I adopted a dog at the beginning of June for a mix of reasons and certainly know it was a marvelous decision after just a few weeks of bonding. In between the previous semester and this one there was a move for me between San Francisco and Walnut Creek. This was quite a challenge and substantial life event since I hadn’t done a move of this scale both regarding how much I setup and moved and financially how much it set me back. This was to upgrade to a larger place with a bit of “luxury” tossed into my lifestyle. The dog was the cherry on top because I had a desire to get one ever since losing our previous one to old age.

So now down to that school stuff many of you are interested in (as am I). I am taking two classes which is full time for summer because of the shortened timeframe. The first is Color Fundamentals and the second is Figure Drawing. Both are foundational and requirements for most if not all AAU degrees. My first stab at Color Fundamentals was interesting and gave me hope for enjoying the class. We looked at different key fundamentals in design and started to pull apart works design aspects to better understand what was happening in the piece from traditional artwork to advertisements. I was unsure how the class fit into my animation path initially though now I see that with the knowledge I get out of this course I can create more powerful images and deliberate design decisions in my future animations.

My move does set me a ways away from San Francisco meaning I have a commute via train that takes about 45 minutes. I don’t mind this since for me it is relaxing, I get to people watch and tinker away on my tablet. Heck I am even writing this very blog post on the train right now, I guess it forces me to have time to focus on something. The people watching is an added treat, most animators enjoy that sort of thing because we are always looking for references and inspiration. I tie in some Sherlock as well and try to piece together back stories for them as well. Another thing about the people I have noticed everywhere I traveled is that life seems to echo, I see faces that remind me of people that have been in my life previously either close or just acquaintances from school or other sources.

The first initial cut can be found here with different filler music.

My original vfx shot planned hit wall after wall after wall until I had to drop it all together. I shot with a wide angle lens when I should of used my telephoto at 60mm placed directly next to the planned path of the bullet. I also needed to capture a clean slate to properly create the faked weapon animation to help make the shot convincing. Because of these issues I resorted to comping simple video layers which still felt very tacky, I messed with cutaways and decided to show a split moment of impact with cutaway to black and intense/gross audio to let the viewers mind do the work.

Multiple composers and audio majors are still tinkering away with the film so the score may change if I get a hold of a score I feel fits it best as pulling scores from other resources is far from desirable compared to having a unique one belonging to the film. The entire film was shot in about 9-10 hours on two separate locations, there were unfortunate last minute changes including me jumping in for a cameo because the original planned actor didn’t work out as a mix of communication error and shooting shifting back by about an hour. If I were to redo the shoot I would of added at least one or two more assistants to greatly speed up the process, dump files to the computer on lunch break and hopefully had a lighting kit that was better than my stands I used in the film. As is I feel the film did what I wanted, it expressed my story and was hopefully entertaining as well. In the future I may present a video showing more indepth of how the project was and how I managed my 22GB of files.

Another nifty update is due so here we go, I have been juggling finals in a decent manner to ensure minimal stress while having optimal fun and learning a thing or two.  For starters there is my foundational final involving drawing a portrait, only requirements were that it be a fairly full frame of a face and adequate lighting to provide an interesting composition (looking for a full range for shading values).  I provided my instructor with a set of pics I printed from around the web and we both agreed my selection of William H. Macy was the best to do.  Over the past couple weeks I have been working on him and unfortunately didn’t take the time to keep snapping pics of progress for uploading, currently I am entering the detailing portion of the work as I have previously gone through proportions, local value, lighting and shading and my instructor has pushed me toward adding details now.

  Onward to the next final in my stack of projects to juggle is my short film,  this has been a work in progress for a few months now given it is the massive key assignment for the course.  From conception to final product we have worked back and forth with our instructor to write a script, draw thumbs, boards, character bios and more.  After all this prep work I casted for actors, snagged additional talent to boost production value (reduce my workload as well) and shot the film last Friday.  I made the first cut shortly after at just about 5:59 so I have a bit of flex room for cutting more content out though it is near the correct length as is.  Just for fun and to share a preview I cut a simple teaser out out of the content while trying to avoid spoiling any of the key storyline.

