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.

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 :)

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.

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

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. :/

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.

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

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

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.

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.