Making of "Nether" Trailer Part 2

So here is how VFX shots are broken up. In my opinion,  Creature CG in hospital hallway scene came out awesome. I wish we had more time and budget towards the end of post-production.... Overall it was a valuable experience for Section to understand how to plan out from screenplay to actual location filming.. Charles had a clear direction from the beginning and I really liked the twist at the end.  I haven't involved in live action filming in my career so that was good also.

Some of our designers volunteered as corpses. Thanks to Rebecca Rhee, Ben Michaels
Director : Charles Paek

Enjoy!

VFX Scene Breakdown




Nether - VFX Breakdown from Section Studios, Inc. on Vimeo.

Here is the final version.




Nether Game Trailer from Section Studios, Inc. on Vimeo.

Making of "Nether" Trailer Part 1

Section Studios' VFX team created a trailer for upcoming survival MMO game "Nether". (website is also designed by Section)
It's an online 1st person shooter developed by a developer Phosphor - game company based in Chicago.
Our VFX executive producer Brian Wee and Director Charles Peak did an awesome job blending live action scenes with nice CG work. In order for us to meet production budget and also to maximize impactful storytelling- Myself and Charles sat down and work through iterations of storyboarding before we went out to shoot at locations. Here I have posted some storyboards and later I will post a link to check out pre-viz. It feels more like a trailer for a indie film rather than action games which
has a lot to do with carefully arranged camera work. This post is a part 1 of 3 posts that I am going to publish on the project.

The storyboards were created over 3 days (3 hours session each). I always enjoy working on storyboards since it's fast and each shot requires compositional solutions and also one of the rare chances to be sitting down and work with paper and pen, marker only. Although your mind needs to stay on fast drawing skills, it also requires you to be organized and able to deal with moving scenes around and stitch scenes on the fly... which can get you slow down and face some deadline issues if you are not experienced in storyboarding.

Filming at 2 locations. Palmdale, Lacy Studios Los Angeles, CA

Section Ad images

A couple Section Studios' promotional images. Done by Justin Yun and Ben Michaels. (Bluecanvas Magazine)

Union Event at Sao Paulo Brazil

So I was in Brazil for a week to do a presentation during Union event. It's a VFX / Game / Art event which went for 2 days and there were 7 presenters. I was able to meet super talented pros from mostly film industry- Neil Huxley (Mothership) , Scott Spencer (Weta), Ian Joyner (Legacy FX), Neville Page, Alex Nice, Robert Young (Blur) etc.. my presentation was rather humble- showing most of my career transition from Sony to Section Studios so my lecture covered from AAA game dev experience to building new IPs in casual market, PC games and etc. Response was great and it was obvious to my eyes how students in Brazil love entertainment genre and there's lots of them who would want to learn and create stuff. Attendees were over 2000 so it's not a small event and I ended up learning tons from just watching other presenters telling their success stories and industry tips. Thanks to Alex Alvarez (Founder of Gnomon) who invited me to the event and also everyone at SAGA (School of Art, Game and Animation- what a great name) for their generous hospitality. Bravo Brazil!

The Union Website

Art of God of War Ascension

Hello everyone, I have been too busy but let me get back to blogging.. if I don't have artwork to share, if I don't have any personal doodles to post, I still have a lot to share from my end. Our company Section Studios are cooking some fun game titles and I can share the progress we are making, some of other areas in business we are pushing- there's tons of stuff to share.
Let's begin with Art of God of War Ascension. With exceptional success and popularity of "Art of Journey" book- we Section Studios / Bluecanvas publishing proved ourselves we can design and execute pretty artbook. Game artbook. It's my passion and our company's dream to put hands on amazing game titles and we wanted to record some of the best efforts our game artists are making.. Art of God of War Ascension is 2nd art book we created. It's over 400 pages and great collector's item.
So far sales has been great and we are excited to bring this artbook to gaming world and all of GOW fans out there.

Buy here - Amazon Page

Introducing Artbook series from China

Leewiart
I have been included in some of artbooks published in China. Here is a sample pages from one of concept art book series. Leewiart is like Bluecanvas.com- features members artwork and also invite artists from the rest of the world as well.

The Tale of Igor Series is Coming

Section Games

Couple Sketches for our 2nd game

Here are some idea sketches to design some of the running levels for our game.
Actually we wanted to set up a camera looking down slightly 3/4 view but we would had to compromise to bring the camera to more like behind angle to our main hero "Igor". It's going to be pretty stylized architecture and BG- as we are experimenting with more simple black/white VS painted landscape style..

Storyboard Demo / Gnomon Online Session

So here I post couple drawings that I did for one of Gnomon's online class. Justin Yun's Intro to digital painting class that I had to substitute for Justin one night, students asked me to do some storyboard lecture. 2nd image was one of students asked me to come up with snow scene in Starwars setting,

Intro Cut Scene Storyboard

So the story had to make sense since we are making 3 games that are connected in  story, character development and location and etc.. Our coin game was the first of three, and it had a simple set up where you are basically trying to regain your treasures / prizes from enemy intruders who seized your kingdom and yes..,all your treasures. They are known as Cicada- infected buggy like creatures and they are many as army. Our hero prince IGOR is the one you are playing as- and he is coming back home to save his castle and his legacy. So here I am posting a quick storyboard I did for the intro which was done in Maya and it's really short and simple but at least it serves a purpose as an opening scene. 

