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.

a post about pie

So, if you didn't already know, I spent this last year working on thesis with my buddies Adam Campbell and Uri Lotan. We can't put the film online yet since we're submitting to certain festivals, but we cut together this trailer to give you a peek if you haven't caught sight of the film yet! (You should fullscreen it!) We've also got a Facebook page running that we'll keep updated with information about screenings, production art, and the eventual online release.

Now that I've graduated I've been going through all the boxes of papers and miscellany from the past four years. The other day I found my first page of pie doodles. Now, most people might not know this, but The Ballad of Poisonberry Pete did not start out as a thesis idea. We had a day off from school, and instead of doing homework like we probably should have, we wanted to be like all the cool kids at other schools and decided to make a 24 hour film instead. Needles to say, we didn't finish but we pulled the idea back out later during round two of thesis pitches. This page is from that very first idea session where Adam, Josh, and I went to Uri's house after the labs closed, somehow thought cowboy pies were a funny idea, and proceeded to make stupid jokes and stupid drawings until 3 in the morning. It was wicked fun.

Looking back, it's kind of amazing how many of our initial ideas, jokes, and design instincts stuck around, and amazing too how much things did change from there to now.

Looking back, I'm also glad I didn't major in something that requires impeccable spelling (although I did spell impeccable right all by myself!)

the seventh ice princess and the sacred salve

At 4am it's either do this or play video games.
I blame Sishir and his recent doings.

white out

Recently my screen printing class put on a show where we printed directly onto the floor in the crossley gallery. I had a whole section with these guys.

dearly departed denim

I may have lost a pair of pants, but I've gained a friend.

littles 1

Some little things I did before leaving home. I wanted to color stuff but not actually draw anything. I then realized that I had a whole year's worth of sketchbook drawings. Very convenient.

for those who don't know

I am making a short film with Adam Campbell and Uri Lotan!
It's a western, with pies!
It will be out in a year or so!

In other news, I will be out by LA at JibJab for the summer!

take2 + reel

Take two! The last assignment of the year! Special thanks to Alberto Beguerie for his super model/rig.


*edit: Just cleaning up my vimeo a bit, I switched this video to private so it wouldn't show and clutter things, but it's still viewable if you want to see it. Password: take2

Oh, and a demo reel:

catman

Final painting for DFA! I tried working in an entirely new way on this and it brought a whole bag of its own unexpected troubles and led to a lot of reworking, especially of color. Working completely flat makes you really have to face value, texture, and the information conveyed by edge quality, and it was really great to do.





This was done in photoshop, mostly polygonal lasso tool, some solid brushes, and a little bit of blur. All colors were kept separate so the file ended up getting really huge (well over 100 layers), but that allowed for easy editing of specifics and quick specific color adjustments (and color adjustment was a very very big thing in getting this to work).

Aaaaannnnnd, here's some of the process! I always find it interesting to see how things came about....

stuff from DFA

Finally, a legitimate post.
These is some of the things I've made in drawing for animators so far this year. Our first project was a character design project where we looked to random sources (photos of textures, random line drawings (aka, "doodles'), and abstract silhouettes) for character inspiration. We drew over them to create our characters, much like finding images in clouds, and then chose a few to develop further. These are all the characters I came up with from the project.


There were a lot of misses, but some cool stuff came out of it and it was a really fun process regardless. This bird guy is one that I shaded. I found him in a photo of tin foil. Below that is a character I found in one of the doodles. I'm using him for the push pull animation assignment right now.



After that project we did our self caricatures for lip sync (to be made animated next semester). I went through a lot of design exploration and ended up at a horrible place. Thanks to the encouragement and help of my friends here, and my own realization of how bad the design I had really was, I went back to drawing. With a few parameters in mind I drew a whole bunch of stuff.


Until I finally hit this,


which was then painted as this (for a possible lighting/texturing mock-up).

birdWhisperingBandit

so much to do and so little time (and putting things together to post takes time).

but here's this (:

thugz

Made stuff for the Character Design Bi-Weekly today (topic: Thugs with ugly mugs)!

