A Progress in Work…

Rain Dance Animatic

And now, the grand reveal of what most of my time this past quarter has gone to….my thesis film, Rain Dance!

Here is the finished Animatic for your enjoyment.  The pitch is it’s the story of a Shaman who does a rain dance that goes horribly wrong, and I’m hoping to explore issues of the role of the environment as an active character in animated films!  I hope you all enjoy!

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Fall Concepts…

Here are some of the concept pieces I’ve been working on for various films during the quarter:

Matte for Natalia Mercado’s film Out of Time

Concepts of the AMU Walker’s Head Design for Alexander Curtis’s film Hephaestus

Prop designs and colors fo Alexis Xuconoxtli’s film All In

Tickets Please…

Here is an animatic for a class exercise.  We were given three words and asked to create a story jumping off from them.  I was given Owl, Blue and Thomas.  Here is what I came up with!

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Demo Reel thus far…

Here is a  demo reel of my work thus far from SCAD, I hope you enjoy!

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Summer’s not what it used to be…

Well the first week of summer classes is over, and it’s pretty apparent I’m going to be busier now than I was during the normal school year…I thought summer was supposed to be a break!

I’m taking 3d Character Animation II, which should be challenging, Environmental Look Development, which should be awesome and loooots of work, and CG Modeling and Design, which should be…..interesting o_o

We had a ’skill check’ assignment in 3D Character, to do a walk cycle with personality to it, here’s what I came up with:

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vimeo Direkt

For Environment Look we had to do a ‘concept sketch’ based on a prompt. We were not to spend more than 5 hours on it and try to get across the feeling we want, like a pitch to a director. Our first prompt was “A Little Planet: It’s a Small World After All.” My results were:

I’m still veryveryvery much learning how to model and texture in 3D, so this class is gonna be challenging…hopefully I’m able to get across the aesthetic I’m picturing at least ^_^; We have a prompt due every class (so twice a week) our next one is ‘Mousetrap: The Board Game of Life” and it’s due tomorrow…we’ll see what I can crank out o_o;

A Healthy Dollop of Inspiration

Saw this tonight and just had to share:

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Freaky, creative, gorgeous, beyond impressive…and apparently all the work of one person.  Just wow.

Year One, CHECK.

Well, I have officially finished my first year of grad school at SCAD…got my marks and I recieved a 4.0, which I’ll go ahead and say I’m rather proud of

The quarter (and year, for that matter) was very productive, informative and exciting.  I’ve enjoyed my time at SCAD thus far, the folks I’ve had the opportunity to work with and the direction things are heading for next year.  The bulk of my work to come will be on my thesis, but I hope to work on some side projects as well.

For now, here’s an art dump of most of my work for the quarter, enjoy perusing it!

2D Character 2 Final:

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My pièce de résistance for the quarter…the epic 18 second Madame Medusa dialogue piece.  So much time spent on this, but I really did love doing it (even despite the hideous character design…she was actually kinda fun to make look as disgusting as possible ).  Quote is Madeline Kahn from Clue, character is Madame Medusa from Disney’s The Rescuers.  Some tweaks I’d like to go back and put in, but on the whole I think the performance is there and I’m quite pleased with it.

Concept Art:

3 concept pieces for a friend’s senior project All In. He wanted a flat, graphic art-deco inspired look, but with the textured grittiness to depict a grimy basement speakeasy. This film goes into production next year and I should be helping out on the environments, look forward to more updates!

Concept I’m currently working on for a fellow Grad student’s thesis project. Enjoying this project a lot just for the experience even if my work doesn’t get used…it’s fun to draw on my time in Japan for arts sake.

Background Painting:

I was also asked to help out with some background paintings for a short film called Girl and the Fox. Originally I was brought on to help color, then asked to animate some scenes, then paint backgrounds, so it was cool to see all the different steps of the process, haha. Project is still ongoing, but here are some of the WIP paintings:

The landscape has been particularly enjoyable, and fun because I get to draw on my Alasakan background for it, hee.

Random Painting Practice:

And just for fun, here’s some just-for-fun stuff I’ve been doing to keep busy:

Cardinal Chang, Dr. Svenson and Miss Temple, respectively…3 main characters from the book Glass Books of the Dream Eaters, highly recommended. Done as an intro to texture brushes in photoshop.

And to end, a couple silly self-portraits:

Maya: Not your Grandfather’s Multi-Plane Camera

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Technical Specs for those who care: A test to see the potential for using Maya as a souped-up multi-plane camera for creating depth with traditionally painted backgrounds and environments….this is an old illustration I did for my comic (seen here) that I split up and tried to make look 3D-esque. For what a slapdash job this was (I didn’t edit or touch up the original picture at all, just sliced it into layers…and the video is just a simple playblast, no lighting or textures at all, hence the not-awesome quality of the video), I’m pretty happy with the results and excited about the possibilities this presents for using the technique with my thesis. Already planning a more thorough, proper test with images drawn for this specific purpose.

leveL lives…IT LIIIIIIIIIIVES.

