A Stack Of Drawings

I'm Freakin' Done!

2011-03-08T23:17:00.000-08:00

If I haven't mentioned it already in a previous blog post, for the past 6 months I've had the immense pleasure of working on Kung Fu Panda 2, the next installment of our story of Po and the furious 5. This experience has been enjoyable in absolutely every way. Our production team did a brilliant job of making sure the show was well run, that artists were always well informed and taken care of, and that everything was communicated to the utmost level of efficiency. I owe a lot of my enjoyment to them in particular.

Though also I was able to work with a completely new team this time, Damon O'Beirne head of layout and Rich Shiba, my Final Layout Supervisor. Working with both Damon & Rich together, I was able to learn more about camera work & cinematography at a sequence-wide level as well as the shot level. My new co-workers on the team were also a pleasure to work with of course, extremely helpful and always very positive, which can be very important when working on an epic-scale picture.

For now, I move on to the Kung Fu Panda 2 DVD in which we'll be creating an original short film adventure that takes place in the Kung Fu Universe, should be interesting! Until then, be sure to see the film when it comes out May 26th, it is going to be Awesome to say the least. As if this wasn't enough shameless promotion, here is our epic trailer that just came out:

Thanks for reading, now it's off to get prepared for the next project!! I leave you with a picture of me wrapping up my last shot on the movie! I love Kung Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuu--- Panda!

11 Second Club February Results!

2011-03-05T18:25:00.000-08:00

Hi Everyone, it's that time again. After a long hiatus for the holidays, I jumped back into the 11 Second Club competition for February. This month was a very active clip from Garden State, and certainly challenging. It's been a long time since I've attempted full body mechanics, my last two submissions being mostly from waist-up, so it was intimidating, but fun to tackle. With a short month, and many things going on, it was not easy to stay focused on this daunting endeavor, but managed to get through, and ultimately finished 14th place out of 191 entries, tied with my highest ranking ever. Here is a look at the breakdown pass:

Did quite a few breakdowns to really describe the movement of the dance, and her active explanation that follows. Now, here is the final piece:

And that is that! Again, been getting great feedback from colleagues and DreamWorks Animators to which I'm very thankful for, their input is a huge help. Now I shall take my hiatus month and hopefully jump back in again in April! Thanks for watching!

11 Second Club Sept Results

2010-10-09T10:38:00.000-07:00

Hey all, so as previously stated, I crunched through the Sept 11 second club competition. Each time I run through, I learn a little more, get a little faster, and hopefully a little better. This month was a fun clip from Angel Heart that allowed for some fun facial acting and interesting arm and hand gestures to work through in the breakdowns. As before, I wish I had another day or two to really work out the polish, would have liked to do a better facial pass on both, as well as fix some of the linear motion in there. But nonetheless, I came in 14th place out of 209 entries! My best submission yet.

I've been getting great feedback from the extraordinarily talented animators at DreamWorks. I'm hugely grateful for their input, it's like getting a masters class while at work! Hopefully I can digest their notes and put them to good use in the November competition. Now I'm in my "month off" as I attend to life related matters again, prepare for several weddings I'll be in, run errands and get ready for the upcoming holidays!

11 Second Club July 2010 Results!

2010-08-05T16:55:00.000-07:00

Hey y'all! So much to my surprise, I ultimately was able to finish my 11 Second Club submission for July. It definitely needed a lot more work on the lip-sync, and on working on the spacing especially in the second half. I also had a list of CBB's that would have been nice to get to, but I appreciate everyone's input that I received.

Voting has ended and I came in 45th place out of 233 entries. Not too bad, but I would like to move up the ladder to someday reach that top 10. My work remains cut out for me. This month I shall focus on all the other things I missed out on last month, work-wise and life-wise, and jump back into it again in September. Below is a link to the finished version. Thanks for watching!

11 Second Club progress for July 2010

2010-07-23T11:03:00.000-07:00

Hey all, I'm in full swing on the July 2010 11 Second Club challenge, with about 8 days left I'm hoping I can finish this beast and have my first ever submission to the newly renovated 11 second club. Last months entry I decided to hold off since the spline and polish was a bit overwhelming for only 4 days left. I'm currently about halfway through my splining process before I begin fine tuning and polish. The video here is my breakdowns and lip sync tweens. Hopefully will have updated post First of August with final result!