My mom's a first grade teacher and I go in at the beginning of every year to help her set up her classroom. Helping usually means playing with all the awesome toys :). I had tons of manipulatives at my disposal including pattern blocks, links, milk caps, stacking rings, buttons, and snap cubes (not to mention all the office supplies).





Drawing based on the first dude; he was my favorite.


Here's a thug for life. Cut him and he'll make you cry.
This guy was tons of fun to make. Ears and nose are made out of thin (bust strong) blue plastic from the cover of an old planner from high school. The rest is gold acrylic gouache (for his teeth!), black acrylic gouache, holbein ink, and of course 1 onion. Balancing on onion on your wrist, even with tape, is not as easy as it would seem.

possible painting

I got the itch to paint today so I snatched an egg from the fridge and had at in photoshop for about an hour until the light changed too much/I gave up. I'm moderately happy with it considering it's the first thing I've painted in quite some time.



Also for an hour I had a go at redrawing one of my guys from the meowmix post.


I also tried out some screen capture video stuff.
process of nightcat, =~18MB.

For those with mac os x, I found this sweet little auto screen capture program here for free. It's very bare bones and you edit the configuration file to change your settings instead of a windowed user interface. You just tell it how often to save, where to save, and what image quality you want and let the thing run - the only catch is you can't quit it like a regular application, you've got to kill the process instead. That's easy to do though so long as you remember you've got it running. I used the default of taking a screenshot every five seconds, batch resized them in photoshop to a width of 640px, and then imported them into frame by frame (also free). It was pretty easy to do and quality-wise came out pretty well :)

meowmix

Hoping to develop some of these guys in the coming days.

I've been reading a lot of books lately. I just finished up one on Aubrey Beardsley and Kim Elam's Grid Systems and am about to start on her book on typography. I'm also working through a book on pre-revolutionary Russian graphic design and just picked up Gruppe on Color and The Art of Robots today from the library. Gruppe's book is really amazing. I've only just started it but right away started taking notes - there's so many good things he says in it! I'll likely be posting some of my favorite quotes when I'm done with it too, seeing as how it's out of print and pretty expensive to acquire.

QuadFecta

The first computer animation assignments of the year: a finger point, walk, head turn, and take. These were strictly animation exercises and the model and rig were provided to us. It's my first time animating a human character, or anything with arms really.... Needless to say I learned a ton on these and feel like I'm in a much better place when it comes to understanding animation. The take was the only one I had time to fully revise, and even though it was my favorite one when I did it it still looks worlds better. It's amazing how such slight changes, small relationships, and subtle emphasis make a world of difference in the visceral experience. Currently we're working on a modeling project in NURBS and then we're going to start SIT STAND, the big assignment of the semester. I'm pretty excited for this, and so is Carson.

fishing for complementary angles

Our latest assignment in traditional animation was to create a short pantomime to work on body language and emotional change. On this assignment I started to understand things at another level (levels, which I'm sure are infinite, but learning is learning!) especially with overlapping action. I've started paying so much more attention to that lately and really try to work with it. I also wanted to work on animating a more interesting and graphic character. Looking back I feel I should have pushed the designs further and paid more attention to keeping them there in the animation. I know the story and motivation really doesn't make sense anymore, since so many things were cut and reworked, but he is barefoot for a reason! As far as the motion goes, it could definitely be tightened up and plused more as well as made less swimy (haha!...). What really made things for me though was during the critique so many people let out a sincere sympathetic "Awww" when he became sad. It's so satisfying when you create work that people connect with, and really, that's at the heart of all art. As with every assignment it was a great learning experience and I look forward to taking everything from this into future projects.

No Mushrooms Here...

The next project in traditional involves animal based characters and I drew badger. He's got quite a thing for books and literature and is inspired by the greatest bibliophile I know and shares his namesake.



And here are the development silhouettes we had to do. Fun stuff.