Aaron's Art Tips 9 - Persistence

hi everybody Aaron blaze here and welcome to another episode of Aaron's art-tips number 9 okay so today I'm really excited I finally get to share with you what I did this summer and I worked on a commercial for a company based in London for John Lewis department store for you folks in Britain you know what I'm talking about and it's a commercial called the bear and the hare each year they do a big Christmas campaign and this year they decided to do their commercial in animation and so earlier in the summer I was approached by a company called blink Inc they were bidding on this job and they needed some character designs and they knew of my work and brother bear and and so they were wondering if I would be interested and at the time I almost didn't take the job because I was doing some work for blue sky and paramount but I decided to take it I did some designs for them some of them you can see here on my computer screen and along with an animation test and the story reel and everything else they ended up getting the job and then it came back to me to kind of finalize the designs and then at the same time while I was still kind of hemming and hawing whether I was going to take the job or not I I found out that I would be working with my old Disney friend Dom Corolla and all the people that work with him at his studio called premise entertainment in Orlando and at that point I decided I was definitely going to do it but today I want to talk about I want to talk about that but it really started getting me thinking philosophically and and I want to go a little deep today and and so I hope you guys will indulge me and it might get a little emotional but you know one person they saw the test or the commercial and and they my last few years of my life have been really up and down and professionally personally and and recently about a year ago I had lost a movie the company went bankrupt and and this person wrote you know when a door closes another one opens and had that not happened we wouldn't have this commercial and it really got me thinking even on a bigger scale and thinking about animation itself and how it's such a metaphor for life and so I'm going to talk to you especially you younger people out there that are just getting started and can get frustrated and and and life can throw you curves you know animation is all about the marathon you know we don't do it overnight so many people ask me you know how can you do something that's so tedious that it seems like it's the same thing over and over and over again and and in a way isn't life is kind of that way it's it's day after day we try to get through get through it and so I'll you know let me give you a quick history of what I'm talking about and it's going to be it's it's a quick quick history of my life you know ten years ago I was working at Walt Disney Feature animation in Orlando at MGM we had three hundred and sixty people working there we had just finished up Brother Bear many of these people I had worked with for 15 years and we were a family and we were very tightly knit and everything up to that point my whole career was was kind of skyrocketing forward and and I was married and I had two kids and everything was perfect until the brother bear came out and and that's when the company decided Disney decided they were going to shut down the studio in Orlando after 15 years and we were heartbroken and not only that they were going to lay everybody off and so this family this tight group that we had had for so long was all of a sudden dispersed to the wind and but myself and a few others were held on to which was an ordeal in itself so we survived that we transferred to California and I started developing movies again I was with my old partner Bob Walker my other partner Chuck Williams who some of you know working with me on art story and we started developing another project after brother bear and a couple of things we we stalled out on a couple things but there was one project that started taking root cause project called the king of the elves and we're moving forward and then while we were making that my wife Karen woke up one morning we're still laying in bed and she felt a little lump right here and she had me reach over and I felt it and for sure there was there was a lump there and she went in and had a biopsy even and sure enough she had breast cancer Allison I thought you know how many times are we going to get hit like this but it didn't get better and you know we brought her in for treatment but it was very aggressive and for 23 months she fought it and fought it and I tried to work try to take care of things at home with Karen and we even got to the point where I couldn't go to work anymore and the guys would come to my home and we work out of my studio so I could be with Karen but eventually on March 2 March 11th 2007 things had just gotten to the end and you know we had family there and all of our friends and I had Karen in my arms and she passed away and at that point I was like I don't know if I can take this anymore I mean it was such a such a big hit and I remember waking up the next morning and the Sun came up and I remember being so angry that the Sun came up and it came up again and it came up again and it came up again and life moved on and it kept going and and but the loss of Karen and the blow to the my family it it hit me in a way that I wasn't able to get back to where I was at Disney and as hard as I tried to get king of the elves back on track I just wasn't able to do it my head wasn't in it and so ultimately I was taken off of that movie and when I was taken off that's when I realized you know I got a I've got to start over and so I decided to leave Disney I'd been with Disney for 21 years and so I left and took my family and we came back to Florida I wanted to come familiar surroundings and while I was making that decision I got a message that there was a company in Florida starting out animation company I was looking for a director to start developing films and so Chuck and I who Chuck at Arles also left Disney we decided to go ahead and interview we interviewed got the job and lo and behold were back in Florida starting over starting fresh and creating something new and so we started developing several projects one of which took hold and it was called The Legend of Tembo and while we were developing that we developed we brought in a great crew of people were making friends again and and developing that family that I had lost at Disney in Orlando so many years earlier but as luck would have it three years into that venture and two years into the making of The Legend of Timbo we came to work on one Friday one Friday and discovered that the company had gone bankrupt and we had until noon to clean out our offices and the movie had been shut down I'm like oh gosh I can't I don't know if I can keep doing this you know and you know it's such an emotional blow and I felt like I was going through that loss oh all over again that was about a year ago well about thirteen months ago and the reason I'm telling you all of this is because it brings us to where we are now which is making this commercial so I was out of work for several months and that's when I got that phone call to make this commercial and had I not gone through all of this journey to end up where I'm at now I wouldn't have had the opportunity to make this commercial and you're going to see it and you're