soon direct to an entry splashpage with more general information about the story and short film while the blog will remain functional as a week to week archive of our progress and past work.

The above picture up top was a wonderful posted piece of process work by Mel Miller for the ad we're going to make. We're overdue on a good promo style group shot and like the banner I did the composition and rough pencils and she's going to do tight pencils and a color overlay. Stay tuned!

Storyboarding Act-shun

2011-05-30T15:17:00.000-07:00

Taking a slight break from the character posts to get one last post here in May related to our storytelling aspects. The full treatment for ARMSmasters has been coming along nicely now and has seen multiple revisions. The -complete- story, beyond just a synopsis, is a really interesting challenge to tackle and I'm fortunante to have so many people I'm able to bounce ideas off of and to also be inclusive of their own thoughts and perspectives on varying twist and turns.

Preceding this official treatment was - or rather is - our concept for the short film which essentially concentrates mostly on introducing the world and bringing some excitement in by showcasing the characters and several of them in dangerous situations. As part of this we decided to pair off some of the characters, Street Fighter style, and give quick looks into their fighting situations and duels. In short, mainly meant to get the blood pumping.

At the time of these boards, Braun was as of yet unnamed but elements of his char design were mostly solidified. This is actually the second pass on these boards. The first pass was done by Patrick but actually had Tyr on the defensive a little to much or my tastes. These above drawings are some images from that iniital pass. Gorgeous sketches and roughs. Storyboards really don't need to be that detailed, especially in animation. You're trying to convey the energy and motion of the momet though I have seen and -am- fond of storyboards that are more detailed and on model. At any rate, the drawings and actions were beautiful but we collectively felt that Tyr needed to be more front and center.

This second pass evened out the combat a little bit. We start with Tyr being pressed back by Braun who then takes a quick glance at his bounty hunting paper and then lunges in. This is similar to the start of the first pass but this time we had Tyr remain standing instead of falling onto his back. It gives an air of defiance and equality as opposed to an implication he just got beat up really bad off screen.

Tyr reacts to this and we have a sequence of side-shots where he and Braun exchange blows until Tyr misses and Braun leaps back. Their skill is more equalized here and it is questionable who is stronger, enabling both characters to take abit of the spotlight.

Ultimately Tyr takes advantage of Braun's momentary vulnerability and launches into a ground based hammer attack which sends an explosion lunging at Braun in a fast pull in. The animation of this attack is already featured in the trailer. For our storyboards we were reworking in the proof of concept animations that were already done. The aftermath of this is an enormous explosion that can be seen from a great distance. We then cut from the action here to another sequence, leaving it a guess who is the victor.

Also here are some great sketches by Van Andy Prevalus of Riot. as part of series of group shots we're working out for print and promotion. This relates to my final note for this post. We'll be making some more frequent updates soon. We're very pleased to be taking part in the 2011 Pitch Party contest hosted by Animation World Magazine! As part of that this website will be getting a slight polishing. An opportunity for a readers choice vote will exist with this contest so stay tuned as we could sure use you help!

More soon!

Hanging In There!

2011-05-21T23:14:00.000-07:00

Here, have some art to ease the pain of posting delays! Here is a work in progress of Kongou and some additional unposted work related to Collette that didn't get posted last time.

Any who are following us know how time consuming and challenging the 50 to 60 hour work week can be when in the heat of pre, pro and post production on a feature film. Needless to say the business of contract freelance and studio work can be somewhat involving and time can pass quickly before you realize it! I could certainly use an extra 8 hours or so in the week, that's for sure.

At anyrate, although that has impacted our production schedule for ARMSmasters it hasn't derailed us and without work like the production we are involved in, it wouldn't be as realistic to complete ARMSmasters!

Production wise for ARMSmasters, in the next few weeks we're going to be making moves on continuing the last bit of character design work and I hope to post some sample layouts and storyboards as we well.

A Relic Hunter

2011-05-08T23:08:00.000-07:00

This is a repost as for some reason the previous post seems to have disappeared.

Collette has been in and out of the line up a few times. My initial intent for the main heroic group of ARMSmasters was to avoid having a group of kid characters but to instead represent a spread of ages and talents and have a slightly more modern sensibility with the cast. As a result the ages of the original cast of characters varied greatly but largely stayed in the young adult and adult ranges. A real need to break the lineup up a little more began to present itself along with several other story variants and possibilities and Collette began to rear her head and then rear it again and again.

It soon became necessary to provide a contrast to the other female characters in the group and to also provide a window into the world from a younger character even though that character was not necessarily the main one. At the same time I wanted to avoid character tropes often filled by characters like Yuffie from Final Fantasy VII or Jubilee from X-men. I did not want a 'token' - a character like Evan from X-Men Evolution who was clearly created explicitly to cater to some executive understanding of an ethnicity or a particular age group.

Early concepts for Colette pegged her as a dungeon explorer, an orphan and a character who relied very much on luck and skill as opposed to extreme ranges of power. She was also envisioned as the sister of Inari, both orphans as a result of the great war. Early designs reflected her relationship to Inari but later as the character concept matured a decision to tie her into Tyr was made. Now the daughter of the great machinist, Colette and Tyr are more partners in 'crime' then father-daughter. The result of a short marriage when Tyr wed outside of his culture (a norse themed culture whereas Colette is very french), she represented Tyr's exposure to the world at large compared to the more strict military-faction based reality of the nation of his birth.

Colette holds her own design wise next to the other characters and visually is very strong. Van Andy's designs helped bring her more into the front as a major character and she looks capable of starring in her own side story as an adventurer and explorer with luck, as opposed to power, on her side. Story wise the characters end up needing her resources and expertise as strength alone is not sufficient to win the day. Mel Miller, who did the piece at the top of this post, has further tightened this character up on the road to her completion.

Kongou Commission!

2011-04-30T19:15:00.000-07:00

WOW! - Kongou as done by one of my favorite artists - Jeffery 'Chamba' Cruz - most recently known for his work for Udon comics Street Fighter II Turbo. I'm just shaking my monitor back and forth now in desperate attempt to try and figure out how the heck this guy pulls his cel shading and lighting off. This was a bust that I commissioned and I was very interested in his interpretation of the character and I couldn't be more pleased. The capstone to it all was his message that he had fun doing it which is perhaps the thing that I enjoyed hearing the most and taking delight in. That being knowing that these characters are 'fun' characters artistically and for other artists.

I'm usually not one to do the commission thing but when one of my favorite artists opened up for commissions again at a reasonable price, I had to finally take the plunge and get daring. This, of course, has now proven dangerous because I feel the commission bug coming on and I'll need to fight, and fight hard, to keep from going wild otherwise I see an Aeslyn, Tyr and full body Kongou coming on.

A note of some hilarity are the comments in Chamba's post of the character, making mention of Kongou looking like a love child between Dan and E-Honda or Zangief. This is especially evident in Chamba's style since Chamba -drew- the Street Fighter comic for several years. Ironically I myself didn't see the relation to Dan until it was pointed out to me by a friend of mine quite some time ago and I went 'Oh no! It /IS/ Dan!" It's especially funny since the single hair strand and pony tail was inspired by another source all together. Now I don't mind it and in fact embrace it as, in a way, it makes Kongou something of a parody of a parody character as he's about as opposite 'Dan' as a character can be. Fun stuff! Thanks Chamba!

A Ray Of Sunshine

2011-04-29T14:45:00.000-07:00

So let's talk about one of the banner seven again. Inari, along with Tyr and Kongou, date back to the early genesis of this world concept before it was actually titled ARMSmasters and was one of the original 'group' of characters who began to have intersecting histories and belong to the same world. Like Tyr, Inari came into being with a strong visual style already guiding her and didn't require the same degree of searching that, say, Riot and Aeslyn would need.

