Friday, October 31, 2008

Happy Halloween!


A yearly childhood icon. Hocus Pocus had an annual showing in our living room, so it's only appropriate I include it to wish everyone a Happy Halloween! Okay, I'm off to celebrate!

Just in case, here's a clip of dear ol' Winifred(Bette Midler):

Saturday, October 25, 2008

Daffy Wrap-Up and Lockdown

It's already the halfway mark! Week 7 just ended and things are going really well. Busy from 8 in the morning until about 1 in the morning, but it's work I'm enjoying. Film is going very very well. Making a lot of headway on it--a non-stop cycle of battling the beast that is story.

Time to share the finished Daffy Duck animation I've been working on for the past 3 weeks. So I basically took those 3 drawings from the previous post and did a breakdown, adding in additional poses so he starts to move between the main 3 key drawings.


This also had an idea which I dropped immediately after sharing this. In this breakdown he's moving up and down on the broom--pretending to ride it, but after my teacher's feedback, I started hunting for a stronger less muddy way of describing his action. Another critique involved how many poses Daffy was doing. I was having him really reach out and grab that broom and just fly right over it, so I restrained Daffy more and did another pass on the breakdowns:


Here's the new breakdown, with a few more drawings in there. Much clearer.

I then started smoothing out his actions, aka. Inbetweening until I got the final result:


I added in more time for the broom to actually take off, and really dragged Daffy's feet to convey his weight. I didn't fully inbetween the floating at the top(it alternates between 4's and 2's to those that want to know), so that's why it's a little jumpy at the top before Daffy reacts.

And in other news, it's the official 48 film lockdown! Every year voluntary students all get together and spend the following 48 hours making an individual(or group) film based on a noun drawn from a hat. So lockdown begun last night at midnight, after Mark Andrews came and gave an incredibly inspiring lecture on story(which I'll try and get the notes posted. Pretty similar to last year's notes though). I am attempting to participate, while I do have a story based on the theme of "Hair", and it's kind of working. I also have a ton of homework/film work to finish so I doubt it'll see the finish line, but we'll see. Well, have some photos from the lockdown meeting:


It was jam-packed. So lets see what kind of Hairy adventures will debut in 2 weeks!

Thursday, October 16, 2008

Belated Update

Been super busy this past week, it's amazing the workload to time ratio difference between first year and second year. Despite my best efforts(and NOT pulling all-nighters), I'm usually working on homework up until the night before it's due. Last year I was able to finish all my homework usually by that Monday---now, I'm wrapping things up usually by Wednesday, though I get my Monday and Tuesday homework done way before then. But I'm learning a ton and do enjoy all the homework, lots of drawing. Anyways, this past weekend was spent working away on homework/film stuff so I could spend Monday at Disneyland with several other classmates. Monday was a holiday, and CalArts was closed so we bolted off campus faster than you could say, "Happy Indigenous People Day" lol. Well, Disneyland was great, exactly what I needed. We arrived at 9am and spent the next 12 hours at the Happiest Place on Earth! Rode Indiana Jones and Space Mountain twice, among all the other rides. Splash Mountain was unfortunately closed all day due to "technical difficulties" but otherwise, all 8 of us had one magical time. Throughout the day I sketched the tourists, so here's the display of Disney-goers:


One particular highlight was found at the Tiki Room. During the show I started watching the crowd more than the whistling parrots or flowers. I highlighted the observation below:

So we have three classes of audience members: Those that are usually spell-bound by the show. The parent and child who were swaying to the tunes. And then this one guy who proceeded to PLUG his ears and try to sleep. This didn't work, he was constantly shifting his position and shoving his fingers deeper into his ears trying to block out, "Let's all sing like the birdies sing!" It was a big contrast compared to the mom and son who sat in the row in front of him and highly amusing.
After a second round of Space Mountain, followed by the Buzz Lightyear ride which happened break down mid-way through and resulted in us blasting targets for a good 10 minutes before they fixed the problem(I got a score of about 350,000). We ended the day with hanging out on Main Street and enjoying a good dose of coma-inducing waffle-cone icecream, followed by more sketch-time:

Look at us go! Anyways, I'll get some classwork up later this weekend including some updates on my Daffy Duck animation.

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Two in One day!

Making up for the lack of of posting with two posts in one day. Last week was one crazy rollercoaster kind-of week. Thankfully this week has improved a lot, and next week looks very promising(Monday is a Holiday and a bunch of us are spending it at, of all places, Disneyland). CalArts is all about the ups and downs. Oh yeah, and Zesung--by your standards this post will be unfortunately long, but you've probably stopped reading by now anyways. lol

Following up on my previous post with the animated music note, here's a page of thumbnails. I planned this out without investigating the actual rig, so I lost some of the flexibility when I translated these poses into Maya. Still came pretty darn close though:


The rest of this post is for traditional animation. While the actual animation isn't due for the next two weeks, we DO need our idea and poses, so I'm going to post my process here as this project goes along. This does ruin the surprise once I do have the finished product. But I won't include everything that happens. The assignment is an action/reaction scene with a maximum of 48 frames for the entire action. Basically he starts the scene with one emotion, and then at the end has a completely different emotion(ex. Happy to Angry) We have the option of using a prop of our choice. I settled on Daffy with a broomstick. Being October and since this is due pretty close to Halloween, I stuck with a seasonal theme, so while a devious Daffy "imagines" he's flying, the broom will eventually start floating with one very stunned Duck attached to it. So first up are thumbnails of a very disfigured duck:

Just trying different approaches to a similar situation. Encountered problems with some, others I planned on refining later on. Ontop of planning our assignment we also have to study the Daffy Duck model sheet the teacher handed out. He's really emphasizing being on-model for this next assignment, so I've been working on this part:


And now, the key poses for my assignment based off of the earlier thumbnails. Eventhough I've sketched this out on animation paper, I'm going to redraw these once I, A)get feedback from class tomorrow night and B) I start animating. Otherwise these will hopefully not change too much.




Alright, that's all folks!

Musical Stairs

My return to animating in 3D:



And I even animated to music. The sound clip from Brazil and music note rig were both assigned to us by the teacher---the rest was up to us, so while most notes dance, mine ended up falling down stairs. And as always, the report on how many times Maya crashed: 5.

I'll be posting other things tomorrow. I'll even post my thumbnails for my music note too---for now class calls...

Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Daffy Dodgeball


Daffy Dodgeball for traditional animation, we had to study a sports action and then apply those studies to Daffy. Looking back, I need to watch how even my timing gets, unfortunately this'll have to do, otherwise I'm getting better at drawing that duck! Definitely looking forward to the upcoming acting assignment, should be a lot of fun.