This breed of cat was seen as lucky and friendly in ancient Japan, because apparently the moretail 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.
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!
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....
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.
