Art of Annis Naeem

Liquid Skies

2012-01-18T02:26:00.000-08:00

Here is a recent short I made

Play on high volume.

Directed by: Annis Naeem
Written, Produced, Animated, Illustrated, Sound Design, Edited by: Annis Naeem
annisnaeem.com

Music credits:
Two Fingers - Fool's Rhythm
Written by Amon Tobin
Published by Just Isn't Music
(P) Ninja Tune 2010
Licensed courtesy of Ninja Tune

Liquid Skies is the story of an astronaut hurtling across the universe--past suns you and I may never glimpse, yet fighting battles we may all face ourselves one day.

This is my student short film at Art Center College of Design. It is my first big attempt at animating or doing something at this scale and finish. This is part of a broader story that I am working on, following an astronaut across the suns of many galaxies. I hope to share it with the world in the next year.
More information on this is available on my website.

Old Speedpaintings

2012-01-16T12:06:00.000-08:00

A pilot and a spaceship speedpaintings. These sketches were done around a year ago. Finally getting around to posting them.

Take-off

2012-01-10T21:45:00.000-08:00

Another one for Blast but slightly modified. This one is also partially the cover image:

Blast- extra work1

2012-01-03T18:57:00.000-08:00

Here are some pieces I never finished and remained extras. I ended up not putting these into BLAST
More to come.

BLAST + other work

2011-12-27T13:12:00.000-08:00

BLAST, another book with Scott Robertson, Danny Gardner and myself is finished and off to press. Unlike DRIVE we did not work on this full-time. Instead it took our evenings and weekends between jobs to finish it over the past year.
While DRIVE focused on land vehicles- this book focuses on spaceships. We did not limit ourselves to anything specific as a guideline for the book (aside from spaceships) and it was to be whatever direction we each wanted to pursue. There is no collaboration in this book and it is an interpretation from the three of us separated into three different chapters. I think each of us brought something different to the table, adding diversity to the book. Not to mention that Scott is featuring amazing guest artists in the last chapter and also gave them free reign.
Reserve your copy here!
Here is a sneak-peek at some of my work in the book:

More to come!
Here are a select few pieces from my 5th term at Art Center.

Boris + The Beatles

2011-11-14T12:49:00.001-08:00

Here's an animation I did a few weeks ago. A little rough but I got much out of it that I wanted to accomplish. The assignment was to create a 15 second animation... so it's a little fast. If I have time, i would go back and stretch out some of the timing to give it a little room to breathe.
It was based off the song "The long and winding road" by the Beatles. I took some of the lyrics and created frames/text to match the moods. A story I've been developing on a little guy named Boris and his love for Dina. In this small version, Dina has broken his heart and he's running toward her house over a span of a day and night.

credits:
lyrics: The beatles, "the long and winding road"
music: by Aldo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vm9_ywA4uNw

For this animation, I wanted to animate Boris running. It was my first drawn out frame by frame animation and took forever to figure out. But I learned much from it. His running is still awkward and the weight distribution isn't really there at all... but it's enough for now. Here it is:

And here is my concept-art that I developed for all of this. It was a little bit of unnecessary design work for this specific scene, but I wanted to treat it with as thoroughly as I could within the time I had. Plus it's always fun to flesh out a design and it's details.

Steampunk Countdown

2011-10-17T23:33:00.000-07:00

The main big goal was to create a countdown. I had a few smaller goals which included having an animated character in there and some other things (smoke, etc).
It was painted in photoshop and then animated in after effects.The color kind of went wonky in the transition from PS to AE. Will have a closer look when I get the chance.
I will upload the design/thumbnail sketches as I get the chance.

It is a little rough as the painting to the final animation took about 14-18 hours in total. A rush exercise.

Term 5: Motion / BLAST

2011-10-02T20:56:00.000-07:00

Finally back in school for my 5th term. I'm focusing more on animation and motion this term and probably for the rest of my art center career. Here are the fruits of some of the recent weeks.