Warm, passionate, energetic somewhat sensual and self confident, Inari is, at least on the surface, somewhat more grounded then, say, Aeslyn, and much more sure of herself and her place in the world with a very strong 'big sister' persona and a sense of 'been there and done that.' Original concepts pegged her as a performer and a seasoned traveler as well as an entrepeeur, martial artist and information broker. Wheeew. She definently had a few too many roles going on and eventually they would be tightened up and her place in the mythology as an anchor and a more human and down to earth perspective would begin to take shape. She doesn't have as much outward power as other characters, at least at first, and so her point of view provides for some clarity and a sense of humanity.

Although Aeslyn entered the picture eventually for quite some time there was just Inari and early story developments tied her background to Riot, Tyr's, Kongou's and Collette's very tightly. One of my earliest animation pieces actually involved a young Inari first meeting with Kongou when he rescues her from a group of monsters during a time of war. Background wise, she and Riot and Tyr had a brief partnership as bounty hunters and problem solvers but would end up going their own way. It would also be implied that a relationship between herself and Riot may have once existed. While I was not necessarily thinking in terms of a 'love triangle' (Riot, Aeslyn, Inari in this case.) the thought that there would be past history just, to me, worked well as another source for possible conflict and character development and reconciliation.

Inari's designs pretty much stemmed from the concept of her as a performer and also an acrobat/martial artist. Initial thoughts had not quite penned down what 'style' she would be practicing and how that style would translate into the ARMSmasters world or look in animation.
Her earliest design, a marker render at the top of this post, was actually heavily inspired by the get-up worn by Penelo at the end of Final Fantasy XII and in her follow up appearances in the other Ivalice Alliance games. Later Inari's dominant color themes of red and gold and purples came next with a design that was used in my thesis film and later made slightly more elaborate with this second marker rendering effort.

This new render, although it spoke of more possible complexity, leaned a little too much towards showy performer then I liked and so I dialed it back some but in the process overly simplified it and decided to revisit her again later with a rough idea for something abit more modern looking including the really rough concept piece of her in the blue jeans when ARMSmasters was teetering, and still is, towards more modern sensibilities. Ultimately I went towards another variation on her original themes, this time electing to try a look that was more covered up, especially in light of deciding to bare Aeslyn's arms and shoulders.

At the same time Mel Millers and Niles Bontragner began to contribute ideas as well with some truly creative ideas and gorgeous concepts. At this point we paused on Inari to begin to solidify some of our other characters as well. Inari, like many characters, is still a work in progress but there's much to learn from the act of progression.

The Deacon

2011-04-21T14:51:00.000-07:00

Heya folks! We're still taking matters a little slowly on the blog to account for some heavy duty production scheduling on another unrelated project but that's the nature of independent productions and the film and animation business. We'll probably continue to hold steady at about a post a week until things enter a different phase which, I predict, will be around mid May.

In the meantime I wanted to continue our trend of moving away from just focusing on the principle cast of heroes and to, instead, continue introducing other character elements and threads and again bring our rogue's gallery back into focus with a first post concerning Riot's rival and former comrade in arms; Deacon. Deacon is a man of the military who remains involved in affairs of the state and is swept up in the conspiracy that soon leads to outright civil warfare between the powers that be. some of the themes he deals with include degeneration, the corruption of lofty ideals, the right of the strong to rule over the weak and a desperate need for recognition and acknowledgment.

An Archknight, like Riot, Deacon and Riot's histories were intertwined. Rivals now, Deacon represented elements that Riot had forsaken. He was refined, elegant, in control, dedicated, dutiful and diligent. In a sense he was the white knight and Riot was the dark. For his character we opted to reflect this in uniform, poise and stance. He seemed like the type of guy that would skewer someone for spilling ketchup on his clothes.

Jon Bowling really began to nail the imagery of a sleek, fast as lightning, man of poise and deadly powerful precision. In my minds eye I saw Deacons combat style being defensive based or possibly based on the Iaido Sword style of fighting but I also wanted to consider him using a double bladed weapon as well or a weapon with trans formative capabilities. Jon's variation provided the model from which other ideations would come from.

One such ideation came from Van Andy who played a little with the silohette and color scheme. Van Andy's approach bulked the character up a little bit and pulled the military uniform aspect of the design even more forward. The blue and gold felt as regal as the white and gold of Jon's variation. Deacon is still a work in progress. His storyline is being fleshed out as well as his appearence but in the end we're looking to have a deadly rival for Riot and one who will be featured in the animation teaser when all is said and done.

Amping Up The Animation

2011-04-12T13:51:00.000-07:00

Things are going to remain a little slower - down to about one to two posts a week - while things are worked on for several major production projects under way - but we're still pressing and ARMSmasters is soon going to be entering a ramp up stage as we move on several major projects and concepts related to the property.

I thought I' break from our previous molds though and share animation that has been in progress for some time now. These are all the product of Patrick Stannards hard work and show our intentions for the shadow matte on the characters. It's really amazing work and great to view at this stage. One thing that was our intention was to take our current character trailer and amp it up considerable to a full finished piece with full effect animation and, as you know, some additional animation to bring the teaser full circle. This project, called 'Stage Zero' has occupied a good portion of our production efforts ranging from finalizing character designs (for the trailer) to storyboards and working animatics.

One of the artistc elements I wanted to accomplish with ARMSmasters was a strong use of shadows and light for a very traditional cel animation colored look. I also enjoy the strong use of shadows and details done by animation houses such as Madhouse. One thing that separates us is that we're striving for full animation as much as possible and it is a tendency of some anime production to focus on detailed drawings and use minimum animation save where necessary. For a teaser trailer there would need to be alot of attention grabbing shots among those slower moments and doing heavy detailed animation with complex char and effects is by no means simple.

Here is the same shot with just the shadows, showing the effort Patrick put into the shadows on this shot. Despite the challenges our initial tests and successes should speak for themselves. They are just one layer of shadows but give a strong level of dimensionality to Tyr and a great sense of his depth and massiveness. At this stage of the project we just were doing one shadow layer but ultimately we will do two or three for a real sense of depth.

Finally here is a shot of the shadows with colors applied. This sequence runs through several test variations, trying to get a feel for styles that can be applied here from solid blacks or near solids to a gradient overlay. Note: This -not- the final composite. That I am saving for when we're ready to edit and unveil an updated teaser.

More to come soon!

Moving Along

2011-04-05T13:49:00.000-07:00

Things have slowed down just a touch on this blog due to the wonderful event of several of our principals, including myself, being involved on heavy production side work. Rest assured we're still moving ahead with ARMSmasters with many things in the works and new plans and designs to unfold. We will soon return to our regular set of posts with more breakdown of our cast of characters and world premise.

In the meantime; This is looking to be a good year for the action adventure cartoon and anime and I'm incredibly inspired right now for what is being done. Seeing these things come to fruition is just helping to energize our drive to make ARMSmasters the best it can be.

Thundercats 2011 - Now Thundercats was my show, growing up in the 90's as I did. I was all about some Sword of Omens and Lion-O and Cheetara was my girl. That said - the show was crazy, disjointed and silly most of the time but there were still moments of wonder and magic. The opening still remains one of the best animated openings of all time. Well now we have a full trailer for the new Cartoon Network series, being animated by Studio 4C (degrees) over in Japan and it looks fantastic. It's modern without being trendy and still gives nods to the original. (King Claudis is voiced by the original Lion-O. Hilarious.) Be sure to check this out.
http://www.newsarama.com/tv/wondercon-2011-thundercats-panel-110404.html

Avatar: The Legend of Korra - This needs no introduction. There's been little by way of animation preview aside from a few leaked pencil tests here and there but I'm expecting this one to explode like crazy.

