Sunday, December 7, 2008

Ticket to Read

Voyager is the last place of employment. i was concept artist and illustrator. i worked on a flash based educational program. 

The game helps young students to read. I created all the artwork for the game. from characters to interface buttons. it was a fun project. 

This project helped me grow in my drawing skills and pushed to become more proficient in adobe illustrator. The artwork had to be in vector from in order for the animators to use the artwork in flash efficiently.

Uncle Tocket


Uncle Tocket was the first character i did for this project, This guy was gonna be the one that would be the guide for the look and feel for the rest of the project. The direction i had was a cooky fun loving inventor and that he had to be a ticket. So i took a stab at it with different syles and levels of detail. i didnt know how detail i could go with it. i am satisfied with the final design.

K.T. Ticket


K.T. Ticket is a tom boy and likes to work with tools. We wanted someone who is strong, and have a strong attitude, but still be feminine. K.T. is the main character who the student will be interacting with. She is the one that puts the toy together once you have collected all the peices.

K.T. Ticket Facial Expressions


Here are K.T.'s facial expressions for the instructional portion of the animations. 
got your basic smiles,  sad, and surprised looks. 

ZogWogs


These guys are the zogwogs! These mischievous bunch are the characters that stole Uncle Tocket;s toys. i didnt have any real direction with these guys. cept for they had to be mischeivous and not from this world. i liked the end result. they look like trouble makers, but not threatening for the kids. plus the simple shape really helped me to be able to quicklty crank them out.

Big Z


Big Z is the leader of the zogwog;s. We wanted a hat of some sort to distinguish him as leader. i went through several hats to portray this. The bowler or derby hat was the favorite so that is what we went with. persnally i liked the leatherhead up there on the top left. but you can;t win them all.

Phoneme Mouth Animations


These are the basic phoneme mouth shapes for these characters. Did these for the animators for the instructional parts of the animations.

Tocket Shop Interior


Uncle Tocket's place for his visions. This is where he invents, brainstorm, and comes up with his ideas for new toys. The room needed to be something fun and inspiring for a creative thinker. should lots of his inventions in the room failures and successfull ones alike. I didnt want to put any tools in the room. Didnt want to give the impression that they built the toys here. that K.T.'s job. 

Tocket Shop Exterior


Here we have Uncle Tockets Shop. I did several designs of it. I imagined uncle tocket to live outside the city, more in the coutry side for some reason. i never got any real direction of where. but i didnt want to be in an urban setting. Since he is an inventor i assumed he would have his own means of powering his building. Also because he makes his own toys i wanted the building to reflect that its a place of manufacturing a bit industrial like. I tried to give a uniqueness something that you wouldnt normally see in a building.

K.T.'s Room


This is where K.T. puts the toys together. She is a mechanic type of a person, she doesn;t do the toy design, she just puts them together for Uncle Tocket. So i wanted to show some tools off and some spare parts. I had lots of metal parts and some industrial tools in the room before, but they decided the room looked to industrial and male oriented. I took it back so it can be more gender friendly. This room is also located in the same building as Uncle Tocket's shop. so i didnt want to stray to far from the looks and feel of his room.

This is also the room where we keep the completed toys in. So we wanted a shelf to keep all the toys in and make it easy for students to click on the box where the toy is kept in.

We played around with the idea of a carousel or a train of some sort to roll the toys onto the screen. but the boxes ended up being alot easier for the animators and programmers to deal with. 

Toy Design 1st Round


So here we have the toys that were stolen from Uncle Tocket. The toys have been broken into peices, to get back a peice the student has to complete an activity. Once they complete all the activities they are able to complete the toy and enjoy a short animation of the toy in play.

Most of the toy names were done when i came in. they gave me the name of the toy and i had to come up with a visual to the toy. the toys ranged from psycodelic style to your typical toy. plus i got to come up with some of the toys in the newer batch.

Toys Design 2nd Round


this is the second batch of toys for the kids to acheive, once they complete each session.

Storyboards for toy animations.


As the kids complete each toy. They are treated to a short animation of the toy being used either by K.T. Ticket or the zogwogs themselves. these are the first round of toys in action. they wanted the animations to be pretty short to keep the load times from being to long. 

Corgan Media Lab

This next batch of work, is from corgan media lab. where i was lead concept artist, architectural modeller, texture artist, and sometimes but rarely did some lighting using v-ray and mental ray in 3D studio max. 

i got to do some story boarding, and did alot of character design, and some environment work there. A small team would gather to come up with short story ideas for e-cards that were animated in 3D. Also came up with concepts for commercial spots for EXTV, which also were done in 3D. 

it was alot of fun working there.