Also, my Conditional Review is tomorrow morning….shall report back on the results of that and my profs’ adviee as to my 2D vs 3D debate…

Ruminate, Rinse, Repeat

Went through a short spell of creative rock-bottom-ness this past week. Well maybe that’s putting it a bit harshly…what happened is I saw some really inspiring work and it motivated me to spend some time working on my thesis concept. After giving it a couple days thought and a bunch of random sketching to try and get the juices in my brain flowing, I kept coming up with nothing. Best I got was considering reverting back to some as-of-yet-unused leveL concepts, but this frustrated me even more because all those ideas are more that 5 years old, and if I expect to be any sort of a viable creative force, I need to start coming up with some new, fresh material.

So after some low-level huffing and angsting I sat down with the Planet Earth DVDs to inspire me…that really didn’t lead to anything, but after that I had to make a 3 hour drive to visit family for Easter, and the time alone in the car with me ruminating in the thoughts and impressions from the DVDs led to some exciting ideas that I’m looking forward to exploring….which I guess means crisis averted! …for the moment at least. I guess I need to remind myself that creativity and inspiration isn’t just a faucet you can turn on and off whenever you choose…..if anything it’s more like a muscle that needs constant exercise to remain strong and responsive. In any event, I’m excited for the concept I’m working on…once I’ve got it fleshed out a bit more perhaps I’ll post some preliminary work

This coming week is going to be a big pick-up in workflow, as the short film for my Digicel Animation class is going into the ‘Production’ phase, and I’m also starting work on an independent short film with what freetime I can muster. This is all pretty exciting, it’s nice to be making some real creative progress.

Also, if I didn’t mention earlier, my Preliminary Review was pushed back to this coming Friday, so I will have to wait until then to get some faculty opinions on what direction to take the remainder of my studies here. Hopefully they will have some enlightening advice!

AND!  Just for a fun note, here’s a serious blast from the past for anyone as old as me who can remember it:

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Of Dragons and Beagles

I caught Dreamwork’s How to Train Your Dragon last night.  Despite some technical difficulties in the theater (the BG soundtrack only played at about 25% of the actual volume it was intended), I wholeheartedly enjoyed this film.  The only two things I can think of that I’d wished were different were that I felt the character of Astrid was a bit underdeveloped and came to her conclusions waaay too quickly, and that I didn’t think the 3D actually took advantage of the grandeur of the great vistas it was showing (that last point, however, might once again be attributed to the lackluster theater I saw it in, it was kinda ghetto).  The dragon was soooooo well animating, his design was at once endearing, cute and cuddly, and really dangerous and intimidating.  Hiccup’s voice was perfect, and I really liked the relationship between him and his father, it felt very layered and real, like they were both rounded characters with their own flaws and hang ups having a really jilted interaction that led to avoidable complications….a very realistic father/son vibe, I felt.

I’m not generally a fan of Dreamwork’s films…they are a bit too pop-culture reference-y for me, and I’ve never been a great fan of their character designs, but this one really got me.  It was, on all levels, pretty durn fantastic.  I wants to see it again

On the school side of things…this quarter is gonna be pretty steadily busy the whole way through.  For my 2D Character class I’m working on a dialogue acting piece which I’m using one of the gargoyles from Hunchback of Notre Dame for (I should have a pose-test done for that sometime soon, shall post the results of that once I do)

My Aesthetics of Animation class, taught by the Chair of the Animation Department, seems like its actually going to be very interesting and engaging….our final project for that class is to make a personal project exploring some aspect of animation we are interested in…right now I think I want to do something with 2D-Environment/Atmosphere….I’ve actually considered possibly exploring that dream I had when I was in Japan, it could yield some useful results for my thesis…

Finally, my Digital Cel Animation class, in which we are making a short film based on a children’s book written by a student here at SCAD.  This week we were all asked to explore a different digital technique of translating the style of the book (ink and watercolor drawings) into digital animation means.  Some people are making Flash puppets, some are coloring in Photoshop…I was asked to animate it in Flash and then print the inked animation, color it by hand and scan it back in.  I used watercolor pencils and washes (similiar to the technique I used for my Rotoscoping Project, minus the inverted color), and here is the result:

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Just a VERY quick and shoddy walkcycle….it was my first attempt animating anything in Flash from scratch ever….surprisingly I think I took to it pretty easily.  If anything else, it was fun to animate something with a bit more character to it rather than just demonstrations of animation principles like overlapping action x_X  Speaking of characters, Hubert the Beagle is copyright of Nate Marsh, and quite a delightful little pooch he is too X)

Beyond animation-type things….I gotta make a couple big decisions here shortly, about living accommodations for next school year and what I will be doing with my summer vacation.  Kinda deciding between a few big options, hopefully I’ll get some sort of sign about which direction I should follow >_>