Visualizing Poetry

For Art Env & Efx, we had to visually represent that feeling we received in reading both a poem and a death metal song's lyrics.

Hatebreed-"Not one Truth":


EE Cummings- "Since Feeling is First"


I'll leave it to you to figure out which is the deathmetal song.

Ant model

We had to create a model sheet of a character that we'd then model in Maya. Our teacher recommended that we create bipedal bugs, so I made an anthropromorphic ant.

Ball and Teacup

For Artificial Characters, we had to animate a ball entering the frame and then interacting with a teacup in 3D space using physics as accurate as we could manage.



Wormholes are an accurate depiction of physics, right?

Instructions and pictograms

The first Artificial Environments & Effects assignment of the year: create a diagram of instructions and two pictograms from a set list of options.

For the diagram, I opted for "How to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich." I wanted to go as aesthetically simple as possible:



Then, for the pictograms, I chose "College" and "Animation."

Thumbnails

First new assignment of my second semenster!

In Visual Development we were given a slip of paper with an animal and an object/action. Mine was "An ant and a ping pong ball." From that we are supposed to create a visual story in 10-15 panels.

2001: A Photo Composition Oddyssey

This actually preceeded our Shake Tracking Project, but I forgot to upload it.

Photo composition: we had to insert ourselves into a photo from history. However, the teacher also gave us the option of inserting ourselves into stills from movies, which most of us opted to do instead.

Here's the pic I was working with:


Here's the photo I took of myself:


And here's the finished result:

Gold's House Interior- Illustrations

Our last assignment for Artificial Environments and Effects: illustrate the interior of the character Gold's house.

Life Drawing Sessions

All of the drawings I created in attending the Life Drawing sessions this year are due tomorrow. So, here they are on the blog!

9-1:




9-8:



9-15:

The skull drawn in the right-hand corner was put there by my instructor to further illustrate to building blocks/components that go into drawing the human skull.


9-22:



9-29:



10-6: Hopefully you'll notice a mark-up in quality. If you do, it's because I started using a different sketchbook with a better quality paper. For anyone that doesn't think money=better drawings, they're dead wrong. If you have crappy materials, you're going to make a crappy drawing. Not to say skills aren't a considerable factor, but a great drawing is poorly rendered on a shitty sketchbook. The previous sketchbook's pages would literally come apart while I was erasing. These drawings are more "crisp" because I could erase without smuding everything up.

I made the mistake of not sketching the entire figure before going into the details. Because of this, his legs taper off because that's where the edge of the paper was. It's a mistake to draw larger than the pad. You will subconsciously alter the proportions to fit more onto the paper.




10-20:





10-27-06: These sessions were faster-paced, with an emphasis on quick sketches upon which you could base the rest of the drawing. For the first drwing I didn't make it past the sketch. For the second, I finished the sketch, but the session ended just as erased the lower-half's sketch so I could add cleaner, darker lines.



11-3:

The beginning of the day's session started with a flurry of fast-paced sketches, where we were to draw the model's figure, emphasizing the "line of action" as quickly as possible. The model would change her pose every 30 seconds. This was the first of 6 pages of sketches. I'm particularly fond of the sketch in the upper-left corner.

To relate back to animation, the instructor had the model change positions in a series of poses meant to resemble an action taking place, so we could practice "thumbnailing" the key parts of an event. In this, the model saw something, walked to it, and gave it a closer look.

Same idea as above. In this, the model is sweeping.

Shake Tracking Assignment

For this assignment, we were given a piece of footage shot by our instructor and we then had to insert something into the footage as seamlessly as possible. For mine, I shot myself in front of a bluescreen and then inserted myself into the footage. I removed the blue background with chromakey, matched my colors with the footage, and then tracked myself using reference points in the footage.

Here's the leveling guide:


I think it was pretty successful, or at least as good as I could get it.



