New RDR2 Video: "Multiplayer Free Roam"

"Free Roam" is one of many ways to play Red Dead Redemption with other people. As the video below explains, during Free Roam, you pick an avatar and explore the Red Dead world in a group of up to 16 people. You are all then free to start a posse and team up with others, start fights, go hunting, or do anything else you would normally do in the game. You and the other players in your group all stay in Free Roam while your group leader sets up a traditional/structured multiplayer match, rather than the traditional chore of making everyone wait in a lobby menu until the match is ready to start. This concept of always being in the game's world was applied to my last game Midnight Club: Los Angeles as well, but RDR2 pushes the concept much further.
But enough of my yapping. This video shows it better than I can tell:



Click here for full "Multiplayer Free Mode" write-ups on the Rockstar website.

And keep an eye out for the new Red Dead Redemption Dueling Facebook Game on Monday.

Newest, shiniest RDR2 video now online at GameTrailers.com

Titled "Life in the West Part 2," it does a great job of summing up the gameplay in Red Dead Redemption's ambient world. Check it out in HD below:



The video is a definite hit. As of right now it already past 68,000 viewers, 750 comments, and a 9.8 rating from over 1,400 votes. We are now the #1 Game Trailers Game Rank. Click here to keep us at #1

Ready to pre-order? (how could you not be?!) Visit the Red Dead Redemption site and decide which pre-order bonus you want.

RDR2 at PAX East

The Red Dead Redemption hands-on demo was available to play at The Penny Arcade Expo in Boston this week. You had to wait a bit to see for yourself, though:



Plenty of people blogged about their experiences playing the game at PAX East. Check them out after the break:

RDR2 Cover Art Revealed

Drumroll please...the official cover art for Red Dead Redemption:

New RDR2 Video: "Gentleman and Vagabonds"

The Marketing team is on a roll. This week's video contains snippets about some of the characters you'll encounter on story missions and side quests. Take a look:

Greener Guy as Popeye

Greener Guy was a character I came up with while attending a very liberal arts college. He resembled many of the students who went there. After coming up with my first parody piece using this character, I later used it to reinvent the Popeye characters. I watched Popeye after school a lot when I was younger, and for a reason I've now forgotten I sketched some concepts of the Popeye characters in this vein.

I came up with a super-villain that tried to sell sneaky credit cards with high APRs on the college campus, and went very "Mr. Burns" with the design:

Finally, I had the idea to use the Popeye-version Greener Guy in a cartoon about the WTO riots in Seattle (aka the 'Battle in Seattle') that I witnessed in 1999. It ran in the Evergreen school newspaper.:

New RDR2 Video: "Life in the West"

There's a new Red Dead Redemption video up, and it might be the best one yet. Titled "Life in the West," it showcases the big picture of what your character John Marston faces in his day-to-day life as he tracks down the members of his former gang. The big port town of Blackwater gets some screen time, as well as mini-games such as herding, breaking horses, gambling, drinking, and shooting down the vultures that circle around a fresh kill.



More RDR2 info

Super 8 Theater Spotting - Chicago

I took a Super 8 filmmaking class in Chicago years back, and one of the urges I had while that little camera was in my possession was to take a picture of all the major theaters I could get to in one day. My buddy Joe, another camera and movie enthusiast, agreed to join me and we spent the day driving from theater to theater and taking snapshots and videos (we didn't have time to catch any films, however). Here's some of what I saw through that little camera:

Here are the short videos I shot:


Time-lapse shot of the Pickwick movie theater in a northern suburb of Chicago:



Plane flying across the sky:


Sears Tower on an overcast day:


The shadows of three flags against a wall:


The American flag floating inside the downtown Bank One lobby:

For Sean's 28th birthday

Happy birthday, buddy.

"Sean," Digital Painting, 2010

Stats: 6 1/2 hours, 4 layers, 2 brushes, and 3 tools in all, aka "6.5/4/2/3." Used only one layer for the character strokes and used plenty of smudge tool to clean as I went. I'm getting more comfortable with relying on the smudging method, but my hand still isn't very graceful as I draw on the tablet, so I find myself eating up a lot of time with redrawing lines. I used the source photo to help save time with nailing down the proportions, which I would normally do 100% by hand. I gotta keep life drawing to maintain that skill, though.

New RDR2 Video: The Women - Sinners, Saints, and Survivors

Lots of new cutscene footage from the game.

Mohammad-Reza Shah Pahlavi

"Mohammad-Reza Shah Pahlavi," Digital Painting, 2010

More tablet practice. I wanted to step up the difficulty this time with some details and a specific likeness to recreate. The subject is the former Shah of Iran, which I chose for a very early Norooz gift for my father-in-law. The first layer in Photoshop was all lines, then I made a smudge tool pass, then came a light layer of tighter lines. It's still too blurry for my taste, but I didn't want to dwell on it too long. I signed my name in Farsi along the bottom (while I remember how).

