loopdeloop

Yeah, yeah.  So I've been bad about keeping up this blog and just bypassing it with tumblr - but I have been doing things!  Most of it has been a series of small explorations and other things in between jobs.

One of the things I've gotten really into is Loopdeloop!  It's a really awesome bi-montly internet & real life event where people from all over the world make looping animation based on a topic.  They can range from a few frames to almost a minute, can be gifs or movies, and run the gamut in style and media.  They all get put up on the site for everyone to see and then get screened at regular loopdeloop events in Melboure and Los Angeles.

It's a awesome place to sandbox out ideas or new techniques or just get motivated to animate something without being overwhelmed by the magnitude of a short film or other project.  It's a great way to discover new animators/artists and keep tabs on what the regulars are up to.  I actually got a freelance gig from a creative director seeing one of my loops, liking the timing, and reaching out based on that.  It's kinda crazy.  But the best part of it all is that making loops is fun!

I'll admit most of mine get done in the few hours before it's due because I'm busy with work and/or the deadline always surprises me when I convert it from Melbourne to California time and it turns out to be way sooner than I realized.  As such, most of the ones I've done have been pretty quick and show it, but I'd rather make that push to get something new made than do nothing at all - and besides, it's all in fun!  Some people go all out and make small films out of their loops.  I try to keep mine small, as on the scale of a walk cycle.  This is partly so I keep the project small and manageable so I can worry about other aspects of it other than sheer production volume, but I also enjoy the challenger of thinking about things on that small of a time scale and exploring what works for it.  Since January I've made 5 loops.

#1 - Hollywood

This was my first go at it and the most involved.  I used this one as a first foray back into 2d animation, which I've neglected since sophomore year.  The rough was done in flash, final frames in photoshop, and then everything was taken back into after effects for the flicker and editing.  Since making this I've found Alex Grigg's super helpful photoshop animation tutorial which everyone should check out.  Animating is photoshop is pretty straightforward but Alex shows some super workflow actions that he's put together that really streamline the process.

#2 - Sports

I had just learned how to do basic rigging in After Effects before I did this loop so I put my new found knowledge to work to make this whole thing in an hour during one busy work night.  It's super simple but I really enjoyed working with the graphic quality of it.  I'd like to do some more stuff in this vein in the future.

#3 - Frantic

What if a robot was frantic?  Another quickie made from non-motion blurred and randomized sections of this project (which is also to get a blogger write up eventually).

#4 - Food

Getting the downshooter I made back in use.  Cut up a strawberry, did some stop-mo with it, and edited it to music by Craig Smith.  Full song and original video collab with Sishir Bommakanti over here in tumblr land.  I shot some other material that night as well but didn't have time to developed a layered edit with everything, so it stayed just strawberries.  I've been revisiting the footage though, so expect to see that.

#5 - Frustration

I had recently ordered an LED light pad to get back into doing some traditional animation and had discovered tailor's chalk while wandering around the garment district of down town earlier that week.  (Tailor's chalk is awesome!  It comes in both clay (chalky) and wax (crayony) compositions, features very limited colors, and is shaped in chunky rectangles or triangles that let you really leverage it and get some neat marks!)  Anyways, I put all those things to good use in a five hour chunk of night after work.  It's all straight ahead, which was really really fun.

tumblr is addictive

I managed to hold out for a while but it's time to admit that I've finally succumbed to tumblr (and it's completely distracted me from this blog).  I've got to start getting this one back up to speed.  The two will overlap - but not completely.  I'm trying to keep tumblr land largely wordless and mostly for personal experiments (mostly) while this blog can contain pretty much anything, personal, professional, whatever.  I'll only be talking about work & process on here though.

So yeah, tumblr, you can check it out here, http://itsaherring.tumblr.com/
Also, I contribute to another tumblr for other experiments and such with my friend Craig, http://insteadofbread.tumblr.com/ (It slowed down after summer but it's getting revived).

Oh, and the thing above, just trying some stuff out with shapes/form/color/and leaving details unsaid :V

Too bad it prints like garbage.  If anyone's got some real tips for printing intense RBG images or knows of any printers that actually give good color in the los angeles area or online please do share.  Kinkos and I have become mortal enemies.

crystallography

 

"Fig. 102 shows a tetrahedron (o), it's edges bevelled by the trigonal tristetrahedron, +202/2, k{211} (l), and its angles replaced by the rhombic dodecahedron (d)."

From the 1890 edition of Elements of Crystallography by George Huntington Williams.  Fig. 102. appears in the chapter "The Isometric System".

operations

 

child of

doodletime

 

and then Roy Orbison and Devotchka joined in.

site seeing

I made this website about a year ago.  It's birds, because birds are neat.  Not only were birds featured on this website but so was my work.  It's gone now though, a new one will be up later this month when I can get my domain back.  Everything + sub pages were hand drawn/written because I came to the realization that there were no internet rules saying I couldn't and this simply made more sense (it was also more fun).  But back to the topic at hand, websiiite.

