Industry Exercises-Day 5

Hey guys, well here it is the final design for Billy the Goth, and the final drawing that I shall make into a model in Maya, which is why I have a model sheet. This is the final drawing mainly because in my mind this is what he should look like. He should be a blonde haired goth because I just thought that idea would be a bit different and the fact that it shows that he hates people but loves insects more shows on his shirt and his face as well with that spider tattoo on his right cheek. It's based on two early designs, one is the favourite one of mine which was the one where he's blonde and has weird eyes and the one where he wore a sleeveless shirt saying 'I hate people' which was a favourite of everyones, and mine as well. But this is the final drawing I shall get back to you when I finally start building the model. Till then see ya later.

Inspirations Pt 9

Hey guys, more music for you now and this is the music from the "Narnia" movies including the latest single from the latest one; "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader". Please enjoy.

The Animan Kingdom: Concept Art

THE

ANIMAN

KINGDOM

BY GABRIEL BOYLE

CONCEPT ART 

Industry Exercises-Day 4

Hey guys, what have for you now finally are the designs for my character Billy, which I'll be very happy to explain to you what went through my mind as I was designing him. Please enjoy the gallery although you won't get to see the designs for Billy right away, you'll see some drawings I've done of regular goths. It's me just testing out and trying to capture the goth look and make sure I get that right for my character.



These drawings are the first pieces of test drawings I did of goths, just to try and capture the look of them and everything and some of these characters are kids, and since my character Billy is what you'd like to call a kid goth, I have to see what kind of clothes they wear and what they personality is because as you know goth kids act very differently compared to regular kids.



More test drawings, one of them being the very iconic figure of a goth with wings also if you notice there's a drawing in there of a goth's tattoo which is something I'm very keen to give the character.



Again more test drawings, I basically drew these to see if the look of any different goth would suit my own goth.



This one is based on the digital goth painting of actor Steve Buscemi which I collected for research from the internet. I was also thinking about giving Billy the same lip service that goth Steve as I call him here has.



This is a hand test, I had loads of ideas on how to make this work for my character, I had the idea that maybe his hands would have eyes in the palms like the pale man had in "Pan's Labyrinth". Also I had the idea that he would have a dark poem tattooed on his hand and what I did was I took the poem from one of the actresses' Megan Fox's tattoos because it's the only dark gothic story I know and it's not exactly a poem. The phrase is "There once was a little girl who never knew love until a boy broke her heart". Unfortunately I couldn't fit the whole poem down.




Again just exploring some more ideas and again trying out with the tattoos.



More ideas.



Now this is the first design for Billy I did just exploring the hair and just trying to capture the solitary nine-year-old feel to him.



This is him with a long leather jacket with loads of belt buckles. Even though it's appropriate to goths, few of my friends thought it was little too extreme for a nine-year-old but the idea is is that he is a very extreme character but I suppose it would be a bit too extreme.



This is exploring the creepy aspect of him and that's his insect loving self if you notice the little spider that he's stroking. Plus I wanted to give him long streaks of hair and have him wear stocking on his arms like most goths.



Again exploring his insect loving side and again just trying out some ideas for the hair.



This is his way of saying leave me alone and just making him a little creepy looking. Looking at this drawing now, I basically see a combination of three characters, Gollum a little bit, Jamie Hewlett esc the way he draws his characters and Neil from "The Young Ones" all to make one goth.



Again this is exploring his insect loving side only this time he's acting like a insect as he's down on all fours.



As you can tell from what it says on his t-shirt, this shows that he loves insects more then humans. Also I've done some stuff with the eyes as well, remembering that phrase that the eyes are the windows to the soul. And in this case his eyes show that he's creepy and dead inside when he's around people.



Gave him sunglasses here but in the end though I decided not to go with this one because he looked at bit like Neo from "The Matrix", but definitely kept the neck collar.




This is him with a wide shirt with a spider's skull in the centre of it. I decided that I wanted him to wear a gothic shirt that had an insect pattern on it, so I did some research for spider skulls and found one and placed that skull onto what you see here on the centre of his shirt. Also I have cockroach tattoos on the palm of hands here, exploring the tattoo aspect.




This is a little bit based off of Tobey Maguire when he goes all goth in 'Spider-Man 3". I saw a digital painting of that particular image from the film of him showing his darker side and incorporated that into my design here but changed the image on his shirt.



This is a little poster idea I had of him showing his shadow of what he is inside and that's an insect-like monster.



This is him with his ideal mother and father.



This one I have to say is my favourite because he looks more like a trapped child and plus I've given him different coloured hair. I decided it was interesting if he was a blonde goth which you don't really see a lot of.



