The Evolution of James Dashiell

Here's a partial turn-around of James Dashiell, the main character in "The Case of the Midnight Murderer."

I refined the character a bit more as I got him Flash/animation ready but this is more or less the final design.  Dash is a private dick, he's new to the game and doesn't really know his way around a magnifying glass yet.  He spends a lot of time trying to act tougher and cooler than he really is, spouting out hokey lines of gibberish that probably sound quite eloquent and profound in his head.  His posture in the turn-around is somewhere in between his cocky showmanship and his less self confident true self.  This isn't always how he looked though.  Here's the first drawing I have of him from back when I was like 14...

GAH!!!!  That's horrible!  His feet looks like hooves and I can only assume his shins were broken for some reason.  Maybe he welched on a gambling debt that I forgot to write about.  "The Case of the Midnight Murderer," was a short story I wrote in highschool...I actually wrote a series of them but Midnight Murderer was the only one that's still any good.  It wasn't until several years later that I thought there might be potential in adapting it into a movie.  That's when I drew this next incarnation.

This is a much better drawing but at this point I hadn't even written the script yet and was still deciding on the approach I wanted to take with the whole thing.  I ultimately decided I wanted it to fall somewhere between this more cartoony version and a more comic bookish type of style that would fit into the stark film noir shadows I wanted to populate the movie with.  Here's some sketches from his development into the movie version.

Every character in the film is in some way modeled physically on an actor from the 40's.  I essentially cast the movie like I was a 1940's movie mogul who could afford any actor he wanted.  The end result of each character doesn't necessarily resemble the actor that much though.  It was just a jumping off point to get me started and in the end all that mattered was that I liked the look of the character.  Dash sort of fell through the cracks though in that way.  He tries to act like Humphrey Bogart but he's not very good at it, he's a lot younger than Bogie was in these movies and should maybe even look a little baby faced.  I looked a lot at Dick Powell...he was also too old but he was as much known for playing hard broiled gumshoes as he was singing and dancing in musicals, so he had the goofball quality to counter balance the tough guy.  In the end, Dash looks like a vague amalgam of Powell and Bogart who's had a face lift to look several years younger.  I'm also told he looks a bit like me and I can't fully argue that.  Here're some early drawings of his outfits...I don't know why I drew his legs so long in these.

I have a lot more clothing sketches.  I watched a lot of old movies with a clipboard in hand and just drew stuff that I thought looked cool, so a lot of Dash's earlier outfits are mixed in with everyone else.  His trenchcoat is based pretty closely on Bogie's coat in Casablanca.  It had a lot of layers and flaps and stuff which I thought made it a lot more interesting than most of the other coats I looked at in my research.  He wears that coat for the lion's share of the movie so I thought it better look interesting.  Here's some really bad drawings I did for a quick and dirty colour test.

The movie was always intended to be in black and white but I wanted to have some idea of colour early on to help in defining the gray tones.  I literally just scribbled down the line work with a Uniball and did some quick pencil crayon colouring.  Next up we've got some action poses!

Nothing much to say about these really...just an opportunity to make sure he'd look good doing the stuff he needed to do.  Down below is one of many fully rendered pencil concept drawings.  I just posted a whole whack of concept art over on the "The Case of the Midnight Murderer" Facebook page.  If you haven't already liked that page I recommend you do...I post stuff like this on there once in a while that I won't necessarily post anywhere else and with any luck I'll also have updates on festivals and opportunities to see the film in the coming months.

New 'Midnight Murderer' Poster

Here's the latest poster for 'The Case of the Midnight Murderer.'

I really like how this turned out but I kinda procrastinated over finishing it for a long time cuz I wasn't sure if the idea was actually gonna work or not.  Half the poster was reliant on blending in frames from the movie and until it was done it was a little hard visualize properly.  I thought it'd be fun to post some of the steps I took to make it.

I started with these thumbnails which is always a good place to start.  Problem is you should really be doing a whole whack of these things and then picking the best one or mix and matching the best parts from them all.  I had this idea for Dash, Milda, Sam and the killer...I was gonna fill in the rest of the poster with other characters but before I even tried I got the idea to use stills from the film and that was the end of that.  Here's the drawing in progress...

 

 You can see I changed my mind on how the title would stretch across the page...mainly to allow space for the stills...which came in after colouring:

I laid out all the frames on top and then moved them to a lower layer under the faded cityscape and the spotlight, then dropped the opacity to like 30% so the red would come through.  I'm quite happy with how it came out but I'd never tried an effect like this before so I was worried the whole time that it was gonna look too cluttered and busy.  But anyway, there it is.  If you want to download a wallpaper version for your desktop you can do that at the official website.

Drawing Dash...and the making of 'Drawing Dash'

Check out this bad ass camera rig!

If you can't tell that's a bedside table lamp with a ruler stuck to it using about half a roll of scotch tape, with a webcam stuck to the end of that with another quarter of a roll of scotch tape, plugged into a laptop and sitting on top of a stack of coffee table books over top of a collapsed animation table.   And yes, if you're curious that's a also a package of socks on the table.  Not for any particular reason.  They're just there and I'm strangely proud of the fact that they made it into the photograph.  Believe it or not, this is actually a drastic step up from the death trap I had rigged up a couple days before this but unfortunately I never thought to take a picture.  That one had the same webcam taped to a floor lamp that balanced on a plastic crate and hung over my shoulder to film me drawing on that same animation table, set up properly on the kitchen bar.  I could barely move without knocking something over or getting tangled in a cord...it's a miracle I survived, but here I am to tell the tale.  I had camera trouble that day and the footage I walked away with was pretty much unusable, hence the opportunity to figure out this beautiful setup you see before you.  The result is now on youtube, and here's the drawing I did:

I was using markers that I hadn't used in a while and of course they decided to die while the camera was rolling.  You can probably see how streaky the marker job on this drawing is...I would usually have the chance to clean that up while shading with the other markers but the other ones died too.  It sorta makes me cringe but it was fun to do anyway and the videos kinda cool.  Here's the video by the way:

Gotta love that digital watch, hey?  I'd like to do more videos like this...I even bought a new box of markers today(50 bucks by the way, jeez), but as you can imagine it's kinda a pain to hook up that camera in that way with any regularity so I'm gonna need to figure something better out for future.  The drawing from beginning to end took about 45 minutes and I sped it up to 8 minutes.  The unsped version features a lot of complaining about those damn markers.

New Trailer for "The Case of the Midnight Murderer"

No new drawings or anything but I might as well post the new trailer for the movie.  Just uploaded it this morning!