Green Ninja!

It's finally online! I'm proud of this episode since I co-directed it with Samia Khalaf and we had an awesome team consisting of

(click on their names for their blogs!)
Vis Dev
Leslie Wyatt, Maaike Scherff, Stella Longfish.
Animation
John Kleckner, Chelsea Holt, Danielle Harmon, Matt White, Natalie Corsie, Heather Gregersen, Arturo Miramontes.

and produced by Revathi Kotni!

The Green Ninja Project is a collaborative effort started in San Jose State where students and faculty come together to promote climate science and solutions to current world problems.

Samia approached me with the idea of a video game themed episode and I thought it was really cool so I hopped on board. We went through a couple revisions of story, style, and at one point since we thought it would be mainly just us two, to have it as a motion comic style where animation is minimal and we would rely more on illustrations. Eventually we went back to the video game idea and gathered a crew together to pull it off! We worked on it most of last semester then myself and Samia edited it over winter break. I'm pretty happy with how it came out and glad we had an enthusiastic team for it.

So this older animatic had a couple of problems. It had more of a storytelling aspect to it rather than video game and it had no ending.

Here are some sweet notes we got from Dave to simplify and to incorporate the solutions to climate change into the fighting moves.

The animatic we made to address the notes and the final below! Originally it was going to be silent with captions but it felt empty so in the end they have voices!

Personal Film!

With all the BFA projects and other projects happening, I decided it would be smart to also work on a personal film project during any free time I don't have! Just in case it somehow get's done in the future I won't give out much detail about the story but basically it's about a reverse relationship between man and parrot. This being the first time I started completely digitally for a film project, I wanted to share my progress so far! (This is in Flash)

This shot is not too complicated, the parrot is watching tv, hears the coo coo clock, and realizes it's feeding time. Here is a rough animatic for it done by Samia Khalaf.

For my first pass I just wanted to try moving this new character in space and get overall timing close to what I was thinking from the animatic. 

I felt it was a little simple so I tried changing the action in a second pass. After looking at some parrot videos I made his turn quicker like parrots do. Trying to get the subtle movements down is tricky but in Flash at least it's faster and easier to inbetween.

So I have a lot more to go but so far really enjoying working on this thing!

Behind my Behind!

That was the title of the film project I worked on over the summer, directed and created by David Chai! This one I felt was a real challenge because none of us on the crew ever did stop-motion animation so the whole process was a good learning experience for us all.

Some character sheets I made for the main character

Before I get to the stop motion part I'll go over what I did for the 2D side. The film is about Ernest Knapp, a man who feels miserable with life until one day he discovers something right in his own home. My first task was to animate people in a subway train with Ernest, then a bunch of other people piling in and squishing him.

Although that wasn't always the case, the original animatic had Ernest just sad on the train.

This is the animatic for the updated version.

I really liked all of Dave's design for the subway characters so I wanted to keep it as close as I could to them. Here they are one by one.

and here's the finished version! Inked by Melissa Paff, background by Catharina Sukiman.

For stop motion shots we had to animate in pencil first to get rough planning and timing for the shot to make it easier on us noobies. Luckily it turned out to be more helpful than we thought since we found out in DragonFrame you can import a video file and follow it frame by frame! My shot was Ernest blowing a kiss. This was hard because I had to get the right feeling of longing, loving, sentimental and happiness.

The animatic for the shot.

My first test for it was too happy and carefree.

 He needed to feel nostalgic and sad but a happy sadness like he's moved on.

After getting somewhat close, next came animating it with puppets! The fabrication part was challenging as well. We only had one person creating the puppet the entire time as she had the most experience and access to the lab equipment. The awesome Rosie Diaz had to go through many trials and errors with different types of puppets before the final one was made.

Here's two early versions she made before casting and molding the final version, which is on my head.

