El Tigre - Cut Board Seq. 2

Another short gag that was cut for time. Chui the chupacabra is hungry!!! You may recognize the dude in the goat costume.

El Tigre Board- Cut Seq.

Here's a short sequence that was cut from an upcoming episode of El Tigre. It's a pivotal point in the story where Manny and Frida are going to abandon their friend in the desert, but they get lost, and he ends up saving their lives.

We spend a fair amount of time on them abandoning him but completely gloss over the getting lost and saving of lives. It wasn't in the script. Well, it was insinuated that it took place with a single line of dialogue, but I wanted to actually show it happening. I tried to make it as epic but short as I could. Everyone agreed that it made the story stronger, but alas, it was eventually cut for time.

We tried to fill these Tigre episodes with so much awesomeness that they should've been 22min episodes instead of 11min. And the 22min episodes we did do maybe should've been hour-longs. I don't know if the final episode will even air now, but hopefully it does.

DigiBird

Yeah yeah yeah, it's been a while. I'm done with El Tigre (tear) and am working on some new projects from home on my new Cintiq. Yup, I did it, and it's awesome. So hopefully, more posts, more often. Hmm, that kinda rhymes.

El Tigre - Cancelled

Well, technically "Not picked up." Apparently good animation, art direction, writing, and characters don't mean anything to the real people in charge at Nickelodeon. Oh, and heart. This show had fucking heart! What show has that nowadays?! El Tigre is no more.

Oh yeah, if this post seems familiar, reference this

http://seanszeles.blogspot.com/2005/08/buzz-on-maggie.html

El Tigre Storyboard Promo

So, I've been storyboarding for a couple of months now on El Tigre and it has been the hardest, but most rewarding job I've had. I just finished my third episode and am getting used to pitching in front of everybody. But a while back on my first board, on my first thumbnail pitch, Nickelodeon decided they wanted to shoot a promo of it. I'm pretty sure it had nothing to do with me, but I just happened to be the next board artist in the rotation to pitch. To pitch my first board to a full camera crew along with supervising crew members was nerve-racking to say the least. But somehow I got through it, and it turned out pretty well.

Above is the full promo that they edited. It's interesting to see how they took a 45 min pitch and whittled it down to 30 seconds or less. Of course I find the edits to be pretty funny since I know which audio parts they cut and placed over other video parts. I even had to go into the recording booth weeks later to do some added v.o., so that was pretty cool. And even though it's kind of embarrassing to watch yourself pitch, I think it turned out great. The promo is airing right now on Nickelodeon, but I haven't caught it on tv yet.

Below is a short companion promo.

El Tigre Animatic with Animation

Here's an excerpt from the animatic I did for an episode of El Tigre called "Yellow Pantera." I think it's one of my favorite episodes of the series so far. This episode deals with Manny calling his father a coward and really believing it. Harsh stuff. The board was so good on this one that it made me want to animate the whole thing! But, that's crazy, so I just did as many scenes as I could in the time I had. In this sequence, Manny goes off and tries to defeat Mal Verde, the meanest bandido off all time. Of course, he has no idea what he's getting himself into. It was boarded by Eddie Trigueros and directed by Dave Thomas. I did the timing, rough animation, sound effects, temp music, and timecode.

El Tigre Meeting Sketches

Luke Cormican

Eddie Trigueros

Fred Osmond

Jorge Gutierrez

Matt Dougherty

Western Show

The El tigre crew had a western themed art show this week, so I whipped up this piece for it.

The sketch.
The rough digital color comp.
The final painting. 5x7

More El Tigre Animation

Here's another scene I animated for the El Tigre episode "El Tigre El Jefe." In this scene Sergio, who's a villainous kid wanting to seek revenge on Manny, is convincing the other kids of a plan to take Manny down. He starts to laugh crazily and then notices everyone looking at him. This is a case where the storyboard drawings where so good and funny that it made me want to animate the scene.

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Here's the scene in animatic form. It was storyboarded by the amazing Eddie Trigueros. Eddie's drawings are always hilarious because they're so pushed.

Now here's the model for Sergio. Sometimes when you send a scene to be animated at a different studio, they can have a hard time interpreting the, dare I say it, "off-model" drawings form the storyboard. And Eddie's expressions were so funny that I didn't want them to get lost. So I humbly tried to capture his drawings while still making it look like the character.

" So, here's my interpretations of Eddie's drawings in animated form. I'm pretty happy with the way it came out, and Eddie seemed to like it as well. It was definitely fun and more challenging to animate. I added the finger motion in there just because it felt right.

El Tigre stuff

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Here is some rough animation from El Tigre, the show I"m working on at Nickelodeon. One of the main parts of my job is timing and editing the animatics. This invloves a lot of work, but basically it's taking the storyboard and timing it out, adding dialogue, editing action sequences, adding sound effects and temp music, etc., to make a blueprint for the whole cartoon to send overseas to be animated. We do very tight animatics on El Tigre, trying to get the cartoon cut to exactly the right length. A lot of new poses are added, layouts by the amazing Fred Osmond are added, and sometimes whole sequences are re-boarded. So there is also a lot of drawing involved. The board is then slugged based on the animatic, which I think most studios don't do. Well I guess some people don't do animatics at all and would scoff at the idea. But I love it. It's like creating a new short film every other week! I say every other week because my buddy Aaron Horvath works on the other episodes.

Of course we go over the animatic with the director, Dave Thomas, and the assistant director, Gabe Swarr, and then it's off to the network for notes. But when it's all pretty much finished, I get to go in and animate some stuff, time permitting. I try to choose harder scenes that require more new drawings, or difficult angles, etc. Most of it is pretty rough and is used as a jump start for the overseas studio. Well, like I said in the beginning, here are some quick clips.

As you can see, a lot of the scenes are pretty short. Even this run cycle above probably wasn't on screen for one and a half cycles. This clip and the first girl running are from "Enter the Cuervo", storyboarded by Ricky Garduno.

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And these last two clips are from "A fistful of Collars", storyboarded by Luke Cormican.
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Dia De Los Muertos

Here's a painting I did for the El Tigre Dia De Los Muertos art show back in November. It's titled "Dia de los reencarnados." It was my first time painting on wood, and it was fun.