Monday, January 21, 2008

Full Circle-character environment design


Full Circle was an inhouse animated short. the story is about 6 rubber ducks in a tub. i got to design the bathroom, and the ducks. i decided to do the ducks in more mallard duck scheme than the typical yellow rubber duck color cause of the environment was so sterile, so much white in the bathroom that the yellow ducks would be so boring to look at. that is why i also went with a more abstract style for the ducks.

Full Circle-environment studies


close up paintings of the different regions of the bathroom. i went with a more warped look, kinda like a drooping candle wax look to the assets in the bathroom. i did these in photoshop with a wacom.

Zeno-advertisment design


style boards for an advertisment of a product that removes zits. never really played with vector tools, so this was my first time to really play around with it. they wanted it really feminine, gearing toward the ladies. did diefferent ones playing with flowers, and the bottom one i was thinking more of the teenage market.

Over the Hill-character concept


character design for a birthday e-card short. the idea behind it, was an old school steamboat willie or bosko style of walk cycle of this character walking over a hill as he pass the highest point and comes back down he starts to get older till his back gives out. he falls and as he hits the ground his body turns to dust and as the dust settles a tombstone is revealed.

Death Prank_character concept


i try to create some different and unique style for each animation short. this one is an over the hill short, where the kid comes to the older guys house dressed as death, and when the dude answers the door he gets scared and he passed out.

World War 2 Pinata-character design


this was done for a birthday e-card animated short. these were painted through photoshop. the story is told from inside the pinata as it is getting bashed by kids. the candies are inside mimicing a world war 2 paratrooper. as the pinata breaks they bail out and jump!

Remote Kat-character design


this was the preliminary idea for an ad for the military tv station that was converting to HD. previously they told us that they didnt want to use any military situations in their ads, they didnt want the families of the soldiers relating to that. so i took to a very colorful direction. more of an anime, nintendoesque lightness to it. i wanted to focus on the vibrant colors that HD cranks out. but they that it was feminine and kiddie kiddie. so they changed their minds and wanted something more gears of war in style. so we took it there.

Flat Panel Dog-character Design


character design for a post apocalyptic future world, where these High Definition Screens rule over the world, the ground would be layed out with broken standard def tv monitors. but the idea got twisted into something else.

Reel Time- advertisement design


coming up with a slate for the final shot of a television ad. done for the military tv station.

Lincoln Plaza- wall mural design


did this for a video wall in lincoln plaza, the content is suppose to be animated later.

Atlanta International Airport-character concepts


the client wanted a flyby of the interior for their airport, we pushed to give it some character by doing some stylized characters inhabiting the airport. these were some designs.

Vikings E-Card_character concept


trying to come up witha style to go with for this animated holiday e-card short.
it involves, this tuff barbaric looking vikings traveling through treacherous lands, finally arriving to a small cottage with orphan children taken care by a pretty young lady, the barbaric looks like they are going to slay the children when they reveal they are there to hand out gifts to them. its a good ol' fashion feel good card.

Vikings E-Card_ character concepts



viking foster mom and viking orphaned children.

Physical Fitness Awareness-character concept


this was for an in house fitness awareness mascot. gonna be used for print work like flyers and other announcements. the ones that got chosen was the health nuts, they are a peanut and a cashew.

Fishie_character concept


this was for a holiday e-card. the idea behind the fish is that he is constantly on edge. like when you go to the pet store and tap on the glass and all the fish freak out. the owner of the fish is changing the decorations of the fish tank from a tropics setting to a more winter season setting.

Corrosion-character concepts


was hired to create a character to represent corrosion on engine parts. very minimal direction only direction it had to be female and be chained. this was for a print ad.

Pineapple-manipulation


this was an indie film, where we were hired to composite a CG train to hit a guy. We did that but something wasn't giving it the feel of impact, so they got me to Photoshop the actor getting smashed in one frame of the film. it worked great, and it was fun to murder him.
i also did some of the textures for the carts on the train.

Target Data Center-modeling, texturing


Target Data Center, got to do the modeling and texturing of the front lobby of the data center. the client liked the custom target phone in the scene that they got a real one made for the security cage.

Blue Cross-modeling, texturing


Blue Cross architecture render, did the modeling and texturing of the building minus the plants inside. used 3DS Max 9.

Club Corp Atlanta-modeling, texturing





I did the modeling of the room and furniture minus the small assets, like silver ware and vases. Also textured the models as well. Used 3DS Max 9 for this.

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click here to view my personal sketches and paintings.

http://sketchesofjoseramirez.blogspot.com/