[Commission] Solrac Ventures

I've been working on a few videos lately, and because of this, I've been neglecting my blog. As the first catch up post, I'm going to explain just what's been taking up my time.

A shouty horsey.

I've been asked by Solrac, a YouTuber in the Brony community to help animate a YouTube series for him. This was beneficial for a number of reasons:

• I could get practice in working with other people's characters.
• I can branch out a bit more in art direction.
• It helps me to make more connections and work with big internet names, such as The Living Tombstone.
• It's a chance to get more people watching my own work.
• Solrac is a pretty swell guy! He's also done some voices for some upcoming animations of mine, so it's a good opportunity to pay him back.

FIRST STEPS

My first task was to learn how to draw the character Solrac, luckily I wasn't the first person to animate him, and he gets a LOT of fan art, so I had plenty of reference material to work from. In the video below, you can see another animator's work which I was told to use as a base, I advise you lower your volume...

The art style in this video has obvious differences to the actual show style on the right, so I had to look at it carefully in order to tell what the main changes are. As it turns out, the main focus is on the mouth and eyes, which add to the screamy "in your face" style. With this in mind, and a bunch of reference material, I got to drawing some test images. I was asked not to make the animation in the show style, but to show I've worked in it before, here's an old video of mine:

These pictures went down well and I then got the script and a rough animatic for the video. Unfortunately, we didn't have time to finish the video by the time the convention came around that was premiering the video. To help speed up the process, I had my good friend Jack create the backgrounds. I've had experience working with him in the past and the two of us work as an excellent team. You can read his blog entry on the backgrounds here. As for myself, Solrac and I agreed that this preview episode would consist of key poses, in the style of some of Egoraptor's work, as long as it contained some animation at the end to give the viewers some expectations, below is an example.

After some time the video was ready, just in time for the convention, you can see the result below:

Despite the video being incomplete, the response at the convention (shown below) was amazingly positive, with people literally getting up out of their seats. The response was also positive on YouTube too, the community opened it with welcoming arms. It was good to work on a piece with someone else that didn't turn into a total damn disaster. I'll be working with him on future episodes, so expect more blog posts!

I think things went well...