Him jamming on a base guitar.



This is him with a little bit of a camp rocker kind of look.



This is the idea of given glasses and making him look a bit more like a creepy scientist. And this could be what he would look like when he's studying his babies.



This is a creepy one of him as a school boy with spider legs that he's somehow stuck onto his back. This is also a little homage to "The Omen", one of the great classics in horror film history





Him with a long coat just minding his own business.



Upper shot of him towering over what could be ants, so this image is from an ant's perspective.



Him holding a spider and looking at it in his own loving way.



Shot of him hooded and looking up, giving him that mysterious figure kind of look.



Finally these are just head shots and what tattoos would suit his face.

Now you've seen the gallery of early sketches, what I'll tell you now is that I decided to make one more design and that design will be the final one. None of these will have that title and there fore be modelled into Maya because to me they don't quite suit to what I now have in mind which I think is perfect, sorry to sound bias. Anyway what I'll be doing is mixing of few of the designs you've seen above and try and make them into one and that one will be what Billy will end up looking like. And that's what you're gonna see in the next blog report.

The Animan Kingdom: The Books

THE

ANIMAN

KINGDOM

BY GABRIEL BOYLE

THE BOOKS

What I'll explain to you now are the tiles of the thirteen book series and brief drafts of the plots. And show you how they make all together one story.

Book I: The Animan Kingdom: The Attack in Anatolis- "The Attack on Anatolis" takes place in the Animan built city of Anatolis where we meet our four heroes Vex, Skizz, Gorg and Leo who witness the invasion of the Shredded ones and watch them destroying their homes and murdering their families. Once they survive, they decide to come together and leave their now ruined home and go off to search for their king, the lion Animan Aronton Pride and beg him to stop this new threat from taking over their world.

                                                                                           

Book II: The Animan Kingdom: The Tribes of the Canis Lupus and the Ursus Arctos- The story continues in "The Tribes of the Canis Lupus and the Ursus Arctos" where our young heroes travel through the dangerous northern redwood forests where they come face to face with the aggressive wolf Animan tribe known as the Canis Lupus who kidnap Gorg. The remaining three then seek help from another tribe, the bear Animan tribe known as the Ursus Arctos who immediately take action to rescue Gorg from their long-time enemies. 

Book III: The Animan Kingdom: The Ruins of Vancouver- In "The Ruins of Vancouver" our heroes now reunited with Gorg learn about the origins of the Animans, the legend about a mysterious race known as the winged serpents and that Leo has a great destiny, that he's the long lost offspring of the great Animan lion king, Ziron Pride and that he is in fact a prince, the next heir to the throne after Aronton Pride.

Book IV: The Animan Kingdom: Kaylisha- Before they begin their journey through the Amazon jungle, the band meet a beautiful but cocky female cheetah Animan named Kaylisha, who decides to help them get to the Kingdom of Animancarve, as she used to live there before she ran away for selfish reasons, wanting to be free and live the life of an adventurer. 

Book V: The Animan Kingdom: The Trek through the Jungles of the Amazon- The teenagers now accompanied by Kaylisha begin their "Trek through the Jungles of the Amazon". They face many obstacles and even come face to face with most of the creatures, big and small, some gentle and some not. They also meet Jaosq, a brave Amazonian Animan jaguar who decides to help them survive through the jungles.

Book VI: The Animan Kingdom: The Awakening of Teeth and Claws- On their continuation through the Amazon jungle with Jaosq as their guide, Skizz comes across a dark cave and accidentally awakens something thought to be extinct ancient dragon, now threatens to destroy anything in it's path, starting with the Amazon.

Book VII: The Animan Kingdom: The Dreams of Destiny- Leo begins to have dreams of what would happen when he becomes king, this gives him a chance to start having faith in himself. Also the band meet an old western lowland silverback gorilla named Barrus who begins teaching them how to fight like a true Animan.

Book VIII: The Animan Kingdom: The Nightmares of Power- "Nightmares of Power" focuses on the antagonist, General Karlrosk, military leader of the Shredded ones. We learn who he once was and why he's leading an army to take over a peaceful realm.

Book IX: The Animan Kingdom: Entering the Kalahari- Our heroes now with Barrus accompanying them enter the African plains of the Kalahari. Suddenly though they come face to face with Karlsrosk and learn what he and the Shredded ones are up to and just how many Shredded ones there might be. However though they are rescued by a group of Animan soldiers and those of the king's army.

