So long... for now

SO! I decided with all the changes going on and with the completion of my film that I should move on from this blog in favor of a new one about my new adventures in Los Angeles.

If anyone would like to see that it can be found here. If my film gets into major festivals or gets any other major recognition, I'll post about it back on here. Otherwise...

SO LONG AND THANKS FOR ALL THE FISH!

SCREENINGS

It went the BEST. The screening for my film department went really well. My friends made awesome comments and everyone went awwwwwwww, almost immediately when the film started. It is so awesome to get the response you've been waiting over a year for. I still have a few tweeks to make, but those are all in compositing and color grading.

My little sister was even there! And My Dad! And My MOM and Step-dad! And Even my step-mom and step-brother came! Wish my older sisters could have been there but with one in ohio and the other with a baby, it is kind of hard.

In a few weeks I'll be sending it to festivals. WOOHOO

I AM DONE

I AM DONE. KINDof... I have finished my edit for school and graduation; however, I have work to do on this film still, first being going back and cleaning up a few frames where strands of glue reflect in the light. I also want to continue to work on the sound, maybe find a composer to flesh out my xylophone idea, make a good credit sequence, and color correct the s#%t out of it.

But besides that... I AM SO DONE! I graduate in a week and have plans to move out to LA only two weeks after that. I am SO excited to not be a part of academia anymore. I do have a couple of things to take care of quick before monday but I am just so excited. For this.

I DID IT GUYS!

Setup Example!

My thesis is done in the basement of my on-campus apartment so... it is ghetto-fabulous. I was doing this shot

And I thought to myself, "I should really show everyone what I am working in. That's always one of the big things that interest me about animated projects, especially stop motion." And so I give you an image of my set (during the same shot). Please excuse the quality. Since my camera is in use, I am using my iphone.

All in all, I do love my set. Especially my lighting rig. Made out of conduit and pipe, hanging from the ceiling by screws though the boards. Sounds ultra safe, right? I have it that way so it can be taken down at ease, when outside influences would require it.

I have 13 shots lefts and two and a half weeks to finish animation. If after May 6th I am still animating, expect a blog post where I curse myself for all eternity for not either getting more shots done in my allotted time or not starting earlier.

I have people working on my compositing and I have little sound work to do (three days worth, maybe) since my piece is so dialog driven (and I've had the final recording of dialog since the beginning). Now many would argue that sound should be almost half of your film and I guess I would to, but not on this schedule when I am the vast majority of the labor. I am not a sound guy. I can work with sound but that isn't my passion by far. Let's not forget I did technically work on getting that recording for six months so, yeah, plenty of time was spent on sound.

I should do a timelapse... I think I'll do one on my last shot. My last shot is REALLY hard for me and will take a couple days anyway. Just need to borrow a friend's camera and computer during it.

That's it for now. Obviously I am in a much better state of mind than I was last post. Next week is email LA week. I need to get pumped for that.

Ridiculous

Not blogging for almost four months is (insert title). So, if it bothers me so much, why haven't I??? Because things have been terrible for me.

Now of course I still have my health and no one has died and blah blah blah so I couldn't have that much to be upset about, right? Well, yeah kind of. I may be in a "bad" place but that is only relative. I should probably shut up and take it but it still hurts... Anyway, the crises of my life has been making it really hard to stay focused and work. Especially when it comes to animation...

I am not sure what I want from animation anymore. I mean, I use to just nerd out about it and get really excited about working on movies or tv shows that everyone will see. But with things that I have lost in the past few months... that doesn't seem as important anymore. So what am I getting out of it? I have sacrificed my time, money, energy, relationships, etc. for the sake of animation and what do I have to show for it?

Had I known what I would lose, this is not the path I would have gone down. But it's too late now. I have plans to move to LA with some the coolest cats I know and I am not going to let any more people down.

Hey, there is still one thing I can always look forward to. The Future. I don't know what this journey of animation will bring but it will probably be the most exciting roller-coaster ride I could ask for.

