50 Years of Bond

I'm a 007 fan, as many people are.  This year marks not only the release of the 23rd Bond film but the 50th birthday of the James Bond film franchise and as a result the character and the movies have been discussed a lot lately.  I'm even set to help my photographer friend, Brad of BWD Photography with a Bond tribute photo shoot.  All this stuff coalesced and I drew this poster you see here.

When I envisioned this thing I got pretty excited but it was a little bittersweet.  I had to move a project I've been struggling to get rolling on to the back burner to do this.  Sometimes you have to take advantage of an idea while it's fresh or you won't do it all.  Can you spot and name all the stuff?  I won't do all the work for you but here's a list of everything included in this poster.  See if you can find it all.  Don't be afraid to imdb if you have to, but try to do it without.

Astin Martin - from Goldfinger(1964) and beyond
Tatiana Romanova - from From Russia With Love(1963)
Domino - from Thunderball(1965)
A snake - from Live And Let Die(1973)
Torture chair and knotted rope - from Casino Royale(2006)
Crocodile - from Live And Let Die(1973)
Nick Nack - from The Man With The Golden Gun(1974)
Submarine - from Thunderball(1965)
The Golden Girl - from Goldfinger(1964)
Martini Shaker - from any of them
Missiles - from most of them
Tiffany Case - from Diamonds Are Forever(1971)
May Day - from A View To A Kill(1985)
Tracy Bond - from On Her Majesty's Secret Service(1969)
Blofeld - from You Only Live Twice(1967)
Skis - from The Spy Who Loved Me(1977)
Scottish Flag - not from any of them really, but he was born in Scotland
Jaws - from The Spy Who Loved Me(1977) and Moonraker(1979)
Largo - from Thunderball(1965)
Vodka - from any of them
Plenty O'Toole - from Diamonds Are Forever(1971)
Space Shuttle - from Moonraker(1979)
A shark - from License To Kill(1989)
Playing cards and Poker chips - from many of them
Oddjob - from Goldfinger(1964)
Doctor No - from Dr No(1962)
Grant - from From Russia With Love(1963)
Auric Goldfinger - from Goldfinger(1964)
Francisco Scaramanga - from The Man With The Golden Gun(1974)
Pussy Galore - from Goldfinger(1964)
Octopus - from Octopussy(1983)
Octopussy - from Octopussy(1983)
Solitaire - from Live And Let Die(1973)
Q - from From Russia With Love(1963) all the way to The World Is Not Enough(1999)
Laser watch - from Goldeneye(1995)
Honey Ryder - from Dr. No(1962)
Vesper Lynd - Casino Royale(2006)
Moneypenny(Lois Maxwell) - from Dr. No(1962) to A View To A Kill(1985)
M(Judi Dench) - from Goldeneye(1995) to present
M(Bernard Lee) - from Dr No(1962) to Moonraker(1979)
Jetpack - from Goldfinger(1964)
Felix Leiter(Jeffrey Wright) - from Casino Royale(2006)
James Bond, modeled mainly on Sean Connery - from Dr No(1962) to Diamonds Are Forever(1971)
Satellite - from Diamonds Are Forever(1971)
Helicopter - from From Russia With Love(1963)
Martini glass - from all of them.  The man liked to drink.
Gun barrel - from every single one of them.

"Here's to swimmin' with bowlegged women."

Show me the way to go home.  I'm tired and I wanna go to bed.  I had a little drink about an hour ago and it's gone straight to my head.

Jaws is one of my favourite all time movies.  And Quint is one of my all time favourite movie characters.  And his portrayal by Robert Shaw may also be one of the best all time performances.  His Indianapolis speech is a work of art both as a performance and a piece of screenwriting.  A speech that was apparently rewritten and reworked more times than the famously buggy mechanical shark named Bruce.  The story goes that Shaw himself rewrote the monologue before filming the scene.

37 years later and Bruce the shark still looks fake as hell.  But the movie is so well written, directed and acted that you still don't care.  It'll always be one of the best.  I rewatched it for the 8 billionth time a couple weeks ago and I drew this afterward.

So...eleven hundred men go into the water.  Three hundred and sixteen come out and the shark took the rest.  June 29th, 1945.  Anyway we delivered the bomb...

