First Assignment

So my animation class has begun, and I have officially gotten back into the animating mindset. I've already had one assignment to start off: a morphing animation. Here it is, straight from YouTube:

So I won't have much more animation to show for a while, since I'm going to be focusing solely on my short film. That means I'm gonna be storyboarding and prepping, though... actually, I should have an animatic up in the near future. So... more videos to come. ;)

New Semester! WOOT!!!

Alright everyone, so the new semester has begun (well, it began two weeks ago) and I am officially in animation again!!! If you can't auditing as official that is. I do. Anyways, expect a lot more on not only my blog but my YouTube account as well, as I'll be uploading little projects as well as updates on my next film. I think I'm gonna try for something every week, but I can't promise anything: I have four other classes I'm taking this semester as well, so it's gonna be hectic. But animation is my priority, so I'm gonna stay on top of things as best I can. And I know - having the class you're not actually recieving credit for take precedence over the ones you're getting graded on doesn't seem like the smartest thing in the world, but... there you go. That's just how I roll.
Anyways, to kind of start things off, I've uploaded my practice demo reel I did a while ago to my YouTube account, and thought I'd share it here too. Here's the vid!

Ummm... Whoops.

So, in my last post (which was in March) I said I was going to be posting other things soon. I lied. Well, actually I forgot, but no one likes excuses, so I lied. However, it's summer now and I have no reason NOT to post new blog entries. I've been constantly updating my Deveant Art account, so that's something, but I'm going to really try and get this blog up and running again. Not that it was ever very big to begin with, but...whatever. The point is, what's the point of having a blog if you're not going to use it? In my case, I started my blog to share my art and other things. And I still intend to do that.

So, to start things off, I'm going to be posting new information about my next film, which I will be animating in the fall. I've only started doing concept art and planning, but I'm just about ready to start storyboarding, and once I do that I'll try and share some animatics.

Hopefully this will be the last time I have to apologize for neglecting my blog. It's not like I do it on purpose. But hey, at least I'm coming back to it, right?

And to apologize, here's some concept art. :)

New Video and an Explanation...

So in case I haven't mentioned this before, I'm a college student and halfway through my second year. I am also taking a full semester of General Ed classes. This means that I am often very worn out at the end of the day. And what all of THIS means is that I have very little time for working on art, or blogging about it for that matter. However, since I am a busy student with no art classes at present, sometimes my creative juices start flowing and,since they have nowhere to go, get blocked up with ever increasing pressure. When this happens, my brain becomes a sort of volcano, and the art ends up exploding in a pyroclastic flow.
Lovely image right? So what does all of it even mean???
What it translates to is me working on major art works or devoting all of my time to a single project that ends up turning out pretty epic. My recent brain explosion produced an animatic that I've worked on for the past couple of weeks on my days off from school. It's drawn and colored entirely in Corel Paint Essentials by use of a drawing tablet, and it was edited in Windows Movie Maker. I posted the preview of it before, but here's the finished product, direct from YouTube:

The description for the video can be found on it's YouTube page; I don't feel like retyping it.
Oh, and here's the video from the actual show "The Slayers" that inspired this video:

But it's not necessary to see in order to understand the video... I hope.
Oh, and please ignore my total inability to draw a boat. Thank you.

So that's all for now! I'll be posting again soon (maybe later tonight) about some animation related topics: namely, I'll be sharing some of my animation and artistic inspirations, and explain some of how they've changed my life. Or done something slightly less dramatic than that.

Some Semi-Recent Side Projects

Well, the new semester has begun, and sadly I'm not taking any art or animation classes this time around. It is indeed very depressing. So, in order to make up for the lack of artistic assignments, I've been working on some "for fun" projects. A few weeks ago I finished a storyboard animatic that I'd been working on for a while, based on characters from the amazingly awesome tv series "The Slayers". It's been up on my YouTube page for a while, and it's about 6 minutes long... 0_0'. Yeah. Here's the video: Since that one's done though, I've started on another video using the song "Mr. Blue" by Catherine Feeny. It just happened to play on one of my Pandora stations about a week ago, and after I heard it, I couldn't get the idea for a video out of my head! This video features the same Slayers characters as my other one did (because I adore them and they're a lot of fun to draw), and it was mostly done in order to satisfy my curiosity about what really happened at the end of the last series of the show. The final ending was very... ambiguous. And when things are ambiguous, I for some reason have the urge to fill in the blanks. It's still not finished, mind you, (as it states in the video...) but I wanted to put up the section that I had done so far, since I'm not sure when I'll actually finish it. And I know it might be hard to understand, but hopefully it's clear enough that you can basically follow the plot. The song helps too. ;) Here's that video:

New Site Features

In case no one notices, I've just added two new "badges" to this blog from Facebook. The first is a link to my photos on Facebook, where I post most of my doodles, sketches and other artistic things. Most of these will NOT be posted here however, since the majority are fan works and not my own original characters. Also, there are quite a few drawings, so I figured it would be less confusing and save more space to just link to an already existing location.
The other badge is a link to my "PB&J's Custom Creations" page, which features arts&crafts projects by my best friend and me. We have pictures on the page of some of the things I've made, as well as an order form for requesting items for us to make. It's still a work in progress, and we haven't had much time to work on it, but we hope that people will take an interest in some cute handmade items.
Anyways, that's it for my "self advertising" for the moment - I'm trying to make a career out of my art, so I need all the exposure and practice I can get! So don't forget to spread the word!

Really, REALLY late update...

Okay, so I should've posted this in DECEMBER, but my two finals from last semester are available for viewing on YouTube. They have been up there for about a month, and will be added to the videos page on this blog. The showing we had in December for all of the RCC animations went really well, and I even won something! Best in the Summer ART-44 category for my short "Interplanetary ART". I'm really happy about this and proud of the work I did on that one! My two new ones that premeired were alright and I was pretty happy with them, but they were a bit rushed since I was working on them both at the same time, and I wish I could've had more time to concentrate on and refine them. However, I did what I could in the time that I had, and I'm happy with that.
Sadly, I won't be taking any animation classes this coming semester, but I will be working on animation and storyboarding on my own for a while, so I'll try and post some of my extra works here soon! I'm still hoping to take another animation class in the fall, so I'm going to be developing my next film, which will be related to my "Interplanetary ART" series. I'll try to post concept art and sketches here as time goes by, so keep an eye out!