11 Second Club Blocking

2010-06-23T08:54:00.000-07:00

So after a long hiatus, I've decided to get back to working on the craft that I love best, character animation. I'm trying to really push this time to work and improve my skills significantly and learn all that I can. As part of this endeavor, I've gone back to doing the 10 second club challenges, now called the 11 second club. The new incarnation of the site has drawn a far more robust community of animators, which raises the bar in terms of challenge but also allows for more feedback and input from fellow artists. Here is my blocking with some breakdowns for this months clip.

There is still more acting at the end to block out after the witch leaves, but it's nearly all there. It had better be, cause I've only 8 more days to finish this sucker. Once it is complete I'll be sure to post the final version here. Hopefully more character animation posts to come in the near future!

Summer doodle

2010-05-28T09:30:00.000-07:00

Here is another illustration that started as a sketch at work, which I then took home and got carried away and inked and colored. A tanktop vixen to kick off the summer, my apologies for the furryness. I tried to work on my inking a bit more in this one, using different simulated pens for varied thickness, executed on my tablet PC. Enjoy! Or, vomit! Whichever feels more appropriate.

LOST: DIY Titles

2010-05-20T23:40:00.000-07:00

Namaste, LOST watchers. The final episode airs this Sunday, and soon we will have to bid Aloha to our favorite headache-inducing show of questions and no answers. Before this whole thing comes to The End, however, there is one mysterious visual element worth discussing that I find more confusing than the island itself. This:

The LOST opening titles, and their simplicity. Now, there is certainly something to be said about the minimalist quality of the titles being a fitting intro to a show whose hook is all about mystery, and often completely devoid of answers. It provides little visual information, giving us nothing to read into, and further just lets the viewer fill in the many blanks that the show has created over time. The rudimentary nature of the titles I don't have a problem with, but the rudimentary execution is what is boggling. The titles are just the word "LOST" rendered dimensionally, tumbling towards us in space through a very tight focal plane, meaning it appears out of focus as it approaches, and for a brief second comes into view before going soft again. Yet in this moment, we catch a glimpse of a horribly aliased, confusingly shaded amateur-grade graphic complete with artifacted edges. Most viewers probably don't even notice, but there is no doubt a large enough population of baffled fans, enough to prompt internet commentary such as this:

Honestly, how does a show that has become the most popular serial series on television have a title that looks like it was the result of some student graphics class tutorial. A few ideas come to mind, but my primary theory is the fact that J.J Abrams has a history of giving a personal DIY touch to the titles of his shows. Before LOST, Abrams had created two other series, Felicity and Alias, both of which he decided to compose the title theme music himself, and in both cases it stuck straight through until the series completion. LOST is no exception, Abrams having composed the title theme again which remains the same today. It's possible that he thought it might be fun to go one step farther in this case and actually design and animate the opening graphics to accompany his music.

It's also possible that Abrams has little experience with graphics software, or was struggling to achieve the appropriate look he wanted. If the 3D titles were done in a comp software with a non-native plug-in of some sort, Abrams probably was attempting to tweak the raw output of the extension, to get something closer to his vision. However, the wrong mix of sharpening, minimize/maximize operations, and ramping blur animation will result in edge-artifacting very similar to the moment we see in the titles. The aliasing of the words, the odd soft-edges of the letter shading, and of course the artifacts themselves, make me think this was likely the case. Of course it is also possible that they just hired a lowest-bidding title company to slam out a quick rendition of the titles for approval, and somehow those made it to air, but for a pilot that cost between 10 and 14 million to make, it seems likely they would spring the extra cash to get a quality title.

The frustrating LOST title is likely the consequence of a tradition that Abrams, and perhaps many series creators and show runners, has adhered to. I'm sure there is a bit of fun and excitement for any series creator or creative head to place their personal mark on their baby before sending it out into the world, even if it means the sacrifice of quality and polish. His tradition continues in Fringe, to which he once again composed the title theme. Yet maybe after his LOST title debacle, he's decided to get out of the pro-hobbyist graphic design business.