Animating this guy was fun and challenging. It got a little frustrating sure when it wouldn't cooperate the way we wanted it to but we had to make do with what we had! We would use other people to help hold the puppet while another person animated and took the pictures. I learned a lot from stop motion, in traditional and CG animation the movement is thought out and can be easily manipulated, for our set up since the puppet wasn't really held down, we had to be quick and hope the shot in the end would work. It was amazing how little and how large you would have to move him for the pose you want to work.

With the help of Samia Khalaf, we were able to create this shot in the end. I'm very pleased with it and feel we kept it pretty close to the original!

A little bit of rest

YO, I had this giant post written up then something happened with Blogger then I lost it all. So this will be a quicker 3 in the morning version of my semester. Basically it was busy and crazy and to show for it I have 5 oil paintings, 3 animation shots, and a short film called Hello Debra. From my oil painting class I'm only really satisfied with the recent one I posted and our last portrait painting on which I did Ollie Johnston. I went over Hello Debra on another post and I can't put up the final film since we're sending it to festivals so I'll mostly talk about Raquel's advanced animation in this post!

Ollie Painting

I learned a lot from doing these dialogue shots in class. Keeping in mind everything I learned about body mechanics, now I had to incorporate lip syncing, more character performance, subtleties and general appeal. I also learned that I take almost forever picking a dialogue so after hours and hours I finally came across Adam Sandler yelling "You blew it!" from Billy Madison.

The line

My friend Samia came up with this great idea of a guy getting a bad haircut so I rolled with that.

My planning/animatic 

And the final thing!

For our second dialogue test, we had to choose from specific directors and one of them was Woody Allen. So I picked a line by Owen Wilson in Midnight in Paris. I wanted to use the line for a totally different feeling from what was done in the movie so I came up with this. I don't have the storyboards for this so straight to final!

In the film Owen Wilson was excited about meeting his hero writer and eager to show his book but he had to get it first.



For our last assignment, we were put into groups of 4 and had to pick a longer dialogue to chop up between us to create shots we can stitch together into a final mini film. My group consisted of Michael Bliss, Ting-yu Chen, Samia Khalaf, and myself. We really wanted to do a female villain and picked a dialogue by Charlize Theron's evil queen in Snow White and the Huntsmen.

Our initial storyboards (so bad)
Here we had her mostly sitting so we changed that later, to help the character move around more and also because it resembled another groups animatic.


A second pass at the storyboards by Samia



One of the earlier stages of blocking for our shots



And the final thing! Off to sleep!

Brandon's Goal Foundation!

Over the summer, or August I should say, myself and a couple of other artists were asked to create a 30 second commercial for Brandon's Goal Foundation. Brandon's Goal is a charity that focuses on childhood cancer and aims to raise awareness as well as raise money to support research for childhood cancer. More info at their website here! Trying to finish this thing before classes started was hectic but was an awesome experience. 

Here is the full commercial (I was responsible for the first shot). The challenging part was of course the plane, trying to keep the volume consistent and having it rotate smoothly. A classmate suggested doing it in Maya and drawing over but that takes all the fun out of it! Our small group consisted of  Wendell Dalit, Youri Dekker, Kevin Lam, Catharina Sukiman and myself.

Brandon's Goal Foundation Ad - created by SJSU Dept of Animation from wendell dalit on Vimeo.

Edith and the Bear!

Last semester for my advanced animation class, I had the pleasure to work on a cute and fun short film directed by Hillary Bradfield. Here are a couple of pencil tests I did for it. Overall fun experience, I really enjoy these film projects and I learn a lot from each one. 

3D Time!

Here are two shots from my intermediate digital animation class last semester spring '13. 
Our goal for the first shot was to animate a character picking up an item. 

I really like the cartoony style of animation and I tried to incorporate that here for this character.


Aldo Pickup Final from aldo kcomt on Vimeo.

For the second shot we had to take a pose we worked on previously and create a before or after animation from it.

Here's the pose I chose


and the outcome.




Scared Final from aldo kcomt on Vimeo.

I tried to push myself more than the last shot and tried to think of a reaction to a loud sound that would have a bunch of movements. Happy with it but if I were to redo it I would add more frantic actions during and after the landing.