And if it isn't... I always have the memories of what could have been.

That sounded pretty pathetic right? So enough of that. How about some screen shots????

I'll cheer up in a few weeks. Maybe. Eh, it doesn't really matter. I've got work to do no matter the mood I am in.

I'M ANIMATING!!!

HEY INTERNET! Guess what I'm doing!

ANIMATIN'! (yeah, bet you didn't see that one coming)

It has been a long uphill battle but I finally got myself to doing a shot. It isn't that good but it's mine and I love it. I am so HAPPY to be animating but am still pretty nervous. I need to tie up some loose ends on the small puppet but the big puppet it fully operational.


Don't they look CUTE!




Would you like to see my first shot? OF COURSE YOU WOULD

As I said it's not that good, but it got me back into the swing of animating. You know? Made me remember all the things I need to think about between each shot. The next shot should be better, the next shot after that should be even better and so on and so forth.

I'll put up shots of my set and lighting rig later. For now, just let me bask in the knowledge that I finally made it to this point.

Building... Oh! Am I?! Nope... Still building...

As my title describes, I am still building. I am SO FAR behind it makes me want to commit hate crimes against an under-represented group of peoples... Well, maybe not THAT far behind but still...

The puppets are almost there. You can see in the picture there relative size and shape. I really like how they are coming out. I just want them FINISHED!!!

I decided to make my mouth pieces out of layered paper. I acually enjoy cutting small shapes out of paper so this has been going pretty well. The little girl mouths are SO VERY TINY and hard to set up without a reference. I decided to do the big versions first and then model the little girls after it.

And THE SET! Well... this is only a picture of one toy mountain. My set is suppose to be the inside of a toy chest, so it is made entirely of TOYS! These toys are all from my childhood. So many memories. It has been a little painful to hot glue them all together, as if to finally say, "I'm not playing with you anymore, so shut up and let me build my masterpiece from your corpses!"





So that's it, at least in picture form. I have another couple hills in progress and more parts of the puppets completed but nothing absolutely finished. I am spending from now till christmas with my family but I will probably head back to my basement on campus a day or so after we praise the birth of the newborn king. Watch out for the week of January Tenth, because I will start animation that week. Wish me luck till then.

 

THE kindof FINISHED butcouldbebetter ANIMATIC

As the title gibberz, this is my final animatic. Any changes made after this will not be published (since they will be pretty minor). It's still ruff but I am not really interested in pre production so I am trying to move past it as best and as quick as I can.

The big news: this version is over a minute less than the last one. A really BIG cut for my standards. I hope it flows better this way.

Not much else to comment on. Set is getting closer to finished and so are the puppets. More on that later.

ROUGH Animatic

Hey yawl.

So I have been working hard the past few weeks. Started building my puppets and finished a rough cut of my animatic so obviously that means I have to SHOW IT  (it is up above... duh)

So things have had there ups and downs. Ran out of money a few times and haven't been prioritizing homework in a proper fashion so I am behind on construction. It is a habit I seem to be forming with puppet construction. A very BAD habit that must be CLEANSED from my flesh.

The only big thing I should explain is that they are in a toy chest (some people are confused by the opening of this cut. that should be solved when it is actually shot). Also I am not a draftsman/illustrator. I enjoy drawing but I am not necessarily great at it or care enough to improve my skills.

Hope you enjoy it. I'll post the new one once I finish it and I should have shots of puppet armatures next week.

tOOtles

Camera Geek

(I am only doing this to indulge my inner camera junkie so bare with me.)

Over the past summer I have learned to LOVE CAMERAS. I mean seriously, photographic technology rocks my socks. It started after I bought my first DSLR, my canon t1i, for my stop motion projects. I didn't do much with it besides my one quarter film during that first spring but it was cool to have a nice camera (I only ever had one camera before it and that was an extreme compact fujifilm point and shoot). Then when I moved to my next project I read up on a bunch of things regarding flickr and how to avoid it. The number one was an adapter and nikon lenses, and at first I had no money so it was out of the question. BUT a shining beacon came in the form of my girlfriend, who shall be called A. She had once been into film photography and still had an old pentax k1000 to prove it but that wasn't the exciting part.

