Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Yao

©Disney
While doing my move last weekend, I came across my old stack of Mulan artworks (only copies of course!) and found this layout pose of Yao. This is from the avalanche sequence where Yao is sitting on Ling's shoulders. He's about to fire an arrow with a rope tied around it to save Mulan and Shang as they were being dragged by the snow. This was done using prismacolor on 24 fld animation paper. It is one of my favorite layout poses and since I found a bunch of them, there's more to come...

3 comments:

Mark McDonnell said...

Impressive work as usual. I have one question about the job of character layout. Are you given the camera/layout and asked to create the characters framing in the shot? And how many "character layouts" are you accostomed to doing on a sequence? Just not sure exactly what the job requires.

You work is truely impressive and inspiring. Thank you so much for sharing.

MAC

Lubomir said...

I really like the unity and flow of this one.

Armand Serrano said...

Hey Mark,

First of all thanks for visiting not only my site but the pirate blog as well. To answer your question, layout at Disney covers character, bg and camera. And if you're a journeyman, you do workbook and a bit of visual development as well. unlike in other studios where they separate the tasks to different artists, we did all three in different layers but at the same time. This is how it goes: I am assigned a scene from the workbook. Then I make a quick rough design of the scene complete with camera mechanics character poses and bg all in one paper. Then I consult with the head of layout and director and if they're happy with it, I go ahead and draw them separately in layers and in it's actual size whether 16 or 24 fld. This is the rough layout stage. Im not so sure about your second question but if I understand it correctly, we have to draw all the characters and their pose/s. There's one shot I did in Mulan that I might post in the blog later where Shang-Yu told the captured imperial guards "Congratulations, you found the Hun army". The shot reveals a 3/4 downshot view of Shang-Yu and probably fifty of his men on horseback. I had to draw each and everyone of them on a full 24 fld paper. And of course that could have been different now with Photoshop. Hope that answers your question and pls do keep in touch. Take care.