Yay swooshy AE thingy

Sorry for the lack of updates: I've been preoccupied with three semester-long group projects, all three of which I am basically coordinating.

In the meantime, here is a promo video my friend and I made for a competition the College of Computing is hosting: I did the swooshy After Effects part in the middle of the clip. Uh, I gained experience points in using AE, so yay?

yay Cats

I will have a real post up tomorrow.

In the meanwhile, hear are photos of Earless or Tailless Cats!


the Japanese Bobtail

This breed of cat was seen as lucky and friendly in ancient Japan, because apparently the more tail you had, the more they suspected you of demonic soul-sucking plans. The waving good-luck cat (which you can find mini-versions of in Asian souvenir stores) and Hello Kitty are bobtails.

the Scottish Fold

They aren't exactly earless, but they're fairly small and folded down nearly flat against their heads. Their tails on the other hand are your standard length. I think they look adorable, like long-tailed teddy bears!

On Personal Stories and a Story Tool!

I promised myself I would post something every Monday last week, and already I'm breaking it, lol. I've never been good at deadlines, and I'm always arriving or turning things in late. But hopefully with time that will change! It's a personal dream of mine to create and share animated work I've made to an online audience, and um, if I want to do that sometime in the near future, then yeah, I will have to become more punctual.

This last week has left me a little dazed, due to a recent development at the art school I attended in Korea this summer. The art school I attended was run by three teachers: the founder (whose name literally means You're Kidding Me! in Korean), her brother (whose name literally means Melancholy: their parents have a strange sense of humor!), and TJ (the teacher who tasked me with creating hundreds of sheets of graphing paper).  I was closest to TJ during the summer, and I really looked up to him. He had uncanny draftsmanship and a superhuman passion that granted him the ability to generate a hundred sheets of 11-by-17 graphing paper, front and back, daily, for 6 months straight. He was always very kind and thoughtful, and more significantly, he was the very first person I ever opened up to and shared the stories, worlds, characters I'd been developing privately for the last ten years. I shared characters that not even my closest friends or family had seen. I disclosed the fates I'd been carefully crafting for these characters. I shared dreams I found too deviant or improbable to share with other people. When he abruptly abandoned the school and his students for money, it was just very shocking to me.

2 out of 50 sets of faces TJ had me do, to improve on capturing facial expressions.

Also I swear I am not a pedophile.

I find it amazing how an opinion of a person can completely flip with a single act, a single moment. Then again, if my best friend showed up at my front door all bloody and said she'd stabbed her neighbor with chopsticks for picking his nose, it goes without saying I would immediately question her character (and sanity). Still, I can't disregard the kindness he showed me during my time there. A kindness that bestowed me the confidence to confide my most personal stories with another person! If anything, this incident makes me realize how human everyone, everything is. The universe itself is not perfect, and if you look at the Bible even God is not perfect! After the events of Noah and the Ark God explicitly states that it was wrong of him to flood the whole world and then promises not to do it again... Man, I am totally going to hell for saying that. If anything, this revelation relieves my fear of criticism by others, because there are both admirable and shameful facets to us all. And if someone cares about me, they will offer their criticism in hopes that my more admirable facets will outnumber the duller ones.

Any fears I had of being judged for sharing weird, crazy or possibly even immoral stories have vaporized dramatically thanks to TJ, and if anything that makes him an important person in my life I care about. So I've emailed him in hopes he'll reconsider what he's done, because I'd really like to see him make the right decision for his other students and to regain my belief in him again. Personal dramas aside, I'm happy I am now mentally capable of sharing my longer stories with you all later along the line. I'm also more determined than ever to finish up the scripts for my series ideas, so I raided the local bookstore to find some aids on story crafting. One particular book I found offered a very interesting technique for figuring out all the 'scenes' in your story, which I thought I would share down below: the book is Make a Scene by Jordan E. Rosenfeld.

The following chart is used to figure out how each scene leads to the next one. The chart comprises of 1) the protagonist, 2) the scene intention, 3) complication and 4) the result.

At the beginning of every scene the protagonist is going to have some sort of goal he/she is going for. This creates the scene intention. Maybe it's to make the stupid dog stop yapping and give it a walk around the park. Maybe it's to grab the last jellybean before your brother does. Maybe it's to enjoy your nice, peaceful doze on the porch for as long as possible. During the scene, invariably something is going to happen that complicates your protagonist's efforts, which results in the end of one scene and the beginning of another.

