Saturday, September 27, 2008

Videos!!

I FINALLY found a website that will upload my videos besides YouTube and the videos are up. Unfortunately........... my Jump video isn't uploading through YouTube or Putfile so you guys will miss out until I just convert my video tape completely into digital. Sorry :P Feedback will be great..

Click here to watch 'Ball-Bounce-Animation'(Keep in mind it's a soccer ball)

Click here to watch 'Cartoony-Ball-Bounce'

Troublesome

I really wish that I could show you guys my animation videos, but every time I load them into Youtube they just sit there "Processing" for hours on end and nothing ever happens to them. I'm tempted to just take them from video and convert them over onto the computer on a different format. Apparently, Youtube is having issues with large Quicktime files. So far I have my ball bounce animation, my cartoony ball bounce animation, and my jump animation. If all else fails, I'm going to try and find another place that will upload my videos.

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Mind Numbing

If there is anything I hate more in TV Land, it's horrible programs like the OC and everything related to it. I'm sitting in class and I'm overhearing other students praise the awesomeness that these and reality TV shows are. Ugh.. I honestly can't believe people watch these kinds of shows.

Anyhow, we are getting into doing double takes for our animation class. I'm watching my Looney Tunes DVDs for some inspiration, and I noticed John K's blog mentioned Tex Avery's genius of doing the perfect double take. We are going to try and do inanimate objects doing these double takes. I just have to figure out a decent inanimate object. I have a feeling this is going to be pretty hard. The object has got to walk into frame, turn to look at something, look back continue walking, then do the double take but completely turn the object and make it wacky. Stretching, squashing it, spinning it, as long as it's "looney" I suppose.

So now I got to find that kind of double take. I agree with John K saying it seems like Tex Avery made cartoons just for the double takes. I just have to find something similar for reference. I can vaguely remember some Bugs Bunny cartoons where he walks along looking depressed, looks at something, then does a double take of it. I'll just have to try and find it.

Anyone have any advice on double takes? I'd much appreciate it :)

Thursday, September 4, 2008

My Childhood

Ever since I began to read, I always loved to read comics. Not the Marvel or DC comics, but the comics in the newspaper. I used to love reading Peanuts, figuring what Snoopy was up to while Charlie Brown was gone. I liked to read others, but I found myself skimming through all the colorful panels looking for something to catch my eye until I read Calvin and Hobbes. I became an instant fan of Bill Watterson's work.



I always saw myself like Calvin, having such a crazy imagination and coming up with different ways to make any normal day seem like an adventure. Whenever I went to a Crown Book Store, I had my mom buy me one of the many volumes that were out for purchase. Every time I got a new book, I'd spend all night reading it and taking it with me when I went to school.

To say I was a huge fan is an understatement. I used to actually come up with a game of CalvinBall. If you are familiar with the comic strip, Calvin Ball was this made up game by Calvin and Hobbes where the rules were a twist of every sport imaginable with a sprinkle of zaniness. I had a bunch of younger kids as friends when I was in elementary school and they were always up for whatever I could come up with to play. Calvin Ball was a mixture of tag, basketball, freeze tag, pickle, and dodge ball. You got points for every safe zone you got to and we used a basketball court as our play area.



I also remember taking the graphic novels with me to class and asking the teacher if I could recite the poetry that Bill Watterson had added to some of his large books. I remember imagining myself as Spaceman Spiff, sitting in class as our teacher interrogated us for our homework or math problems.



One day I decided I'd be brave and try sending a letter to Bill Watterson. I asked him numerous questions as to if there would ever be a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon, and if there would be if I could play Calvin's voice. I specifically remember asking him that question with high hopes he'd reply with an "Oh yes of course you can!" One day I came home from little league and there was a letter for me with Calvin being pounced through the letter by Hobbes. I was so excited I threw all my equipment into my room and dashed back to the kitchen to open it carefully with a knife.

Inside was a cute Calvin and Hobbes stationary stating along the lines that Bill was really busy and gets a ton of mail but he appreciates the letter. I felt a little upset, but also inside the envelope folded up nicely was an actual printed out comic with Calvin and Susie. I felt a little better and I have kept this letter with me even to this day.

Reading and re-reading the Sunday comics was the only thing I enjoyed on Sundays. If the comic made me laugh or grin stupidly, I would cut it out of the newspaper and tape them up on my wall. Eventually, I had almost an entire wall covered in Calvin and Hobbes cut up comic strips. It looked like a mess because of all the tape but I loved to re-read the comics each time I went by to my closet for something. I specifically remember this one being my favorite:



The one thing I really admired about Bill Watterson was his imagination and his incredible drawings. Especially his backgrounds. If you ever take the time to re-read some of his comics, you'll notice the incredible backgrounds especially in his Spaceman Spiff comics. He never really half-asses his work unless there was a punch line coming up



I loved the humor Bill Watterson gave in each of his strips, some of which were so beyond my time that I'll often re-read a panel and laugh hysterically over the subtle adult humor it had. That really reminded me a lot of the old Looney Tunes cartoons where some jokes you never got as a kid, but older you realize just how funny it was.

