Floating Lady

So our assignment for Visual Storytelling was to make 4 panels after this image:

After a bunch of doodling, I came up with this sequence (read left to right):

8.5x11 folded twice, done with pencil hence smudgapalooza.

 The critiques I mostly got with this sequence was:
-Panel 2 had 2 things happening- the primary point I wanted was someone getting out as the second dude was making a call. The solution was to push back the secondary one and try to show the first more clearly.
-Panel 3 and 4 were redundant, in that both were showing the man about to take his glove off. Every panel should be bringing in new information and insight. So panel 3 ought to be indicating his approach to the body, and panel 4 reveals what's underneath the glove he's taking off. Also the depiction of taking the glove off was not clear and the focus (oooh shiny hand) in panel 4 was too low and ought to be in the center of the frame.

Storyboards Mark also critiqued on, my stuff are in the lower right. 

Digital do over, applying the critiques. 

Poses are Fun

So our class assignment was to create a whole bunch of poses.

It was an overtly vague prompt so I just did what I always do which was doodle my characters interacting with one another. GGK was the first and easiest set to do mostly because I haven't drawn them for a very long time, compared with Necromancer and Silhouette where I think I used up all the usual kinds of interactions between themselves. XD

Even though I worried a bit, I found out soon enough I pretty much went overboard with this one compared to my other classmates. My teacher gave me a lot of good notes about why my poses worked and not, and I jotted it down for reference.

Makes me uber glad I got into comic making first.

Breaking Down Animal Walk Cycle

Pete Doctor in CCA

Pixar's Pete Doctor (Monsters Inc., Up) came to our school Monday night to give a short talk on like how the movie Up came to be and generally the work and effort of thousands of artists and life and so on.

Stuff that I got out from his talks were these:

-When Pete was younger, he always thought Disney came up with stuff just like this: 

Turns out, life doesn't work like that. (Though sometimes I wish it did).

-In terms of the debate between realistic 3d and or motion capture, vs the stylized kind of animation, Pete threw out this general question: There's real life and then there's caricature- which do you prefer to watch (as an animation)?  Caricature wins over the other because people will always want to see someone else's point of view. (Not to mention botched realistic 3d leads to the uncanny valley problem which turns people off alot, for examples see the Polar Express or Mars needs Moms). 

-Do your research. Regardless of department, you can't just pull things out of thin air. As an old teacher of mine says, 'You put out what you put in'. 

-Find what you're in it for.I think this is important as knowing why you're willing to do the labor of work expected for an animator in order not to grow stagnant or embittered or jaded over time. 

-Do not attach yourself, or your worth to your goals. Pete mentions that people who tie their self-worth to a goal in mind (eg. I will become a director!) burn out really fast when they are faced with disappointment (eg. ending up in the special effects dept) and thinking they have failed tremendously in the grand scheme of things. 

-The last bit of advice I jotted down wasn't really geared towards animation but rather in directing Voice Actors. It helps that instead of telling a VA 'sound more/be more angry', you can help the VA better by giving them a playful direction or idea in their heads like 'Punish this guy/ make them remember this day for the rest of their lives' because it allows the VA to not just sound like a character but act out with full intentions how they think the character would be.

Ended the talk with some signature signing and doodling, and that's how I got my Kevin bird doodle on my notebook. 

Last Day of School

Oppermann's little note on my Final Portfolio

Last day of class was freaking lovely. We all voted last week not to have to come to class at the usual 9 am (or 7am to catch 8am bus) so we met up at the campus gallery at 12 and there were donuts too. :3 Our final, besides submitting the portfolios was choosing maybe 5 pieces from said portfolio to be critiqued by both teacher and classmates. Surprisingly, a lot of us didn't pick for our 5 pieces works our teacher and classmates considered a whole lot better. As the note above said, some pieces I had chosen for her to ignore, she went and looked and preferred. 

Overall my critique that I got from the class was more or the less the same thing I've heard over the semester and midterm: I am lightning fast when it comes to locking down a gesture or pose (which she calls my talent), but oftentimes in my speed I already have like a pre-set model form in my head that in terms of capturing the human form, my drawings become generic or bland. I also have this tendency to stiffen up on longer poses because (again) I lock down on a pose fast, I spend the rest of time fussing so much about things that I overdo things. The biggest advice I got from her was to slow down, really look at my models carefully, pull back/ think carefully like where I should add another line or paint a shadow. Oh and also to take risks and mess up; if she never minded us having bad drawing, why should we? 

We finished up before the next school bus came so I wandered around the galleries checking out the Illustrations and Painting Thesis galleries (gorgeous stuff, as expected) and then for fun I bum watched this Architecture class whose finals were making these straw towers in what fashion, then were clamped to the wall and their points had to be able support weights dangling in a bucket. 

I think they pass if the towers don't break after maybe 5 pounds.

It was fun seeing the different structure designs and seeing what did or didn't work: some snapped or broke after a couple of weights, one tower snapped off his wooden base, and one fell apart from the 1st weight. The most interesting one was the one that, while the tower (the doodle to the back) collapsed on it's 'sections', it was still holding on to the bucket; even after 15 pounds! And when the teacher finally yanked the bucket out the whole thing magically went back to being a straight tower.