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!

New films on the way!

So, I finished my Animation Production Film Final today! It took a few (several thousand) hours to actually complete, but my instructor and I managed to get it all done! I'm not uploading either film to YouTube or even here until after the showing on Thursday, but once that's done and my films have been officially presented, I'll let everyone on the net see them as well! I can't wait to get some feedback (or at least I hope I'll get some feedback) but I'm also nervous... my films never quite turn out exactly as I had planned. Usually I can hardly stand to watch them for about a month after they're finished, cuz all I see are the gaping holes for things I wanted to do and the imperfections in the things I did. Looking back now at my two older films, I love and appreciate them a whole lot more than I did after they were first finished... but I guess that's just the way it goes with artists. We are our worst critics.
Anyways, keep an eye out for my upcoming posts! There's sure to be something exciting or enjoyable to someone out there.

Shamefully Overdue...

So it's been a while since I've posted... anything. And seeing as I've got two short films in the pipeline at the moment, I figured it would be good to get a few things up before I spring two more finished products on the world... and I had some free time and thought this should be done. At any rate, in a few more weeks I'll post my finals for both Animation Production and Storyboarding, along with animatics, concept art, and any other little tidbits that go along with them. I don't want to post anything prematurely, since I don't want to give my stories away to more people than necessary... I mean, they're only a couple of minutes. Easily spoiled.
Hopefully everything goes well with my finals and I'm able to get stuff posted in a timely fashion... yeah right. In the meantime, I've uploaded more videos to my YouTube account as well as the video page of this blog. They're just a few more pencil tests and animatics, but they show what I do with my life, so I hope they're at least a little interesting. I mean, I do plan on making these things for a long time. I just hope they entertain someone other than myself.

New stuff in the form of Classwork

So I'm not sure if anyone would notice, but I've been posting a few of my classroom exercises on my video and art pages. There still aren't too many things to see, but there will be over time. As such, I probably won't be posting on the front page every time I add something, so be sure to check the other pages for updates every week or so!

How things should be.

So here's one of those posts on some of my inspirations. This is actually something I vaguely remember as a kid and actually discovered a few days ago. It's a segment from Sesame Street (old school Sesame Street... not sure which decade) and is, in my opinion, a brilliant peice of animation. The way the animators used not only the drawings on the dishes but also the shapes and movement of the dishes themselves to tell the simple story is wonderful! And what's really astounding is that these types of segments (Little Super Guy) were fairly common and continually different! The mere fact that people working on a public television show for preschoolers took enough time to create painstaking stop motion animations just astounds me! And aside from that, makes me want to work in this field myself. ;)
The Sesame Street crew really went above and beyond over the years with not only stop motion animations and puppetry, but also beautiful hand animated segments, all for the benefit of little kids. If only more people nowadays would take so much pride in their work and care for their audience.

Design changes again...

Hey there! Since I seem to create art more than usual during the school semesters, expect there to be a lot more content up on the blog as the weeks go by. However, the majority of this stuff will be going straight to the art or video pages and won't be posted on the front page. And SINCE there's going to be a great deal more art and whatnot, I'm going to try and make some pages within pages so it's a little more organized and not just a huge page of pictures. So! Once I figure out exactly how to do this, ... it WILL be done!

Sneak Peak!

Here's a preview of one of my exercises in Animation Production: animate an interaction between a teapot and a teacup, using seperate layers for each character. This is just the test taken off one of the monitors we use to try our animation before we turn it in. I know it's hard to see, which is why it's just on the front page and not the video page. I'll be uploading the actual animation soon: most likely next week. And that'll be the actual, clear animation from the computer! Enjoy! ;)

Here's a sketch I did just recently of my cat Felix lounging about under the covers on my bed. It's sketched from a photograph, much in the same way my recent storyboard exercises were. I'm getting more and more used to sketching from real life, and am quite enjoying the results!

New Fall Semester

So school has started up again, and since I'm taking two animation classes this semester, expect a lot more to pop up on this blog! I've just started my Storyboarding and Animation Production classes, and already I have a few things to show! Check out the art and video pages to actually see my work as the classes progress, but for now, here's a look at what we've started doing: Our first assignment in Storyboarding was to take a series of photographs of an action and redraw the frames as storyboard stills. Here's the first shot of my series, showing my cat Felix jumping onto his cat tree.

During the call-for-entries period of the NexTv Web Series & Short Film Competition that I'm participating in, there is a monthly viewer's choice "Shortcut to the Finals". The top vote-getter each month gets a pass to the finals of the overall
competition (still ongoing) and about $1,250 worth of filmmaking software. The list of industry heavy-weights involved is long (ICM, Disney, "The Office", Fox, etc...); getting to the finals is extremely significant.

Here is how to vote:

1. Go to www.nextventertainment.com/web
2. Click on the big blue tab at the bottom left of the page that says, "Shortcut to the
Finals"
3. Type in my name (or my project's name) in the search bar on the right just above the list of submissions
4. Click on WATCH.
5. Then click on VOTE.

I appreciate your support.

Interplanetary ART

Well, here's my latest film! It's actually only my second film, and was made entirely in just about a month. This should be up on the video page soon, so if you happen to stop by there, don't forget to check out my first short and my animatic for this film.

New Content!

Well, thanks to perseverence and a good amount of luck, I've managed to figure out how to put together pages on my blog with actual content on them. As of now, two of the videos I've made have been posted to my videos page, namely my short "Leo and Dee" and my animatic for my newest film. The art page is pretty sparse at present, but hopefully after this semester ends and I finish my film I'll be able to post actual artwork from my portfolio. Right now it's just a few of my character sketches and early story ideas for my film, but stay tuned for more!

This is an early incarnation of my character Leo who has appeared in two of my films to date. He hasn't changed too much apart from size and proportions, though he did go from being an outcast European bat to a lost Brazilian one.

Okay, so here's a picture I did a while ago, that basically depicts a cartoon "me" with most of my film and animation inspirations. Included are characters from The Last Unicorn, My Neighbor Totoro, Labyrinth, The Hobbit, and yes, even Muppet Babies and Pokemon. I'm not gonna lie, I totally love those shows.