Years ago, when she had first gotten into photography her aunt gave her two nikkor lenses from when she had a camera (not sure why she had the lenses but not the camera). A fifty and a three hundred. There was my answer! And A was more than happy to give them to me, (she had since moved on from photography into different craft interests).  Immediatly upon these turn of events I bought myself an F mount to EOS mount adapter.

During my second film, I eventually purchased a couple old manual lenses from a local camera shop. He gave me a discount so I paid way under what one of the lenses with AF would have cost me. Then, when my father and I were looking through some old things at my late grandfather's house, we found my dad's Nikon FG. He gave it to me and, luckily, the lenses I bought work with the FG's metering system. Hooray!

Now this summer happened. I got more and more interested in digital photography (and did some film practice on the side). I also acquired a professional crop-sensor nikon body through my adventures. She's old but hasn't run out of actuations. And all my old lenses work with her. This all leads me to this -->

I took out a 7D from my school's equipment cage to familiarize myself with it in jux-position to the nikon. And I decided to take the oppurtunity to photograph my main equipment.


Sometimes I wonder if I should go into Camera and lighting work when I move to LA, or stick with fabrication or compositing. It is a given that I want to animate but I have been a little conflicted as of late as to what else to try and specialize in, if anything at all.

I'll be buying some 100w fresnels in the next few weeks and I am just about to move onto my animatic. More updates to come.

Character DESIGN!

 Did I ever mentioned I abandoned the whole claymation/downshooting concept? Well I did and am going back to my roots of puppet animation. These are just a few pages that my lovely assistant drew up when we decided to go this route. When I first kiboshed the whole clay emote thing I went back to my original monster and princess concept I had before I started recording Girly. We mulled it over a little but something didn't seem right about a Monster and Princess pairing.

  I wanted my the two creatures to be distinctly connected but in order to be satisfied with the princess thing I could only come up with adding a prince that the monster was eating. I hated the idea and quickly had my character designer go with an idea I had for a smaller version of the monster. (Hence the first picture)

I was hooked on the idea immediatly after she drew the first hairy little thing (the fanny pack is an abandoned concept). We went through I few revisions of her basic set up and I realized I wanted her to be asymmetrical. So the horns were adjusted. Of course once she was uneven, we just had to go back to the original creature and see how he would look next to her. He has changed a bit since his original drawing but I very much enjoy what he has become.



After some discussion about construction, we wound up with the illustration on the right of the two of them. Aren't they just ADORABLE!? I am very happy with this result. There are noticeable differences between the two disregarding the size. The arms are probably the most notable. The elder monster is much more (dare I say) "animated" with the lines from the recordings so I wanted the long arms for that purpose. The junior monster needs to hold more innocence and be as juvenile as possible without breaking away from her counterpart, so she was given smaller arms and her awkward horns to signify a different age group


Construction will begin this time next week. As for this week, the storyboards are being worked on. Now before you go "A week to decide how your visual storyline? are you really doing it justice!?" Because of a certain animatic requirement at SoFA I need to get something on paper and then onto a timeline for export within these next three weeks. It won't be a finalized version but it will be close to the end result. (just a quick thing, my recording is edited to exactly what I want, meaning my story timeline is already concrete. I don't need to work out timing within the dialog or any such thing. It flows better as it was dictated so I am keeping it as such.)

Also, since this is my first time blogging I thought figuring out pictures would be a nightmare but chrome and blogger together now make it infinitely easy. Thanks again google for slowly making me dependent on your software.

I'll post some of the boards next week. Going to go take a test now. Damn all my other classes.  

