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...