UPDATE: Art of the title sequence has an article about this subject, and confirms that it was indeed made by Abrams himself on a laptop and after effects: http://www.artofthetitle.com/2008/02/29/lost/

Thank you for everything, you useless reptile

2010-01-28T01:06:00.000-08:00

After 9 months of very challenging and very rewarding work, my employment on "How To Train Your Dragon" has come to an end. I am officially off the show, and am now gearing up for my next DreamWorks endeavor. The experience has been indescribable, and as recently mentioned here, I'm sure I will attempt to pass along some of the artistic knowledge I have gained through this journey.

This was a privileged opportunity to work with some of the most talented feature animation artists working today in all departments. Personally in my department, I got to work with layout veterans James Ryan Peterson of Kung Fu Panda, JC Alvarez of Shark Tale and Bee Movie among others, and our head of layout, Gil Zimmerman. Learning from these three gents was always a simultaneously humbling and empowering experience, both making me realize my bad habits, and yet showing me how to utilize my strengths. You can find an interview here on the official How To Train Your Dragon blog with Gil, where he briefly answers some questions about himself and the movie. Also, a brief clip in which he discusses the challenges and process that went into Romantic Flight, the first sequence I worked on in this film.

Tomorrow, I get to meet with the director of the next project I am starting on, where we will discuss the set dressing for one of the large landscapes we'll be using. Always new and challenging work to be done at DreamWorks! More to come!

Welcome to Dragon Training

2010-01-20T22:07:00.000-08:00

Hello readers! Much time has passed since the last post, for many things have been occupying my time. The purchase of a Condo being one of the biggest time consumers, but also because in the past year I've been enjoying a position as a Final Layout Artist at DreamWorks Animation working on the next upcoming film "How To Train Your Dragon".

The experience has been incredible to say the least. It has been a continuous challenge, both in artistry and stamina, but the rewards have been invaluable. The amount of things I am learning about stereo, cinemetography, camerawork, staging, and visual storytelling make the job well worth the efforts alone, besides of course all the fantastic benefits that the company itself provides us. It is awesome to get to work at a union shop and experience what The Animation Guild has to offer. I'm nearly finished with my dues, I'm sure I'll have a celebratory post when that day arrives!

There is simply too much to say about the amazing things I've been able to experience, accomplish, see and learn in the past year in just one post, and I'm sure I'll be posting more updates that are relevant to the adventures in layout, but in the meantime I shall say that this movie may be the most amazing things I ever get to work on in my entire professional career. Seeing final renders from this movie are astounding to absolutely everyone on the show across the board. I truly think people are in store for images they have never seen anything like before. Check it out everyone!! Just 2 months away!

Dragons on the Mind

2009-09-16T00:33:00.001-07:00

Working with Dragons all day will definitely have its influence on idle sketch time. Drew this in an airport recently using one of our nifty Dragon Sketchbooks they have at work.

Sparty On, Cat!

2009-03-30T23:29:00.000-07:00

My friend applied to Michigan State University for the Music Education Grad Program this summer and recently just found out she was accepted! So I drew this as a gift for her, a faux movie poster to get her excited about her adventures-to-come this summer! Congratulations, Cat!!

Faux Movie Production Logo Animatic

2008-11-30T22:47:00.000-08:00

So earlier in the summer, I had the idea to do an arrangement of the Super Mario World "You defeated a koopa kid" victory song, and the more I thought about it, I started to get the idea that it might work perfectly as a movie production logo, if Nintendo ever had some sort of in-house movie studio or something. So, I decided to do a MIDI version of the arrangement, and put together a quick animatic of what it might look like (watch in High Quality if possible):

So there it is! Turned out allright, I think. The next phase, if I decide to keep going with it, will be 3D layout/previs to see how the camera animation will play out in full 3D. Hope y'all dig it so far.

Cheetah DS Crash Drawing

2008-11-22T02:17:00.001-08:00

Over the years, my DS has gotten more fragile especially when playing games off my M3 Lite, and sometimes it will just randomly crash in the middle of a game, evoking this momentary feeling of "wtf!" This drawing started out as just a head-sketch I was doing at work, which then evolved into this upper body image, which I decided to splash color on. Overall, a boring pose, but I thought I'd post it anyway!

