It’s been a while since we last posted on the blog. But in a way, that’s a very good sign, because it means we’ve been too busy to do so. The main thing we’re working on right now is a big commercial project for a big (for us anyway) client, from the south of the country. The final film will clock in at about five minutes and will be a combination of live-action footage and 3D animation, the latter of which we are doing. After some extensive character designing and storyboarding, these last two week we’ve been busy modeling, rigging and shading our character and props and we just started animating.

While we can’t show you anything from the film yet (that won’t happen until October), we can show you some pre-production artwork, showing a selection of the different character designs. All these sketches are from characters that didn’t make the cut, but we felt were pretty cool in their own right.

These next few weeks, we’ll be hard at work, pumping out all the different shots, but we’ll try to keep you all posted on our progress.

A while ago, we posted some early character sketches for a kids’ entertainment mascotte, called Marchi. We’re pleased to tell you that Marchi is now running around on the Mallorcan beaches, scaring the bejezus out of little kids, meaning we can show you the final designs. The mascotte also stars in a number of colourful and happy illustrations, that Arjan created to be used in interactive media (games, web, etc.). If you can handle the OD of sugary sweetness, click on the last image of this post to view a full-sized version. Enjoy!

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Yes boys and girls, it’s official: this week we got the word from our producing buddies at Il Luster that our first studio short has received funding from the Dutch Film Fund! So pop those champagne bottles: we’re in production. Having the Film Fund behind us means that we can continue our pre-production on the project and get ready to actually make the damn thing. So obviously, we’re very happy and can’t wait to get back to work on the project. It won’t be until September however, before we can do that, because we’re pretty swamped with commercial work (which we can almost show you) until the end of the summer. And besides, it’s about 35 degrees Celsius in the studio, so instead of spending the weekend drowning in our own sweat, we’re gonna have fun with our friends and family.

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Or rather, an animators law: the higher the temperature, the higher the workload. An age old rule, that has proven to be true, time and time again. So given the great weather we’ve been having this week, you can imagine we’ve been able to keep busy quite easily. Luckily, we’re working on some awesome stuff (which we still can’t show anything of… soon, soon, we promise) and we can still make plenty of time to have lunch on our balcony, sit in the sun and have an ice-cold beer… or two.
What we can show you this week, is a quick work-in-progress shot of our snail project, which we’ve been working on between things. Right-now we’re wrapping up sculpting and storyboarding, after which we’ll move on to shading and rigging.

Last week we went to the largest animation happening in the world: the International Animation Film Festival in Annecy. This was the studio’s first time there and we had an awesome time! We saw a lot of cool animations (obviously) and met a lot of interesting people from all around the world. But alas, after a week of hanging out in the sun, drinking wine and watching more than 25 hours of animation, it’s time to get back to work. We definitely left the festival feeling very inspired and totally recharged, ready to make awesome stuff and show it on the big screen in the coming years.

After last weeks humongous double post, we just have a quick little post for you this week. This is a quick render of the snail we posted a couple of weeks ago as a sketch. This is just the base model, without any cool snaily, slimy, bumpy, detaily, coloury awesomeness. But it’s all in the works, so you can expect to see a full-fleshed RocknRoll snail in a couple of weeks.
That’s all folks!

As promised, here’s part two of our animated short, pre-production artwork post. The images below are a selection of the style & technique research we’ve done.

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Hi everybody! We’re a bit late with our post this week, so we hope we can make it up to you with this extra beefy, two-part blog entry. We’ve been working on a number of commercial projects, but sadly, none of which we can post here yet. So we decided to show you some pre-production artwork from the animated short we’re working on for production company Il luster. Today, we have a couple of different sketches of characters and environments for you. Check back with us on Friday for part two…

Even more creatures this week. For a group of hotels in Mallorca, Arjan created a bunch of character designs and illustrations. One of the developed characters will become the official hotel mascotte. The mascotte suit, used to scare entertain the kids, is in production. In this post, some of the early character sketches. We’ll show more of the illustrations and character designs soon!

We’ve been keeping pretty busy here at RocknRoll, but since we just recently finished up a couple of projects and have all sorts of fun and exciting stuff coming up, we decided to take a few days off and recharge our batteries. We do however have a couple of quick sketches of a fun new project we’re working on. Enjoy!