Countdown Till Christmas

So much to do and so little time. I've got a lot of my gifts for people either made, bought, or decided on but I have no idea how I'll get them all done in the amount of time given to me. Finals are this week, and in a way that's a blessing. Having only one class to show up to each day is much nicer than showing up for three and allows for a lot more spare time. It shouldn't be too difficult.

In other news, I finally got a chance to watch Bolt. My review: The story is cute framed by super cool over-the-top action, and dotted with more believable action that really isn't all that actiony in comparison. I liked the animation best, and by that I mean the way the animals moved. Bolt's smooth run makes him look like he's flying at any speed. And that kind of is how dog's (and wolves) run, with long bounding strides. (This is why wolves can pursue their prey over miles. The stride covers lots of ground with minimal effort, saving energy.)

So enough with the animator babble. Merry Christmas! And have a happy whatever-other-festival/holiday you may celebrate around this time of year!

Work, School, facebook, etc.

Life right now has consisted mostly of school, work, and facebook. Not much of a life really. Obviously I haven't bothered updating "Penguins" for a while. It's hard to know if anybody is actually reading this stuff at all.

That's not to say there hasn't been some interesting things happening. My new trademark appears to be a very brightly colored hat. I keep getting asked, "did you make that?" My response is continually, "No, but my friend Kristen did. She's the crochet person, not me." In fact, last time I tried crochet I ended up with a big knot. The hat is terrific though. I wear it every day. Random people around parkland have started recognizing me just because of the headgear. Is that normal?

Between the endless school and work, there is the occasional down-time when I get a little bored. The following is a product of a few hours free-time:

I am thrilled that thanksgiving is finally here! I really needed a break from school, not to say I don't have more homework than I can get done by next week. I am glad to finally have time to work on some story writing. Maybe a little cross-stitch even.

Only a few more weeks of school! Wheeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!

Rigid Squash

This is my very first Animated 3D project. Yay!

Stuff I Never Knew About Web Pages

I am taking Intro to Web Design this semester, and it's been fairly interesting so far. It's also been fairly easy because I learned html basics back in high school, so it's not entirely new. Not to say I'm not learning. Here's some highlights of things I have learned:

• The best way to make all pages in a website look like they belong to the same website is to use a separate document called a external CSS sheet. (I really wish my high school teacher had told us about this. It would've saved me a lot of cut and paste.)
• A simple thing like leaving out a semi-colon can ruin an attempt at formating something.
• According to a Google search, there are 27,700,000 pages on the web with the title "Untitled Document".
• Web browsers like text. And keywords. And titles other than "untitled document".
• The web-safe color chart with the hexadecimal numbers has a pattern. I have figured out the pattern. It's clearly time for me to get out of the computer lab more.
• Whoever wrote our textbook for Dreamweaver has a real nutty sense of humor.
• Old cartoon theme songs were very corny, but at least they gave some idea on what the show was about.

Web Design is a great class, but maybe I'm just turning into a complete computer nerd. Next thing you know, I'll actually be understanding my dad's electrical engineering jargon.

... on second thought, no. I will never be able to understand electrical engineering jargon. But I might be able to guess a web color when given a hexadecimal number.

Framed

I recently finished writing the actual story for Episode 1 of my cartoon stories. In that I am estatic. The problem is I wrote it in two forms: half script, half sketch. To bring the story into one format for easy viewing, I made my own storyboard template and have been redrawing the whole thing. This might sound like a lot of effort, and it kind of is, but once I start drawing all sense of time goes out the window and it's really not so bad.

This is the original sketch of a sequence where a dragonfly swoops past Beth's head and lands on a shop awning. As you can see, it was drawn in a spare notebook. Nothing fancy. No borders. I'm pretty sure I was making it up as I went along too. Still, it got the point across.

I drew that one, maybe two, semesters ago. This semester I'm taking 3D Animation II, which is really more "Cinematography Using Maya Instead of Cameras" class. It's got me thinking more about the visual side of the storytelling. Camera angles, timing, hints at what a character's thinking without having them say anything. When I make a second draft of a story, stuff gets tweeked just based on what I've learned since the first draft.

Surprisingly, the thing that really makes a storyboard (or rather the sketches in the story board) pop is the border. Just like paint is only as bright as its contrast with the canvas underneath, a drawing is only as dynamic as its interaction with the boring rectangle that houses it. A rectangle gives you a point of reference, something to base the diagonals off of, something to give you the feeling of distance from the subject.

