Blue Dragon
This was a story pitch I made with the purpose of experimenting with telling a story using two different art styles (pixel and hand-drawn) and trying to bring two characters I designed to life.
Initial Style-Boards
Playing around with Pixels
For the "pixelated" look, I simply went into Photoshop, changed the dpi (dots per inch) to 72 and used the pencil tool to draw everything from the characters to the background. For the text I used color select and added darker tones of colors and then applied a Mosaic filter to pixelate the text. In fact, I used the Mosaic effect to anything I felt wasn't pixelated enough.
 Title ScreenOne of my first few attempts at painting a scene that was 100% pixelated. The background was inspired by an image of the Dolomites in Italy. |  The StageEntirety of the arena featured in this film. Once again, the mountains in the background were inspired by the Dolomites in Italy. |  Leone Sprites PageVery first sprite page I made for this project. |
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 Iron Crusader Page 01The big bad of this film. For the armor I took inspiration from Conquistador armor as well as some medieval armor I saw at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Some of the poses for these sprites were based off of the sprites sheet for Mortal Kombat 3's Shao Kahn. |  Iron Crusader Page 02The big bad of this film. For the armor I took inspiration from Conquistador armor as well as some medieval armor I saw at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Some of the poses for these sprites were based off of the sprites sheet for Mortal Kombat 3's Shao Kahn. |  Foot SoldiersThe Iron Crusader's men, design inspired by old Roman armor. |
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 Blue DragonFull body of Leone's dragon along with some reference pictures I used. I based its design mostly off of Thyrus, a dragon of Italian folklore. |
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Below is the initial test of Leone's whirlwind slash animation, without the flame effects added
Non-Pixel Scenes
The scenes that I drew for the beginning and end of the piece to book-end the pixel art sections were done in Paint Tool SAI and Adobe Photoshop
 bluedragon_frame01_04.jpgLeone flying over the mountains, with the full "sunset" in the background. |  bluedragon_frame02.jpgReveal of the Iron Crusader and his cronies, with an unused "speed lines" effect. |  firebreath.jpgOne of the few scenes I speed-painted in the interest of time, depicting Leone leaping off of his dragon as it breathes fire at the soldiers. |
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 bluedragon_frame_slicethru.jpgThis was one of the first few non-pixel scenes I wanted to get done first, since I wanted a smooth motion of Leone swinging his sword at the weakened boss. |  bluedragon_TV.jpgThis is of course a parody on Super Famicom, as well as some of the harsh grading systems found in today's more unforgiving games. |  bluedragon_finalframe01.jpgThis was literally the first non-pixelated scene that I fully colored, so the style looks drastically different than the rest of the film. |
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