Here you can see my example of the chart:

Protagonist	Scene Intention(s)	Complication	Result
Bob	Walk the dog to make it shut up.	All the doors won’t open.	Bob gets angry and tries to blowtorch the door.
Scruffles the Dog	Make Bob realize the house is alive and not happy about its doors getting blow-torched.	Scruffles can't talk.	The house gets angry and tosses the two into the basement pinball-style.
Bob	Try to get out of the basement.	The two are tied up in wires from video game consoles, which Bob is not willing to damage.	The dog gets annoyed and chews through the wires, to Bob’s dismay.

You would basically extend this chart, letting scene lead into the next scene to craft your story. Obviously some scenes are going to be longer than others. An epic escape through a field of killer lollipops from some giant baking attempt gone horribly wrong is going to run much longer than an attempt to open a jar of pickles.

Also, here is an adorable photo my awesome photographer sister took of my model of my character:

We were playing poker for family night, and he was safeguarding my sister's pile of chips....

Spoilers and a Video from some Goblin school

Yo! Sorry for the lack of updates: now that I am back from Korea (and recovered from Jet Lag), hopefully my updates will become more regular from now on!

Hmm, also, I've been contemplating just how much I want to post and display here on this blog... I mean, before I got into animation and drawing, I was really into writing, and it was a personal goal of mine to fill up the two large white bookshelves in my room with novels and series I'd written with MY OWN BARE HANDS!!!1 So, many of my animation ideas are actually ideas for series with overarching plotlines and all that jazz. I've always thought series were so cool... how the reader can see the character change (or not change, blah, boring), how themes connect or separate the different books, how there are different arcs, and cliffhangers, and recurring gags or characters. And one of the things I really enjoyed about following a series was the anticipation for the next book, wondering how all the questions will be resolved, how everything will end, yet hoping the end is still a good distance away.

Incidentally, I really do not appreciate spoilers, since they definitely lessen the impact of whatever surprise the author/writer/artist had planned for the audience. And I imagine the author/writer/artist don't particularly appreciate spoilers either: spoilers spoil (har har) whatever surprise the creator has been carefully setting up, in anticipation of the thrill and joy the audience will experience upon its release. Anyways, it occurred to me that my original plan of posting up the storyboards and progress videos of whatever animation I am working on is equivalent to me spoiling my own stories, which is... not very smart of me. So with regards to this realization, I've decided that, at most, the animation I post will be limited to any shots I am having difficulties with that are not spoiler-ish. I wish there was an option to limit who could see which posts, so the people I regard as mentors and sound critics could see posts containing more sensitive material... but oh well! Everybody can play mentor when they see the finished animation!

In the meanwhile, while I post on whatever animation I am working on, I'll cover why I made the style decisions I made, why the current project excites me and what sources of inspiration I am feeding off of. I'd also like to share any thoughts on the current animation industry, animated shorts and series I like, etc., here. Hopefully it won't be as dry and boring as it sounds here... Also, there will be images, and pictures, since a blog dedicated to a very visual medium shouldn't be a wall of text, as well as video whenever possible!

Speaking of videos, there is this one really amazing video created by students at the current-best animation school in the world, Gobelins. Located in France, Gobelins puts its applicants through a rigorous audition process, where the young and hopeful must prove to the committee that they have the knowledge, skills, and fluency in French needed to make it in their school! I believe each applicant must take a written test in animation and cinema history, a French fluency exam, storyboard a given premise, and then animate a walk cycle based on a given character sheet. The excellence of the students definitely show in their student videos. In the featured short below, the stark graphical style, coloring, acting choices, pacing and narrative bring a mature story together into something I think transcends into the domain of literature. Watching this still sucks me in and gives me chills.

Watching something as amazing as this just makes me all excited and enthralled at all the possibilities of animation again! And... it makes me look back at all my short ideas and laugh at how childish they look in comparison, lol. 

During my stay in Korea I basically worked on visual development on five animation ideas simultaneously, in addition to some intensive leveling up in draftsmanship and general drawing ability! One of the ideas is that earless tailless cat idea that's been stuck at 5% Progress during my past two months of blog-neglect. I won't be sharing whatever I've worked on on my other four ideas, but in the next few weeks I'll slip in some of the stuff I've made for the ET Cat. Haha... the initials make the name E.T. ... and the cat is like extraterrestrial because it is mutant or something! ...Yeah. I think I've made a lot of headway with this project, and I'm pretty excited about it now. I'm planning on making a stuffy version of the main character because, um, I think that would be awesome! My personal goal is to finish everything for this project by the end of this month, but we'll see. 

A minor Detour...

