This is a blog following the production of "Merry Melony", an interactive graphic novel about a girl in a surreal dream-like world.
I'm Eric Drobile, Lead Animator at Reel FX Studios and cocreator of the worlds most fattening webcomic, Hatefarm. Hope you found this blog helpful and/or entertaining! If you have any comments, questions or crits, don't hesitate to use the "Ask Me Anything" link below.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
More experiments in color/shading styles. I think this was pretty successful despite the ugly palette. I’d like to do a series of color scripts soon to find some palettes that work for different environments.
‘Nother panel exploration. Somebody tell this girl to stop checking her cell phone while encased in a frozen ceiling.
Hey guys! Sorry it’s been so long since I’ve updated. Between Hatefarm, my girlfriend, and work (we recently started production on our first CG animated feature film, Turkeys, set for release in 2014), I haven’t had much time for Melony. I’m still stuck on the medium I want to do this in — I know branching storylines is too big of a project for me, but I really want to maintain some level of interactivity, and so I’m considering maybe turning this into a game of sorts. I don’t know! Much to think about. But on the other side of things I know where the story needs to go and there is a lot of concept art I can move forward with. Here is some environment design with a little foreshadowing of a new character. I want to clean this up further and color it because I think it’s a pretty solid foundation. Hopefully it won’t be long before my next update.
Work in progress. I found myself unhappy with the comic book coloring style — flat colors and lots of use of black… I’m just not very good at it. I’m experimenting with a new painting style that is relatively quick and maintains a sense of “painterliness”…something I’ve never been terribly good at in the past. Going to color this and give it the full treatment as if it was an actual final panel and we’ll see how it looks. This piece will also serve as some environment design (there is a lot cropped out) and a look at one of the Rabbit’s forms. Should be fun!
Introducing a new character…Big Kitty!
Alright back to it! Got some serious concept art and story writing to do.
I’ve been doing some heavy thinking about not cutting out the interactivity, but cutting out the branching story line. Writing 3 separate stories is proving to be way huge of a task and I don’t want to stumble into My-Project-Is-Too-Huge-And-I-Will-Never-Finish-It territory.
Our heroine, Melony! Learned a lot from doing this. Made a few mistakes in shading, linework, and perspective that I hopefully won’t make again. Overall I hope the shading will be a little bit more simplified than this in production images. Up next, expression sheet!
More progress…already wishing I had done some things differently but this is it…time for some forward momentum!
Some expressions. More on the way!
My vacation has started and so it’s time to buckle down and get serious on some storywriting. BRING IT ON!
New rabbit vs. old rabbit.
Some creature design, finally! Rabbit takes multiple forms, this is just one of them. Will color this soon. Happy Friday!
Scream!!! Just as expected, that was really hard. Hopefully I’ll do it better next time.
All this developing Melony into a well rounded character means that yes, she needs to be able to smile.