OIAF

I went to Ottawa this weekend for the Animation Festival. Boy, was it a blast. Seriously. My top pick of the festival is Dodu, the Cardbaord Boy. It was just so Pretty while still being made of cardboard. My Second coming in close would be the feature Colorful. I completely avoided Phil Mulloy's Ending to his tasteless trilogy. I learned my lesson from Goodbye Mr. Christie.

As always it had it's ups and downs and keeps me asking "why is this in here" but as my professor told me, "It doesn't want to be Annecy."(summation of what he said)

I had my girlfriend (and lovely character design and fabricator) along with me. We have some final designs of the characters for my film now. Pictures to come soon. Probably send along some pictures of ottawa as well.

Pip Pip and all that jazz

I'M BACK

HEY THERE!

So, after many many months of not even trying to blog again, I HAVE RETURNED! I was interning in Brooklyn this summer so I kind of lost track of time, even with regards to my thesis... BUT I did get work done on it. Let's crash right past the boring part of how far I came and get to the point.

I HAVE MY RECORDING! I have what I consider worth all those nights I was stricken with panic concerning whether doing recordings with my sister would ever work. I am in the piece now, in fact, I am the other main character alongside my sister. Basically, after I thought I had made a final choice on what I would use for My Thesis I did one last recording with my sister AND BOY! was it worth it. It is basically an argument we had after she accidentally called a bucket a shovel.

Also, lots of medium stuff has changed. I am almost definitely doing clay animation with a lot of replacement work and I might even do clay on glass (little weary of that though). Of course, with Tom on my side giving me pointers, my sculpture skills should progress rapidly. I am struggling with whether to put the nail in the coffin on that though. I mean, originally the whole point of the piece was to do a lot of solid character animation with full bodied humanoid characters. That all changed with this recording. There is just something about it and the ideas I get from it do not equal the blue-print I started with. I feel that I need to express these characters beyond the confines of a body. I want to squash and stretch them as their emotions rise and fall. I want to convey their emotes different from the expected.

I think that is the point of my new vision. I want to move away from the expected and have fun with the animation. I could stress over how this work will be my last chance before getting into the real world of animation, or I could just have fun making a GREAT animated short involving my sister. So to hell with the confines of "reel-worthy" and let's say hello to getting back to the FUN in animation.

TATA!

I PASSED and I THINK i have an internship

My update is this, My faculty have given me the green light with the Thesis. So I am now busy trying to look at options for recording equipment. I will probably end up buying something simple. Like the H1 zoom. One of my professors mentioned something called blue microphones. I have to email him about it.

Also, my internship. I guess I have it? I had an interview and it went great and I emailed them back about this summer but they haven't gotten back to me. It has been about a week. The only reason I am worried is because the guy I was talking to was really good with responding to all my emails before. Oh well.

That was a quick update. I'll start posting audio clips soon I think to show what girly is saying.

Updates and GOOD NEWS

Okay. So it has been a few weeks since I last updated this blog. Off to a rocky start I guess.

The good news is I have about three hours of recording with Girly. I have her playing restaurant and teacher with my father, girlfriend, and me. She was priceless. She seemed to thrive off of positions of power when we role-play. She sets the rules and all of us who play with her have to follow. I wonder what she'll do if I set the rules and she must follow. I may get some weird stuff from her then.

I've been having talks with my advisor and he wants me to explore more of the "show and let her tell" technique I somewhat stumbled upon. If I show Girly a short video, and she likes it, she will start talking about it. Sometimes, it is as simple as recounting the story in her own way (cute enough as is). Other times she'll talk about how she would rather the ending go.

For example: I showed her an animated short I had completed for school in ten weeks. It's about a bunny who tries to eat some mutant flowers but the Momma mutant flower catches him and chases after him. She gets about halfway through, when the chase is happening, and begins to say, "I think it would be better if the Flower just wanted to be the Bunny's friend." For everyone who hasn't seen my short film, that's what happens (in a matter of speaking). The flower is only chasing after the bunny because if "wants" the bunny to shower its affections on. My plots are so predictable a 6 year old can figure them out.

