In Progress

I have been working in animation for more than 30-years and I always find it surprising how little some people in the business know about basic film language. In my free time I have been working on writing some notes for a lecture on visual language for film, and as a companion I am going to be doing a bunch of drawings illustrating the basics. I thought that I needed a bunch of generic A-B-C 'block in' characters which were easy to draw so I came up with these. Originally, I thought I'd give them mitten hands, but as I went along I changed my mind. I'll be revising some of these at some later date.

I'm posting these more for me to get quick access to the images when my big sketchbook isn't handy. I guess you can have a peek, too. Enjoy.

I had a bit of fun trying to come up with a Kid (K), and these were the three which had the most potential.

I knew I needed a Villain (V) and some Henchmen (H) for blocking out a chase to illustrate the use of moving cameras and aesthetic considerations like 'rhythm vs. space', tension vs. space' and 'character status' in 'character shot dominance' situations.

Then another project came up and I did a few sketches for that.