TMNT: This has had numerous revivals over the years and another one is coming from Nick. Now I'll admit I've never been a huge TMNT fan but It's been interesting to watch their evolution over the years and the last movie that came out which incorporated all of their incarnations into one adventure was alot of fun; http://television.cosmicbooknews.com/content/video-new-teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles-2012-footage

X-Men: I haven't been impressed by the Marvel-Anime project with Madhouse up until this point. Their previous shows seem to have had their B teams on it - this one has their A team with its signature Madhouse style and what I really enjoy is that it is an adapation - not a re imagining of the X-Men - meaning that they are actually telling the Astonishing X-Men story arcs and not trying to re-invent the wheel. Ergo if you know X-Men you can get into it. I was mixed on the character designs at first with the too tall Wolverine and the 'I'm too sexy' Cyclops but seeing it in action I'm more at ease. It's very anime but it's got this fusion style that's working for me. Plus I think I espied quite a few shots where Wolverine -is- shorter then Cyclops and around Storm's height. There's a few where he's way taller then common people though which makes me wonder if there was a change regarding his height in mid production. By the way this isn't out yet in America. It'll air on G4 later this summer - but you can find streaming videos of the Japanese episodes online. Watch out for dueling fanboys though:
http://www.anilinkz.com/category/x-men-2011/

Wak-Fu - I've never been a huge fan of flash character animation when used for action adventure cartoons. I feel flash based animation has its place but it wasn't until I saw scenes from Wak-Fu, a gorgeous 2d animated series being done in france and also an MMO being made via partnership with Square-Enix, that I was really sucked in. The 2d and 2d digital animation production in Europe is amazing and it's really a shame things have developed in the States as they have because outstanding work is being done on a global scale. I know only a limited amount of Wak-Fu's actual story but the design and animation bears studying and appreciation. This is their second season and common sense should let you navigate their website easily enough: http://www.wakfu.com/fr/serie

Building the Rogue's Gallery

2011-03-30T16:37:00.000-07:00

This unfinished piece of Kongou provides a good segue into today's post, which primarily concerns itself with our rogue's gallery.

Even though we've not yet gone through all of the development on the first set of characters, the so called 'main' ensemble featured in the top banner, for a change of pace I thought I'd turn thoughts towards the villains and rogues gallery for ARMSmasters. Villains are very important as 'they' say your heroes are only as good as your villains - but so far we've posted very little development art for our villains.

The villains were approached by tiers. For one we wanted most of the characters who would be antagonists to not necessarily be irredeemably evil. That would be saved for the metaplot and even then there would be reasons and justifications meant to make audiences think and examine themselves and the villains - but the rogue's gallery had to feel believable, had to believe in their own agendas and had to have realistic goals.

One of the earliest fleshed out villains was Braun the Hunter. From a fanboy standpoint I really liked certain portrayals of Sabertooth from the X-Men comics and also beast like characters. Also I wanted to re-establish various alternative races and humanoids in the world. The story presented a need to have the heroic characters pursued at one point in time by various hunters and Braun and his gang of bandits soon slipped right in. With him I wanted a character we would love to see be bad and who had alot of fun being bad. Earliest concepts for this beastman veered too closely to Kongou in face proportions and, to a lesser extent, Sabertooth. Even though Sabertooth was an inspiration he couldn't -be- Sabertooth obviously. The ideas were neat but he still seemed to human like. The second drawing was contributed by Van Andy, presenting some costume ideas.

This was when Patrick stepped in and was willing to take a stab. Patrick's art style and visual approach brings a very strong balance to the overall design direction as he has very strong western animation design principles which can be re-interpreted into ARMSmasters 'merged' aesthetic. One thing he immediatly brought was a change of proportions that kept Braun menacing and threatening but didn't repeat Tyr's bodybuilder body or Kongou's 'Hulk' body. At the same time Braun was still a heavyweight - one of our three heavyweight characters at this pont: Braun, Kongou and Tyr.

The above image is a page from Patrick Stannard's awesome portfolio, showing the final base progression we reached that gave us a very solid Beastman Hunter to work from. There was some early push for the darker blues for flesh tone but after some counsel and consideration we went with tans and reds because we felt the darker color may make him seem more Orc like and less beastman like. Another change that was made was to adjust his teeth and his facial features to pull him back towards the Great Cat influence and less baboon like. His weapons and gear were dropped in favor of him being more hand to hand and his clothing was modernized just slightly.

Finally Patrick produced several drawings in his style and I then went over it myself and made some final tweaks, enlarging the hands and feet further, bringing the hair and other alterations more into the 'ARMSmasters' development style. At this point we had our Braun though a final tweak will be done when his 'turn' comes up for the model sheets.

Kongou Week And Then Some

2011-03-25T18:41:00.001-07:00

Well Kongou week has been over and posts this week were sparse due to several obligations to the various team members..but hey, the guy is too massive for a mere seven day week so here's one more post before we move on to another development area! The above picture is by an associate of ours who isn't on the main crew page, but who still contributed when he had more time, by the name of Mike Blazowski. This was just a really fun clean up and prismacolor drawing of a rough layout.

As finishing up Kongou week I thought I'd also share some very early storyboards from ARMSmasters. These boards sprang out of the original short film that was done as part of my senior thesis as part of an early concept to revamp the premise. It was given a rough title of 'Versus' and in short, as I may have already briefly described, basically involved Kongou and Riot working at cross purposes to recover an item of some import out of a ruined temple. These boards were some of the earliest in the process of really revisiting and re imagining ARMSmasters as part of a larger world and were an exercise in timing and character development.

Riot's personal attitude began to really take form through these boards and Kongou's own range was given considerable expression. Although I did not finish these they proved a very important exercise in layout, composition and storyboarding and some of these led to later layouts we're still working with and some of the early character design direction changes for Riot and Kongou that have stuck.

Again, I want to thank people for following the blog and passing through here and leaving kind words on the various social mediums we're also working in. Many big things are in the works and things are looking quite positive for us and our little production crew. Continue visiting and please spread the word about ARMSmasters!

Kongou Week Part 2!

2011-03-20T12:06:00.000-07:00

Well okay it's not -exactly- within the same week but hey it's in the seven day spread of the original Kongou post so I'm okay with this!

In the last post I talked a little bit about the genesis of the design of Kongou and how the character kind of evolved into this iconic mascot character for ARMSmasters. Kongou's visual development, especially for areas of his costume and overall body proportions continued to be ongoing. Finding his face let us begin to really iron out his expressions and also start to nail down his personality through discovering the range and realm of his acting and flexibility in body and face. Storyline wise this evolution has been ongoing as well. Now the main purpose of this blog is to chart and chronicle the overall development of ARMSmasters as an animated short and intellectual property and so we've been taking care to not reveal to much by means of story spoilers but a few things come up fairly quickly and are part of the overall setup.

A few model sheet and final design variations were tried, as shown above, though these were still stepping stones. With Kongou one of the things that evolved was his origin and place in the lineup. Scale wise he was clearly not human compared to the others and so was the first main line up character to establish the presence of other humanoid races in the setting ARMSmasters takes place in. Though other characters ranging from more subtle like Rune, to more overt like Braun, would enter the picture to represent the concept of diverse species, Kongou had to be explained earlier on. At early phases when ARMSmasters rang with a more traditional fantasy tone, Kongou had elemental roots and later on he was possibly going to be a summoned creature trapped in material form when that was a more prominent story element.