Moving on, I wrote up a draft of my proposal, had my advisor look at it, met with him last thursday for feedback and I sent him a new draft earlier today. Just wanted to write that down somewhere as a reminder. I will also have a budget and schedule set up soon. I'll be posting my schedule as another reminder.

On to the GOOD NEWS. This summer, while I am recording hours upon hours of Girly, I also plan on working... sort of. I want an internship for the summer and have been kind of timid and sluggish about the search. I finally emailed the company that my advisor recommended and 14 minutes after I sent the email the guy called me. On the phone. It was great. And terrifying. I am going out there for an interview on the 8th of april. Oh out there, right, I didn't say where. Hmm. I guess I'll keep my mouth shut until they "hire" me. Okay, quick thing about this internship. It won't be one. Due to how the state I would be in for this internship, the boss can't say I am an intern unless I pay for the school credit that would go along with that; however, I am not made of money. As the alternative, I will be listed as a "volunteer". Sketch? Yes. Worth it? You betcha.

I'll have more updates after this internship thing gets sorted out.

Recording My Little Sister

About a week or two ago, I started doing some test recordings of my sister to see what I would be facing this summer. I plan on doing some more practice recording in the weeks to come. I'm learning quite a bit through this process, especially about how much noise is just in my house. There is almost this constant tap in the recordings from the dog on the hard-wood floors. I'll either have to take her out of the house or make a sound booth in her room with some blankets.

Which is exactly what I'm testing this weekend. Whether I can set up a sound booth in her room AND if she'll be comfortable in an interview setting as appose to something more freeform (such as on the couch watching TV).

I had a meeting with my advisor and he seems really enthusiastic about my project. He also asked me whether I wanted to be part of the interview in my movie, along with my sister. I'll see where the recording takes me but in the mean time I'll just focus on some more testing and writing up a solid treatment.

ON a slightly related topic, I am trying to finish up my last short animation in the next few weeks. It is in a "completed" form already but there is some tweaking that needs to be done in the audio and, even more importantly, I have another scene I never got to animate that was intended for after the credits but was still important to the story. Hopefully, I get that done before april.

That's it, just wanted to update things a little. I'll probably post again after this weekend depending on how the new tests go.

My First Post

Well isn't this exciting! I'm starting a blog. I've never had a blog before. Now I can talk to myself as if someone might actually be paying attention. Woah, that's more terrifying than gratifying. Anyway...

This blog is suppose to be about my Thesis. (Backstory time for anyone who might read this that doesn't know me in real life). I go to film school for animation. My senior year is coming fast and I am starting production in the last film I will make while in school. This thesis project will slowly consume my life until fall, when it will finally take a good hold of my legs and drown me in its waters. (That's a good thing... I hope)

First off, this short film, like all those before it, will be in 3Dimation. That was meant to be a joke but no-one probably knows the reference. I am talking about Stop Motion puppet animation (Nightmare Before Christmas, Wallace and Gromit). The reference is to Ray Harryhausen, one of the greatest stop motion animators who used this term for his puppet animation shorts. I'm going to try and bring this term back into use.

Back to the point. My 3Dimation will obviously be animated by me. The puppets will also be made by me but they are being based on designs by a very talented amateur knitwear designer named Alyssa (her blog). The sets will be incredibly minimal (I want to focus more on animation than building this time around). There are others involved but I shouldn't talk about them without their permission.

Okay, onto the actual idea. MY FILM IS ABOUT... nothing. Yet. Don't worry, I'm not the one responsible for that part. Exactly. You see, my plan is to take my adorable little sister and record her talking about whatever I can get her to ramble on and on about. That recording phase will happen this summer. I have a somewhat rigid visual story I can force this to take but I have been advised to be far more free about this process and be open to the possibilities that will be presented by my sister. So I won't talk about this rigid idea unless it comes to pass that I go with it.

So that's all there is to it as of late. I could talk about a lot of other details involved with the film but that would make this post even longer.