So here's the same sequence in storyboard.

Amazing what a tweek in timing, camera angle, and framing can do.

(insert gourd joke)

School is a lot like working at County Market. You have your rush hours, those days when 24 hours just doesn't seem like enough for a day. Times when you're rushing here there and everywhere and social life and fun stuff gets pushed off to the side. Work (or homework) demands your full and undivided attention.

And then there's times, like right now for instance, when there's absolutely nothing to do but pull those last three carts from the parking lot. You can kick back and chit-chat or whatever. At times you are so bored out of your....well.... gourd.... that you just can't wait to hit the next rush hour.

I'm at that point. I'm up to date on all my homework, including my first Animation II project (shown above). I've been in a lull for long enough that I'm actually excited for the critique on Monday. Excited for a critique? What is wrong with me!? I'll tell you what's wrong: Animation (and possibly County Market) has made my brain look like an acorn squash; nut-shaped with a soft interior. But if this is what it's like to go crazy, I'll take it.

Now if only I can think of another gourd joke.........

Piggerton Walk Cycle

Having fun with Piggerton and Anime Studio 6. The walk cycle can be the most important part of a character's movement, and one of the most complicated. It's so much more than moving the legs. When Piggerton walks, his whole body moves up and down with his hips. His tail moves counter to his hips to maintain balance, his head and neck move to keep his eyes steadily on wherever he's going, and finally his ears bob through passive movement.

At least Piggerton doesn't have any arms. I would've had to animate those too!

Wish I had something to say

I wish I had a clever picture to post this week, but I got nothing. Not to say that I haven't been creating. In animation class I made a gourd in a garden. In drawing class I've been drawing a still life. It is amazing how the position of three different gourds in a still life from one day to the next can wreak havoc with the composition drawn around it. In programming the other day I had fun making an application reminiscent of Mad-Libs. Hmm... a Mad-Lib application might not be such a bad idea...

Paying attention...?

Classes have started anew and so far it hasn't been too bad. I have 3D Animation II (digital cinematography), Intro to Web Design, Drawing, and Intro to programming. Right now it's a lot of explaining the basics stuff, nothing too hard. I usually catch on pretty quick to the basics. In web design, I already know the basics from high school. Not to say I wasn't paying attention...

...okay...maybe I wasn't so much. I've gotten into a really bad habit of doodling in my notebook, but my notes for Web Design are by far the worst. I know I won't be able to get away with this for too long. With two studio classes and two computer courses I know my homework load is going to be massive. I tried to set my availability schedule for work accordingly, yet somehow they still manage to schedule 21 hours per week for me. One one hand, money and some apparent job security if they need me that much; on the other, I'd really rather be doing homework.

Why would I rather be doing homework? Well simple. When you're completing classes for your chosen field of study, homework can be fun. It can also be a nightmare, but one you get to tell horror stories about later with co-workers who know what you're talking about. In Animation I had to relearn how to use Maya, the modeling program we use. It all came back pretty fast, but I still had to do a little tinkering. What comes out of my brain the minute I start playing with an animation program? An animal. What animal? Uh....

This is piggerton. He doesn't look exactly like this in Maya (he's missing his feet) but I hope to end up with something similar to this eventually.

So that's the random wanderings of my brain this past week. Enjoy.

Super Bunny Lives!

A few months ago I posted a sketch for a bunny with a baby blanket cape. Well, the cape is going to be a bib instead, but I finally made the bunny. I ditched my initial idea of green and blue and went with different colors, but how it ended up is cute as a button. Of course, the rabbit itself doesn't have any buttons. The eyes, nose, and mouth are all embroidery thread to make it safer for the baby it will eventually go to.

Faster than a race horse! Cuter than a koala! Able to leap tall cabbages in a single bound! It's Super Bunny!

Kenlilians

I've had a lot of free time lately, and I haven't been as productive as I should be, but at least I have gotten something done. I've been meaning to design some outfits for some of my extraterrestrial characters, the Kenlilians. Their clothing presents some challenges because their legs are built for jumping and running, and therefore pants become a bit of a mobility issue. They get around this by wearing shorts or leaving the knees out. The rest of their clothing is determined by personal preferences and occupation.