In those early stages he was a bandit, or at the very least on the wrong side of the tracks, for a portion of his past and eventually an encounter with a younger version of Inari would soften him and he ended up becoming a patriarch, of sorts, for the orphanage where numerous war children including herself, were being raised. He wielded an enormous testubo at that period of time as well and occasionally a long jacket, sleeveless and even glasses from time to time! The above image is actually more recent but follows that older style. There are very old pencil tests showing Kongou actually rescuing a young Inari from a pack of Hyena-Men, perhaps some of the very first story elements of what would evolve into ARMSmasters.

Well as time progressed and the story grew more sophisticated so did Kongou's role and origins. Early short story treatments kept the inhuman origins, instead solidifying him as a member of a rare race of Giantborn individuals - descendants of Titans - and he differed from the others in his ability to use Mana (magic energy) and so to train his body to superhuman levels of strength. Later as the concept of ARMS developed further his origin and purpose continued to adjust.

ARMS are extremely powerful magic amplification devices that are utilized by their wielders to achieve superhuman levels of skill in a given area and element. ARMS are either often a device, trinket or weapon of some sort but the procedure that creates an ARM can actually be done onto the body as well, creating humanoid ARMS. Most ARMS are second and third generation ARMS but the first generation, the so called Sacred or Sovereign Weapons, are the artifacts that drive the major story points and some of these are actually humanoid in origin. In upping the scale, a decision was made that Kongou would actually be one of these original Sovereign ARMS in human form. Doing this injected him right into the middle of the major storyline and crafted for him several arcs and directions for growth as a character and involvement with the others.

Something else decided was that Kongou's actual allegiance would be in question. Although in the proof of concept animations he's on the side of the other hero characters, Kongou as an antagonist or an anti-hero with unclear motives became a concept that was further explored through storyboards that pitted Riot against him in a type of David and Goliath confrontation. Huge characters like him are often based used in an intimidating fashion as once you begin working to bring them down to the audiences level, you can sometimes lose abit of that edge and epic scope. A good example of this is what is often unfortunately done to Juggernaut in the X-Men comics. When used correctly, as an unstoppable force of nature with his own agenda and motives, he's a power to be feared. When dumbed down and given a side kick and made a hero, he was harder to take seriously without that edge.

As an antagonistic force or a power that seemed to be operating on a different side from the other characters, Kongou and Tyr not only avoided criss crossing, allowing Tyr to play the guardian big guy for the first story arc until Tyr's own role and story arc as the machinist could run its full course, but it freed up the ability to really use the character in a variety of broad areas that a heroic character would have to be more restrained.

As part of this I also began exploring the ideas of Kongou having an alternate form. A sort of secondary true ARMS battle mode whereas his first form was basically a restrained version of himself and this second form was basically 'Boss Mode' to be used against large scale forces and threats. Several designs and doodles were made by Patrick under my direction. This is getting ongoing exploration. These earlier designs by Patrick were very elemental themed and Shadow of the Colossus inspired. Obviously as all things this is a work in progress and may not even appear in the final animation piece.

It's Kongou Week!

2011-03-16T15:15:00.000-07:00

I had so much fun doing the marker rendering of Tyr and getting my confidence back in that area that I decided to tackle this meat head here. This was also a blast to draw and render out though I think I may be dying of Chartpak Marker Fume Poisoning now.

But anyway, in doing so it struck me that we're long overdue on a post regarding the development of Kongou. And so I've decided to call this Kongou Week! (Nevermind that it's already Wednesday...)

Kongou is easily most peoples favorite character and the one most people seem to remember me for. Design wise he's alot of fun to draw and visually fun to animate and see in action and see drawn. Fundamentally his design premise is simple - he's huge. Somehow, though, I managed to create a hugeness that stood him out even among the ranks of other big guys out there in fiction and fantasy. It's as if someone took The Hulk and The Juggernaut and mashed them into this ball of meat and then re-sculpted the combined mass as Kongou. An inelegant analogy, I know, but that's essentially what happened.

Kongou is probably the oldest character of the ARMSmasters crew and not just in story content. At first I thought it was Tyr but I actually remember creating Kongou first albiet for a completely different setting. He was the result of a game of Exalted with some friends of mine and in that I made an Earth Aspected Dragonblood (to much to get into. Look it up on your own time.) who was this behemoth of a warrior with massive war hammer the size of some ships mast. Exalted encouraged over the top action and character designs so Kongou was basically.. Hulk in a high fantasy setting. I nicknamed him Mountain That Walks - in part because that sounds cool and appropriately kung-fu-esque and also as a pun on the name Mountain That Rides, a title held by a character in the George R.R. Martin books 'A Song of Fire and Ice' (Again, look it up. :)) The above drawing is among the earliest Kongou drawings that I feel are okay enough to show. Progression is a good thing. :)

This version, including the crazy DBZ hair, was circa the original ARMSmasters pencil test short - though I thankfully thought better of doing the crazy hair in the rough animation itself. I was at the College for Creative Studies at this time which is when the early concepts for these characters started taking off. The story gets more detailed but suffice to say Kongou in particular continued to be worked and reworked. and used nfor a few projects and story premises. Of all the main characters Kongou has had the most progression and the most variance in terms of costume details, proportions and direction and has, in some ways, charted the overall growth of what would become ARMSmasters -and- the various artists involved.

One of the hardest parts with Kongou was finding the proportions that would be both aesthetically interesting and also be able to be animated in a believable fashion. As you can tell from these above older sketches by yours truly and Van Andy Prevalus, Kongou's proportions varied from more Hulkish and dis proportioned to more bodybuilder like and stretched out. Avoiding crossover with Tyr was important. Tyr was going to be a big guy also but more along the lines of how Colossus is 'big' and Thor is 'big'. Kongou needed to be The Hulk and The Juggernaut but he also couldn't just be 'The Bigger Guy.' There was a danger of 'Yeah and me too." with him in regards to Tyr, who was much more secure in design and purpose at this stage then Kongou was.

Constant sketching and ideas contributed from others played an ongoing role in the search for Kongou's ideal shape and size and bit by bit, the character began to shape up, especially helped at this point by a stronger understanding of the story and the design began to follow the needs of the story itself. Proportion wise, I found myself beginning to make enormous strides with him until finally I hit upon the basic model and template that would serve as the final guide for truly bringing him under control.

One of the major things that helped was that I finally found Kongou's face and expressions and began to nail his actual features down to something solid and consistent. The above drawings show that continued progression towards final costume details and expression concepts. Finding that ideal head shot really helped push Kongou over the edge and other things began to just fall into place. The second blue line image was essentially when Kongou was 'found' in terms of general face proportions though a few final tweaks yet remained.

And here was the final/present template that locked Kongou in and paved the way for his final development and look. His jawline was fattened and rounded out a little bit - not quite as square as Tyr's but still huge and brick like. All of his features are kept towards the top half of his head, giving him a smaller cranium and a huge lower jaw. Contrasting, say, Hulk, he has a smaller space between his upper lip and nose and his nose was very inspired by Zangief from Street Fighter Zero Anime. Broad but flat with large nostril flares. An interesting character construction exercise done by Patrick Stannard and then gone over by myself to tighten up.

More to come! It's Kongou Week after all!

Thanks For Coming By!

2011-03-13T20:16:00.001-07:00

It's been a little over a month since we've gone live and we've just passed 1000 hits! Now while maybe some people might find that a modest accomplishment or not a big deal, to me it's really exciting and encouraging. Especially considering that there are some avenues we've not tapped yet to promote this site and that we're really just getting rolling. Thanks very much for your comments, interest, stopping by, etc. It's all very appreciated.

