Crack of Dawn - 48-Hour Lockdown Film (with sound!)

Here it is, my lockdown film for this year... (which wasn't really made in 48 hours... shhh..!) This year's word was night, and it produced a really awesome lockdown show. My short however premiered without sound for some reason I'm not smart enough to understand, but it's been fixed now. Anyway, enjoy!

Flies and Monst'as

Things have been busy!! Also, it's the 48-Hour Lockdown week, so look for a lockdown post in the near future! If I'm still conscious.

Cooking up second year.

Okay that was an awful post title, but I have chef drawings here and there was no other choice.

So a summer of fun, learning, and back breaking labor has ended! I couldn't have dreamed of a better experience, and there's no way I can thank those enough who helped me grow over the break. But now it's back to school at Calarts as an official second year!

It's been great getting to see everyone again and people seem pretty pumped for sophomore year, and even more have film ideas ready to go. Woo! I really wanna focus on my animation this year... So the faster my story and stuff solidifies the better.

And so here are some chefs from an assignment in character design class with Rik Maki (TAKE THIS CLASS. IT IS FANTASTIC)

A post from the Past.

...uhhh... Got nothing else to post, so here's a bunch of old film stuff!

Recently my harddrive went berserk and caused the destruction of all my files. I found some videos of rough animation and old story reels of my film as I sifted through my back up drive, so I thought I'd upload them! And most of my files are intact thankfully, film included.

First off are some images from my portfolio with some Leonardo, cat and dog development. Also some drawings of the city.




































































Here is the first story reel pass from my film. The entire beginning had to be restructured. I liked the pacing of this intro better, but in reality, there was both no time and no seconds to spare. The actual animation went way over time from the reel, which was a huge headache to trim down from what I had planned.


And here is the entire second semester of my life, animation! Or 70% of it. Here is most of the pencil test animation from my film, some parts rushed, some parts even more rushed. Would have done a lot differently looking back on it.. namely with better drawings =P.

If you notice in the animation where Leon is running with his back turned to the screen dodging traffic and what not, he is not holding the plank of wood in his hand after having picked it up from the fence near the dog. After I had cleaned, scanned, alpha channeled and composited one of the longest animation sequences in my film, I made the horrific discovery he was missing the damn plank of wood. I had to go back, erase and redraw that arm with the plank in his hand, rescan, re-alpha channel, and re-composite again right in the middle of crunch!! Somehow I lived.

First Year Film: Leonardo's Chase

It's still crunch time!!

Yesterday some of us dropped by Disney Studios for the Inspire Days held there. We got to attend various panels covering everything from 2d and 3D animation to Layout and Story. The highlight however was the visit to the Feature Animation Studio, and my freaking God. It was awesome. I haven't felt so happy and giddy leaving a place since my first trip to Calarts. We saw Mario Furmanczyk's cube and his Princess and the Frog footage chart, and man, it was amazing to see how far he's come. Once a student at Calarts and now animating on the feature bringing 2d animation back to the big screen. It was amazing! We also saw Jen Hager's chart, another graduate from 06.

It was really super inspiring and I'm set to work as hard as I can to improve! Although I'm unsure I'll always feel this way... I think I want to become a feature animator! But I need to learn how to draw better first- my draftsmanship is sorely lacking... But eitherway, I'm inspired as hell and all of you should be looking very forward to Princess and the Frog, coming this November!

Anyway, I need to get back to film production. It's still crunch time which means more sleep deprivation than usual. With that, I'll leave this post with my animation assignments from last semester in Mike Nguyen's class.

It's Crunch time! Five Weeks Left...

Well, it's still my first year at Calarts, but I'm pretty sure we've entered what seems to be the beginnings of crunch time. Everyone is stressing over their films, myself included. I'm just barely at a third complete of my film, and yet so much remains to be done with only a fraction of the time. I'm either going to have to work harder than I ever have in my life to complete one of the largest projects I have ever undertaken, or leave the year with an incomplete film. Personally, I am promising myself to avoid the latter at all costs. How exactly I'm planning to do that, I have no clue. But what I do have is this: a short, short snippet of animation from my film. Needs some more editing, sound and music, but visually it's near-final. It's using the background from a couple of posts ago. Sorry no story details or any more previews for now, but stay tuned till April to see Leonardo's adventure in Venice in a (hopefully) finished state.

AHHH. A late, LATE update!!

GAHH. CRAP. I haven't updated in forever.

Well, second semester is in full swing which means there's lots of work to go around. It's film season people! Everyone's working hard on their films, busy boarding, thumbnailing and animating. First year films have to be under 90 seconds long, and I'm personally having tons of trouble fitting my film under that limit. I'll probably just make my 2 minute target film and cut the fat out to 90 seconds once all is said and done.

Anyway, a quick recap of the semester so far. A LOT OF AWESOME CRAP HAPPENED.

To start the year off with a bang, we had a 2-week, 4 part lecture from James Baxter himself animating a scene using Giselle and a rabbit from Enchanted. It was really informative and interesting to see a professional's workflow in animating a feature-quality scene.

Amazing animator! Thanks for the lecture!

The director of Kung-Fu Panda, Mark Osborne dropped by for a lecture too, and let a lot of insight into his experemental background and approach to directing KFP.

Thank you for making an awesome Dreamworks movie.

We also had the awesome, awesome Shane Prigmore and Shannon Tindle give a 2-week lecture on character design and their work on Coraline. What's even better is that they assigned us to make character designs based on Oliver Twist characters. Shane's awesome work.

Shannon's awesome work.

They came in and reviewed EVERY SINGLE DESIGN late into the night. It's not enough that these guys are crazy talented, but they're even nicer too! I'll take this chance to plug Coraline. Seriously, go see it. CORALINE. GO SEE IT. My horrible work. This is my take on Oliver.

John Khars and Clay Caytis from the animation podcast came down from Disney to give critiques on any animation we had, along with some people from Pixar. Needless to say I learned a ton from both my critiques and thier insight from others too. For my animation they pointed out that I need to act out my scenes, and note how body parts move in motion. And they're totally right! I usually animate without acting out anything before hand, but I'm slowly trying to researh motion and acting into my animation. AHHHG~ I LOVE ANIMATING. Ahem. John Khars is also coming down this week for a lecture too, exciting!

Dan Holland from Pixar came by this year to talk about character design too. If you've stuck around my blog for a bit, I wrote about Dan Holland coming last year too when I came to visit Calarts. It's freaking crazy that a year ago I visited and was totally blown away by the students, the 48-Lockdown and a Pixar lecture. A year later, here I am making a first year film. Damn awesome. But hard ass work.

Anyway, I'm really happy about the support we're getting from Disney animators coming down to critique our stuff and help us improve. Shane and Shannon may also return during Film crunch time and lend a hand.

My own film is onto the animation stage with some partially completed scenes. I'd say I'm about 30% done though, so there's still shit tons to do. But I'm having so much fun with this film, with my main character Leonardo, learning how to animate quadrapeds, painting the backgrounds... it's freaking fun. I just hope I can finish it, heh. Anyway, I'll post again with more details on my film. And maybe some partially complete footage too. For now, Here's one of the many watercolor backgrounds for my film I'm doing. More to come! Hopefully.