Zorkedian is a soldier stationed on an intergalactic war ship. His uniform is pretty basic with the knees and elbows left open for mobility. The gold patch on the shoulder displays his rank of foot soldier (in Kenlilian culture, gold is a pretty average color, like blue for us). He carries a blaster with him at all times. His boots are steel-toed and divided like most kenlilian footwear.

Gen is a mechanic on a cargo ship. He's usually seen wearing a vest that acts as armor against mechanical accidents and has lots of pockets for stashing tools in. His shirt is made of a simple coarse fabric and has a few stains here and there, but it fits well and has more pockets. Arm guards protect his fore-arms while digging around in the interiors of ships and machinery. His pants have an extra flexible patch on the knees that doubles as a knee pad. His boots don't have two lobes (it's difficult for him to find good kenlilian boots) but they're steel-toed and well worn.

Dige is Gen's son. He's small and round in comparison to the adults. He's his father's shadow, always helping him in the shop. He has his own vest like his dad, but everything else on him is a size too big. Sometimes his clothes don't match because he's blind, he just grabs the first shirt and shorts he lays hands on and calls it good. He wears kneepads to protect his knees while crawling inside ships and machinery, and can sometimes be convinced to wear arm guards, but he absolutely refuses to wear shoes. Being able to feel the floor is essential for navigating the corridors of the ship.

Anke is Zorkedian's older brother. He's a cook in the war ship's galley. Over his shirt he wears a smock that is slightly big for him. The smock has pockets for kitchen ware and an extra fold of fabric at the color, used to wipe food splatters off the face. The green name tag and trim labels him as the head chef (kenlilian blood is green, so green is used to denote high rank, much like red for us). His pants have the knees left out and his shoes only cover his toes, held on by straps that wrap around his foot and ankle.

Tough as Nails

I love using goofy quirky characters in my stories. Then again, who doesn't. The other night I was fleshing out my Ninja Order of Animalburg and ended up with the character Nails. Nails got his name because he can seemingly live through anything. He's a master at taking a hit so that it generates the least amount of damage. This skill didn't come naturally or easily though. Nails is missing a finger, about 40% of his tail, a piece of his ear, six teeth, and his appendix (though that had nothing to do with ninja work). All the same, Nails comes off as a happy-go-lucky sort of fellow who at once accepts that he has bits of himself missing and seems to have no notion that it should affect him in any way.

In Animalburg, the ninja all strive to be as tough as Nails.

The Monster of Rudard Pond

Lately I've been trying to flesh out the imaginary world of my ninja characters. In the biggest park in the city, there's a lake called Rudard Pond (they call it pond, but I'm pretty sure if it has an inlet and an outlet, it's a lake). Lurking in the "pond" is a lake monster known as Rudy. The civilians of Animalburg don't really know what the monster looks like, so they make cute little salamander and sea dragon-like figurines of him for souvenirs. The people never get a good look at their monster because Rudy only hunts at night. Turns out Rudy's nocturnal and reclusive nature is for everyone's own good.

The ninja of the city are perfectly aware of what the monster looks like. Their unnofficial list of rules has "don't feed the lake monster" as #12 on the list. In reality, Rudy is a ten foot tall cross between a salamander, a sea monster, and a mutated experiment. It has no teeth, and it's completely blind from injuries and cataracts on its eyes, but anything that floats in the waters of Rudard Pond after dark has a good chance of being eaten. The monster brings along a trail of pondweed stuck to useless extra limbs caused by pollution. The end of its tail is missing from when it tried to eat a ninja that strayed too close to shore.

I had way too much fun inventing this thing. Can you tell?

Animation is a Pain

I already mentioned something about singing puffballs in my last post. Meet Rodger, Omar, Yolanda, Gary, Celia, and Benny (listed from right to left). They are to be my first characters capable of vocalization. In their case singing. This is mostly a practice in lip-sync and reading waveforms, but also in patience. As of now, I have only the first 8 seconds done. That is only after sitting in front of a computer for approximately ten hours total with a graphics tablet in hand. Sure I haven't been animating all at once, but it's a lot of work. Especially for one person.

Animation takes tons of imagination. The ability to hear a character talk and see them move, even when all you're doing is drawing one frame after another, after another, after another....

Free Time

Two weeks vacation and my imagination's already running wild. I'm launching back into my favorite things: cartoons, animation, and hopefully some movies. But I also love creating bizarre photo collages. The one above is made from three photos. I think it needs something though. Hmm....

I also figured out how to make an animation using Pencil, iMovie, and Garage Band. It involves lip-synced characers and a 6 part sound track of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star on comb kazoo. Hope it flies. If I does, I'm posting it.

Enjoy the two weeks vacation fellow Parkland people!

Onward and Upward

Last week of summer class. I can't even tell you the relief. Fall class starts on the 24th, and with it a whole new set of worries, but for two weeks I'll have my freedom. What do I plan to do? Maybe catch up with friends, see a movie or two, sew a bunny rabbit for my co-worker's baby, and write, and draw, and write some more. I think that's all I have time for actually.

So as for this blog... well it just so happens blogging is fun, even if no one is reading. But for the sake of those who are, I think I'll keep posting here, though I am so changing the title. How does "EY Productions" sound? Or, oh! I know! "Penguins With Jet Packs"!

Anywho. Onward and upward...

Paying Off

This class has been frustrating, I'm not going to lie. Being shoved into a box of grids, squares, and rules for everything really irritates me after a while. Yet through all the nerve hitting, graphic design class is really starting to pay off. Well maybe not pay per se... but it's handy. Like take this flier for instance. Mom asked me to make one up on Monday. I had it for her by Tuesday. Sure I spelled some things wrong (They really need to add some spell-check on Adobe products) but at least it worked. Now I realize how handy a vector drawing program really is.

My dad has been pestering me to use vector drawing programs for years. He's never going to let me here the end of it after this.

Flights of Fancy

I admit it. I doodle in class. Usually it happens when I'm not interested in what's being said, which causing problems when the teacher says something in the middle of a review that is actually new information. I'm just ready for this summer semester to be over with. I wish I could have a vacation and just not have any deadlines for a while. Ah, but real life isn't like that.

To be like a bird, and fly where ever I wanted. Even if I was a big scraggly crow it would be heaven.

Chicken!

I'm not entirely sure why I drew a chicken.

When reading a book, I often get an image in my head that just won't go away. Usually it has something to do with the cover art of the book, but sometimes it doesn't. Like when I was reading Pride & Prejudice I had the image of a peacock in my head, which wasn't unusual because a peacock was on the cover. I was just trying to attach a meaning to the cover art. Now I'm reading Les Meserables (spelled wrong I'm certain). For some bizzare reason I keep coming up with the image of a chicken. I think it's a warp of the peacock. Pride and Prejudice is about english high society, and Les Mes is about the struggles of the french lower class, so the pompus peacock turned into the humble chicken. (or maybe it's something to do with french hens...?)

Anyway, I did draw this entirely from memory. How'd I do?

Toby and Daniel

I have a lot of different stories bouncing around in my head at any one time, maybe I've already mentioned that. One that I've been working on recently is called Nut Job. It's about a mouse named Toby who is a science major. He lands an internship with Dr. Pistachio Harve Vester (thus the title of the story). It turns out Dr. Vester is a bit of a mad scientist, and everything goes downhill for Toby from there. Toby's best friend is his roommate Daniel. Daniel is a graphic design major (yes this class has effected my story writing). Daniel is a little more confident than Toby. He doen't get freaked out about minor crazyness.

Happiness is Like a Box of Cookies

One of my earliest childhood memories is eating Nilla Wafers at my grandparents house. Nilla Wafers and milk before bedtime. So good. I usually pass up simplistic cookies like that these days, but once you get me to eat one the memories come back. They are kind of addictive. I drew this picture the other day when I was munching a handful for lunch.

Happiness is like a box of cookies: It doesn't have to be complicated. It runs out eventually and we have to find a new box. We may even forget what it taste like at times. But for the brief time you have the cookies, they are so good.

Father and Son

One of the things I find the most entertaining when writing stories is showing the passage of time. No Hi and Lois/Blondie/Bugs Bunny time loop for me. My characters change. They have childhoods, college memories, get married, have kids, grow old and play with their grandchildren. It's also interesting getting parents and children to look similar but different. The child has to be a combination of the two parents, or more often I have to work in reverse and create parents for an existing character, which is harder.

So the picture above is two 8-year-old ferrets, but they come from different time-zones. The one on the right is one of my adult characters Greg as he was as a child. The one on the left is his son Cody at the same age. Getting them to look related yet distinctly different was the fun part. The clothing helps.

Cell Phone in the Silent Zone

I love the silent zone of the library. No distractions but the scratching of pencils. When I have peace and quiet, my brain can run at full speed. What takes me an hour in a noisy classroom takes me thirty minutes in the silent zone. It's so nice. Until of course someone's cell phone goes off.

From my experience, when a cell phone goes off in the silent zone it's like, I don't even know. Imagine a guy in a devil costume running down the center isle in the middle of a Sunday church service. There is nothing in the world that can stand out more. Then, who ever has the cell phone let's it ring loud and clear for three to four rings before picking it up and then--and I'm not being racist here, I am just stating an observation--half the time the person starts talking on the phone in some language besides English. In a normal conversation volume I might add. Normal conversation volume in the silent zone is almost as bad as a cell phone ringing in the silent zone. Maybe they need to translate the "quiet please" signs into mandarine chinese. Then again, the other half of the time it is an english speaker talking, so maybe people just need to stop and read. (Reading in a library, what a concept!)

So please, for the sake of the silent zone, if your cell phone goes off, catch it early, reject the call, go down stairs, then call them back. Us studious types would really appreciate it.

StarJumper

You know you're an animation student when you have a trailer running through your head for a movie that doesn't even exist yet. This happened after working on a Graphic Design assignment involving making a title sequence. I'm relatively familiar with storyboards, so it was only a hop-skip off topic to sketch out a movie trailer. The story is one I call StarJumper. The characters Squiggles (a lizard from earth) and Dige (a dog-like space alien) are riding through the streets of an alien planet on the back of a horse-dinosaur thing called a rodeon. Even being blind doesn't stop Dige from being a back-seat driver.

Nagging Doubts

Yesterday I tried to do an exercise involving goals. Bad idea. Goal setting has never worked for me. It's like being attacked by crows nagging me for being a bad student. My grades are consistent A's and B's, but I'm always fighting a battle between nagging self-doubts.

Someone in class was wondering if organizational lines (the "skeleton" of a picture) could communicate motion. This is my example of organizational lines doing just that. I started this picture with only the two lines shown in heavy black marker, then drew the characters around them. Using organizational lines as character backbones is a fast way to make dynamic character interactions in cartooning and animation.

Da-dada-DA! Super Bunny!

One of my coworkers at County Market is having a baby in October, so I thought I'd make a stuffed animal for the kid. I think it'll be green with a yellow poke-a-dot belly and blue feet and ear insides. I also think I'll add a cape held on with Velcro so it can be detached and used as a blanket. I'll have to see it in color first, but whatever happens, it's sure to be cute.

Blade in a video game

I almost forgot about decorating the cover for my process book in Graphic Design. Almost. I remembered in time to start drawing thumbnail sketches for it. I think I'll do what looks like a level to an old Donkey Kong game (not that I'm into video games, I just think color on a black background looks cool). The game is filled with geometric and sharp cornered shapes and primary colors. The player, however, is a hamster in a ninja costume. I'm using several emphasis tricks for him. Though he's the same size as the other elements in the game, he's orange with a purple costume, and he's made mostly with organic shapes. This should make him stick out enough to establish him as the hero of the game. I'm planning on making this scene with paper cut outs on black gel pen paper.

Revelations 5:6

The book of Revelations is filled with some pretty vivid imagery. One of the best described is the appearance of Jesus in the form of a lamb with seven eyes and seven horns representing the sevenfold spirit of God. I have never seen a depiction of this scene, so I've made an attempt at drawing it. Around him are two of the twelve elders that are described to be sitting around God's throne. The Bible also mentioned four creatures with bodies like animals found on earth but with eyes front and back, but I decided not to draw them. My imagination does have its limits.

Stress Mode

It's funny, when I told others I was taking summer courses, their responses were usually, "Good luck. You'll need it." I kind of ignored them because I figured that summer courses couldn't be any worse than classes during any other time of the year. But that was because I have no sense of time. Now I'm in student stress mode, always having three things due within 24 hours it seems. Graphic design defiantly has me worried. I mean, at least for English class I know how to write a report. I hate writing research papers, but I can handle it. Design class however... like the dragon in the picture, I'm a little overwhelmed.

Bugs

Most of what I draw consists of animals. I usually do vertebrates but I occasionally deviate from the normal. Maybe it's because I've been helping Mom with her garden, but I've been taking notice of bugs a lot more than usual.

Dragon on the brain

I must admit, I'm a little worried about project 1. I'm not used to thinking in boxes and lines when drawing. I've got a few layout ideas down on paper, but I tend to get distracted...