Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Monday, March 16, 2009

I've decided to make this blog art and animation specific and create a tangent LiveJournal that I'll update with my more-personal posts:

The Lost Angeles

Thursday, March 12, 2009

Production: casting

The producer I'm interning under is working to develop a show for television and today I helped with a casting session, which was held in a room at a casting studio. This was all new to me, but the way it worked was we hired a production director who helps us (and other productions that hire her) cast actors.

We were given a room in her casting studio, while the other rooms were being used by commercials for Intel and Geico, so I saw a lot of their actors come and go. My duties were to stay in the lobby with a copy of call sheet of the actors, copies of the asides (excerpts of scripts for character-specific dialogues), and help check them in and keep track of who was here at what time for each role. It took about six hours from start to finish.

Probably the most interesting thing that happened was a woman auditioning for a Geico commercial brought in a small white dog. Next thing I know, I've got the dog in my lap, holding onto it while she auditioned! Even while actors for our production checked in I held onto that dog (it was a wiggler), giving out asides and checking off names with only one arm available.

One thing to note was half of the actors were late and a handful simply didn't show and with no explanation. My producer later told me that was typical.

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Some Flash intros I've made

Towards the end of my senior year at UCF I worked on creating a new animated intro for CUNY TV's program, "Brian Lehrer Live." I did, they loved it, but I never uploaded the entire video. Until now!



Music by the amazing Chris Heckman!



And then, about a month ago a friend asked me to create an animated intro for his graduate thesis, a game about a man losing his moustache and going on a quest to get it back. All that he gave me to go on was "guy waking up, going to the bathroom and looking into the mirror and freaking out when he realizes his mustache is gone."

In less than two weeks, I sent him this!

Spy poster

I draw a comic on the side called Carzorthade, which is about a kid's online avatars, specifically his forum and chat usernames, crossing over into his world. Along the way I introduced a few new characters, some of which entered permanently into the cast, others gained a spin-off series, and some vanished entirely.

One of the characters, Campion Blaine, an obvious parody of James Bond, was one character that was almost entirely forgotten. That is, until a comic-making friend sent me a few guest comics with Blaine in the starring role. I enjoyed them so much I asked him to take the character for himself, which he declined. Instead, he wrote a small miniseries and asked if I wanted to illustrate them. The material was so good I immediately agreed. However, this was in the middle of college which was taking more and more of my spare time, causing me to drop comics altogether.

Well, I'm managing my time more efficiently now.


I drew a lot of inspiration from this:


This was an experiment as the inks are in Flash, and the colors in Photoshop. Previously, I only made comics in Flash. However, my previous job (the one I was laid off from) gave me a lot of work involving Photoshop so I've since become more comfortable with layers, brushes, and colors. I'm hoping that as I draw the actual comics, which I'll upload here, I can continue to experiment with brushes, color, and texture.

It's the year of the blog

I realized I haven't updated this web log in waaayy too long, so to sum up:

I was laid off from my previous job (they ran out of stuff for me to do and weren't willing to keep me on nor move me to a higher position)
I lucked into a part-time Production Internship (volunteered at the Annies, met a producer who mentioned they were looking for interns)
I landed a Story internship with the same studio, also part time (adding together to 5x a week, or "full time")

Both internships are unpaid, which sounds like a bummer but I'd rather be unpaid and be making contacts and building resume stock than simply being unpaid. Plus, I'm fortunate to have money saved up and supportive parents.

Check back again tomorrow and I'll post images of where I live!