Print-a-Palooza!

I worked on this piece over winter break and finished it late January but wasn't allowed to share until today! So this was for Print-a-Palooza which is a non-profitable art print sale for charity, centered around 3 popular Cartoon Network shows! 100% of the proceeds will be donated to the charity Angels on Stage. The 3 Cartoon Network shows are Adventure Time, Regular Show, and Steven Universe!

My characters were were these dudes

   

Iacedrom and Ybgir, which is Mordecai and Rigby backwards. They're from an alternative universe where they hate giving speeches. So my thinking was I can either make them more realistic, or make them cartoony BUT if I make them cartoony people might mistake them for the regular Mordecai and Rigby so I went with realistic.

This was an initial concept with all kinds of gumball machines in the background.

One of them is Pops

Then I had this idea of the park being its own planet like King Kai's planet in DBZ

I wanted most of the piece to be traditional so I painted the space background out of watercolor.

 

The rendered drawing for the dudes.

And the finished version! I tried to make the grass and trees in front of the house be a Shrunkenheadman Logo but maybe its too subtle, or just enough. The planet and characters I colored digitally. But yea check out all the other prints too, everyone did a great job and they're only 8 bucks each! 

http://printapalooza.storenvy.com/

New Header

Old header was boring and old, this ones from a painting I did a while back and heres a quick step by step till finish!

 

I forgot to save so jumps to this knight

Textures make everything nice

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!

Inktobers!

I heard about inktober on the first day of October and had to try it! I only lasted 19 days though ha!

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

10part2

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

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!

Change of pace!

Other than my animation classes, I am taking a figure painting class this semester which is a nice change. I haven't got to paint much over the last couple years since I been focusing so much on my animation. Here's a progression of my latest painting. Painting in oil is really fun and relaxing! Next painting I'll be sure to take more pictures of the progression! These type of things are always fun to look through.

Big jump here since I forgot to take pictures...