Premise Entertainment Drawing Night

Posted on by Thor


About every month Premise Entertainment hosts a drawing night at Creative Cay, (5959 Anno Avenue Pine Castle Fl). The cost for a two hour sketch session is $10. The poses were fairly short which offered me a chance to do a whole series of sketches instead of the one  sketch I usually do each night at events. The model was Megan Crawford who is a talented local dancer, aerialist, acrobat, body paint model and artist model. I see her at events all over town and have drawn her multiple times.

She was running a bit late because of traffic. When she got to the studio, she was rushing to get on her ballet outfit. On the side lines she started the delicate process of lacing on her ballet slippers. This is the kind of moment I always hope to sketch when drawing on location. Dominic Carola the President and Creative Director of Premise runs the sketch sessions and I shouted out to him, “Do you think we could sketch while she laces up?” He agreed and we were all off an running. I stood so as not to relax and settle into old habits while drawing.

It was a fun night of sketching. My goal was to loosen up working digitally. Instead of creating multiple layers, I simply painted right on top of line work on the sketch. When sketching on location there really isn’t time to switch back and forth between layers. At some point I usually end up painting or sketching on the wrong layer. This meant that some line work was destroyed. Destruction as it turns out is very much a part of creation.

 Dom plays music during the sketch session which adds to the story of the scene. The song I most remember from this session was “Don’t You Want Me” by the Human League which was about a female performer who was lifted from obscurity by some guy who is shocked that she is moving on to a better life without him.

Artist Kyle Gentry brought in a “Making Of Klaus” book and Dom was flipping through while sitting on the model stand during a break. Apparently there are very few of these books and they are sold out. Klaus was produced for Netflix and there was speculation that might be the only reason that this film did not win an Academy Award. The film uses traditional hand drawn animation combined with some simple but very effective ways to paint the characters so that they look volumetric and solid. The backgrounds resemble the work of Disney artist Eyvind Earle. I recently heart that a film is in the works inspired by the drawing style of Ronald Searle, who is my favorite cartoonist and illustrator. My hope is that this is a sign that traditional hand drawn animation may be experiencing a resurgence.

Premise Entertainment

Posted on by Thor


I returned in my first scene of animation drawings to Premise Entertainment. Rather than immediately leave I decided to stay and get sketch done of some of the talented artists now at work in this small production company. In this room are the Effects artists Tonyand Enoc are busy working on Cintiqus. Tony West was working on a scene that needed to be rushed since it was needed for marketing. Conversation in the room centered around the strengths of Macs versus PCs and different modeling programs that had been experimented with such as Maya and Zbrush. Tony actually felt that Sketchbook Pro which is the program I was using to do this sketch has its advantages over the program they were using to do inbetweening for the effects work on the film. I however was very impressed watching them work. They could zoom in as close in as they wanted to in order to place line between line. That might not mean much to the casual reader but I have lost some of my eye sight trying to focus on tiny thin graphite lines being inbetweened on sheets of back lit paper. To me these Cintiqus look like the dawning of a new day. They give me itchy fingers. If only they were Mobile.

Premise Entertainment

Posted on by Thor

I started working freelance at Premise Entertainment studio in Orlando. The studio is located in a nondescript office complex. I signed a non-disclosure agreement and picked up my first scene for a feature animated film. Since the walls in almost every room were covered with backgrounds and character studies, I decided not to draw inside on my first day picking up work. I was lucky that they were screening some dailies and I got to see the work they had done the previous week. It was exciting to rejoin the 15 or so artists from the old Florida Disney Feature Animation studio days who are working in the facility full time.

I was told that to find the building, I should look for the Utility truck parked out front. I could not pass up the opportunity to sketch the utility crew after I picked up the scene. I spoke with the crew since they became curious about what I was up to. They were doing routine maintenance on the electric lines underground. They discovered that one connector had blown out and was lying on the ground. They showed me the part that had blown. It was a heavy metal cylinder that had a chunk missing like it had exploded. Apparently they usually check the connectors by just touching them by hand to see how warm they are. Today for an unknown reason the worker decided not to do that. He is glad he did since that blown connector could have given him a 7200 volt jolt had he touched it.