Random Comic: Robot President

Taking a page heavily from Chainsaw Suit, I present Robot President:

Indies Flash Class- Week 2

Lip Sync!



We created a character with a nested mouth symbol and we lip synched an audio file they provided. I ended up having extra time so I animated the eyes too.

They liked it!

I was accepted into the Indies Flash Class! I'm beside myself... I also just found out it'll be held at the studio that creates Metalacolypse. This is crazy exciting!

Tried out for a Flash Class

I've been attending a Traditional Animation class offered by the Animation Guild and this week my instructor sent out a link to a Flash competition. As it turns out, local Los Angeles Flash animation studios are banding together to offer a professional Flash animation course that's free, but you have to compete to gain entry. You download a test, make an animation, and resubmit it with a resume. By the time I received the e-mail with the link and began to compete I had only 3 days to make an animation. I tried my best, and here's the result:



It's pretty stiff competition... there are only 24 seats and its open to ANYONE in Los Angeles. Even if I don't get in, although I hope I do, I'm proud I was able to put this together and meet the deadline... with an hour and a half to spare (a new record)! According to the contest website winners will be notified starting May 5th. I'm all a-twitter!

Redrawn Robot

I used to draw a webcomic more frequently and one of my favorite things to give/receive is gift art, with someone else's character drawn in your style, or vice versa. I found out one of my old webcomic buddies had a kid recently, so I took his titular character from Girl/Robot and redrew him!

Original:


Redrawn:

Comic- plight

Nope!

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

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.

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!

Pony Animation v3, and learnings

I said last month I was going to upload model sheets of the characters I'm (attempting) to animate but then I realized I'm trying to emulate a style where there is no consistent way of drawing a character. Here's a rough version of the animation:



I mostly worked on this when I had a lot of free time (read: unemployed) and so it's fallen by the wayside. But! I'm trying to jump back into Flash in a big way so not only am I going to finish this animation (or as near as I can get it), I'm also reading a big book on Actionscript 3.0. The goal is to broaden my skillset to include Maya and Flash, as well as any relevant programming languages I can get a grip on.

UPDATE holy crap

Hey all! I've graduated from UCF with a degree in Digital Media: Visual Language and I've since moved out west to California! I've got an apartment, a job, and I'm stil alive to boot!

So many things going on. Work keeps me busy and I was surprised to find out the average workday in the CG industry is 9am-7pm (bummer).

I trying to decide which "path" I want to try to follow- 3D or 2D, animator or rigger, or Production. All interest me heavily but it's hard finding the time to work on personal stuff for the more art-related fields (animation especially).

Speaking of personal animation I'm in the process (ie, started but shelved due to lack of time) of animating a comic from one of my favorite authors, Kate Beaton. You can read the comic here.

Hopefully I can find the time to finish that up. I'll post the character sheets later too.

I'm also working on webcomics to keep me dedicated to art every day and you can view them here.

Update and Evolution of a Scene

Lots of news since my last post which was, good lord, almost a year ago. We finished our movie, Ladybug Action Hero, and I'll try to get some scenes that I worked on up. I've graduated from UCF with a BA in Digital Media/Visual Language and I'm planning to move out to LA by the end of July.

I've also been involved in a bumper (intro) for a local TV show in New York City. I don't know if I can say which one or show that much of it, but in the process of creating the animation I made many, many graduated saves. I went back through them and took several interval versions of the same animations and uploaded them to YouTube so you could see the progress one shot went through, from start to finish:

Beat Board

Lack of updates due to nothing actually being technically "due." Deadlines are now starting to take effect, so here's a beat board.

A "beat board" is a single frame that sums up an entire sequence from the movie. This way, you can look at 12 frames and get the "feel" of the entire movie and story. I was assigned the "comic book" opening sequence. Below is the rough layout I scanned and below that is what I churned out in Flash.

Artificial Environments and Effects Final

For our final assignment we had to break down the movie once more based on the winner's idea (thus, reinterpreting it). For our group, my role was to create the plan view and elevation.

Plan View:


Elevation:

Texture assignment

An extension to the "Pallette Swap" assignment. We had to take the three pallette pictures and apply different motifs of textures to them to elicit different moods.

Idea Illustration

For Artificial Environments and Effects, we we were given idea topics to illustrate. I was given "Lust" and "Death." Since we had to get the topic across as easily and as visually digestibly as possible, we were instructed to look at advertisements or guerilla marketing.

See if you can figure out which is which. Should be easy.

Finalized breakdowns

These were all part of my pitch for my take on our senior movie:

Plan view:


Elevation


Illustrations:

Preliminary Breakdowns

In Artificial Environments and Effects we're breaking down our senior movie "Ladybug Action Hero's" script. We were assigned to individually break down the action into plan views (bird's eye view) and elevations (profile view). Here are the first versions I created:

Plan view:


Elevation1:


Elevation 2: