Wednesday, November 21, 2012

FANARTZ!!!!

During Fanime some friends and I like to get together and draw out some fanart for our booth: "Pokefinity". It originally started by a small group of us who enjoyed doing this for the fun of it. The only real guidelines was that it had to be fanart and done traditionally, usually in watercolor. Once a fanboy...always a fanboy.  lol

Here are some of the ones that I liked the most that I did.   :)






DMC

A small while back a small group of friends did random animation tests just to have a chance to animate things that we wanted that wasn't part of the stuff assigned by our classes. I decided to animate this duck character that plays with a muddy puddle.
I don't have the duck animation, but I recently found the rough puddle animation. There are some things I can still fix on it, but for now, it is what it is.   :)




Tuesday, November 20, 2012

KOMD




I had the pleasure of animating a scene for one of my teacher's (David Chai) short films. I think all of the time that I've been at school, I've always wanted to animated something in one of his shorts. I finally got my wish last summer and worked on a scene where Chai's family is going all crazy on the scene. A really fun scene to animate and I had a great time working on it. Thanks for letting me on the team Chai!  :)

Knock on My Door is about a man's journey to America and his struggles being a Korean-American in the land where dreams are suppose to come true.

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Tule Lake

Heya!

The short film "Tule Lake" got first place in animation and best of show at CSU Media Arts Festival last weekend!

Go to the blog to find out what it's all about!

http://tulelakeproject.blogspot.com/


Here are a couple of scenes that I animated.  :)


Sunday, November 4, 2012

The chair

So, one of the first assignments we were given for BFA was titled: "The Chair". We had to interpret what that quote meant to us. We could do anything we wanted as long as it wasn't shot in real time, was at the max 30 seconds, and was done in one week. I really wanted to explore more with stop motion so I decided to do something in that direction. Knowing full well how much time I had, I wanted to do something that felt complete in itself and being an animator, I thought how it would be fun to bring a chair to life. I remembered the wonderful animators at Aardman did something called Creature Comforts. I really like how it was like little snippets of what each creature was like in their life and how creative it was that they put random interviews they had with people on the street and instill that into the animation. So I know full on the direction I wanted to go in.

So I knew I wanted to do something within this in limit, but knowing that I would be spending a lot more time making everything than animating it, I made sure I gave myself enough time so everything would be ready by the time I get to animating.

I interviewed one of my friends and asked her random questions. Picked the one that I liked the most. Meanwhile, I would go research on chairs and picked the one that I felt best fit this character that I had in mind after hearing JUST her voice. Now the fun part, making the character and props.  :)




 I picked a design that felt a little Southern to reflect this friendly warm feel I wanted with this character. I wrapped some cord around some of the clay making it seem like the cushion was made from a straw-like material. I think one of the hardest things for me to deciding where to place to eyes. I ended up putting them in front of the cushion next to the mouth so the viewer would have less space to look from the eyes to the mouth since that is what is moving for the majority of the time.







Here she is in all her glory! Her legs were made from white paintbrushes attached to the top of this white jewelry box I kept from many years back. On top of that was the cushion seat. And the top of the chair was made out of white cardboard. Even with all of this...something was missing that she felt incomplete!

I made a little sunhat left off in an angle so it looked like someone left it there for the day. Now she's complete!  :)















I bought a ton of colored cloth from a previous black friday at a fabric shop thinking I could one day use it for something. Good thing I did cuz now I needed to make the curtains. What was important to me was that everything in the background supported the scene with the character. So after a while, I narrowed it down to these fabrics.
But even that was too much, so after even more thinking, I narrowed it down to four. 


This felt too busy and I felt it would detract from the character.

 I felt that this color didn't work, it made it too mellow for me and for some reason, it felt a little sad.














The red felt too bold and romantic for the character. Even though she was talking about what love means to her, I didn't want it to be something like she was crazy in love with, more like how someone would love their pet.

 This was the color I ended up going with. It had a very nature-like and friendly feeling with this shade of green and the patterns was fun without being too distracting. 



For the back wall, I painted it all with gesso and layered it thickly with a palate knife giving this stucco feeling I wanted.

Here is the character with the back wall. The blinds were actually part of this toy picket fence that I folded in together.

The set with the curtain and a clear plastic over the window.

After listening to the audio that I picked for a number of times, I knew that when she was answering this question about what is love, I wanted her to be thinking about the cat. So I called the same friend up and asked her to take a picture of one of her cats.

And viola! Kitty cat!

Here is the kitty in the scene. I also added a cloth behind the window with a pattern that reminded me of clouds. I also added that other green cloth with the vine patterns behind the window to make it look like part of a bush. I also added a photo frame with a little drawing of the cat.

 One of the things I also did was made an X-sheet of the dialog to make sure by the time I put everything together, things synced up. Literally everything that I could think of was written or drawn out on those X-sheets. From mouth shapes to when the cat moves, eye darts, blinks, everything I could think of. Since I never did this before, I wanted to make sure I could control as much a possible.

Here are some mouth shapes.


This is probably like...90% of all the mouth shapes in the scene... what was funny is that I ended up not using like 40% of these mouth shapes.
















 
The other 10% of the mouth shapes. 

 
 Here is the set in relation with the camera, which was borrowed from one of my other friends. I also added a microphone by this point. What was interesting was that I did not account for the fact that the battery in the camera only last me at most for around 2 to 3 hours. It also took a really long long LONG time for that battery to be recharged. So here I was, wondering how I was going to adjust. I went back to the audio clip and cut it even more to make sure I would have time to edit everything. Went back to animating after the batteries were recharged. So the little jumps in the frame is actually because I had to unscrew the camera from the tripod and then put it back on trying to match it back to how it originally was as much as possible. I think it took me in total around 4 to 5 hours to animate the whole thing.



I used the blue from the Beast statue I had as bounce light.

The whole set...in front of my books...

I also had a lamp that was attached to my bookshelf. I put over it an orange cloth to help give a feeling that this was happening in the later part of the afternoon. You can kind of also see the blank picture frame on the bottom which I was trying to bounce a little more of the light onto the set as well.

I also had a lamp in the back, which I faced the wall. That light hit the red cloth which I put behind the cloud cloth layer to further give the feeling of that time of the day as well.

A blurry picture of the cat picture hanging on the wall.



















So after much talking about it, here is the final product of the film! Even with the backaches and being drenched in sweat after animating this, I wouldn't change a thing. It was such a trill even completing this project and I'm super happy that I went through with it. I hope you guys enjoy!  :)