I whipped up the above piece via markers with just a wee bit touch up in photoshop. I was going to try and get back to doing an all CG piece but decided to give markers a try in the interest of trying to wrestle back some of my forgotten rendering skills. So I suppose Tyr's saying thanks or he's eyeing a T-Bone rather hungrily.

Chasing Riot - Part 2

2011-03-09T12:08:00.000-08:00

Working on these new model sheets and final character designs has been a treat. Mel is a blast to work with and the fusion of our aesthetics is creating what is most certainly turning out to be a unique ARMSmasters look. I couldn't be happier. However, the quality of the character work has exposed the need for us to revisit older characters and make sure they're being brought up to speed.

Nowhere was this more apparent then Riot. Without careful attention Riot could very quickly be overshadowed by other characters. Although the cast is meant to be an ensemble cast, Riot is meant to be our window into the world of ARMSmasters. He is the character that the audiences see the events happening through, at least at first, and even though he is aware of information that has to be gradually revealed to the audience, there is also a lot he discovers at the same time as the rest of us. This puts him into the unenviable position of 'lead character'.

The previous posts about Riot concentrated on our goals for his personality and expressiveness and once that was locked in it became much easier to guide the development of the character visually. In terms of his face and expression, earlier versions of Riot sported longer and wilder hair but bringing the hair closer to his skull and sort of cradling his cranium with his hair slimmed his silhouette down considerably.

I found the desire to really keep his shape and silhouette trim and lean. This wasn't just to contrast him against Tyr as we would have other more standard heroic build characters but because we wanted to give Riot a sense of coiled energy and motion. Almost like a slingshot.

Van Andy contributed the above designs which weighted him down to much up top but brilliantly began to divide the colors up and break the costume up and move away from over simplification. Attempts at bulking him up with too much detail seemed to weigh him down to much but making his costume too simplified caused him to get lost in a character lineup and this is especially true with the solid work coming across in the recent final designs. The balance was then to create the proper visual interest in his costume without letting the details weigh him down. In the end, elements from all efforts began to resurface as a final design for Riot based upon previous explorations started surfacing.

And that's really what it boils down to. Exploration! Although some characters came easier then others, all of the characters required exploration and some degree of variation and failed attempts that out weighed the successes in terms of how many of them we would have.

More soon!

Background Layers

2011-03-05T22:42:00.000-08:00

Doing the backgrounds as 2d backgrounds required the tried and true method of utilizing different layers in order to create the illusion of depth and 3d space. As a result, with some of our early backgrounds, there are some elements that actually don't get seen and are partially covered up by the layering of the images atop one another. I thought it might be interesting to post those layers and briefly make mention of our background layout efforts as a break from the character and story heavy posts we've been doing lately.

Van Andy Prevalus and Jon Bowling were responsible for our early background efforts. Based on a rough design by yours truly, Van Andy conceptualized this type of Final Fantasy inspired European Fantasy Castle Town Square. This was before the ARMSmasters world had received heavy conceptualization outside of loose ideas but it created some initial grounding as a fantasy story in a fantastic detailed setting. The original ARMSmasters short dealt with the idea of a spirit like sorceress who haunted the halls of this castle and used her powers and influence to try and challenge the main characters in various ways. Jon Bowling beautifully rendered the mountains and the castle itself in a very special way though in the layered layout much of these mountains are covered by the other buildings.

The middle layer of town square showcased different buildings and different styles of architecture, again beautifully drawn by Van Andy and rendered by Jon. We got alot of mileage out of this layer in our early animation tests due to how detailed it is and the large resolution of the image. Careful cropping and mirroring let us simulate a much larger cityscape for the purposes of quick test shots. It's all about using your resources.

The layer closest to us reveals the side wall of a tavern where some action in the longer short will be taking place. The designs and personality of these layouts is very strong and this portion, with its strong shadow contrast against the brighter areas of the other pieces, is probably my favorite of the three. The color choice and the little design elements like the boxes and padlocks and alleyway treatments are quite fun and don't get old to look at.

Those elements, the padlocks, the pipe networks, the iron barrel with the steam valve on it, and others, helped contribute to guiding the world direction of ARMSmasters - not necessarily towards it being steampunkish - though steampunk elements would exist, but towards this sort of hybrid fantas world. Similar attention to detail and treatments were done for another city layout. While not as elaborate as the first set, it still spoke to our overall direction and was, again, great collaboration between the two artists and very fun to look at in their non layered forms with nothing hidden by camera moves or objects (and characters) in the foreground.

Aeslyn Model Sheet

2011-03-01T14:23:00.000-08:00

Capturing Aeslyn was not an easy task - something Mike and I found out readily in creating her reference sheet. There's bound to be a challenge with a character carrying her level of complexity: She's bold, confident, yet reserved and sophisticated. She's sexy and highly feminine, while absolutely commanding respect from herself and those around her. (Defying many action-fantasy female tropes.) Even her color modeling came down to a tremendous amount of thought - what tones could Aeslyn embody that no other female member of the ARMSmasters line-up pull off? Through all of our effort, and the total blast we had exploring the character, I'm really pleased with the results.

Posing this gal was one of the greater tricks to creating her reference sheet. Screaming "Sophisticated Sexy Confident Intelligent Noble-woman!" all in one go is a mouth-full for any one pose to maintain, to be certain. Above are among the many quick sketches of Mike and I's that lead up to the final full-body pose.

Last but not lease - Color exploration with Aeslyn. In the end, purple, feminine colors seemed to call out to the character the strongest. She, without a doubt, is the only female in the cast thus far who could, or would even want to based on personality alone, pull off such graceful "pretty" tones - they're inherently Aeslyn, and manage, I feel, to accentuate her beauty and roots as nobility all the more.

Aeslyn: Sophisti-Girly

2011-02-25T10:20:00.000-08:00

The posts this week have been more spaced apart due to how busy a number of us have been on various projects - freelance, business related and even production work on ARMSmasters. This week also saw the first major town hall meeting regarding recent plans by Gov. Snyder of Mi chigan to severely limit the Tax Incentive that has allowed the film industry to grow in the state. While this blog is not a political platform I still feel the need to mention this because the incentive program and the growth of the industry here has a direct impact on myself and people who are donating time and effort to helping us out on ARMSmasters as well as other projects.

I have my own personal blog to go into exceptional detail on this matter so I will leave this link: http://www.filmcreditswork.com - and encourage you to visit it, support it, and learn about what is going on and the potential impact.

But enough of that! I have my own website and art gallery blog to go into details about this on. Ideally you are here due to being interested in our production blog! I'll make up for this with lots of early production sketches!

Aeslyn is a character who has undergone much by way of visual evolution but whose role was identified early on. Similar to Riot I knew I wanted a female lead to help carry the initial direction of the story for the ensemble cast and given the genre, homage and type of design ARMSmasters was I knew that I wanted certain visual elements, skills and powers to be there. For example I knew Aeslyn would be a magician of some sort though early on before the ARMSmasters story really developed I did not know what -kind- of magician. Typically the trope for this type of 'shonen inspired' action fantasy would place the female lead as a healer or a summoner or some sort of gentle bubbly, motherly girl.

Well..we wanted Aeslyn blowing stuff up! It wasn't just the action adventure aspect of it but we wanted a character who would be competitive with Riot and not just someone you point at and go 'Oh that must be the love interest!' In fact, if Riot and Aeslyn even ended up as a pair wasn't even part of the consideration of her design. She was going need him to accomplish a certain goal and in accomplishing this goal Riot would be made aware of the bigger picture and the necessity of staying together with her. 'Love' was never part of the equation at that stage but the thing I knew for certain was that this character would have a strong and self confident perosnality and sense of self and that she would be from a different part of the world system then most of the other characters which in turn breeds conflict and room for growth and thus interesting storytelling. But we also were dealing with a female we wanted as a three dimensional character. Creating this untouchable ice queen was not on the agenda.