Ellen Meets Twain

     A couple weeks ago I was trying to decide on a movie to watch.  I can't remember exactly what was on when I turned on the TV but it was annoying so I changed the channel to something while I was thinking about film choices.  I ended up flipping to PBS' broadcast of Ellen Degeneres receiving the Mark Twain Prize for humour.  My intent was to just watch 5 minutes while I looked at the PVR but I ended up watching the whole damn 90 minutes.  It was hilarious.

     So anyway, I drew this the next day.  Just got around to colouring it.  I've always liked Ellen anyway, but I had been thinking about watching an action movie or something bloody...so the fact that a PBS award ceremony stole my attention is pretty damn impressive.  

     Mark Twain himself didn't actually attend the ceremony  which I thought was kinda douchey of him.

Mary Shelly's Frankenstein

For years I've said I wanted to read Mary Shelly's Frankenstein.  As a kid Frank was my favourite of the classic movie monsters...I went as him for Halloween once or twice.  The whole idea behind the crazy doctor and his monster is cool and creepy...and the fact that it was written by a nineteen year old in the nineteenth century just made the book more intriguing.  I finally got around to reading it this month.  I always knew the original Universal Pictures version of the story differed from the novel but I was still pretty surprised at just how different.  Even the movie entitled "Mary Shelly's Frankenstein" as I recall has a lot of changes in it although it's definitely closer than the Karloff version.  The book moves pretty slow actually and tends to wander on tangents that aren't always necessary.  I thought it bounced back and forth between painfully dull and genuinely freaky.  Shelly's descriptions of the monster are quite vivid and that's maybe what I was most surprised by when I read the book.  I don't think Frankenstein's monster has ever been depicted on film they way he's described in the book.  I drew this while I was reading it...

Here's how Shelly herself describes the wretch.  "His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath: his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing: his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriences only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shriveled complexion and straight black lips."

I figured if his skin was translucent from being stretched so thin then it would have been difficult to keep the ends together when sewing.  So I made sure to show some exposed meat beneath the skin at the seams where the stitches are barely holding him together.  It was a myth for years and years that your hair and finger/toe nails continued to grow after you died and I wondered if that's where Mary Shelly's idea for his flowing black hair stemmed from so I gave him long claw like finger nails.  I also skewed some of his parts so  he wasn't quite put together right, which is why his abs kinda stick to the one side.  I also cut a hole over his heart and then stitched it back up cuz I figured a delicate organ like that might've required frequent reaccess while he was being built.  And I reasoned that he might not have a lot of cartilage left in him either which is why I pulled his nose back like a skull.  This isn't a bad drawing but I think if I were designing him to appear in a movie or something I'd take a couple more passes.  I'd probably experiment with the stitching a bit, maybe see how it would look if it were more excessive and I'd definitely play more with his posture.

Of course...there's still a lot to be said for the classic...

Vancouver International Film Festival

I just finished my fourth volunteer stint at VIFF.

I actually drew this shortly after last year's festival.  My intention at the time, I think, was to actually send this to VIFF in case they wanted to use it to promote when they were looking for volunteers.  Of course I completely forgot about it and never even sent it.  I found the drawing when I was cleaning up not long after I'd already signed up for this year's volunteer roster and a day or two later they were done looking and we were getting our schedules.  I still liked the drawing though so I scanned it and coloured it and even sent it to a couple of local newspapers just before the festival started...but I don't think anybody printed it.  If they did, they should've told me.  VIFF runs for two weeks and as a volunteer you get a free pass to all of the movies that you can fit into your schedule.  I didn't see a ton this year but I've packed in a lot in passed years.  Some people manage to see over a hundred, I don't know how they do it.  Even with my small amount of movies, it's still two weeks of shift work, running from theater to theater and eating mounds upon mounds of fast food.  It's fun but I'm always glad when it's done.

Commission With a Side of Awesome Sauce

You may recall a couple months ago I posted a commissioned drawing of a guy, a girl and a couple of cats going up against an army of zombies.  If you don't, check it out here, and try to keep up.  Well anyway, that drawing was commissioned by the guy in the drawing as a gift for the girl in the drawing.  Make sense?  Hopefully, cuz here we go again.  The girl in the drawing then recently commissioned me to draw a new drawing as a gift for the guy in the drawing.  I feel like I could've explained that more concisely but I'm happy with how it turned out none the less.  Anyway, here's that new drawing now, I'm quite happy with the way it turned out and thankfully so were they.  Kim described it as 100% awesome sauce.

