merry christmas!

(new banner, yeah~)

something i tried in photoshop. and another doodle of myself.  i'm feeling sick, but i hope everyone has a merry christmas eve~

some photos

here are a few more photos from when i was shooting "House Key," and then the last few are some photos i took with my point and shoot on the train ride back home. if you live on the east coast and need to travel a bit north or south, the view in the morning is beautiful. i take the amtrak from providence to philly early in the morning for school breaks, and there is a beautiful fog on the marshy areas around connecticut.

(below) when the area starts to look like this, i know i'm getting closer to philly, lol

semester final projects

i could talk a lot about what the process was for each project, but there is a long story to both, so i'm just going to say that a lot of time and effort went into the making of each one, and i hope you enjoy them. the flash-animated one in particular was difficult process, even though the result ended up being a very short and simple piece.  i have put links to both here, which are on my vimeo page.

House Key (stop motion short)


When I Used Scissors (2D animation in Flash)

i have in my plans to re-export House Key and try to figure out how to make the color more vibrant...and i will be adding a teeny bit more animation to the ending of When I Used Scissors, at the suggestion of my classmates in final crit.
(some more "production" photos coming soon...i have to upload them to my laptop)

this must be in production! :)

copper wire hands! covered in sports tape, dipped in latex

there is a huge ball of aluminum foil inside, but i sculpted the outside from super sculpey~

aluminum wire+propoxy+brass tube armature

pieces of felt/other cheap fabric sewn on to the foam body, one by one

set building time!! didn't expect to need another board, but i ended up using two

the house! it's just cardboard and chipboard, but i covered it with this fibrous paper i found at the risd store. it was 6 bucks a sheet, so i could only buy one, and the back is not covered. luckily i won't be shooting the back ^^ my teacher had some little trees she had used in her own work before, so they are screwed down to the wood board.

this isn't the final look, i'm going to make the background a brown paper with watercolor texture to make everything monotone, but i did some lighting tests last night and it took forever, but i think it'll look good! :D i still have to make her little purse and grocery bag. i will be shooting half of sunday, all of monday, and editing/soundwork tuesday probably through wednesday morning, to be screened around 11:30am

she's cute, isn't she? ^^ i didn't have time to do animation tests, also because we have to share stations with another student (my partner is shooting today and half of tomorrow)

 

i wasn't going to scan this, but 2 people in my drawing class saw it today and gave me a heap of compliments, so with a little courage i'm posting my quick self portrait. i actually did it fairly quickly and without much thought when i was trying ink+brushes out in my sketchbook. it's not perfect or totally proportional or whatever because i wasn't trying to make it perfect. i just wanted to use the ink haha. but i think it looks like me. i think i like ink very much.

ink

sketchbooking, experimenting with ink, getting away from graphite pencil, because i've just been sticking to pencil and i think it has been limiting me. i'm planning on doing my drawing final project series with ink/ink brush. loves it. well, i haven't done too much with it before, but i really enjoy the fluidity. done with big brush and brush pen (pentel ink brush pen BEAUTIFUL tool). the last two doodle pages were done on Mylar and cut/paste in my sketchbook. i never used Mylar before...interesting. the ink doesn't dry though  T___T

the below image is a little doodle in my sketchbook. if you click on it you can see the whole thing, but it says "Saturday Afternoon, when i'm supposed to be doing work, I watch the emotional finale of a singing competition."

clay puppet lipsync

I have completed a lipsync project for stopmotion homework! yay~  clay puppet on top of armature mounted on wood base. Here is the link to it on my Vimeo page:

An Interview with Cyclops Bunny

I learned a LOT about planning dialogue and being really organized with the exposure sheets, because it was a small nightmare, at least the way I went about it.
It's weird how important the "acting" in the voice is...the intonations, the actual quality of the voice. Even though I used my own voice, I thought about it objectively and had to be clear about the character. I dreaded the process before going into it, but I actually really enjoyed animating it, even though from setting up to FinalCut Pro compression took me about 10 hours of my time. After it was all over, I finally sat down and realized that my feet were sore from standing, haha.