So as mentioned in my last post, I am currently in Korea. The main reason I decided to come to Korea has to do with my desire to become a better animator. Animation, like any visual medium, requires a great deal of technical skill from the artist. Only with strong drawing skills can an animator draw the same character from changing angles and heights. Only with a sense of perspective can an animator convincingly move a character away from the viewer towards the far horizon. And only with a strong sense of line and color can an animator create the visual style most suited to his or her narrative. It is my hope that I can gain the technical skills needed to become not just an animator, but a truly great, innovative animator.

I am currently attending a school run by a teacher renowned for his achievements at the Art Center of California and various other companies, as an Industrial Designer. Of all the people I have met in my life, his drawing abilities are top-notch. An artist is obligated to scrutinize all work he/she sees around him/her, and I've always found myself noting something off in the anatomy, shading, color choice in the work of my peers or teachers. But with this teacher, whether it is because my eyes are not sharp enough yet, I see absolutely no flaws. Everything is rendered perfectly in pen, and I find myself treating the images like photographs, thinking about how they make me feel, what the subject is like, etc. At the moment he is having me do a common design exercise: 10 pages front and back of straight, evenly-spaced lines. When I asked him how many he did back in school, he did 100, on 11-by-7 paper. I have no idea how he found the time or money.

My failed attempts to do 100... Sigh, making graphing paper is hard...

When I first met the teachers, the other being a fine arts friend of the aforementioned teacher, they had me show them all my work, as well as any ideas I might have listed down. Unfortunately I only had a few pictures with me since... I have this habit of ripping up work when I'm frustrated. At the end of last semester, I ripped up 2 year's worth of sketchbooks, drawings and paintings (there goes my portfolio), save the few my sister held. I did, however, have a lot of ideas listed down, so I showed them those. From the 70-80 I showed, they had me choose 10, and storyboard them roughly. I was sure to storyboard Umbrella Duck to the best of my ability in a limited time-span. Unfortunately they found another idea of mine more interesting; an old, abandoned idea about an earless, tailless cat who, after traipsing away from a shower of mockery by eared, tailed normal cats, runs into a convention full of... Gasp! What's this? Humans wearing the ears and tails... of cats?!! They also believe the idea will take less time to animate, and they want me to create an animation within my 2-month stay here.

To get to my point, I will have to postpone my short Umbrella Duck, while I work on this new other short. My posts for the next few weeks (days, maybe) will therefore be for the Earless, Tailless Cat. This kills me, since I am the kind of person that likes to fixate on a single idea, obsessing and thinking non-stop over it, and ever since E3 2011 (yes, I am a nerd) and the news on the latest Zelda game I have been thinking about the awesome graphics of WindWaker, and therefore Umbrella Duck's visuals, constantly. Well, the good thing is, my lack of any visual plan for this newest project has helped me explore a lot of different looks and designs, which you can see below. Sorry, none of them are scanned!

Here you can see the various character designs I went through before settling on the blown up one on the right: I thought this design was best because the cat looks so... derpish and stupid, pfft (is immature).

Later on in the story, the cat, enraged by the human's supposed abuse of cats for accessorizing-purposes, attacks everyone at the convention; after everyone has run off screaming in horror, a pair of ears and a tail that someone hastily threw off in their escape fall on him, and he is overjoyed upon his glance at his reflection.

My teachers said he looked too plain (I somewhat disagree, but then again I'm in love with the minimalistic Samurai Jack), so they had me play with accessories the cat could wear. I decided the accessory should emphasize the character's dopiness, and settled on a band-aid. I might add a sock (though it would be hard to animate).

The character design has grown on me, so I'm not as annoyed by this sudden detour as before. Also, to get myself in the mood, I plan on listening to music that um, puts me in the mood for this project. No more listening to WindWaker OST playlists on Youtube for me! Below is an example of some of the music I'll be listening to: maybe you'll be able to get a sense of what the animation will be like from it! Or maybe it will just annoy you, in which case I apologize.

Wow, I'm such a nerd...

Designs and Sketchy Google-Searches

Yesterday I spent the day coming up with a new logo for Umbrella Duck: the old one you see below was just something I slapped together, to concentrate on the actual project itself + the myriad of other projects thrown at me during the semester. I'm still nowhere near a scanner, but I'm thinking about making the following logos below in something like MS Paint, to play with colors later. I might look up a free vector program later, since vectors are always cleaner and easier to play with than ragged pixels.

The old title screen you can see in my final project last semester.

The new one I'm considering: I'll be using the pen tool to make this into a vector image. All those weird transforming feathers are going to give me carpal tunnel syndrome.