Strong female characters in positions of leadership in fiction and fantasy served as inspiration at the early stages. Study of Princess Leia, Katara and her counterpart Azula from Avatar the Last Airbender, Padme Amidala (in the first two prequel movies. The third will not be mentioned here.), Wonder Woman, Storm and especially Lois Lane were all examples of this archetype and also all had differences among how they were handled and so served as great examples to look to. Someone once described Lois Lane as the woman Superman tries to keep up with - and that was what we saw Aeslyn as, especially through our commitment to make sure we had strong interesting female characters and not just show pieces, which often happens in the fantasy and superpowered genres.

Early on Aeslyn was cemented as a woman of nobility, high upbringing, leadership and education but her earliest designs started off more tomboyish and then veered more into more openly wizardry like and in part this was due to the ongoing development and style of the world itself being explored. Early sketches had her blond as well as some sort of fashionable sorceress but eventually she was sleeked down and a stronger silhouette for her found. At some point her hair color was altered towards heavy darks. At first brown and then an implied jet black. At this stage I was looking to actresses and models such as Monica Belluci as Persephone in The Matrix Reloaded or Antoinette Nikprelaj from Scar23 for an iconic raven haired beauty look.

Ultimately Patrick Stannard and Mel Miller stepped in as well and participated wonderfully in helping to find Aeslyn's ultiamte look. Patrick re-tied down animation that was already done and provided more direction and structure which Mel Miller finalized with wonderful clean up animation. However, even after our early animation test with her she needed some ongoing refinement in costuming and the particulars of her features.

Mel's particular elegant touch and command over costuming details really began to push Aeslyn towards her final design which we tackled much in the same way we tackled Tyr's final model with me doing initial roughs, her cleaning up those roughs and also interpreting things based on my sketches and her own added concepts, me directing that and fixing things where I wanted things adjusted but deferring to her judgment on matters as well and so on. The results, however, I'll leave for another post!

Early Storyboards and Layouts

2011-02-21T14:09:00.000-08:00

I thought I'd share some of the storyboard and layout drawings that have been produced thus far for ARMSmasters and talk a little about our method for doing these.

In going through the archive of scans and drawings and ideas we've generated over the past few months, as we really got going on this, it struck me just how many storyboard drawings and concept drawings have been done. ARMSmasters has been through several stages, each one more increasingly complex then the last as more people came aboard and began to contribute and the realization of what a team could do began to come to fruition.

Early concepts for ARMSmasters focused primarily on Riot and Kongou engaged in a one on one more reminiscent of Street Fighter and such with the idea that they were at odds over retrieving an artifact of some sort and that circumstances would force the two to have to work together to defeat the guardian of said artifact. Later this expanded to be Kongou against Tyr, Riot and Aeslyn with, again, there being a final boss sort of encounter that forced an alliance.

Many of these ideas went as far as boards and early layout concepts done by yours truly, mostly as tests for test animatics and pencil tests. When the idea came to just do a short character proof of concept that revealed the major characters and world designs and the project had evolved beyond it being mostly a party of one or two contributing to it, the desire to get just a little more advanced was kindled. Still these early boards were very useful, educational and in many cases were able to be re-purposed. We ended up creating many new ones for the original character teaser but used older ones and layouts when we could. Most of the ones posted in this post are newer boards but some older ones continue to serve their purpose.

Recently I was privy to a discussion regarding the difference between storyboarding and story development in the East and the West. The pattern for most major anime and anime directors is for the director to do most of the boarding, if not all of it, and basically lead the vision and lead the way. With such strong stylistic things happening in anime and many of their directors being exceptional artists and designers in their own right, this makes sense. Individuals like Miyazaki, Takeshi Koike, Fuminori Kizaki, and Yoshiaki Kawaijri are known for this and if they aren't doing the boards they have their favorite prodigies doing them.

This method results in a much tighter series of boards where the artwork is consistent and often so plotted out that the boards effectively become the layout which become the keys. Tight keyframing in storyboards is also used for storyboards that are done for animation in the US that is meant to be sent over seas. Storyboards for shows like Avatar the Last Airbender and many of DC Comics direct to DVD features are done so tight that sometimes you can see timing charts on the boards, leaving little to no room for guess work for the overseas artists.

By contrast western studios such as Pixar and Disney tend to have their story departments engage in a much more hands on approach to doing the story telling. Storyboards are often rougher and story direction is constructed by critical analysis and team work pulled together from story meetings and director notes. Well the question was posed; which is better?

Alot of artists who answered were independent artists and film makers in pursuit of their own goals and dreams, much like we are, and they seemed to favor the japanese method and there's no denying the quality of many of the top anime films and series - but there's equally no denying the power behind the story departments at Disney and especially the Pixar Brain Trust, as they've yet to miss a beat. For me, it became a question of which method to use for ARMSmasters. As the director and creator of the property the ultimate vision did rest in my head but I would be foolish to not tap into the incredible talent that had made itself available to me. Ultimately for ARMSmasters I knew I would have to spear head the storyboards but ideas would be generated and created by those who wished to contribute and it would be my responsiblity as vision keeper to bring those ideas into line with the big picture. This collaborative effort has worked beautifully for us.

Tyr Model Sheet

2011-02-18T02:40:00.000-08:00

Mike and I are amidst an effort to nail down finalized reference sheets for each member of the ARMSmasters cast. First on the list was one of the characters whose design has remained quite iconic and concrete since early in on in his conception, Tyr, which is now up in our Artwork gallery. I've often found myself describing Tyr as a living sculpture - his hulking body-builder physique makes him fascinating to draw, as much as his intelligent, approachable nature makes his intimidating size and strength a curious and interesting juxtaposition of character.

Creating these character sheets is proving a great deal of fun, as well as an exploration between what makes Mikes Style and mine our own - how each of us approach drawing shapes in different manners. My ultimate goal with these, of course, is to tailor them as closely to Mike's wonderful style as closely as I can. I receive initial rough sketches for every pose, every expression, and begin to tie them down more and more - each phase of tie down altered with Mike's red-line revisions. Once the line work reaches final approval, the final color treatment for these character sheets is made to reflect all of the final, polished elements we would like to bring to the finalized animation: dual layers of shadow, a gradient light layer, as well as colored line work.

Below is an example, starting from the initial rough sketch I received through flat colors, of the revisions process these character sheets are going through, as we work to nail down the final look for these reference sheets.

Tyr the Machinist - Early Thoughts

2011-02-16T21:51:00.000-08:00

Tyr was one of those rare characters who was found very easily, visually, early on, and received minimum by way of heavy duty total design revisions. This isn't to say that he did not undergo his steps and have his periods of trials and error, but we seemed to have stumbled across a good, fun, iconic design to fit his role and his abilities somewhat early on.

Tyr was one of the first of the created characters who ended up part of the story of ARMSmasters. He's even older then Kongou by several degrees though his original incarnations were somewhat different he was also seen as this Warrior Machinist who was both a builder as well as a fighter. Another way to describe him was a 'Nerd Jock'. I wanted him very physically capable but he was, for all practical purposes, the smartest guy on the team. Physically he would be different from Kongou much in the same way that Thor is from Hulk or Colossus from Juggernaut. While still a 'big guy' he was more human in scale and classically bodybuilder. His role was different as well. Though physically imposing and capable of superhuman feats he'd utilize his knowledge of artifice (the machine magic of the world.) in conjunction with his strength and sometimes instead of.

