Anthony Zierhut

Just a quick note: I just got finished reading an article on VFX Newswire about digital pre-visualization (previs) of movies. This is an excellent story about exactly the kind of work I spend my time doing these days. Namely 3d (and 2d) previsualization.

For our industry it’s both an exciting and frightening time, depending on how you look at 3d vs. traditional storyboarding. Read it and take a gaze into the future.

A friend gave me one of the published Robert Crumb Sketchbooks recently. This one’s from around 1990. Man, that guy can draw! There’s a wonderful freedom in his sketches, a drive to delineate things witnessed first hand and imagined, fueled by some kind of obsessive compulsion: you get the feeling he can’t stop drawing, even if he tried. Painfully funny and honest. Here’s a sample of some even more recent sketchbook work (warning, not all of it is safe for viewing at work or around kids). The excitement just oozes from the work, and is guilting me into drawing and sketching more.

I’ve been slowly putting together an on-line sample of an animatic specifically for this web site that won’t infringe on anybody’s copyrights. It’s a short action sequence that I’ve been chipping away at for a while. Maybe I’ll post some of the drawings here in the near future.

In the meantime, I wrote about some of the animatic work I’ve done and the software I’ve used in this article: Animatics for Motion Pictures. It’s a brief explanation of what an animatic is and how it is used as a tool for a movie director to realize his / her vision before shooting. It was written for Blender3d.org last summer, and so is geared towards the users of Blender3d software. Blender is a wonderful – and powerful – 3d modeling and animation program that is absolutely free for anybody to download and use. I used it for about a year on Spider-Man 2 before switching to LightWave to do 3d animatics. I highly recommend Blender for anybody interested in learning about 3d without having to pay a dime, or put up with irritating 30-day trial periods or watermarks.

A few months ago I was contacted by Maxim Magazine to do some storyboard-style illustrations for an upcoming issue featuring a story about James Bond, agent 007. I just checked on their web site and it looks like the January issue has the feature. Tomorrow at lunch I’ll take a look at one (there’s a newsstand in the deli where we frequently have lunch near the studio), and see if they published my drawings. If so, I’ll add them to the SAMPLES page. I feel like a kid waiting impatiently for a birthday or something.

UPDATE: Yep, they published my little Bond storyboards – page 58 in the January Maxim. I’ll put the art up on the SAMPLES page as soon as time permits.

UPDATE: Did it.

At the end of the day at work today at Sony, fellow storyboard artist Dave got us all excited about painting with some examples from Craig Mullins’ web site. Wow! Beautiful, loose, powerful stuff – and most done digitally without the “digital” faux-airbrush look you see so often. Really amazing, and worst of all, he makes it look effortless. There are hundreds and hundreds of paintings to look at, too.

Then I got home and another board artist friend emailed me this link to some video looking over the shoulder of comic book cover artist Adam Hughes. Again, fantastic, inspirational stuff to get the weekend going.

Andrew Loomis was a phenomenal illustrator. Unfortunately, and tragically, his books are out of print. I’ve seen them recently go for hundreds of dollars on Ebay. I actually own Figure Drawing For All It’s Worth, bought for $13.00 at a mall bookstore in Texas back in 1980 when I was an illustration student at UTA. What luck. Speaking of luck, however, many of his books, including the one mentioned above are available free online. Check it out, here’s the link:

http://www.saveloomis.org/

Well worth studying, in my humble opinion.

Finally updated my LINKS page. Consolidated and added a few things – some articles on storyboarding for a living, etc. I also added an image in the SAMPLES area for Animatics. It’s a portion of the image I submitted for the Spider-Man 2 Art Book, published earlier this year. I figure that’s a safe thing to put up, as far as Sony is concerned. I can’t wait to dig into the animatic sample I’ve got planned to put up here. Just have to find the time to actually do the work to complete it. Easier said than done…

I get a lot of email from students who are interested in pursuing a career in storyboarding. I just found a terrific site with lots of info on the subject:

http://interact.uoregon.edu/MediaLit/mlr/archIve/VO3NO2/033003_storyboard.html

The only problem is the link they have to my site is down, got washed out with my recent clean-up of the old – seven-years old – version of this web site. It’s making me think seriously about re-posting those old HTML pages as clones of my HOME page so I don’t lose any prospective visitors. When I get a moment I’ll do that.

UPDATE: Done! I found some code for “This page has moved” etc. and re-coded all my old pages. Now if any old, extinct pages on my site are linked – as in Google – no problem. It funnels down to my HOME page. Whew! At some point I’m going to stop all this procrastinating and actually get a drawing up here, believe me.