Here you can see me playing with the look of the actual title name itself. Yes, I am crazy and am going to basically make my own font. In my last pseudo-animation (which you can see below) I basically drew out half the words with the pen tool, then rushed and typed everything else in some font. All the words I painstakingly drew look infinitely better than the weird bulb-ended font I used. I have no idea why I didn't use some similar looking font instead. I'll probably use the boring last one.

The first 'animation'-y thing I made during my stay here at Georgia Tech. It was made in two weeks, when I was a naive, chipper Freshman, all excited and ready to make a name for herself. I was able to do multiple all-nighters in a row with that green Freshman energy to finish it. :sigh: If only I had the energy to do that now.

Here is a photo of all the different variations I went through to come up with the final three designs: I am showing it to you to make you feel bad about all the hard work I put in just for the name and make you feel obligated to follow this blog and comment about my heroic efforts and spread the final animation upon its completion, making it viral. Lol, no, I'm just joking... though I would appreciate a comment or two ;)

The logo of my little animation studio-thing. I mean, this isn't really a studio or anything, but it's nice to mark everything you make with an identifier and stuff. Yeah... Lol, I think it's clever. Look, the name makes the shape of a Fish and a Wishing star, har har... See the tail-fin, it looks like a star! (feels smart)

Old character design... I don't think redesigning the little boy will help eliminate his ambiguous-gender-problems. I think it all has to do with the poses. I mean, if you look at little boys and little girls (in a not-creepy way), and you pretended they all had short hair, you'll notice they all look fairly similar, structure-wise, to each other. I remember the professor demonstrating the boy's er, femininity, in the pose when he's looking behind him (lol, I don't think I'll ever forget that...). Uh, so to fix the problem I'll have to watch more little boys and look up videos of them, to make more realistic boy-like poses. Lol, the things I have to look up... 

Everyone swears I have an unhealthy obsession with ducks, because I practice quacking (for the voice-acting) all the time, and have dozens of duck-photos and videos on my harddrive. For obvious reasons, I keep my people-reference photo nestled deep within numerous folders... Soon I'll be looking up swords and spears and other weapons! In the future, I'll probably have to look up guns and stuff.

Cute Cuttlefish and Hummingbirds

I am in Korea right now, to take lessons in basic draftsmanship during the summer, and to visit my relatives from my mom's side of the family. I'm at my grandparents right now, where I'm forced to hitchhike on other people's unsecured wireless connections and in dire danger of getting overweight from amazing recipes perfected over decades by my grandmother. This isn't a travel-blog, though, so I'll spare you the details of my trip, save one.

Yesterday I followed my grandmother to the marketplace, where the tables are lined with whole skinned animals, and buckets and tanks of live seafood lay at your feet. Along one corner were cases of whole skinned dogs, in the kind of wide ice-cream case you look down into to choose a flavor. Hardened, tough vendors spoke out prices and offers in loud, quick barks. What particularly struck me was a tank near a quiet corner of the marketplace, full of dainty little red squid. The vendors wouldn't let me near the merchandise, so I couldn't snap a photo; you'll have to do with the sketch I photographed below: pretend the squid is colored or something.

The squid were very pretty, and I wouldn't mind having them in a personal fish-tank: they had little see-through flaps attached to their tops that diligently propelled them about, and they were a solid, pretty red; not the usual mottled botch of random colors. What made them especially endearing were their eyes: squid have very large eyes, and on a standard squid the eye look monstrous. But on these tiny squid the large eyes looked inquisitive and adorable. They reminded me of a hummingbird's; large, round black eyes ringed by a touch of white. These large round eyes, in my opinion, give their possessor an innocent, bright appearance, due to the touch of white on the edges of the round black center.

When I first came up with the idea of a Serious Little Boy I didn't really know what he would look like: I just knew he would look really cute, which would make his seriousness all the more amusing. I didn't want him to look like some generic moe-blob, and I didn't want him to look like a rip-off of the other characters he was inspired from. It took until we visited a family friend's house last winter that I suddenly grasped what he would look like. This family friend had modeled the outdoors porch to attract and feed hummingbirds, and I found myself wondering why hummingbirds looked so adorable; when you look at a hummingbird up close, they don't seem quite as cute. When they are seen from a distance, the patch of white ringing the outer corner appears like a part of their eyes, making them appear larger. Also, since the white is on the outer edge, the birds appear cross-eyed. If the white was on the inner edge, the birds would probably lose their appeal... though that doesn't seem to be the case for Miyazaki.

I always thought Totoro looked kind of scary...

Based on the eyes of these appealing animals, I therefore came up with the character design you saw in the last animatic-thing I made. Basically the little boy is based off of a hummingbird! Unfortunately, the Serious Little Boy's gender seems to confuse everybody, so I'll have to work on that. 