Igor's CoinQuest

So we submitted our 1st game to appstore last week. There will be some adjustments we need to do but most likely it will be available in next couple weeks. Here I have one of the early sketches that became a foundation for our game. We learned tons about making a casual IOS game... it was a lot of fun.. experimentation and lots of errors, as a start-up company and being a first title, yes.. we learned different aspects from each others and now we have a solid production pipeline. I can talk more about story, Igor franchise, our next 2,3 4th titles we are planning this year. Although I worked in gaming biz over 1 1/2 decades, casual mobile market is completely different beast and I can say.. I am still learning.

Bluecanvas Contest

Bluecanvas / LAAFA Contest

Hi everyone! We are accepting artworks for this contest.. submit and win $10000 scholarship program LAAFA/ Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Art offers.

Each applicant must submit five different traditional two-dimentional artwork pieces and five different two-dimensional or three-dimensional digital artwork pieces. Images of work should be in JPEG format. Images should be as close to 800x1200 pixels and 72 DPI, and emailed as an attached zip file with your first and last name. The JPEG must also be large enough to show your entire piece (do not crop your artwork). Each JPEG must be labeled with a number and the artist's name. Include a list of portfolio works with your submission. Include numbers corresponding to the images submitted, as well as title of work, descriptions of piece, concept and/or subject matter, size, medium, and completion date. Submissions are limited to original artwork only, completed within one year of the entry date. No Master copies allowed.

Judges:
Cecil Kim, Justin Yun, Bill Perkins and Robert St. Pierre.

Please leave a comment if you have any questions regarding this contest. LAAFA offers great traditional portrait, landscape painting classes as well as entertainment classes.

Marina Demo

Contest from Bluecanvas Magazine

All artists out there! Art Contest is open to everyone- cash prizes and also free admission to CGMW workshops.
It's still a month away from deadline, plenty of time to crank out some paintings, contest theme is "Journey"

Bluecanvas Contest Page

The Making of Alcazar Part 1

My company Section Studios' 1st game development workshop is available for purchase on CGMW website.

It's part 1 of 3 lecture series. IOS game franchise "Alcazar" has interesting story and 3D graphic.

It's about 2 hrs long- covering some of the beginning ideas for the game concept and also story development.

It' also has some character designs and I also talked about how these creatures were created. It also has painting demos done by Cecil Kim and Randolph Williams. Here is the link:

CGMW Workshop "Making of Alcazar" Part 1

Gnomon Gallery : Forge Artshow

Gnomon Gallery : Forge Artshow

Next weekend 29-30th Oct, At Gnomon school of visual FX, there will be 2 days workshop. It's a revival of gnomon workshop series that were pretty popular 4-5 years ago. I was invited to come in and do my talk, demo this time. Also Travis Bourbeau, producer at Gnomon put together a group show with speakers altogether. I have all my recent stuff still under NDA, so don't really have any new stuff but I will have some artworks at the show along with some of heavy hitters, amazing talents in game, film industry... so come by and meet all of us. Thank you,

Artpark in Russia this weekend

I am going back to Moscow,Russia to do some lectures at Artpark festival. It's 2 weeks long art festival covering cinema, fine art, digital art and etc. I have met some great people last time I went there to do a workshop at Mail.Ru company. Something about people there, highly educated and serious artists... it's a mega size country and sure it did feel like a biggest metropolitan city I have ever been in my life. Last time I figured out their subway system so I am anxious to go out there again and experience their culture and enjoy hearing what history has to say.
As an educator myself, it's important for me to share my past and future as an artist and what I learned from working with artists in US. I have 4 sets of lectures, Each ones are 1 hour long focusing on game dev experience at Sony, Bluecanvas as my mission and long term goal to inspire people to embrace, love art and Section studios' alcazar production and lastly.. just 1 hour digital painting demo.
It's already low 50 degrees over there so I need to cover myself warm...
Thanks to Konstantin, Alina, Victoria.
Here is the website :  Artpark Moscow

Touching up students film Pitch Comps

War movies are always entertaining and all time favorite..so for my Practicum for Concept Art Class at Otis, as 1st assignment, Nathan Ota and I came up with war theme concept paintings.
Here is week 2 progress. Mostly correcting main hero's pose and composition.

Students Work Highlight

Hi everyone, so I have been teaching this fun class on Saturday morning at Otis. "Visual Development for Animation" for sometime now, It has been a lot of fun and students come up with their own interesting stories. Here are some character development stuff, key frame illustrations. Thanks to
Maria, Ashton, Audrey, Hana, Danny, Daniel, Martin, Cecilia,Luke and others who took my class..

Here are some of my past students work.