Demo Reel

I had signed up for a portfolio review for yesterday last week, so the day before then I went through all of my work during my time here at Georgia Tech. One of the reasons I'd delayed graduation to next year was because I was afraid that my work was subpar, and nowhere near good enough to get me into grad school, much less get a job offer. To my surprise, the response to my demo reel was fairly positive. Everyone told me it was very strong, and I was able to get an internship offer. I would still need to take a test in animating via Flash, but it is an offer nevertheless! My reel still most certainly needs work, as well as the projects displayed in it. But I've learned I should be confident with what I have, and openly share what I've done regardless of where I am. At the very least, it can serve later as a mark of how much I've improved over time.

Here is my reel below:


Demo Reel from Jeanie C on Vimeo.

An Overdue Update

Hi,

I'm sorry I neglected this blog. I just wanted to update it to share something that happened near the beginning of the semester.

My friend Connie, an aspiring director, brought me on board to do all the animated scenes in her short for this year's Campus Movie Fest, a nationwide competition where college students must make a short within a week. It was very down-to-the-wire: I was literally jerking the shadow puppet around to make it tap-dance while the people from CMF were breathing down our necks to turn it in. I'm not all that proud of what I managed to contribute, but the script my friend penned as well as the DP (Director of Photography) and the actors my friend found were amazing. The short won Best Film from our school and will be judged at the CMF Hollywood finals with many other shorts this summer. On top of that, these finalist films are screened at a panel in Cannes, to help the filmmakers build connections and whatnot. It's really amazing, how my friend has grown as a person and director, and I wish her the best in a future of doing what she loves for a living. It's her last semester here, and it's gratifying to see all her hard work finally pay off.

Right now I'm tweaking the animation. I don't know if it's possible to resubmit our film to Cannes (I know we can't for the CMF Finals), or when I can submit it by, but my goal is to try and send in a new copy by the end of this week.

See our winning film here:



Right now the same group is working on another film for our Capstone: a live action film with a CGI monster, the Jabberwocky. The difference is that the DP of our last film, Donovan, is director this time, and Connie the DP. Donovan has wanted to do this project for a while, so hopefully he can be happy with what we accomplish in a semester. I'm a little wary about the scale of the project (I've never painted concept art, or successfully rigged a realistic model before), but um, at least it will be a learning experience. Here is our Kickstarter link:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/455609731/jabberwocky

Lol... I hope to change our main kickstarter image sometime soon...

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...