Book X: The Animan Kingdom: The Kingdom of Animancarve- After a long journey our heroes finally make it to "The Kingdom of Animancarve" where they meet their idol the king and explain about where they come from, what happened, who the Shredded ones are and what they're planning to do to Aronton's Kingdom. They also ask to become soldiers, immediately the king places them into the royal Animan boarding academy where they can stay now since their are orphans and they can continue their educations and learn to become the warriors they've always dreamt of being, Leo however who reveals to Aronton that he's the next heir and the long lost prince, stays in the king's palace to learn to become a leader from the king himself. 

Book XI: The Animan Kingdom: Training the Sexes- "Training the Sexes" focuses on our heroes facing very difficult obstacles, Leo has to learn to be a great leader which everyone in the Kingdom is expecting him to be and that Vex and Kaylisha have to fight Skizz and Gorg to prove which sex is the strongest fighter. Gorg however falls in love with a sexy and intelligent but beautiful female deer Animan named Lela, also Skizz tries to tell Vex that he's always had feelings for her.

Book XII: The Animan Kingdom: The Battle on the Serengeti- "The Battle on the Serengeti" is the first part of the big climax where the Animans face off against the Shredded ones in an epic and bloody battle for freedom.

Book XIII: The Animan Kingdom: Inner Strength- In the exciting conclusion to the story, Vex, Skizz, Gorg, Leo and Kaylisha take part in the great battle on the Serengeti and show that the key to making you a hero, is the faith you must have in yourself.

The Animan Kingdom: The Story

THE

ANIMAN

KINGDOM

BY GABRIEL BOYLE

THE STORY

"The Animan Kingdom" is this incredible fantasy visual epic adventure series, very much like "Lord of the Rings" or "Narnia" or "Star Wars" but very much like "King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table" type of story. What I'm planning to do as I said before is write a series of thirteen books that take place in this grand world where exist all these anthropomorphic creatures called the Animans. 

They're basically animals who long ago were normal animals that through the breakthrough of science, they were given human blood and were changed into anthropomorphic creatures, some however were failed experiments, some were able to grow a man or a woman's body but their original bodies and legs would stay the same. The ones that were a success were made this way because first of all it is set in an alternate future from our's and human kind is dying out. There's a disease that's killing all humans and the only way for life to go on is for science to pass on the blood from non-inffected humans and put into the body of animals who have somehow grown more species as humankind came closer to extinction. When the experiment works and the animals learn how to talk and think like humans, they began to develop more and when the human race died out, the now Animans rule our world even when the climate began to change and become one super continent like from the age of the dinosaurs. 

Also over time dragons began to evolve and now share the world with the Animans and the ones who are partially Animans, those are known as the Anitaurs, were failed experiments who weren't taught to speak or learn the way the Animans were. But as time went by and the Animans began to rule, they helped the Anitaurs to adapt to their new culture. The Kingdom was built up of both modern and wild civilisations but they would both be ruled under the leadership of the Animan lions. The dragons of course would have a king of their own but the lion Animans would rule both their own race and the race of the Anitaurs.

During this time however they were some Animans who saw their new form as a gift and decided that the predators especially should use it to their advantage and feel as if they are the powerful ones and have their prey be their slaves. One lion Animan though objected to this and decided that both prey and predator should live equally and that they would eat off the new animal species that evolved over time, like even the animals who were not given human blood and instead just grew and became bigger and more savage, so yes they would be eating some of their own kind. Many Animans lived by this law but the ones who defied that belief decided to leave their home and go and find a new world where they could live like the natural beasts they were born as. Since then the Animans have grown into peaceful gentle loving beings with their great lion kings and their soldiers protecting them from any sign of evil or rule breakers, and have lived equally for a long time.

The story however is centred around four teenage Animans; Vex a fennec fox Animan, Skizz a chimpanzee Animan, Gorg a brown bear Animan and Leo an adolescent lion Animan. Vex is the story's central protagonist and is the carefree happy young teenager who dreams of adventure and one day joining the Animan army in the wild southern lands where lies the magnificent kingdom of Animancarve where all wild civilised Animans live and breed, it's a little bit like Camelot, and it is ruled by the Animan lion King Aronton Pride who happens to be Vex's idol. One day she hopes to leave the modern Animan populated city of Anatolis where she lives with her parents and little sister and attends high school with her friends, and go fight alongside her king and do some real good. But soon everything changes when the city of Anatolis is attacked by pirates who have sailed from an unknown place and look strangely like Animans except with no fur and instead have violent colours painted on them, they are accompanied also by vicious reptilian like monster that look a bit like dragons except in human size, some however bigger. These enemies are known as the Shredded ones meaning that they are not only shredded of their fur but of their souls. In the midst of anarchy, Vex escapes with her three best friends Skizz, Gorg and Leo but their families and homes are taken from them. Without any other option they decide to ban together, leave their now ruined home and go search for King Aronton Pride and his army of Animan warriors to warn them about this new threat and see if they can vanquish them.