going to see the magic that we were able to create and what's even cooler about this for me was the fact that I went through this ten-year circle the the group that I was with in Orlando we all said goodbye to each other and I didn't see a lot of them for 10 years and I went through all of this story that I just told you and I came back and I worked with these people in Orlando some of them that had never left and it was the same group that I worked with at Disney so many years ago and what was cool about that is we came together the family was reunited and we were able to make this magic on the screen and that's why it's so special to me and I talk about all this because animation is like that you know animation is this marathon and it's hard and from the outside it looks like this mundane hard difficult thing but when you play it when you look back when you play the history of it when you play those drawings and they and and like looking at life you see magic the the whole thing comes alive and just like life it becomes magical it's the ups and the downs and all that that make the tapestry of how we live each day and so if you take anything out of this rambling that I'm doing today I want you to know that if you're having difficulty in your art keep pushing persist the Sun will come up the next day it's like doing a new drawing and then you add another drawing and over time those collections of drawings those collections of days you can play them back and you can see the magic of it all it'll get better your art will get better your life will get better things will get better you can look back on it and you can still feel the emotion the SADS the sad times and the happy times and all that but that's the music that's the art that's the beauty of your life and drawn and pour that into your art and that's what we do now and so I've got to thank ink blink or blinking sorry I've got to thank blinking for calling me I've got to thank all my friends who recommended that blinking call me and most of all I got to thank Dom Corolla and all the great people at premise for making such a special experience for me because I was able to go through all of those ups and downs and come back home again and create something great so anyway that's my rambling for today persist when it looks dark keep going because the sun's going to come up tomorrow and just keep going alright so the first thing I want to play for you is the making of and you're going to get to see how we did this it's a pretty non-traditional way of doing animation everything was hand-drawn you'll see me in there flipping stuff but my job on this was I was I designed all of the characters and then Dom Corolla and myself we supervised doll of the animation and then I myself I animated all of the bear and the hair so without further ado I'm going to play for you the the making of and they'll come back and I'll troduce the actual commercial itself you you you so that was pretty cool wasn't it I mean it's it was so labor-intensive was such a cool mixture of stop-motion and 2d and sets and I've never seen anything like it before and when they told me how they originally did that test I was blown away and it was so cool to see our drawings that we created all of a sudden becoming these 3d little cards and in the set of never it was so special so anyway so that's how we made the advertisement for John Louis and now I want to show you the actual commercial itself so please enjoy I walked across an empty land I knew the pathway like the back of my I felt the arm beneath my feet sat by the river and it may be completely a simple thing where have you gone I'm getting tired and I need someone to I came I felt the branches of it looking we is this we still oh is this the place that I've been dreaming no have you gone I'm getting tired and I need someone to and to be so any end of everything pretty cool huh there's like a little mini two-minute movie and I was thinking about this you know that's the first project that I've actually taken through to completion and release in probably almost 10 years I've worked on so many projects but this is the first one that I've seen all the way through and in that amount of time so for me it's very emotional very cool and I'm so glad that I've been able to share it with you so I want to remind you all you know check out Wacom and all of their great products I use them I've talked about it every week my Cintiq 24 inch HD I love it and I really recommend it and here's their website and go check them out also if you're interested in more of my stuff please go to my website creature art teacher dot-com it's the art of Aaron blaze and it's creature art teacher com go check it out you'll see more of my art you'll see I've got a lot of tutorials on there for Photoshop animation how to draw elephants all kinds of fun stuff and also I want to remind you that if you have any ideas for future episodes of what you want me to cover please send me a letter write in the comments down below and I'll see what I can do this is going to be my last episode of Aaron's arc tips for the next two weeks because tomorrow I'm heading out to Wyoming for a painting trip taking my father with me we're going to have a great time I'm going to be out there for quite a while so I'm going to miss next week but hopefully after that I'll have a whole bunch of cool stuff from Wyoming that I can share with you so anyway thank you so much for letting me kind of ramble on and wax philosophical for you all about life and all the ups and downs and persist persist in your art persist in life persist in creating beauty for everyone else it's our job to make someone else's life better and go out and start doing it today okay so thank you so much and I hope you enjoyed the commercial tell your friends all about it knock those views on YouTube right up I mean we've hit we've hit four million views in three days how cool is that now is that was the number one video on YouTube the other day so anyway I hope you enjoyed it and in two weeks I'll see you again so thanks a lot for watching and I'll talk to you later bye

Channel: The Art of Aaron Blaise

Views: 99,814

Rating: 4.9928222 out of 5

Keywords: The Bear and the Hare, Aaron's Art Tips, Aaron Blaise, animation, 2D animation, tutorial, Help, Reel, Short, commercial, John Lewis, persistence, character design, drawing, film making, life lessons, Documentary, Experimental, stop motion, Premise Entertainment

Id: Hbcdn8QXcts

Length: 19min 15sec (1155 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 11 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/sloecoach]

Making of starts at 11:35 finished piece at 14:35

I loved this. I like that they chose to do it practically. They could have easily done this with CG, but I feel like there's something wholesome and warm and personal, that CG hasn't been able to capture yet.

[u/PEEnKEELE]

Also, if you aren't into the speech at the beginning, check out the end of the video where he shows the making of a super creative advertisement. This channel is full of great tips on character design and animation!

[u/[deleted]]

Thank you for sharing that. Now I'm going to try and regain my composure before someone at work sees me.

[u/quandary13]

Thanks that was nice. I saw the advert on TV the other day and thought it was really engaging, not thinking of the story behind it.

[u/[deleted]]

thank you for sharing that. I really enjoyed it. very touching.