A major inspiration for Tyr was John Henry, the African American folklore character. Initially Tyr was not black but that did not last long as he began to quickly develop and early on his race was changed as homage to the John Henry character. Some time before even this I had been working on concepts for a short titled 'Super John Henry' was was basically a more super powered/superhero retelling of the John Henry tale. I never finished it but the designs ended up influencing the direction we were moving with Tyr.

At the same time, the norse themes grew more prevalent and one of the warrior cultures of Cellene ended up being designed as this kind of militaristic nation that had a heavy theme of norse mythology among its weaponry, characters and abilities. Naturally, Tyr being black, brought a sense of contrast to this but as the culture and background story developed the inclusion of the norse themes were more about the attitude, the power and the elemental nature that they represented and not about the historic link to the real world mythology. We were borrowing from it but not strictly emulating it as for example Tyr's wife is named Freya and is also black, and Fenrir/Fenris is a giant airship of Tyr's own creation, and not a wolf - but this airship still ends up costing Tyr a limb - which he replaces with a prosthetic arm. It was more about exploring these themes then retelling things literally.

Also with Tyr I knew we wanted a character older then the rest of the gang, though not by much, and more seasoned in matters of the real world and yet with personal issues he's ducking and hiding from. Tyr being estranged from his current wife, Freya, due to their differing political beliefs was one element that I brought in early and stuck with developing. Colette being made Tyr's daughter was a more recent choice This was for additional contrast and conflict as it tied her in beyond being just another protege. Tyr provided a balance between Riot and Aeslyn as well as with the two characters you basically had two Alpha's in contest with each other but Tyr's development into mediator and big brother provided a way to create balance and inject a responsible nature and a way of thinking that the others would want to grow into and mature towards.

Chasing Riot - Part 1

2011-02-13T20:48:00.000-08:00

I've done a few posts about back story and our pursuit of the development of the world but without character, what do you have? :) ARMSmasters is very much a character driven story even though, as is the case in many efforts of world development, the characters themselves were an elusive bunch and emerged bit by bit from the chaos of creation.

An example of this is Riot, arguably our 'lead' character - or at least the character through whose eyes we, the viewers, become exposed to the world. We decided, early on, that ARMSmasters would be more of an ensemble style group, similar to, say, the X-Men, wherein each character has an opportunity for spotlight and importance in the big scheme of things as opposed to just being about 'one' character. However, just like X-Men draws alot of its central conflicts from the struggles of Xavier and Magneto (or did at least, for those up on present day Marvel.) ARMSmasters still needed character leads who would serve as the prime movers, even among the rest of the ensemble cast.

Riot emerged as one of these characters. In him we wanted an iconic archetype that would be easily identifiable with, and immediately recognized but he also had to be able to stand out and not be overshadowed by more ambitious designs or lost in the crowd when lined up against characters built from similar tropes and ideals. In short, the search for that elusive 'main character' while also trying to avoid the 'main character curse' often prevalent in modern storytelling and gaming; ie having a main character much less interesting then the rest of the cast.

Ironically enough, developing Riot as a person came easier then we realized. One of the things that helped was that right away I knew that what I did -not- want to do was the classic Heroes Journey sort of heroic character as embodied in characters like Luke Skywalker, your average JRPG hero (Japanese Roleplaying Game), and other assorted sources wherein we had a naive, angst ridden, indecisive, whiny sort of character go from that to being the greatest hero ever who saved the world. While I recognize that the reason why this works for those stories is because it, in part, gives the character somewhere to go and a place to grow from, I felt that could be still be done with a character that started off more mature, settled, and aware of himself.

In that sense, Riot began, early on, cut from the same cloth that produced characters like Han Solo or Dingo (Zone of the Enders) and Dante (Devil May Cry.) He was more sure of himself, would be less prone to indecisiveness and uncertainty about his place in the world, and would be already experienced, battle tried and full of opinion about the world around him. At the same time he would be very human, at times amoral, roguish, a trouble maker and not exactly cut out for being 'the hero' at first glance. He would have elements of the classic iconic 'Will Smith' character (circa Men in Black I) A very diamond in the rough sort of character who had seen much of the world, but still would have alot to learn even if he would never admit it and be prone to leaping before looking. Riot wouldn't even be his real name but just a callsign left over from the war and an attempt to distance himself from his more distant past. He would have his share of secrets, of course, but instead of weighing him down they would drive him forward.

And so, he would still have the traits necessary for growth along a Heroes Journey but would be much more developed psychologically which itself opened up all sorts of other story concepts. Visually, early Riot development lent itself towards this sort of roguish youth who would have war experience (and in reality was one of the augmented knights that the story would center around.) I experimented with him as just a martial artist but the idea of a swordsman came early on and stuck with Riot ... and lets face it, cool swords and fancy sword duels are fun.

Early concepts leaned a little too close to the Sol Badguy and Dante routes with the primary red colors and the giant sword, and I pulled away from that to try and find more of a middle ground that spoke more to ARMSmasters itself. Finding the iconic Riot has proven to be a quest and a half and final refinement of him is still under way.

Early Development - Part 2

2011-02-12T20:16:00.000-08:00

We've a wealth of information and material to share just based on how much thought and time has gone into ARMSmasters to get it -this- far, let alone new material that is generated for the property as we aim to bring it to the next stage. Right now, our main goals are dealing with getting the final character sheets done and building a complete set of storyboards to cover the longer short film which we're aiming at being around 3 minutes. At the same time we're taking major shots from the existing character teaser and taking them to completion so before we have the longer 3 minute piece we will have a revised character teaser comprised of finished shots.

Before we get too deep into just dropping additional concept art and animation onto people I thought I'd take a post to continue the early development thoughts that went into ARMSmasters and also share a little bit of the setting back story.

ARMSmasters takes place on a world known as Cellene during an era titled The Second Age of Magic. Magic in this world is powered by an energy source known as Mana which permeates the world. For the most part this 'magic' is realized through the creation of technology known as magitech which is used to enable the people to live fairly comfortable lives within the industrialized city-states of the world. There are some people able to wield mana naturally or harness it in unique ways without artificial aid but these individuals are extremely rare.

The people living in this era actually know little about their entire world, believing it to be a world without end, due to the numerous challenges such as monsters, wars, areas of wild magic and other phenomenon that hinders travel on a global and even continental scale.

The main action takes place in the area currently labeled Continent Arcannia and a rugged area known as The Sanctus Frontier which exists between Arcannia and the region labeled Vantyr. Arcannia should be thought of as a type of future-fantasy Europe with a number of diverse cultures and nations brought under the banner of an organization known as The Ministry of Nations. The Ministry exists to maintain the status quo; a peace labled the Pax Arcannia which controls the development of technomagical weapons, including ARMS, and the use and development of magic energy itself. This has resulted in a growing gulf between varying social classes but that is something for another post.

The ability of some people to utilize magic energy naturally, the existence of technomagical weaponry and super powered martial arts, and magic amplification devices such as the ARMS themselves have resulted in the existence of the superhuman in this world. The reality of enhanced humans who can push beyond the normal limits of mankind is an accepted part of this setting although the strength of powers varies and truly exceptional, mythic feats are eye openers.

The existence of such beings has given rise to a number of different factions and occupations that help shape events in the world. Relic Hunters such as Collette make a living by exploring the numerous ancient ruins of the world in search of secrets of the previous age. Bounty Hunters and Monster Hunters like Riot and Rune aid in the capture of other enhanced beings who have turned to a life of crime or defend settlements from the varying degrees of monstrous dangers that threaten them.. This brings them into conflict, or alliance at times, with rogue factions like the Sky Pirates or Crime Syndicates and so on and so on.

