E-MAIL: chrisleathers@me.com
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Background shot from Kappa Mikey Season 2.
I've developed a deep appreciation for cinematic shots of empty Japanese street sceenes from the two years working on this show. Almost all of the shots in this cartoon series were locked off, non-animated still shot renders, so the cinematic angles and framing were within out control, as we exported images down the line.
You can see in the two images above, how much magic was added to the initial vector renders. Vector rendering was the technique in use because the character animation was being done in Flash, and because it allowed the over painters to work with good linework. Shout out to Sun Min, and Lawrence Valente.. for super-human amounts of talent in bring these raw models to life. I can take credit for the shapes, the cinematic layouts, and in some cases the lighting, but not for the beautiful finished depths and surfaces.. !
One of the sets I worked on was the Shibuya Cross in Tokyo! Luckly I didn't have to model all the people.. haha. It was used and repainted in different ways across both seasons of the show and many episodes. I would like to go there in real life one day because I feel like I know it intimately.
We modeled lots of streets and buildings, and structures of all kinds. Interiors as well as exteriors.. This page is just a drop in the bucket of how many sets we created.
More examples of the exported models without and WITH the overpaint post-process!
As production went on the workflow evolved and we began to do fully rendered sequences, not for the show, but for the intro to the show, which was usually a battle scene. Or in some cases within the show, like this background, which was part of a looping render played behind a walk sequence. This particular background is one of my favorite images I have ever created. It played behind a shot of Mikey and a talking possessed motorcycle as they walked and talked. I had the opportunity to rig and animated the talking motorcycle in this sequence of shots as well.
Another fun task on this show was doing some dynamic simulations, and creating things like this toon rendered smoke effect particle system I am proud of figuring out..
Vector rendered props were used by rendering out a sprite sheet of sorts for each object so that animators could pull the correct angle of an object from an animated sequence, to match most situations..
Shout out to all the amazing people who worked on this series.. even Kostya..