Happy Birthday, Cat!

2008-10-23T11:32:00.000-07:00

This past Wednesday was my friend Cat's birthday. She's a music teacher at several schools in the area, and in addition, every so often she does music performance gigs. The week of her birthday, she's going to be doing percussion with the Beach City Symphony, which is sweet, but also means she has to spend her evenings at rehearsal all week, even on the night of her birthday. When she told me this, this image came to mind. At any rate, Happy Birthday Cat!

"Lights Out" animation clip

2008-10-12T00:48:00.000-07:00

Towards the end of the summer this year, I was part of a small animation team whose purpose was creating a short film for the Project 21 Film Festival; a Festival that challenges filmakers to produce a film in 21 days. A friend of mine, Simon Stahl, was the director on the project, which is how I got involved in the first place. He's a member of the popular online animation school Animation Mentor, and so most of the team consisted of AM members, with a few outsiders including myself. I served as an animator, technical director, lighting TD, and render wrangler for the duration of the project. The story is basically a neurotic guy who has a clap-activated light in his bedroom, and a noisy neighbor whose television is causing complications with his sleeping arrangements. Below is my shot from the film.

We had about 2 weeks for animation, and an additional week for lighting, rendering, and working out miscellaneous problems. I'm not completely satisfied with my shot, but I think it turned out allright for the purposes of the film. Which, by the way, ended up winning Best Animation in the festival, so how about that! So there you have it, actual new animation to show on my blog! Goodness! If I'm not careful I might just actually post new drawings here too!! That would be something!

LA Times Article

2008-10-10T00:14:00.000-07:00

Hey y'all! I know it's sacrilegious for my first blog post in a long time to be not-artwork, but I promise some is coming very soon. In the meantime, I wanted to share a piece of microscopic publicity. I was interviewed relatively recently by the LA Times about my university art school experience, and the article came out a few days ago with my name mentioned briefly. Click below to see the full article image.

They got my educational info a little wrong, but still a cool mention. Which also reminds me, new season of South Park has started up again, so I'm sure my art-dedication time will be limited. But, new posts coming in the next few days I promise.

The Journey Towards Illustration Greatness: An Observation

2008-09-06T15:09:00.000-07:00

Part of the experience of being an artist is constantly being motivated to improve and aspiring to expand your abilities and craftsmanship. I personally feel like I didn't really start to improve as an illustrator until I entered Graduate School and was able to not just practice my skills under incredible instruction, but also have the added bonus of being in an environment now saturated with fellow artists, all with different styles and skill levels.

After being in the program for about two years, and pulling my draftsmanship out of the world of embarrassing and into somewhat-acceptable, it was then that I could see just how much further I really had to go, and started to observe a general pattern of stepping stones for really great illustration. I say observation only, since not only is this just my own thoughts and opinions, but also if I knew exactly how to become great, I would probably be closer to getting there myself. At any rate, I like to think of these phases as three general stages:

Stage 1: Static, Flat and Constrained

We've all been here before. This is the phase when the artist will be interested in illustration, and making valiant efforts to render the images in their mind, but lack the knowledge of anatomy, composition, silhouette, and directionality, let alone the ability to push the forms into 3D space. The result then, is work that generally comes out flat, constricted, and generally unappealing. Though, in the artists defense, they are making a valiant effort to improve. Or even if they aren't, they are at the very least putting in some good mileage towards improvement though experience.

Stage 2: Good Yet Boring

At this phase, the artist has now become instructed in the ways of form, composition, anatomy, and their illustrations are now starting to resemble the shapes and images they are attempting to communicate. The problem here is, the illustrations in this phase are usually rather stale and end up looking the same. They may be well-constructed, but the artist is still roaming around within their comfort-zone, and are focusing mostly on the technical and academia aspects of constructing the image, rather than variation in style or experimentation in different ways to communicate visual ideas. In short, the illustrations become good, but not particularly interesting.