As a side note, I had a bunch more sketchbook bits edited and ready to go but my macbook up and died.  Those scans are going to stay where they are until I can perform an autopsy.  In the meantime, funeral services will still be held next Friday as planned.  I hope to see you all there.

strawberry

It wasn't any kind of plot point, but when we were working on our film we came to choose a pie type for each of the characters.  Pete was apple - the quintessential American classic - even the stunt pie standing in for him in the live action scene was an actual apple pie.  Sheriff, we decided, was a meat pie.  Narrator came to be a strawberry pie.  Of course, by that point, it only seemed proper to outfit him with an appropriate bandanna.

airplane drawings

tiny squares

making drawings move.

dress-up

Key Lime was such a minor character in our film, really she was just a background character who played into a couple of gags.  Since she wasn't all that important and never got much screen time, not a whole lot of time and concern went into her design beyond the initial phases.  Upon entering 3D though it quickly became apparent that we had some issues to resolve and decisions to make.  Since Key Lime is a "flat top" pie she is very close to Quiche structurally and the structural problems were consequently solved through Quiche.  Her dress however wasn't.  We were stuck with the simple short hand we had used for her in prepro, but that simply wasn't translating into the world we were building, so it was back to the drawing board.  These are my notes from that whole bit of trying to fix her and how to adapt a showgirl's dress from a person to a pie.

jest

Guess which one I own.

don't cry over spilt milk

Not everyone catches this little gag in our film, it goes by pretty fast, but you can catch it at 1:14.  I did the lighting in this shot, Uri did the comp, and then I painted the milk residue and drop animation in photoshop to layer back on top and finish off the shot.  Since Blue is really the only thing that moves in the shot we were able to simply layer it on instead of having to map it or anything.  For consistency, the drop residue was painted in and then duplicated and erased as I animated.  Also, her refraction in the mug is a total cheat, which let us get it to look the way we wanted.

red bull kluge

Recently I had the pleasure of working with the fine fellows of Syyn Labs on the Red Bull Kluge, a giant Rube Goldberg Machine combined with some wonderfully talented athletes (check it out, it's an awesome video!)  My main role in this was creating storyboards to help communicate what was going to happen and help plan the path of the main camera capturing it all (which by the way was an ultimate arm, the sickest camera rig I've ever seen)  There were lots and lots of other cameras on set too, including a small army of go pros.  When I wasn't doing drawings I was helping out however I could with the machine.  A lot of people worked really hard to make this all happen and it was great to be able to be a part of it.  On shoot day I didn't have a fancy camera phone like these guys, but I did enough foresight to bring along my sketchbook. (:

Drew Bezanson on BMX

The Skaters, Ryan Sheckler and Joey Brezinski, were tougher to catch in action but I was able to get a couple of decent sketches of them and some of the other guys around set.

Danny MacAskill up on Fowler's green.  You couldn't stop that guy, he was a true artist with a bike.  He rode on just about everything around the site including Brezinski's manual path, the skate/BMX ramps, and even the forklift.

Danny & Clay, chatting on bikes.

Things that fly!

(Red Bull helicopter and a Black Phoebe who I caught darting around our corner of the air hangar.)

We did this shoot out in Irvine and had some really beautiful scenery around us.  On shoot day there was a 40% chance of rain for the morning but fortunately not a drop fell.  Instead we got the great combination of lots of fluffy white clouds and bright sun.

And at the end of the day when we could all finally breathe and had dinner under the light of the jennys.

around town

e pieribus omnom

So you know how in our film we had that coin?

 

 

Well, it was one of my favorite props to work on!  I came up with the basic design and painted the displacement maps for it.  This is the only shot where you get a good look at it, and the only side you really see - but thanks to the internet you can now look at both sides!  At the same time!  Try doing that with your Susan B!

 

beaches are the best

Beaches are the best.  They've got all the best things, like little girls with afros and footballs

birds!

folding chairs

and lots and lots and lots of water - even waves!

relic

I was poking around some zdrive backups and found this.  I'm not sure, but I've come to think it's a really angry cat.  Timestamp reads 1/6/2012 12:44 AM and my foggy memory tells me that I was in the 24 hour labs using ms paint.

Now that I've got my desktop back up and working, things scanned, and pictures dumped there will probably be some updates on here as I start sifting through things.

orange shirt, blue sky

Looking at books by Lois Ehlert and working outside under the bright sun of Irvine.

dragons

d is for dragons all up in dis manuscript.

35%

 

In the first semester of my senior year I took Serigraphy (screen printing).  I'm glad I managed to hit three out of the four major printmaking classes (lithography will have to wait), but it was a bit of a strain trying to manage this along with thesis.  Thesis of course was paramount, especially since I was on a team, so unfortunately whenever I encountered a hitch in my work I did not have the time resources to go back, redo, fix, or properly test ideas I was trying out - time was so limited as it was.  As result, I wasn't technically satisfied with most of these projects in the end and not all of the them will make it to the blog.  My first print went of without a hitch though!  It was a three color print on paper, edition of 10.  Below is a bit of explanation of the elements.

 

 Being in senior year where everything is about polished 3D work I was really dying to use 3D in a "wrong" way.  It was one part me not wanting to follow the conventions of that department for once and part sheer fascination with how 3D programs are set up to operate.  The starting point here was a poly plane that I skewed around the insides of and edited in an straight view.

 

I've also been fascinated with dither patterns, especially more recently.  They're very simple, but their occasional irregularities produce interesting patterns when tiled that in a way become a recognizable alphabet of gray scale.  There's also a kind of fondness associated with them thanks to computer graphics of the 90s.  This is the pattern for 35% black.

 

yeah, tiled.

 

The next step for me was to apply the dither as an image texture to my poly plane.  Normally that would be boring - but I didn't touch the UVs on it so they were still all messed up from me dragging verts around and screwing up the topology.  Consequently, I ended up with a pretty interesting landscape of pattern.

 

Running with those elements I came up with this mock-up in photoshop from which I made my transparencies.  The rest is process!