CrAzY TiMeS

I should probably be working on homework right now, but sometimes you just need to vent and let all your frustrations out. Like right now, I'm so stressed I can barely think straight. It's like the CA department faculty go together and had a meeting on "how can we make our students more stressed?" lol

I have a major assignment due for each class within two days of each other, and it's starting to get real difficult to manage my time between each project. In CA we have the Push/Pull, which I haven't had time to work on my animation because of problems with my Maya file. I finally got that figured out though, so tomorrow I'll spend about 12 hours in the labs working on it, then come back to my room and work on it some more before class starts at 8:30am Monday. For DFA we're doing an environment value painting, and here's a little preview of that:

I'm not too worried about this project as I am the others. My DFA class is the only CA class where I'm actually getting good grades. I think that's probably because I've always been good at drawing, it's sort of my comfort zone and doesn't take much effort. It's more natural.


My One-Minute Story animatic for Concept class is something I'm worried about and have been stressing about for a week now. We could come up with just about any story we wanted to do for this project, so I came up with a love story between a zombie and a human girl. It wasn't the greatest, but it was funny and witty. But..... my teacher didn't like it and suggested that I either make the story more creative or start from scratch. AFTER I had already been working on it for about two weeks. I've been pretty brain dead for awhile now and nothing I came up with was better, so I started from scratch. All that work I put into the story is just trash now, and I have to have a working animatic by Tuesday at 12:30. There's even more pressure because Karen and Billy (the other two Concept teachers), are also coming to our class to critique our work. I'm really nervous because I only finalized my story yesterday. I'm not going to be sleeping very much in the next couple weeks.

All I know, is that I need some motivation right about now. I don't mean to complain, but it's hard when you haven't had free time to just relax in over a month. I actually took a little time to try and have some fun on Halloween, but it just stressed me out more afterward.

LipSync Character Design

Our last assignment in DFA was to draw a caricature of our self. We had a couple class sessions where we went through everybody in the class and we all drew each other for ten minutes at a time. Below I have some drawings of my classmates I did

Here are some drawings that my classmates did of me









The next few pages are just some experimentation I did with face shapes before moving on to trying to make it look more like me

For the turnaround, the 3/4ths view had to be in an "attitude" pose, so I did some quick poses before picking the one I liked best

This is the line drawing for my caricature

I did a quick color study for this assignment, I had a tough time deciding if I wanted to go with blonde or dark hair. It's kind of funny, the new teachers I have this year have no idea that I'm actually a blonde :)

I finally decided to go with my new hair because it's more unique with the blonde sections I have, it'll be fun to make later on

Before moving on to doing a fun-on color painting of the 3/4ths drawing, I did a value painting. That's means just shades of gray.








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This is the final with color
(click the picture to enlarge)

I really liked the way this turned out, and when I get free time I want to fix a couple things. I would have gotten an A instead of an A- if I had time to make a few tweaks. Like adding a specular highlight on the eyes, fixing the fingers in the drawing, and working a little more on painting over the lines in the hands. The whole point of the color painting was to see a preview of how it will look in 3D, to see the volume.

The last assignment we have in Concept is to take this caricature we developed in DFA and create a 15 second story animatic. We're going to come up with a story situation, write a script, and then record our voices in the sound room.

THEN... next semester we take our design and our story, and we're going to animate it in our CA class. So come April 2011, you're gonna see me on the big screen :D

The Witness

The Witness project for my Concept Development class involved your character to witness something. I came up with this idea that it'd be funny if a vampire turned to ash and was then vacuumed up. This is what that turned into:

Pose Test

I just wanted to give you guys a taste of what the early stages of animation tend to look like. This is a pose test of my Push/Pull animation exercise, and it's basically just blocking in the camera shot and the poses for your character. Even now I've made a ton of changes to the poses since then.



This is my natural animation which is due before Thanksgiving break, and then after break we do an exaggerated version of this project.

Over Thanksgiving break I'm also planning on doing a 3D render of my character and I'll post that here too cause I really like Pete :)

Point A to Point B

So in concept class our second animatic we had to do was called Point A to Point B where we have a character, wait, get this............ go from point A...... to point B.

I was busy focusing on CA so I really didn't have many good ideas and decided to do a piece on a mouse in a maze. Here's my final story:

The Door

In Concept Development class this semester we're going to be doing a series of short, about 30 seconds long, animatics. The first one we did was called "The Door," in which we have a character find a door and interact with it. The purpose of this wasn't so much about the door, but rather the emotion and the action points.

In fact, Ringling has a connection with FST (Florida Studio Theathre) in Sarasota. Once for every Concept project we do our entire class drives down there and we act out our stories. If it's possible, sometimes professional actors will act them out too.

Here's a link to a collage of the reference video I got at FST for my story: Door Reference

Make sure the sound is on, it makes the story even more awesome!




My story is about a young mermaid, Cindy, so stumbles upon a door while out exploring one day. When she gets to it, she's in complete awe and tries to open it, but the handle won't budge. A bit frustrated, she shoulder rams it, it swooshes open, and she falls through.... landing with a slap and a splash on hard ground. We see that she has fallen in a butcher shop, just in time to see a fish murdered. When she looks up she sees Dave, and he's dreeeeamy. They make goo-goo eyes and she bats her lashes to lure him to her, at which she pulls out her own cleaver.

Waiting . . .

So this was probably the most fun thing I've worked on so far this semester. We had to come up with a scenario where Artie is waiting for someone or something. I decided to make him a girl, Emily, and have her waiting for the results of a pregnancy test. Enough said :)




I do have a few problems though, mostly about the pregnancy test in her hands being a bit jittery. This is also a rendered version I did real quick, instead of a quick playblast like the Silhouette or Walk Cycle, so the lighting isn't the best it could be.

Silhouette

This was our second animation exercise for the semester, and we were give a week and a half in order to finish it. Basically, we were given a list of six words to choose from; we were to then choose from three of those six words and create a story. I came up with a story about Artie being bored at a bar when all of a sudden he sees a pretty lady and tries to flirt with her. She ends up slapping him and he's completely bewildered. The main purpose of this assignment was to work on poses and to make a clear silhouette.

It's OKAY, not my best. I definitely ran out of time on this one, not to mention my homework in my other classes was piling on.