Now I know what you're thinking, "jeeze Dylan, isn't it kinda crass to plaster your company name and logo all over that poster?"  Well it would be, but those are just watermarks and I assure you they were not included in the version I handed over to them. 

I was given pretty clear instructions for the first poster.  Caillin really knew what he wanted, right down to the basic composition.  For this new one though I was given pretty much free reign to come up with something.  Kim gave me a run down of things she'd like to try and convey with the poster...I took that and we decided to keep with the same theme as the first poster so the two of them could work as companion pieces.  I came up with this, somewhat based on the poster from the original Conan The Barbarian poster.  I googled that though and it turned out I really wasn't remembering that poster correctly at all, so this may or may not look much at all like Conan, save for the raised arm.

Here're the stages of the drawing.  I draw it out in blue so once I ink it I can scan it without picking up my construction lines.  I used to have to erase all that stuff when I was done drawing...it burns the hell out of your arm and covers the desk and floor with eraser turds and who wants that, right?  It was another fun gig.  I'd like to do more of this kinda stuff.

Teachin' Summer

Last week I finished off a summer of teaching.  I teach Flash animation once a week at Vancouver Film School, which I'll be picking back up again in a couple weeks, but in addition to that I also taught classical animation at the Port Moody Art Centre for ages 9-12 this summer, that may also pick up again as a once a week after school class in the fall, along with a claymation class.  But most of my summer teaching was done at Koko's Activity Centre, also in Port Moody.  Koko's offers two classes a day along with plenty of play time so parents can drop them there for the whole day if they want.  At Koko's I taught Claymation and Comics and Cartooning for 5-12 year olds.  There's a big difference between teaching 9-12 year olds at the Art Centre and teaching 18-25 year olds at Vancouver Film School.  But there's an even bigger difference between teaching 9-12 year olds at the Art Centre and teaching 5-12 year olds at Koko's.  Most of these kids were on the younger side and not all of them were necassarily interested in animation or drawing or at least not for a 3 hour stretch.  5 year olds have enough energy to put the Energizer Bunny out of work...in fact I don't know how it hasn't happened yet(or maybe it has, I haven't seen that bunny in a while).  I can only assume bribery is at play.  The world's energy crisis could be solved if scientists devoted more time to harnessing this power.  One day it will happen...but maybe not in our life times.

Anyways, some times I had a whole whack of kids and was against the ropes the entire class.  I spent a lot of time drawing custom stuff for the kids to colour if they weren't too into drawing themselves, I cranked out a lot of drawings that way actually.  Other days there though, wouldn't be as many kids and I'd actually have a chance to just sit with them and draw myself.  Here's a comic I started drawing on the first day of Comics and Cartooning.  I didn't get too far...

I thought by the end of that first week I'd actually have a complete comic...but that didn't happen.

Here's some random doodles I did one day.

That yellow dude with the green hair is Koko himself.  Or my take on him anyway.  They actually shot a live action Bananas in Pajamas style TV pilot with Koko as the main character and they got me to do a couple of the voices.  I won't get into that now though.  That Spider-Man drawing was inspired by a kid that apparently came to the afternoon classes dressed as Spider-Man...I always missed him.

Here's some sculpting I did one day during the claymation class when the kids were actually managing to keep themselves busy.  This is what happens when I'm bored.

These got a good laugh from the kids, and one of them actually used these guys in his movie.

One sunny day I actually had no kids at all.  I got some work done on my laptop but when the battery died I dug up some art supplies from the back and doodled some more.  Here's an okay drawing of Batman.

I was starting to draw a close up of his head when I got word that I was free to go.  At that point there obviously wasn't gonna be any late comers.  I actually drew a really cartoony version of Batman for one of the kids that I really liked, but they brought that one home.

Anyway, that's what I was able to walk away with from my time at Koko's this summer.  These and some paychecks, but I'm not gonna scan and post those.  Teaching's fun...glad to have a bit of a break though.  Now I can catch up on some other stuff.