Insomniac Blogging

 

Julian Field, Digital Painting, 2010 

I'm back late from a comedy show in LA so I wanted to close the night off with a soothing session of painting. This one is of the landscapes I'd pass on my way to Julian, a small rural town less than two hours away from San Diego that I go to every now and then. One of the things I realize about digital painting is that I need guidance with choosing and creating the right brushes in Photoshop. I've been using the smear tool after doing the initial painting and I feel like there's a much better method that's escaping me. Any recommendations?

New RDR2 Video: "The Law"

Today a new Red Dead Redemption video was released online. It showcases some of the lawmen you encounter throughout the game, set to a nice track from the score. I like the stormy scenes that made it in there, too .

5 Story RDR2 Ad is Now Up in NYC

As seen on the corner of Canal and Greene. Rockstar's website has the pics.

New "Gamestop Outfit" Contest Video for Red Dead Redemption

Voting has started to determine what special outfit your character John Marston will have unlocked if you preorder your copy of Red Dead Redemption from Game Stop. Watch this video to learn more:

Thumbnails: Breakdancers from "B-Boy"

Back in film school, I wanted to do a demo reel that showcased motion that not only was difficult to animate with a computer, but was visually interesting and exciting to watch. Breakdancing was the perfect choice. To do this, I had to pick up every video I could find (this was before YouTube, and most breakdancing videos were shot on tape at that point), and go through them frame-by-frame to find out what the key poses and breakdowns looked like. It was a lot of work, but as any animator will tell you, there's no other way to pull off complex animations. In my student film B-Boy, the moves I had my character do included a 6 step, Swipes, Turtle, Headspin, and Windmill (the 6 step and Turtle were the only two I was ever able to do in real life). Here are some of the thumbnail drawings I did to get the poses and timing down (30 frames per second):

The 6 step:

This 6 step is similar to the style of the one I did in my reel. He does it all at once in the last 3rd of the video.

And here are the thumbnails. The order of the pages goes from left to right on the top, then left to right on the bottom. The three number columns represent the frame # on the video, the # of my scene in Softimage 3.7, and the overall # it would be if it were on its own:

 

Turtle:

These thumbnails go in order from top to bottom, left page to right page:

 

And finally, the famous Windmills:

 
 

Sketchbook: Clothed Pictures of Famous People

Here are some more selections from old sketchbooks that I scanned recently. The first is the author Zadie Smith from her great novel White Teeth:

 

After looking through some old sketchbooks, it turns out I've drawn Edward Norton twice:

 

Key facial features of 4 famous women (2 singers, 2 actresses). Can you recognize them all?

 

Clockwise from the top left: Angelina Jolie, Fiona Apple, Natalie Portman, Bjork.

Stylized portrait of Terrence Stamp from one of my favorite movies, The Limey:

Quick sketch of the godfather of noise, Rahzel:

 

Sketchbook: Classical Art Studies

This assortment is from a range of books from different years, but are pretty good examples of when I would try to focus on classical art through line drawing. The first page was done in 2002 at the Art Institute of Chicago. The top figures are from Cezanne's The Bathers, Hopper's Nighthawks is cropped on the left side (I believe it was temporarily at the Art Institute at the time), and the bottom right quarter is a portrait of Vincent Van Gogh:

Speaking of Van Gogh, I drew a sliced mango in the way I imagined he would in the top right of this page (circa1998). The left side is a line-by-line recration of a drawing by Picasso (whose title and internet link escape me) that I did in 1999. The woman's profile in the bottom right was taken from an art school flyer I had handy at the time (2000).

Rounding out this post are two more artist's portraits. On the is a portrait of the young artist prodigy Amedeo Modigliani (2000). On the right is a quickly-drafted Wasily Kandinsky below a recreation of his signature, both done by brush pen in 2000. I take Kandinsky's philosophies on painting to heart each time I try to work on something abstract.

Unfinished Blue Line Pro pages

This pair of unfinished drawings were done on Blue Line Pro pages. I had high hopes for this rendition of the Drew Struzan poster for The Phantom Menace, but never finished inking it.

This comic book splash cover was done a year earlier, if memory serves. It's of Erik Larsen's Savage Dragon comic, which my friend Sean got me hooked on when I was a teenager.

Sketchbook: Preparing for Film School

I've been meaning to get the better drawings scanned from my old sketchbooks, and I think I'm all caught up. For my first post in this series, these are some pages from 2000, when I was still a student at the Evergreen State College. I knew I wanted to become an animator, but I first had to flesh out my sketchbook to apply to film schools. The Vancouver Film School ended up being my next destination.

This first page has drawings of a dancer from a magazine ad, along with some Matrix poses:

The dancers on this page were "x-rayed" from a cigarette ad, followed by a more healthy yoga couple:

 

 And this page contains my arm without its skin, and some life-drawings from a Pinoy Eskrima (Philipino Stick Fighting) session held at the college. The man with the short ponytail is the sensei. I took his Ninpo Taijutsu class the term before.

  

The first page in this pair is from a book by the famous photographer Eadweard Muybridge. The second is from an animation book, if I remember correctly. Nothing is traced, just drawn to start becoming familiar with the subtleties of how animals move:

 

More animal drawings. Trying to guess what muscles are under the fur: