Last Express on iOS

Amused to see that they ported The Last Express to iOS. This was my first fulltime paying job after art school and really some of the funnest days in my life. 2 shifts of 4-6 animators packed into a small room rotoscoping characters 5-7 days a week. I had the night shift (4pm-12am) and became good friends with Dreamworks Consumer Products Legend; Lawrence Hamashima. Im pretty sure we were using a mouse to clean and paint all the frames, which from the comfort of my Cintiq, I find hard to imagine doing. Jordan was already pretty famous from his original Prince of Persia and for the time the entire project was really innovative and smart- and felt sort of like a punk-rock-do-whatever-you-gotta-do-to-get-it-done little studio on the edge of Telegraph Hill in pre dot com San Francisco. Ahh man, best of times, best of times. By far my favorite character I was assigned to animate was Kahina, who was Kronos's female bodyguard. Check her out! So cool. I could go on and on about those days but perhaps thats better left for a different post.

Art of Mass Effect

Here's The Art of Mass Effect Book. Pretty good look at the development process of a large Sci-Fi franchise. Lots of environments, aliens, vehicles and weapons. A lot of familiar design cues for Mass Effect mass appeal. I like this book though and the art is all really good even if its exactly what youd expect. Theres a lot of the same drawings slightly altered but thats definitely part of the process of developing something of this scale. Ive posted a few of my favorite pictures from the book above... As you can see I particularly liked the white guns. Such a great color for a gun.

Worth it for 25 bucks on Amazon

The Art of the Mass Effect Universe

Casey Hudson

Derek Watts

Chris Helper

Dark Horse Books (February 21, 2012)

184 Pages (HC)

ISBN-10: 1595827684

9 x 12 x .90

Colombe

Home away from home @LaColombe

Christmas

You maybe shocked to hear that there's an entire industry of Christmas, while on this job I met people who work on Christmas all year round. Like full time, major trade shows around the world and everything. Here's one of the sketches from a project with the Christmas people. It's a good possibility that this ornament or one similar to it is on sale at Macy's this year.

Kids in a variety of styles

Kid characters in a couple different styles from a summer project that went in a slightly different direction.

The Art and Making of Surf's Up

Here we are, Art of Surf's Up, little bit of an older book but still probably really easy to get a hold of. Obviously I love this kind of content- any sort of surfing animation and Im on board. Im especially onboard with Mr. Paul Lassaine's paintings which Ive been enjoying since the days of Prince of Egypt.

There's so many great painting of his on his blog which you can find HERE. Sooo good. Definitely on my top 5 list of visual developers in animation and film. Hes had an amazing career.

Anyways, fun book of surfing characters and locations- not the hugest fan of the making of aspects of any art of book but the technical strides the engineering team made in creating realistic, controllable, animated CG waves is pretty remarkable, and in my eyes earns enough respect to have a place in this book.

One thing worth mentioning is all the extra inserts of post cards, dvds and other little bells and whistles they added into this book (and quite a few others, Art of Monster House, Art of Open Season, etc)- some people must like this stuff but for me I would prefer they just left it out and put the budget towards more pages or something else. It makes the book sit funny and flipping through the pages is far from smooth because it automatically flips straight to those inserts. Uhg, I hate it when they add that stuff in. But I digress and apologize for that rant. Really hard to fit all of my favorite pictures onto my book review page but here above are a handful of my favorites. Definitely check out the Paul Lassaine Art Blog for ALOT of great bits of art that are and aren't included in this book.

Surf's Up: The art and making of a true story

Cody Maverick

Insight Editions (May 15, 2007)

148 Pages (HC)

ISBN-10 1-933784-15-6

11.1 x 10.4 x 1

Almost 20 clams on Amazon