Fighting!

I'm not on campus at the moment, meaning I'm stuck without a scanner, software or the school's zippy internet. Right now I'm polishing the storyboard... and trying to make the fight sequence between the little boy, his umbrella-duck thing and the evil, rabid squirrels, which is a lot harder than I initially thought.

Choreographing a fight sequence is difficult and requires consideration of where the characters are and how they are moving relative to each other. Sharp cuts and close-ups need to be done in a way that adds energy to the sequence without sacrificing clarity. Usually a fight sequence is the most memorable part of an episode, where all the built-up tension and suspense is finally resolved. When the artists on Samurai Jack storyboarded action sequences, they would fill pages with the most minute details, to ensure the pacing was tight and good. For example, they would have pages filled purely with arrows, to get the pacing down perfectly. Below are some action sequences from some cartoons I find inspiring:

Spectacular Spiderman vs the Sinister Six (This show is spectacular, btw... har har)

Samurai Jack vs Zombies (I like the Samurai vs Ninja fight better, but there isn't much actual fighting in that one)

Sokka vs his sword master (I like the part where they briefly switch to Sokka's pov)

These are the fight sequences that stood out to me while I was watching (*cough* marathoning *cough*) these series: I know there are a lot of good fight sequences I've missed: and there are a ton of really good fight sequences in live action. Let me know if there's a particular fight sequence you really like! ^_^

the Origins of the Umbrella Duck

At the advice of my animation professor, I've decided to create a production blog. This blog won't be devoted solely to my first major attempt at a complete animated story, which I have dubbed "Umbrella Duck," since I have many, many other ideas that have been swimming around in my head for nearly a decade. For about a year, though, most posts will involve this particular project.

So Serious!

I first came up with the idea last summer when not paying attention in Calc III. I had splurged on Samurai Jack the night before and had been playing Windwaker, and I found myself thinking about how amusing it was when very large-eyed chibi little boy-characters were being all heroic and serious. Since I'm ADD, I then had this hilarious image of this booming, heavy thunderstorm, with this serious little boy tattered and drenched, worn but resolutely standing, grasping his unopened umbrella. He looks down at the handle, which is of a duck head. The duck head also looks back up at him with a serious, resolute look in its eyes, and then nods dramatically. The image of the duck-head nodding all seriously was so hilarious that I immediately drew it down and began to draw out a story surrounding the image. This is rare for me, since I usually reap brief amusement from my random ADD-spawned ideas, only to quickly toss them aside for another amusing idea. With this idea, however, I sat down long enough to pin down how the whole short would roll, marked out color schemes and even picked out the duck breed I wanted the shape-shifting-duck-umbrella-hybrid would be.

A Chuu Chuu facing off against Link!

A cayuga duck was perfect, because of its green iridescence in light. One of the main things that really excited me about the video game the Legend of Zelda: Windwaker was the chuu chuus in the game. In the game many objects (such as the chuu chuus) had this kind of sheen that ran across the surface as you moved around it, and it was so cool and exciting! It was almost candylike, the way the streak of color ran across the subject playfully. I wanted to implement that exciting magical quality into my animation, have streaks of brilliant, electric green flash across the duck and the umbrella as the boy swings it about. To have those disarming, unexpected flashes of green would be really wonderful to behold if I manage to execute it right! Just picturing it excites me.

A Cayuga in the shade:














A Cayuga in the light:

Here is the current logline for the short:

A Serious Little Boy must combine his skills and the powers of his Umbrella Duck to defeat Demonic Rabid Squirrels during a daily stroll.

For the final project of the animation class I took this semester, I attempted to get started on the short. I can't say I got very far, but I have a better idea of how long everything is going to take, and I now have a fairly detailed storyboard I can use. I was also pleasantly surprised at the consistency of the boy's and duck's designs in the clip: usually I can't draw the same thing twice to save my life. The most difficult part for me was the sound design: I had a lot of trouble getting together sounds I could use, and a lot of the music I initially considered was just tacky. Sound is a different beast altogether! The most difficult visual component in my opinion would be choreographing the fight scene. I most look forward to adding in special effects, such as the rain and the sheen of green on the duck.

The final I submitted (it's more an animatic than anything else ^_^;)
- I just realized I flipped the title: it should be Umbrella Duck


Choi_J_Project_8 from Jeanie C on Vimeo.

I'll soon be jotting down a schedule for myself and creating a percentile trackbar on my progress (idea taken from game developer PseudoLoneWolf @ www.fighunter.com). I'll be sure to update this blog at least once a week!