They then begin this long journey through the Animan Kingdom where they encounter many different lands, meet interesting cultures and characters including a beautiful young cheetah Animan warrior named Kaylisha and an old but powerful western lowland silverback gorilla named Barrus who accompany them on their journey, and they also come face to face with some incredible and terrifying creatures. They also discover the now ruined lab where the Animans were first created and they also learn that Leo is a descendant of the great line of Animan lion kings and is destined to become one as he was the long lost son of the last great Animan lion king, Ziron Pride. They also face many foes including the villainous general of the Shredded ones, Karlsrock who seeks to take over all of the Animan Kingdom and basically wipe out all of it's inhabitants. Vex and her friends realise that their world is in great trouble and if anyones gonna save it, it's King Aronton Pride and the Animan army. Soon too, they discover that they can become heroes themselves if they believe in themselves, that way they can do anything. And in the end that's what this whole story's about.

The whole story is filled with great characters, fantastic settings, awesome heroes, cool looking bad guys and really important messages about inner belief and the struggles you have to go through in life and what to do to overcome them. Also quite erotic but not too erotic romantic moments and epic but bloody battle sequences. And it all happens in this incredible world known as...

    THE

   ANIMAN

     KINGDOM

              BY GABRIEL BOYLE

The Animan Kingdom: Introduction and Origins

THE

ANIMAN

KINGDOM

BY GABRIEL BOYLE
INTRODUCTION AND ORIGINS

Hey guys this is Gabriel Boyle here to talk to you about a very special project that I've been working on for a pretty long time now, and as you read in my biography, I mentioned at one point that I was planning to write a fantasy book series. I'm very excited now to tell all of you what it finally is, a thirteen book adventure series entitled; "The Animan Kingdom". What you'll find in this blog are story notes and character design and concepts to give you all a taste of this new exciting fantasy epic, that takes place in a world inhabited by anthropomorphic creatures, dragons and us humans do not exist.

First of all before I explain the story, I'll tell all of you where the idea came from. It originated about four years ago when I was at Westminster Kingsway College doing my studies for animation when I really wanted in my own personal time write a fantasy book trilogy or series. Because when it comes to fantasy I am an absolute hardcore fan, I love Tolkien and love stories like the 'Arthurian' legend, or the 'Narnia' stories, the "Harry Potter" books and movies also "World of Warcraft" but only the comic books not the game and obviously I'm a massive I mean massive "Star Wars" fan even though most people see that as sci-fi, which I'm also a fan of, oh I also forgot to mention "Halo" but not the game just the comics and the artwork for it. So I really wanted to do something like that so I began developing a story which was just a typical fantasy tale with elves, wizards and dragons etc. While I was doing that I was also working on another thing of my own for a college project which had these anthropomorphic characters who were superheroes (again massive fan of, I mean who isn't?), who came from another planet and protected planet earth from monsters and loads of bad guys. Then one day I had the idea of combining the two together and discovering that maybe I could make a story that nobody in my mind had read before, so I was so excited about this idea. I began developing it, making a few stories until I nearly came to the point of just letting it go. It was then though that I saw some artwork on the internet and it was the artwork for the anthropomorphic characters and creatures that you see on my personal bog if you follow it. It was then I was beginning to write a new kind of story that had the characters that I thought of at the very beginning but putting a whole new different look onto it, a more sci-fi look to it and making it a bit more realistic and use both modern and fantasy and make it a bit more sexy as well and that is the final story which you're gonna read a brief draft of in the next report, till then see ya.

Digital Environments-Day 6

Hey guys this is the sixth day of me working on the Digital Environments course, I've already done one part of the project and that's the concept art which you've already seen, now I have the task of animating things in the environment like leaves and grass so I have a few videos here for research which I shall be using. Have a look at them and I'll keep posted next time with what will hopefully be my first test in Maya.


Note: Watch the way the grass moves with the effect of an animal moving through it and how the leaves move with the wind, like it's not moving at all.

Industry Exercises-Day 3

Hey Industry Exercise followers, this is day 3, sorry again about keeping this so late, it's just that I've been designing the character of who I've now changed the name to Billy, been trying to find what's the right look for him, luckily though I now have the final image that I've picked and will be modelling that soon but at the moment I putting up a video on how to build a character in Maya which is the program we all have to use to build our characters. This video is from moodle which is a college page that we all have our briefs on and everything. This should help me when it comes to building the character hopefully. So it is and I shall get back to all when I have the designs of my character and the final piece. See you soon.