You can imagine how stunned and shocked I was when Bill Watterson announced he was ending Calvin and Hobbes series. I felt somehow betrayed and a little lonesome that I wouldn't be reading new adventures of Calvin and Hobbes. When the last comic came out that Sunday, I cut it out and saved it along with my letter and other cut outs from the Sunday comics. To this day I still read the large thick Calvin and Hobbes volumes that are stored under my bed. I still miss the feeling of waking up to a Sunday morning and finding my way to the kitchen table where the comics had already been placed aside for me.

Here's to Bill Watterson, the man who got me into cartoons and taught me to never give up my childhood imagination. Thanks Bill for everything.

Saturday, August 23, 2008

Doodles o Doodley

This is all I do in my down time while I'm working. I tear off a pad of paper and start drawing things around me for practice. I need some more practice with human anatomy though. I really need to take some classes for it :P




Monday, August 18, 2008

Kinkos Issues

Alright, so after dinner I went to Kinkos to print out my final project. The guy tells me he can't print them at the moment because there's someone ahead of me and they are printing on the same machine that does the wide format printing and they are doing like a few thousand copies. So I ask if I could leave the pictures there and come back in a little while to pick them up. He said sure and he took my thumbdrive to receive the pictures. He takes a look at the pictures and tells me he won't print them for me due to copyright laws. I was shocked and angry. Sure, I understand about that but it's not like I'm going to give these to a bunch of people, sell them, or use them in any way to benefit myself except for a grade. He still tells me he won't do them. I tell him, "Look, I don't have a wide format printer. I need this printed tonight so I can work on it and turn it in for a grade for my FINAL tomorrow morning." He ignores my pleas and tells me he won't print them anyway.

So in a cross mood, I think about my options. I want to call Joe and ask him what I should do, but I don't have anyone's number that would be able to help me out. I figured I would just go in early to the student printer center at CSUN and have them do it and I could rush through everything putting it together. My brother recommended we go to Staples, but I wasn't sure if we would have the same issues or not. Instead, we went across the street to Officemax where they were more than happy to help me out and make 2 copies so I could construct one brochure together and keep the others as just a flat layout.

So thanks to Officemax I got my work done. And if anybody is curious, Hewlett Packard has a great cheap wide format printer on sale over there for $249.99 and it does for the largest 13x19 format printing. The ink is cheap and the machine seems pretty solid. I may purchase one for myself because I'm tired of all the hassle.

Last Week

I'm practically done with my project, just gotta work on the front page a bit. As for the projects that are due today, I haven't completed them to the exact detail.. but I don't think it really matters as long as we know the process of it all. Otherwise I'd like to concentrate on our project more. The front page is becoming a bit of a hassle to complete because I can't find any animation desks I can use and make a rough draft drawing of the Looney Tunes intro on it. Most of them are too small or not at the right angle. I'd take a picture of it myself, but I'm afraid I don't know where to go to take a picture of one. That, and it's due tomorrow and I have hardly any time to go taking a bunch of pictures, edit the lighting, and make them perfect to just work with.

And with that, after class ends tomorrow I'll have.. what, half a week to enjoy my summer? I kinda wanted to go camping this week, but I doubt my fiancee has the time off to do it. We might hit Descanso Gardens for more pictures. Speaking of which, we got free tickets to go to a concert over the weekend. It ended up being a Pop-jazz concert which we weren't expecting. We got there late and we had to sneak into the front row during a pause in the music. There were at least 800 people at the gardens there to watch the concert. We left about 20 minutes after we got there because we couldn't stand the conductor's over annunciation of every word, her cocky attitude about how great she was, and the music itself just wasn't what we expected. How nice would it have been if it were classical music being played in the gardens at dusk? It would've been marvelous.. oh well. :/

Thursday, August 14, 2008

Warner Bros. Cartoons Time line

So I decided to do a time line on Warner Bros. Cartoon Studio in it's golden age to when they shut down and developed Warner Bros. Animation Studio. I've learned quite a bit about the studio and some new information on the animators. Overall, I'm really enjoying this project. For the past two days I've been working on this brochure and grabbing snapshots from the many Looney Tunes DVDs that I have so I can place them in the brochure. Today was the critique of our rough drafts and I got some good reviews I suppose you could say. I'll post up what I have. Keep in mind it's a brochure. I will try to describe how it should fold.. So first you have the cover page(The cover page on the picture is white, I'm still working on it). Then you open it up and you see two pages there that fold out (These two pages are the pictures of the infamous Looney Tunes main screen with Bugs Bunny laying on the Warner Bros logo). So these two pages would open up and inside there is a large 4 page layout (This is the large 4 white spread). And the back of the brochure is Bugs Bunny sitting in the traditional Looney Tunes drum that Porky Pig would normally bust out of.