Note: I am working on a new book with Scott Robertson and Danny Gardner named BLAST. Some of this work (the sci-fi stuff) is related to that and a work in progress. So stay tuned for related work..
head over to Scott Robertson's ( http://drawthrough.blogspot.com/ ) blog for updates on it.

TedX event

2011-07-21T23:41:00.000-07:00

Recently helped out Nick Pugh on his TedX Talk in Long Beach last weekend. He asked a few of us to come paint on site to help demonstrate the idea of digital plein-air painting. Everyone was super talented and did a great job of showing the subject matter and execution. These are my paintings from the day.

Following are just some of many half hour evening studies as of late with one turned into a concept painting over 2 hours.

ImagineFX #70 & Nevada Museum of Art

2011-06-09T16:32:00.000-07:00

I recently worked for the Nevada Museum of Art on their upcoming exhibition on mummies. They wanted a sketch of a futuristic egypt to accompany the exhibition. I did sketches on paper, scanned them in, blew them to about 30 feet and detailed them as much as I could. The final size for the wall was 14ft (high) x 87 feet (wide). Definitely a daunting number and it took about a week to draw it with chalk onto the wall in the museum with my assistant Annie. Exhibition opens from June 11-September 14. Link is here: http://www.nevadaart.org/ . So if you're ever in Reno in that time: definitely go check it out.
These are just WIP (work in progress) shots. I will post better pictures of the whole mural that the Museum should be taking soon. These will suffice for now.

People to thank and without whom this would have been an utter disaster:
-Nik Haafermaas for some great art direction
-Annie Hooker( http://anniehooker.com/) for being an awesome helper in applying it and a great artist.
-Celeste Byers for some great advice
-And the museum staff, especially Eric for setting up all the projections.

Some new photos by Nik Haafermaas:

The museum took some photographs of the exhibition with finalized lighting and mummies on the sketch. It's still not a photograph of the whole sketch I did- only 1/3 or so. Hoping that somehow the whole thing can be photographed. Here they are:

In other news, I have been working on the Tron tv series to be released in a year or so. Doing Vehicles/environments under the genius art direction of Alberto Mielgo. Definitely a great learning experience.
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Sakyg8srKU

It's been a while since an update. I have been doing personal stuff, but all of it is geared towards an upcoming book that Scott Robertson, Danny Gardner and I are pushing to get done.
So, first thing is an imaginefx walkthrough/tutorial illustration I squeezed in during school/work last term. Pretty last minute- about a day or so. So I didn't have much time to spend on it. You can check out the whole walkthrough in their latest issue #70.

Work

2011-01-30T23:18:00.000-08:00

Hello everyone,
I've been pretty inactive and M.I.A. Extremely busy at work, and rarely find the time to do personal art that isn't also focused on work. Thought I'd find some time to upload this work that no one has seen, and also some before and afters from DRIVE.

Since the before and afters were not shown in DRIVE, I thought it would be fun to post them here. And the other stuff is work that didn't have a place in the book.
Danny Gardner also posted them on his blog. Check them out. And of course head over to Scott Robertson's blog for more work.

This one had a base pen sketch Scott gave, which I will try to post. The design direction of the vehicle came from him.

DRIVE/Internship work

2010-10-29T00:02:00.000-07:00

Hey everyone,
DRIVE is almost in stores. Some stores like the student store at Art Center College of Design and http://www.stuartngbooks.com/ already have it for you to buy/check out. You can also buy it at designstudiopress.com or at amazon.

Anyhow, here's some work I did last summer that isn't in the book, so it's safe to post it here.

Weekend speedies

2010-08-22T18:27:00.000-07:00

Just experimenting .. Also trying to add a new genre to my portfolio, since I mostly have sci-fi only at the moment.