just a little update

 

the above picture i took on my train ride from boston to providence. i really like when the sky turns bright pink.

below are some production shots of my stopmotion partner project

 

 below is one of the figure drawings i did in my drawing class. we finally started on the figure, after several weeks of perspective drilling. i've got a long way to go, but i am not as confused as i was last year. this year i felt like i could jump right in. i tend to want to "outline" everything, as you can tell, haha. drawing is so basic, so fundamental, and it is probably the hardest thing to do well.

thank you picasso

i don't care what happened in his personal life, the man was a blessing to art. inspired by picasso's Trois Tetes: Le Soleil et Deux Plongeurs. i tried looking for it on google images, but i guess it's not that well known? i saw it today on an old Sotheby's auction catelog from 1995 i bought at the library for 25cents.

today's inspiration

fruition

Here is the link to my stopmotion partner project. We had compression issues and were sort of fumbling around with the exporting in final cut pro, but the basic picture edit is done. We worked on it a total of 21 hours this week, and we thought very hard about character. Was a long process but we're very glad we took the time to finish. Enjoy!

Gwen and Tim

my intuos3 has arrived

it works like a dream. let the fun begin.

getting somewhere

character sketches for my first big animation project! granted, it'll only be about 1-3 minutes, but still exciting!
at first i was going to do something serious and about self-realization
but then i thought if i'm going to be working on this everyday for 6 weeks, i might as well enjoy myself
so my animation is going to be about a group of kids and a group of monsters (2 of my favorite things to draw) who are down to the last hit of "rock paper scissors" game.
feedback, if you please? i find character design really difficult, so any comment would be much appreciated. (my friend told me that the 2 monsters on the left don't really match, and i think i agree)

puppet test

(there is a better quality video on my vimeo page: http://vimeo.com/30776648 )
i admit i rushed through this animation test, because it was close to 1am, and i still have a lot of things to finish before i leave for class at 8:40am, so it's rough.
but it's my first puppet made from scratch, ever!! his name is tim, and he is part of the underworld, though he's not evil at all. he tries.

his face is inspired by a skull mask i saw at the british museum last year from 15th century (i think) mexico.
yep i did the armature, sculpey, wire, propoxy, latex, acrylic, foam, ....it was a bigbig learning experience.
actually, having to build the thing helped me understand character design a little more.

i have absolutely no idea what this is. just continued working on a doodle from my sketchbook, and this is what my brain came up with. (blogger made the colors a little dulled, but. yep.)

more stop motion exercises

 

i have some tweaking to do with the pauses, but i just posted what i showed during crit this week. his walk off screen in the light object exercise is very awkward, yes, haha. i tried to make him look like his arms were moving together as they held the ball, but it came out a little funky.

sketchbook

i have been trying to tell myself recently that i need to stop caring about what style i SHOULD be drawing in, that my tendencies are not good enough.
usually when i stop caring
that's when things start to happen. i think because it's when i stop thinking about definition and just let loose.
luckily, you know what they say. the more practice you do, the better you'll get. i will get better at not-caring what i think i SHOULD do, and as my animation teacher says, "remember to play."

 

i drew these guys randomly while trying to stay awake during a screening. i started with the guy in front, and then i thought he needed a friend. and then another. and then another. the little dude is probably eating a sandwich because i was hungry then. oh, they have no feet because i had drawn them at the bottom of some tracing paper. i should go back and give them some feet.

it is good to stop forcing yourself and let your brain be happy and breathe.

first stopmo walk cycle

here it is! not perfect, but i'm really excited about doing more (did 2 more walk cycles with emotion but blogger wouldn't let me upload). comments are welcome/appreciated; they will help me get better. my teacher did say to pay more attention to the spine. i will have to plan out the walks on paper...this week i just went sort of straight ahead, haha.

sketchbook

I need to make better use of my sketchbook. Met a high school kid today whose sketchbook was AMAZING. Kudos, kid. Good encouragement for me.

Yes, I have perspective issues with the building. I'm trying. HAHA. I think it's mainly the arch-y part, though. If you sort of cover it with your finger, it looks ok. I didn't think it was that bad when I was sketching it, but now I know it's way off.
confession: I originally typed this in all lowercase, but I realized that I had used "u" for "you," felt embarrassed, and I went back and made things make a little more sense. I swear I really value good grammar HAHA.

so! had a few little animations due for homework this week, the topic was "wrong timing." i've learned that i need to start on the homework immediately....and spread over the whole week; not the few days before class. makes for miserable long sleepless nights, haha.  i liked working on these, though. i need to remind myself that i shouldn't be afraid to take risks.

 

a long ways to go, but not a terrible start i think.

sketchbooking during art history lecture...my least favorite class.

new year, new start

  

new year, new start

i'm so happy how my schedule worked out...stop motion and regular animation class!! woohoo! i think we (as a department) may just be learning the technical stuff, but what i like about my school is that the teachers encourage exploration and are really against following a particular set of rules for doing anything. it's really important to trust your instincts and stop thinking what you -should- do, which i have trouble with.

because in the end, no one really cares how well you follow the rules, so long as yours work well for you. 

but i'm really excited about making my first works as a real animation student this year

lots of learning.

i started a new sketchbook for my drawing I class. for some reason i really like the square shape. maybe i should just buy square sketchbooks from now haha. something very satisfying about it.

the words i wrote on the page are a little poem i had to write for my french class...in the manner of jacques prévert. it was the shortest in the class (therein lies the difference between eager freshmen and a grades-jaded junior haha), but i did write it with earnest. it's based on a memory i have from when i was 8 and i wore new shoes to school.

it doesn't translate very gracefully, but here is what is basically says:

-a smile on a small face
-in seeing the new shoes on her small feet
-a sneer on a small face nearby
-in seeing the new shoes swinging under the desk
-the swinging stops
-and today the small face
-feels really
-small.

i remember begging my mom to buy me these adorable plain white shoes with a little image of pikachu's face on the side (misty may or may not have been on them, too, i forget), and i remember telling myself that it's ok if pokemon was for the uncool kids because pikachu was cute and the picture was so small
i remember sitting at my desk, happy about my shoes but sort of nervous, hoping none of the other girls would really notice, but then someone asked me, "oh are they new shoes?" and bent down to get a better look. she crinkled her nose and said, "oh, you like that?" and sort of just walked away, but i remember feeling really embarrassed, and i don't think i wore those shoes to school again. maybe just at home, haha.

not sure why this particular memory sticks in my head, but i do know that third grade was not a good year for little me HAHA.

little kids are so funny.

not sure why i'm so chatty in this post today, but it may have something to do with the fact that i haven't read all of my required readings for my art history lecture in an hour and they are not the most engaging of reads HAHA. and so, back to reading about indigenous architecture of the americas. d'oh.

i'm not sure why i just drew this
maybe it's because i've been feeling incompetent in my drawing skills and wanted to prove to myself that i can indeed draw images that look like people

i need to stop generalizing

someone told me that drawing people you know from memory helps.

"How to Eat Your Apple" by Erick Oh

this 1:30min animated film is absolutely fantastic. just the right amount of cute and disturbing...poetic and absurd...beautiful and bizarre. i watched it 3 times in a row before i paused to think about it.

I saw a commercial online from Chipotle about sustainable development...farming and all that.
But it's a stopmotion animated film, and even though the subject doesn't sound interesting, the animated film is so well done. I watched the "making of" video on vimeo, and for the 2min or so video, a lot of work went into production. Really cool stuff.  It's called "Back to the Start." I've posted a link for you guys:
Back To The Start

a quick acrylic painting i did for my friend's new apartment. click to see bigger.

i must be an art student

-when i was at the beach-

i had my sketchbook out, but i was in front of most people so i didn't have good sketching subjects

but then i saw him.

A YOUNG MAN WITH WELL-DEFINED MUSCLES!

the first thing that came to my mind...

FREE MODEL, HOLLAAaa

*sketchsketch*

i must be an art student.