Cast Talents

Today is a double posting day, I wanted to share a link for you all to check out and hope you enjoy it. The link is a musical piece written and produced by the actor playing Wolfstead in the film, Ossey James. I have been talking with him about possibly scoring the entire film, for obvious reasons.

He created the entire piece, and even played the piano that you hear throughout. I hope you guys enjoy it, and as alawys , please feel free to leave a comment or whatever.

Anyways here is the link to the page on soundcloud.com where you can hear it at

http://soundcloud.com/osseyjamesmusic/abound-destiny-written-and


When you are there, drop Ossey a line as well if you would liek to, I'm sure he would love to hear your thoughts on his work.

More Character Design Drawings

These are the sketches that i promised a while back that needed to be converted into a postable format. I apologize for it taking so long to get around to it, but real life has kept me extremly busy lately. I hope you enjoy them, and please feel free posting a comment on what you think so far.


This is a sketch of Dumall, our villian's sidekick after his transformation.

This is actually one of my favorite sketches so far, showing a side by side comparison of Wolfstead in his human and transformed state. I think Ryan has done an excellent job of keeping the original look of the character in the transformed version.



This final sketch is a full length version of what a transformed Wolfstead looks like. While I am sure that we will see some changes in the future, I do like the look so far.

It's been way too long since our last post on the progress of the character designs, but fear not, hard work is being done to bring them to life. This is just a quick post to show some updates, with more pics and information to be uploaded later on.

Above is our nasty bad guy, Wolfstead.

Initial Sketches of Tasha the tiger as a young cub.

A color workup of the King. He kind of reminds me of Dom Deluise (sp), but maybe that is just me, wat do you guys think?

And of course our little henchman, Dumall.


Once I get a chance to convert some files into a format that can be published on the site here, more pics will appear showcasing the work our character design artist Ryan Huseman is doing.

More Initial Character Design Sketches

Our Character Design artist, Ryan, has been hard at work and has produced the following initial sketches for several more characters found in our story. Below each is laid out, with a small description of the character, and the role they play in the film without giving too much away of course.

Michael is one of the three children who are in the first scene of the film, which opens to these children climbing around their grandmother, asking to be told a story.

This sketch will obviously be softened, to show his young age, and have color added in later on before being sent off to the sculptors for their part of the job.

Grandma is also in the opening scene of the film, enjoying time with her grandchildren.

The Servant may not seem like an important character in the film, since obviously he is hired help found in the castle. But because he is seen in several scenes throughout the film, and interacts with our main characters in those scenes, we wanted to make sure to give him a proper design from start to finish. The initial sketch here reminds one of turn of the century middle aged servants found in Austria and the surrounding region, where his mustache was in fashion at the time.

Julia is one of the two main characters in our film, fairly obvious since her name is in the title after all. Without giving too much away, she becomes somewhat of a damsel in distress at certain points, while being the hero in others. We are modeling her after the actress that has agreed to play the character's voice in the film, but also wanted her to have a look all her own. Large eyes, full lips and a somewhat small nose give her soft yet well defined feminine qualities.

Cat is the final character we are showing today, and while she will be the smallest of our cast of characters, I think her personality will stand above many of the others. Cat is a small talking mouse that has become friends with Julia, and ends up basically going everywhere with her. She may be small, but she is very opinionated to say the least. She will definately be a fun character for the animators to work with when she is in her final model form.

In the coming weeks we will be unveiling more initial character design sketches, as well as the designs as they progress towards their finished and finalized look. If you would like to see more of Ryan Huseman's work, please check out his site here http://ryanhuseman.com/home.html .

Also coming sometime in the next couple of days, one of our sculptors will be showing how a clay oven is made, as well as explaining why they are essential to have around in a production like this.

Initial Character Designs

Well Ryan Huseman, our Character Design Artist has been busy at work and has produced some great initial sketches for three of our film's characters. These are rough, initial sketches, but like I have stated in the past, we want to show all aspects of this process from begining to end, and feel that this is a great opportunity to show how a character develops from an idea into an onscreen presence.

Here you see our wonderful bad guy of the film, Wolfstead.

Next you can see the begining design for King Macpherson, the hero's father in our little story.

And our final sneak peak at the character design process is a look at Dumall, Wolfstead's sidekick.

None of these are finalized character designs, and work is being done already to further breathe life into these characters with small changes and modifications.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to toss me a line, or leave a comment. Thanks for stopping by, and come back in the coming weeks as more pics will be posted showing what we have going on.

Behind the Scenes

I have received some correspondence from people that have been visiting the site, that they would like to see more behind the scenes stuff, how the puppets and sets will be constructed and how we plan on working things so that the faces of the puppets show more emotion than normally seen from a stop motion animated character.

What we plan on doing is showing all aspects of this process, from start to finish including photographs of the puppet building and set building as it goes along. We will be more than happy to share some of these secrets with the world, when we get to that point in the production, which is still quite a ways off.

We are hoping to start voice over recording sometime in February of next year, with sets hopefully being constructed while the film's sound track is worked over and made to sound oh so clean and crisp. At the same time, the puppets will be in the construction phase for use in front of the camera.

Between now and then we will be showing the creation of the characters from the drawing board, to the hands of sculptors as they turn lumps of clay into living breathing creatures, and onto the molding process where custom built armatures are built then covered in various materials to give us the final puppets. As many of you do know, this process is a long slow complex one that takes monthes to finish up, before we can ever step in front of a camera to start principal shooting.

Just wanted to drop a little update here for all of you, and to let you know what would be coming in the near future. Thanks for stopping by, and for all of the support.

Artist Update

I wanted to post and let everyone know that Ryan Huseman has signed onto the project officially as of a couple days ago. Ryan is a midwest artist whose talents are obvious from seeing his work for the first time. He is is an extremly talented illustrator who earned a BFA from the Academy of Art in Chicago. You can view samples of his work at http://ryanhuseman.com/home.html that are not related to the film.

He recently finished work on "Peter's Purpose" a children's book written by Jennifer Oramas, as it's illustrator.

Ryan has signed on as a Character Designer for the film, and we are looking forward to showing the world his artwork as he creates it.
  
In the coming weeks I will be posting some of his sketches and character designs for the film's production as we work through them. I believe that Ryan is going to be a huge asset to the production because of his artistic ability to breathe life into characters, as you can see from his home site. More to come in the future.