Syd Mead contest

2010-07-29T22:02:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone. I haven't posted in a while, but I've definitely been busy. All the work I've done recently, I can't show but I did participate in the Syd Mead contest at CGtalk so here's the painting from that. Trying to simulate syd's style of gouache brush strokes in photoshop was definitely a challenge, but a learning experience.
I'll try to post some of the ballpoint pen sketches but I probably won't remember to...

and this is somewhat of an older piece:

Old things

2010-05-06T22:02:00.000-07:00

Some things I never got around to putting on here. They're about half a year old...

Term 4: completed

2010-04-21T20:33:00.000-07:00

Exactly half way through my Art Center career. Here are some of the finals from the week.

End of term'ish things

2010-04-06T18:27:00.000-07:00

speed-painting done for the above scene:

Summer internship & personal things

2010-03-12T10:53:00.000-08:00

enviro concepts

I worked at Design studio press last year, www.designstudiopress.com , which involved working on a large vehicle project with Scott Robertson. I was given permission to release some of the work I did for him. The best summer of my life is how I would sum it up in one sentence.

Please go to Scott's blog to see the WIP of the book:

http://drawthrough.blogspot.com/

Costumes + mechanics

2010-03-11T18:58:00.000-08:00

Digital Landscape stuff

2010-03-05T09:35:00.001-08:00

Bunch of life paintings, and the application thereof to my concept paintings.

Lady Constance + enviro's

2010-02-18T18:08:00.001-08:00

Character design for a costume class of mine. Concept is that I wanted to achieve the old master-painting look of portraits. Something historical, yet futuristic. The marriage of both in a somewhat convincing manner. I designed the balls that lift her dress and hold it as she walks along as replacement for the servants/page's from back in the day.

A few cliche environments...

Racer

2010-02-11T00:17:00.001-08:00

~~UPDATE~~

Finished the vehicle! Here are the two finals.

and... some paintings from life!

Portfolio blog

2010-01-30T21:50:00.000-08:00

School has begun. I've put together a portfolio blog at: naeemdesigns.blogspot.com . Check it out. There's a lot of work on there that I haven't put on here. Below is a taste of the new stuff.

Junk

2010-01-12T02:02:00.000-08:00

Cities in orbit

2010-01-02T23:15:00.000-08:00

Happy New year.

*edit*

did another one. I'm thinking of doing a series of these. Pretty fun stuff.

Not sure of the backstory of these spheres. Perhaps they're artificial moons/monitoring stations for a huge planet. Or weather stabilizers on a hazardous planet to make an area habitable. Future tourism much?

..and a little something from tonight.

Inspired by the movie "dragon hunters". GO WATCH IT!!

Happy holidays

2009-12-24T23:49:00.000-08:00

homage to one of my fav digital painters: http://www.seunghohenrik.com/ . Couldn't resist the framing he does.

Speedies

2009-12-13T01:55:00.000-08:00

stuff..

Closing in

2009-11-27T01:16:00.000-08:00

Updates: detailed a few pieces and my movie poster for the story I chose.

Nearing finals

2009-11-08T15:22:00.001-08:00

update: some more stuff :/

Lots more environments to come.

more work

2009-11-01T11:49:00.000-08:00

Life took some rapid turns, but I'm getting back on track. On the search for motivation: I thought a certain someone took it, but I'm finding it again in other places. Everyone's gotta learn to walk on their own two feet, right?

3rd term=start

2009-09-25T16:25:00.000-07:00

Chalk spaceships,paintings 'n field studies

2009-06-07T00:45:00.000-07:00

final for viscomm 2- chalk on canson.

And a game cover I'm finally allowed to show from half a year ago..

Speedpainting-space station

2009-04-30T17:19:00.000-07:00

I've been reading too much sci-fi lately... And this is totally inspired off of Sparth.

1940's VTOL, Pt. 2

2009-04-10T01:29:00.000-07:00

Just some finalized designs.

WWII 1940'S VTOL aircrafts (empire + rebellion)

2009-03-17T16:18:00.000-07:00

THUMBNAILS

Alien Race

2009-03-14T20:56:00.000-07:00

JUNKYARD Battle Bots!

2009-01-28T20:46:00.000-08:00