Somebody asked me why I just didn't use Porky, and I just think using Porky to end the brochure would be a little over done. So instead I have him on the inside brochure where it ends. I dunno, something different. I like all the red too.





Friday, August 8, 2008

Timeline.

So our next project is on the horizon, and it's about a timeline. This really got my head working, maybe I'll do it on airplanes, muscle cars, or animation.. I still can't decide. Animation sounds like it'd be fun, but I know more about muscle cars.. for now. I gotta do my research though, and maybe I'll find some inspiration tomorrow at Disneyland. I'm sure I will though. I think Disney really started the animation progress that made way for Warner Brothers. It's so funny how different both companies were and yet how alike they were.

Well, we'll see. And if anybody has a Facebook or Myspace account, be sure to add me. I'd like to stay in contact with everybody after class is over.

My Myspace is: http://www.myspace.com/sephiros

And my Facebook is: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/profile.php?id=681829031

Thursday, August 7, 2008

Final Renditions

Well, I finally finished up the posters. I kept the theme of a comic book cover with all of them so they could relate. I tried to switch it up, but I figured if I had done different text and different shapes with the other posters it wouldn't have looked as if they were alike or were related in any way.

So here we are, I'm happy with how they turned out. I went to the print center on campus and they really messed up on what I wanted, so I went to Kinkos and had it done there. I thought the quality turned out much better than at the printer center. Just throwing that out there! :P Here are the posters.


The Incredibles



Finding Nemo



Wall-e

Monday, August 4, 2008

What I Got

Thanks to my busy work schedule I didn't get a lot of time to work on my posters, so I stayed up all night to work on them so they'll be presentable to the class for critique. Tell me what you think, I know there's room for improvement on them and i really would like some feedback.



Thursday, July 31, 2008

More Sketches

And here are more sketches from Pixar.

Incredibles: This is the one I'll actually be trying to do for my poster.



Nemo: The first picture is the one I'll be doing.




Wall-e:








And here are a bunch of Kill Bill sketches that I won't be using, but I thought they were entertaining.











Film Festival Update

Hey all, I thought I'd update everyone (anyone) on the film festival posters that I'm doing. I talked with Justin on our field trip to the Ventura Printing place and he also wanted to do Tarantino. We discussed ideas we had, and we both decided that we would do some thumbnails for all the movies we wanted to do and let Joe decided which ones were working for us.

I came up with some ideas for Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill, and Kill Bill 2. While I was in the hospital with Mandy and her mom, I came up with an idea for Reservoir Dogs.



I thought it looked awesome. If you haven't seen the movie or have seen the movie and just don't understand, it's the ties and names that were given to the guys doing the robbery job. Each guy got a name, which was a color. Except for Mr. Blonde. so i just put a dirty blonde color in there. I know some people will call fowl because there were 6 members in the team and not 5. But you know what, Tarantino was not added because he's a director and not an actor :P So we had.. Mr. White, Mr. Pink, Mr. Orange, Mr. Blue, Mr. Blonde.. and Tarantino was Mr. Brown.

I had some ideas for Kill Bill, but I wanted it all to look kind of like what I had for Reservoir Dogs. Mandy had the brilliant idea of suggesting the use of snakes, because each of the members on this assasination squad was named after a snake. Best of all, there were 5 of them! Just like the Reservoir Dogs ties that I had posted up. So I was going to do something like that. But I had also made a ton of Pixar sketches to do just in case.

Joe looked at both my Pixar and Tarantino films and he loved my Pixar sketches more so than the Tarantino. I was fine with the decision, infact, I think I'll really enjoy doing the Pixar films over the Tarantino. So I told Justin he can do Tarantino, so I am curious what he comes up with.

I am going to scan in my Pixar sketches when I get home, but the idea for all of them would be taking a real picture of the scenario to give it a 3-D feel without it being made on a computer. Of course I'll touch it up in Photoshop, but I like idea and so does Joe.