In developing the 'look' of ARMSmasters, early on I was exploring the union of fantasy and technology as done in numerous video games but also seen in things such as Star Wars, Disney's Treasure Planet and Atlantis, and popular comic books and mangas. Tim, in his previous post, mentioned Steampunk but Steampunk was just one of several guiding principles and mainly represents the rustic technology and Old West themes evident in parts of The Frontier. The entire world itself embraces an atmosphere meant to be large and colorful and full of fantastic locations and epic heroes and villains.

Van Andy donated art and ideas towards this end long before the current film project itself began to take place. helping to envision a variety of locations that would bring this world to life. Early on he helped establish elements of the old technology juxtaposed against this sense of cosmic high fantasy, that other artists like Tim would continue to carry and work with and further expand on.

The Old Barrel Pub

2011-02-09T16:36:00.001-08:00

I started thinking about this environment design when I came cross an early environment concept Mike did. The original render that Mike did has a huge barrel in the middle of the bar, and I thought this was an awesome potential location when thinking about the ARMSmaster Project extended trailer and pitch bible. We were looking to start designing areas of the world further, incorporating a frontier styled Steampunk theme for some locations. Mike pub scene came right to mind and I ran with it, trying to push it even further.

Keeping true to what I thought made the original drawing great, I made sure to keep some key points in it, such as the huge barrel with the pipes going in and out of it while adding tech elements such as the fans from the ceiling.

With the rendering, we strive to maintain a uniform style with all the environments. Experimenting using 3D turned out to be a quick way to lay out the environment and perspective, which I later rendered by hand.

Adding some lighting directions, haze, and some of Van-Andy's samurai drawings on the wall, we wrapped this one up!

-Tim

Early Development Thoughts

2011-02-08T11:46:00.000-08:00

I thought that for one of our early posts about the property and the film that I would actually first get into some of the the intent behind the visual style for ARMSmasters and later into a little back story on the world itself.

For ARMSmasters it should be pretty clear that our inspiration draws very heavily upon aesthetics and trends seen in eastern game design and animation but we also wanted to temper this with western comic book and fantasy aesthetics as well. These days I believe that western design is being guided more and more by this merged aesthetic, especially for the action and adventure cartoon.

When done well you can achieve some great results as especially seen in recent shows like Avatar the Last Airbender or Young Justice or the recently revealed art for the Thundercats reboot. Opinions vary, of course, and a true post on art style is really a discussion and examination unto itself...but for -ARMSmasters- I knew from the beginning that I wanted it to have the sense of visual design. This was to be reflected in things like the costume designs, world development, color queues and so forth with special attention being paid to the characters clothing and individual sense of style, nationality, combat techniques and personality. The characters are of a mixed age group, ranging from early teens to late thirties and so carry with them a varying level of experience and companionship.

We did a lot of study on favorable art styles and designers on both sides of the sea. Guilty Gear, Final Fantasy (in particular VII, VIII and XII), Street Fighter, Devil May Cry, and various other senses of style by Capcom artists were impactful as was the works of Joe Madueria, Lesean Thomas, Alvin Lee and the design on shows like Boondocks, Avatar the Last Airbender, G.I. Joe Resolute among others. I wanted the world to be colorful, vibrant, saturated and larger then life. The characters, especially the leads, needed to match this while also stating their roles and purpose by visual presence alone.

As an example; Kongou the Mountain was one of the early characters I developed and became one of my own signature characters. Those who know me know that I really enjoy dealing with heavy weight characters in animation and in design. Characters inspired by The Hulk, Juggernaut, and others are among my favorites and Kongou is very much in that mode. He also came to represent the overall sense of scope and epic adventure that we were reaching for with the entire property. Mind you, the quest for Kongou's final look was (and is) a journey in and of itself but that's for another post.

The Artwork Gallery (Iatros Feature)

2011-02-05T20:03:00.000-08:00

Welcome, new viewers! Thank you for taking the time to check out The ARMSmasters Project new home on the web. I wanted to draw everyone's attention to our Artwork gallery here on the blog. There are 31 freshly posted pieces of concept artwork now available for all to see, between three sections of the gallery: Rough Design concept art, wherein our creative crew hashes out new looks and concepts for the ARMSmasters universe, as well as the Final Design and Layout sections, which host polished, definitive pieces for the series. These galleries will be updated on a routine basis - I will announce newly posted images in the News section, and ever so often, feature an image or two with a blog post of its own.

To kick off these features, Above and below are the latest two additions to the Rough Design section: Beautiful, digitally rendered ideation by VanAndy Prevalus of a potential member of the ARMSmasters Rogue Gallery, "Iatros."

Cheers,
Mel

Blog Banner Process

2011-02-04T22:11:00.000-08:00

(Click for Full Res)

In efforts to continue to aid the momentum of the ARMSmasters Project, I recently began two new undertakings: Creating what will be an expansive public production blog for the project that will be available for all to see, and collaborating with the project's awesome creator, one mister Mike Winn, to create finalized, polished concept art and design model sheets for each of the Project's characters. The first of those collaborations is the above image, created for the header of the new blog, wherein Mike gave me a myriad of wonderful rough sketches of the characters, and I cleaned up, arranged and colored them into the above final image. Below is the process of this image's creation - the same process of which we plan to use for the model sheets to come.

(Click for Full Res)

Thank you for checking us out, and keep and eye out - there will be much more to come.

-Mel

Welcome!

2011-02-04T20:01:00.000-08:00

Whelp, let's get things underway shall we?

I am extraordinarily pleased, proud, blessed, giddy and excited to be able to announce the launch of the public production blog for The ARMSmasters Project. Now, naturally this raises the question: Just what /is/ The ARMSmasters Project? Why, I'm glad you decided to ask!

In short, The ARMSmasters Project is a heroic fantasy adventure set in a world of both high technology and grand magical achievement. It features colorful super heroic characters who must resolve their own personal struggles as well as attend to the grave dangers and epic challenges that face them and their world. Their story and the story of their world is realized through a series of hand drawn animation short films and the development of a pitch package that we hope will ignite the imagination of those who might be interested in helping us to get this story out there.

ARMSmasters is an homage to the Saturday morning cartoon, gaming, shonen anime and manga and western fantasy and super powered adventure. It is the first of what we hope to be many intellectual properties developed under the banner of Alpha Omega Animation Design and its production associates. We, the artists and designers of AOA, are a pool of highly talented South Eastern Michigan animators who love telling stories and love making cartoons. Animation design is alive and well here in Michigan.

This production blog is intended as an open window into our development process and into the evolution of ARMSmasters. It is an outlet for our creative team to be able to share with you the tremendous work that is being done, as well as an archive for our progress and a hub to service our fund raising projects and financing needs in order to bring this property and pitch to full fruition.

Stage Zero:

One of our principle aims is to develop exciting, colorful and fun hand drawn animation in order to tell the ARMSmasters Project story and to pitch the concept to larger entities. The short film, tentatively titled Stage Zero, is intended as an introduction to the world of ARMsmasters in the form of a film festival piece and a companion to the written development bible.

As ARMSmasters was dreamed up, it became clear that we had a large and vibrant cast of characters and a big world with a big story to tell. Trying to tell it all in a short film format would have proven an impossible task and so we elected to approach it in the fashion of a character teaser and series opening. The current short form trailer that exists is meant as an early proof of concept regarding the basic character design and art direction. Stage Zero will give us a larger glimpse into the world of ARMSmasters, its heroes and its villains.

Thanks for dropping by! Stay tuned!