This is entitled LOD (Level of Detail).

Inspirations Pt 8

That's right guys it's time for more music this time from the rock band Vertical Horizon.








Vertical Horizon - Everything You Want
Uploaded by Shauni. - Watch more music videos, in HD!

Digital Environments-Day 5

Hey digital environments followers, as I told you before I had the very fortunate job of designing concept art for our project. And today I am very happy to present to all of you the concept art of drawings I made, from pictures of when we went to the British Museum and the London Zoo, as well as the pictures I collected from the internet of African art and mammals. Also I have a some designs of stuff that I thought my group had in mind for the project. What you'll see is some pieces of the final ideas that were picked and some that weren't. I shall be guiding you this time through all the images I'll be presenting to you, so I hope you enjoy the pics you see and this is very cool because this is the first time that I'll be showing all of you my drawing style. So hope you like them, if not that's cool.

These are carved statues from the British Museum that I drew because I had this idea that we could make the trees in our made up Africa be made up of African carvings like these ones that's very similar to the 'Tree of Life' that they have at Disney's Animal Kingdom theme park, although that tree is made up of animal carvings, I thought we could do the same but with African carvings.

This is an image from all the other images I took from pictures of African artwork from the internet that I tried to duplicated here, same with the one down below. I had another idea which you'll see in my drawings later on, which is incorporating African patterns into the landscape.

These African pieces here, some of them were ideas I had for what the animals or the Maasai tribe might look like in our film, if you notice the leopard statue and the human figurines.

This as you can tell is the African map but underneath it is, well first of all what you need to know is that again if you need reminding is that we're not making actually Africa, we're making something similar to Africa. So I took this idea to make an African map of our own and one that could be shaped like an animal, but my group thought that idea was a bit to extreme, so the idea of this and the design below of the Island shaped like an elephant's head and the one above shaped like a lion's were both scrapped.

This is the design for what our trees will look like taken from a sculpture we saw at the British Museum.

These drawings here were based off of cave paintings we saw at the London Zoo, and I was told that my group wanted to make the animals in our film look a bit like silhouettes or shadow puppets, I had this idea that they could look like these cave paintings of animals but the animals from African cave paintings which is what I tried to make these look like.

These are three designs of a Warthog, one in the middle is based on the real life version, the one on the top left corner is a silhouetted version and the other one in the bottom right corner is a silhouetted version from an African painting. I drew these three to see which one our character sculpture Perri would use or see if she could take the one in the middle and make it into something of her own design. In the end though we never used a warthog, we only wanted to use a few animals and those that defined Africa, and we didn't really think the warthog was one of those.

This is a meerkat, that we scrapped in the end.

This is the African wild dog which we also didn't use.

These are fennec foxes, which we also didn't use.

In the end these were the animals we will be using, these are drawings I made of the real animals that I would give to Perri and then she we model them into her own. This is a zebra.

This is a lioness.

This is a ganu or the wildebeest as it's mostly known as.

This is a crocodile.

Fish Eagle.

And finally the elephant.

This is the first concept drawing I made of the opening shot where we have a line of wildebeest with the sun rising up behind them. This was based on something I saw in a local paper of a photograph of a line wildebeest on a grassland at night that you could just see quite clearly. I thought we should use that for our opening shot so it wouldn't look the famous opening to "The Lion King".

This is a bird's eye shot for our African world.

This is from the idea I had of the trees having African carvings on them, so this is an idea of what that would look like.

This is putting the African symbols on not just trees but rocks as well, but the idea is that they appear that much, they would be slightly there otherwise it would all look like 'I just can't wait to be king' from "The Lion King".

This is an idea for what a member of the Maasai tribe would look based off of what they look like in an African painting. Also above is the branch of an African tree with a carving of a African figure based off of the idea of making the trees have African carvings on them as I said before.

This is a shot from the storyboards where we have the crocodiles lurking in the water spying on a herd of wildebeest that you can see in up ahead. Also if you notice the African carvings on the boulder which a croc is sitting on, gives you an idea of what we've got in mind.

This is an idea for African patterns appearing on grass.

This is an idea of a possible ending shot of two members of a Maasai Tribe next to our African tree, with the moon in the background and again there's African symbols in the moon rocks to keep the feel that this could all look like an African painting brought to life.

This is another bird's eye shot of wildebeest running and if you look at the mountain on the left, there's a massive African painting right onto the centre of it, based on an idea I had that the African painting could somehow be expanded so that it would fit onto the side of the mountain.

So there you go there's the concept of what we have or what I have in mind for what this whole thing will look like.