Happy Halloween!

A little Happy Halloween from the zoo's snow leopard cubs--they were going to town on some pumpkins. Absolutely adorable and the action took place a little over a foot away! When they got tired of mauling the pumpkin they quickly turned on each other, or better yet, dear ol' Mom.


(that's literally the distance away, no zoom. Just holding my arm out.)

Last night was the annual CalArts' Halloween party. Had a very good time with friends and everyone dressed in some pretty craazy costumes. The theme this year was "Insane Asylum" and the decorations were pretty appropriate. haha. I stayed from about 9:30 until 1:30 in the morning. Here's a quick photo of the main dance area:


The next morning I came into the cubes and was greeted with Admiral Ackbar and the head of a Star Wars' At-St(I had to look this name up, so I'm not THAT deep into the nerdom. haha). Both were costumes worn the previous night(The At-St was beyond awesome! Complete with silly string blasters)....And a group of students went to the trouble of creating a duct-tape casting of someone's body and then clothing it. It was Mel Gibson earlier in the week, hopefully Ackbar is around longer to warn everyone of any traps!

"It's a traaaaap!"

Psst...this'll catch everyone up:

Tiny Update

Still alive. Very hectic schedule last week and now battling my way over a small cold. So, a real update like guest lecture notes(James Gurney and a bit from Shane Acker's lecture on "9") coming soon. To tide things over here are some animation tests:


A pretty sloppy animated turn around of Peter Pan. We had a choice between Pan and Fred Flintstone...while I learned a ton on it, I definitely wish the end result was less floaty(watch that mouth! And feather, and eyebrows! All fantastically inconsistent and I didn't catch these things until it was too late. I doubt I'll revisit this.)


We had to have a character dive off of a diving board. Could be any character and it was suggested(....Kristen....haha) I try out my elephant character. This is due tomorrow(sneak peek for everyone in Scott's class), and am definitely aiming on a more solid elephant next time 'round. He's verging on the infamous flour-sack body--like those deer in Snow White.
Anyways, this is as good a time as any to introduce my WIP film character for this year, Quint. I had been developing a story involving little Quint, but on Wednesday I had a muchly appreciated reality check from my current production teacher, so I'm shelving that idea and moving on. I say appreciated because it would have been really frustrating to find this sort of feedback out in, let's say, May, so now, while it's still early in the game--I'm turning back and starting a new. Still in love with the original story though, just would have really been too much for me to take on this year, especially with how I want to really focus on animation. The previous story honestly wouldn't have allowed me to revisit any scenes and as was pointed out to me--I'd have to rush through a lot of footage and in the end, the quality would suffer. No way I'd be able to push the animation. Falling back on bad habits, like during crunch-time last year, wouldn't help me at all. Definitely a good reminder after my previous two years...thinking back on those films is what really helped me decide, "Yeah, not falling into that same trap this year." Plus, I quickly put some of my storyboards in the computer and started timing them out---just 40% of the film came to 3 minutes and 30 seconds. I stopped there....Yep, that doesn't exactly play into my goal of having a film that's only 2 minutes long--with credits. Now to think of a super simple, chalk full of character-driven film! Hmm....

P.S.



And then Disney deer a few years later:

Leaf me alone

My leaf assignment that was due tonight. Though mine went the route of "triangle" type leaf. Oh well--like I said, Leaf me alone. :P Now it's onto a head rotation, time to decide between Peter Pan or Fred Flintstone...hmmm

Also, I updated my folding box video on the previous post with a much higher quality.

Every year Third Years tackle the infamous "Third Year Reviews" where, you go into a room with 3-5 faculty members and they look at a portfolio of the work you've done over the past 2.5ish years. Films, animation tests, color charts...all of it, judge your progress in the program, and essentially see if you're on track for graduating. Well next week is my year's turn. Stress is definitely building and nobody knows for sure what to expect. Tuesday the 20th is my day(at 11 am to be exact), so in the meantime I'm gathering all my work from 1st, 2nd, and so far 3rd year and hoping for the best. Looking back at my stuff from first year has been entertaining and depressing at the same time---and that feeling has continued into the work I made during second year. Fun times. Anyhow, the first big rainstorm has hit SoCal and it has been really refreshing. Love waking up to this type of weather---just like home.

What's in the box!?!?!

On Tuesday the assignment was to animate a box folding and unfolding...in perspective(made my head hurt, that's for sure)! This was particularly entertaining since I spent the majority of my summer at a UPS store where folding boxes was a bit of an important job. And now, back to the current animation assignment for the weekend--a falling leaf.

Zoo-rrific

Drawings from today. Tried a couple new things like toned paper and then drawing with just straight watercolor. Toned paper--doing that again fo' sure....drawing with just straight watercolor(just tried it on the colorful birds)--not so much. Oh well---win some, lose some. Anyways, there was a power outage tonight on campus, it just came back on about 10 minutes ago, but unfortunately class has already been cancelled. Power outages at CalArts are pretty entertaining...too bad this one was fairly short(7-8:30).

Swinging and Bouncing the time away...

Just some pictures from last week's zoo trip. Check out the fangs on the lemur--that's pretty cool(the kind of fuzzy stuff ontop of the lemur is the fence).


And then here's a quick recap of animation hw(the quality isn't that great, both blogspot and my own video software has kind of chewed this up a bit). First was the usual bouncing ball and then later we did a swinging pendulum. My spacing isn't perfect--both suffer from gaps and are poppy. Oh well, now I know what to watch out for so this week's homework won't suffer the same fate.

Little bit of this and that...

Zoo day was yesterday---85 degrees was definitely an improvement over last week's 100+ sweat-fest. Anyways, artwork ahoy:







Next week's goal: Draw with a pen that's actually water-proof. The second I added watercolors---BAM, the lines just went every which way.

Traditional Animation class has officially kicked off. We have a new teacher now, a mister Scott Wright who's kicking us into serious boot camp and giving us two assignments a week to catch up on the lost time(first class was this past Tuesday night.) I just finished animating the classic ball bounce(just up and down) and then on top of that, we had to draw two key poses with a character illustrating Squash and Stretch. Well naturally I went to the one subject who is the epitome of these terms(particularly squash):

Annie, aka. Ms. Boulder...when it came to stretch I had to do a couple passes:

Pass 1....it works, but I thought it could be pushed more.

Still could go further I'm sure, but this certainly gets the point across. If I remember to bring my camera, I'll post the ball thing later.