In case you're wondering what I was doing, my original plan was simply to stand in front of the blue screen and do nothing. However, one of my VL colleagues suggested to instead "rub my beard," so I did. Here's a pic:

Walk Cycle Animation

For this assignment, we were to create a walk cycle of a character with a certain "attitude" that corresponded to a loop of music of our own choosing.



I chose "Black History Month," by Death From Above 1979. The loop of music isn't perfect, but the cycle's pretty consistent with the beat, which was important.

Space Pandas... IN SPAAAAAACE!

This isn't really related to my Visual Language track, but I suppose this is also an art blog:

A random favor for a friend. He had to have a graphic for a website class, based on the theme "Pandas in Space." Here's what I came up with:

Final Strip

Final (inked) version of the Comical Strip. Big change in the 4th panel. Before it was a subtle change in the characters demeanor, more of a "lack of reaction" as the reaction. However, the instructor emphasized that the change in expression from one extreme ("high and happy" in the 2nd panel to "low and sad" in the 4th) would produce a more humorous effect.

Floorplan and Elevations

In further deviations from our "The Chain" breakdown, we had to create the floorplan of the character Gold's house, and do the elevations for one room.

Floorplan:


Elevations:

Perspective Shots

For "The Chain," we next had to "zoom in" on our map and create a layout of one of the characters' neighborhoods. Then, we were to show four views of the neighborhood from a ground-level perspective.

Overhead view:


North:


East:


South:


West:

Comical Strip- Rough

Our Visual Story assignments so far have been culminating to this: the Comical Strip. Having studied the visual language (ie, shots, pans, perspective, visual space, etc), we are to create a 4 panel strip using characters of our own design to craft a joke of sorts. I opted to use the ones I created for the class. Here's the rough draft (the final draft is due next week... he'll be critiquing these today):

Map assignment

For The Chain, we had to create a map that fully represents the story and all of the events that take place. A good starting off point is that a dog attack happens where a Colonial House stands n the fringes of a park. Therefore, the "Attack Site" is located close to the edge of a park.

Facial Animation

Facial Animation assignment. From the characters we designed for Visual Storytelling, we were to choose one and animate that character going through a change of expression while dubbing it to sound. Originally, I was going to do my hero character. A peer of mine suggested doing the Old Man, but I was against it then. I thought having to animate the follow-through on the jowels would be too much. However, as soon as I drew the single frame for the Hero character, I realized how much more fun it would be to make the Old Man as jowelly as possible.

Sure enough, it was. I'm very happy with how it came out. I did thumbnails as a preview of the animation, then from the thumbnails I did the keys, then shot the keys. Once I viewed the keys, I in-betweened them and then shot those. After some tweaking, I cleaned up the keys and the in-betweens, shot the whole thing, and then synched up the sound using Final Cut Pro.

So far, it was my favorite animation to do. Took the least amount of paper, too! Only 20 frames!

Flour Sack Animation

Like the standard Disney animator test, we were to give a flour sack "life." However, our assignment differed in that whereas the Disney test asks for a walk cycle, ours was to make the Flour sack do a jump, all the while giving it thought and character in the process. I think I did fairly well. The only part that wasn't well received was the impact on the other side of the gap. If you compare it to my "Bouncing Ball" animation, the flour sack has no contact process; the flour sack is in the air one frame, and in the very next frame has been squashed on the ground, as opposed to making contact with the ground and then squishing. I thought leaving out the moment of contact and instead skipping to the flour sack at its most squashed state would make for a more jarring impact, but our instructor disagreed. Lesson learned.

On the bright side, everyone liked the "flailing kicks" at the end.

Teapot Animation

Teapot animation, due Sept. 20th. We had to either animate an egg cracking to reveal a surprise inside, or a teapot with a "mystery" effect. I waited too long on mine and the result is sloppy animation (quality of line especially). I resorted to using spirals for the effect, which certainly do their job, but certainly aren't very interesting.

Still, I chose the teapot because it seemed like the tougher of the two. And, I feel that I benefitted from it in the long run.

Rough Character Sheets

Here's the rough character sheets that accompanied the facial expressions.