*Update*

So I'm at home now, here are some sketches I came up with for the Pixar Film Festival which I am calling "Pix Flix"

Here's one for The Incredibles



And some for Finding Nemo



Monday, July 28, 2008

Final Decision

So i made up my mind, and I'll be doing the Tarantino Film Festival. I might work on the name. But the movies I'll be doing are hm.. I think I just changed my mind on one of them, but I'll be doing Kill Bill, Reservoir Dogs, and either Pulp Fiction or Boondock Saints.

I'd post some pictures, but i just got word that my fiance's sister is in the emergency room right now so I have to book it over to her place ASAP.

Friday, July 25, 2008

Film Festival ideas

So this next project has got me a bit excited, we are doing a film festival poster. Well, we are doing three. It can be on three films a director did, three films a specific actor did, or three films that all relate to one another. When I first heard of this I wanted to do Clint Eastwood or some sort of tribute to Spaghetti Westerns. Then as I went through it all, I thought "What about Pixar?" then "Johnny Depp movies would be fun.." and of course "Quentin Tarantino would be a fun one too.."

So here's what I'd have

For the Spaghetti Westerns/Clint Easwood I'd do: The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly, A Fistful of Dollars, and For a Few Dollars More.

Then for Pixar I'd do: Toy Story, Finding Nemo, and The Incredibles. I might even drop Toy Story and put Wall-e in there for fun.

Johnny Depp movies I'd do: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Ninth Gate.

And finally the Tarantino films would be: Kill Bill, Reservoir Dogs, and Pulp Fiction.

I've been doing some thumbnail sketches on them all to get an idea as to which would be my best bet. All of them I could do passionately, it'd be hard to really pick the one I'd love to do more though. HELP! lol

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Completed

So here it is, the finished product. It isn't what i expected when I first started it, but I like it. If i were to go back and try using the real photos, I would probably have actual pictures of someone that I would take and alter myself. I can't deal with these stock photos.

Poster Ideas

So here are some of the ideas I've come up with. First it's a poster I took straight out of my sketching.



To be fair, I didn't have a lot of time to work on this. So I know the font still needed to be experimented with and the overall look of it needed to be improved. From here I moved onto this one.



I was getting a little tired of having this realistic look and then using brushes and textures to play with it to try and make it how I want it to be. I wish I had someone who actually had some ski goggles, a mask, and a large jumper I could take pictures of to get the exact picture I want rather than settling. Anyway, at this point I wanted to play with Illustrator.



I liked it, much better. I'd probably crop some of it out though and work on it. This got me inspired to do something more abstract, and I looked for a speed skater up close. Unfortunately.. like usual.. I couldn't find what I was looking for. But I found this picture, and I thought it may work well after I made it abstract. Here are my renditions of it.



I really like how it came out, but I changed it up a bit a few times and I think I like this one more.



And in a bit I'll be off to class to see what everyone else thinks.

Monday, July 21, 2008

Poster Ideas..

So over the weekend I came up with a few sketches for a poster design. I am trying to go for something different when it comes to the sports aspect of the poster. For example, everyone has the standard person jumping off the ski jump, or an ice skater doing a trick as they capture that moment and throw it onto the poster. I want to have more of a look of anticipation or a sense of focus that we see in the athlete's eyes. That look of determination, which I think is what really is what the Olympics is all about. We aren't all just born with the ability to run fast, we have to practice and get better at it.

Last week I had a few sketches already done for class, and Joe really liked the one where I had just focused in on a skiers face. So all you see is half of their reflective goggles and a slight bit of their face. But not enough to really say if who you were looking at was either male or female. And that's something I kind of want to get across. That what you are looking at could be anyone, maybe even the viewer if they desire to. I'll have my roughs up when I get home. In the mean time, what does everybody think?

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Oslo Complete

Well after tinkering with it, I have made the final version. After some critiques in class, I changed it a bit so people could see the viking ship more clearly. I could see the ship pretty well, but if nobody else can then we have a problem. After changing it, I asked Joe if I should add some wave effects to it. He told me to send him a picture through AIM or email and he would give his input when he sees it. After altering it, I was pretty happy with how it was turning out. He liked it too, so here we are on the final print of my Oslo logo.



I'm off to the printing center to get it printed on an 11x17inch wide paper so I can turn it in on Thursday. I already have some sketches of what I may do for the poster so I'll post them later.

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Oslooo

I'm getting to the point where I am tired of seeing the word Oslo, the capital of Norway. I've gone through a bunch of different fonts and I've come up with only a few that I really like. As promised, this is what I've come up with.



It's come a long way from my rough sketches, but I feel like I'm missing something with it. My brother wants me to add sails to it, but I think it would just clutter things up. We'll see how it all turns out I guess. I'm hoping with some comments from not only my professor but other students and friends that I can improve this.