In my 3d animation course I have been working on a lip sync shot, I greatly improved it from the video I have to share and unfortunately lost my corrected scene file so I get to re-correct it for added practice (huzzah!).

The correction work needed in the shot shown above was mainly toning down and revising the lips/jaw, on my first pass I really did overkill on the posing and movement considering 80% of that can be taken out given we are lazy and speak in a mush of movement without all those clearly defined up and down movements.  The final render needs tweak as well given the visor has a nasty reflection and covers his face, I may delete it completely or simply switch to a transparent lambert shader instead.  I did eyebrow tweaks after that video as well because they were a bit drastic as well, somewhat how my first passes usually go though as I am just trying to “scuplt out” my rough forms and ideas for poses and timing.  This project is on a tight timeline so most likely after my next revision it will be due for submission and additional passes are solely up to me if I want to push it further.

I am planning on hitting all 3 project hard this weekend to really max out quality on each and keep me ahead of deadlines, time management is essential to keep anyone sane and productive so I am always delighted to be far ahead of goals and deadlines.  As an artist this gives plenty of relief when things don’t go as planned, I shot my film nearly a month and a half in advance partly to give buffer if there were any number of issues like rescheduling, bad film, location or weather issue and more.  Another factor I kept in mind is my post production, I cut/edit the footage in about a day easily though what will eat up time is a VFX shot I have planned.  The film was shot for both implementation of the CG/VFX or without it so regardless I can meet the deadline with flying colors, ideally I will have it with the full shin-dig of VFX and color correction goodness.  Tomorrow if I am awake enough (seeing Iron Man 3 tonight) and have time I will shoot another video since I am on and off with the vlogs lately.

Just a bit of an update in genera, I tossed together a video to catch up the past few weeks as far as projects and life have been along with full short animation bits in it as well of my paper and clay stop motions.  I also recently edited a film in class for a project we had to do during our time at school that day so it doesn’t have amazing quality, just a quick exercise to work together and go through the entire process.

Today I just wrapped up a quick 3d model for my ANM-105 class, it’s of the Futurama character Bender and was very fast and easy to toss together.  It was however my first time messing with Maya toon shaders, these are surprisingly easy to use and create a fantastic look with just a few quick clicks.  I made the entire mesh a gray filled shader then selected individual portions I wanted to change, the outline by default was a bit too thick for my taste so I cut it in half and was happy with the line thickness.  His door isn’t quite accurate to the original though I don’t mind with the overall design of mine it is clear who he is, my door is also able to be opened if I decide to rig it I will probably freely share it for others to play with.  This next week we are going to working on blendshapes for the characters, at minimum he will be able to do basic lip sync, I had just started playing with rigging possibilities such as a wire deformer, this creates stretch/squash a bit though since he is a cartoon I wasn’t too worried about minor distortions in mesh.  Here is my most recent video blog if it hadn’t been seen yet, I have been getting more and more equipment for my upcoming production with casting rolling out next week already and shooting the week after that.  I am pushing everything as forward as possible to afford me more time for post production.  This is partly because my desire is to have a polished visual effects shot in the film that will take me a while to properly create and composite in post, 2-3 weeks should be more than enough time to let me accomplish this while juggling my other tasks and commitments.

Here are a couple videos from what I have been working on this past couple weeks.  In my ANM 180 course I am working with another animator to make clay stop motion animation.  We kept the project simple and split animating between the two characters.  After working on the stop motion with clay I am not a fan of it, part of the issues could be the quality of the Marquette though I still highly prefer digitally working.  I admire animators that professionally pursue stop motion given how much effort and time is taken to get very minimal results.  In my digital animation course I have been working on a walk cycle exercise.