Stage 3: Dynamic and visually interesting

Finally at this phase, the artist has achieved a level of illustration prowess where issues like form, shape, and line are no longer technical concerns or problems for the artist. The focus at this level can now be purely on the communication, adapting whatever style or technique is necessary to properly render the image in a way that it will be most effective.
Usually at this stage, the artist's work consists of a large variety of styles and experimentation, ranging from the realistic (above) to cartoony (below)...
...to flat graphic and highly stylized.
All of these stage-3 illustrations were done by the same artist. An extremely wide range of style but yet all with extreme confidence and deliberate line work, definitely a product of proper foundation and lots and lots of mileage/practice.

I think it's also worth mentioning that not everyone needs to go through these 3 stages in order to be a successful illustrator or artist. It's possible to jump straight from stage 1 to stage 3, and develop an interesting style that doesn't necessarily rely on form or shape to communicate ideas. Of course, by doing this the artist risks not only limiting their style to only one possible look, but also risks that style being appealing to only a very select audience.
Squidbillies is a perfect example of what this kind of style might look like. Of course, the Squidbillies animation team can actually draw incredibly beautifully and just happened to design this particular look for the series (which I personally find very unappealing), but exemplifies that it is possible to make that jump without being a master draftsman; even though it might be very limiting for that artist in the future.

So, there are my idle thoughts on the journey towards becoming a great illustrator. I know I've certainly got a long way to go myself, and my next blog post will probably be yet another boring illustration from my amateur wrist, but I hope this article provided an interesting read, and in terms of how to get there, all I can do is quote my brilliant drawing instructor: "Draw! Draw, Draw, Draw!"

How NOT to animate

2008-08-09T01:27:00.000-07:00

This week's post is a piece of humor for all you 3D animators out there currently fighting with splines. A friend of mine recently had the super-fun duty of cleaning up keyframes on some of his animators shots for a project he was involved with. Apparently some stuff was very clean and required little fixing, but some stuff well, he sent me a screenshot of one of the animators Graph Editors just to get a taste of the horror. Those of you with weak stomachs may want to shield your eyes.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this is not motion capture data you are looking at, it is keyframe data. I don't even know how something ends up looking like that. A colleague of mine said "maybe he thought he had to key the hell out of it to keep the spline looking straight". At any rate, hilarious and hideous. If you're ever feeling bad about your own GE looking dirty, you can now have a piece of schadenfreude to look upon and feel better. Enjoy.

Mouse Lady

2008-07-21T17:03:00.000-07:00

Recently on my way back from a trip to Washington D.C. my plane was grounded on the runway for an hour or so, so I decided to sketch some random junk. I started doodling a mouse head and it turned into this mouse-in-dress thing. I imagined that she had won some bet against a fellow companion and was requesting that she get her fair pay. So anyhow, I decided to ink it up in Flash since I hadn't tried that before and throw some color on it, and here it is. Wee.

Meanwhile, on YouTube...

2008-07-12T13:08:00.000-07:00

Amidst my random sketching I'm doing (which will be uploaded here soon), I thought I would share a random discovery. So I've been intentionally avoiding posting Jungle Gym to youtube because I was waiting for the festival run to end, and even then was a bit hesitant to share it on the online-video nebula. However, recently I was at a friends apartment and wanted to show them something silly that I had recently saved to my channel favorites. So in order to find this, my sub-intelligent brain thought the best way would be to search for my user account name and maybe it would show up in the listing. Yet instead, when I did this, what came up but my very own film, Jungle Gym, apparently posted 6 months ago now by someone else!!

Almost 100,000 hits, over 100 comments, 300 favorites, ridiculous! All of this happening without my knowledge. I suppose I am happy for the added exposure, but a bit blindsided that this could occur under the radar. I of course realized that in my contract with Aniboom, they reserve the right to re-distribute / re-encode my film in any medium they got their hands on, so theres not much I can do about it, but I suppose this is a cautionary example of what happens when you don't think about what the fine print actually means. Anyhow, I promise more drawings soon.

Summer begins

2008-05-03T20:56:00.000-07:00

Well, May has begun and summer has arrived. For me this is a very big summer since I have several weddings to attend, and possibly several projects to help complete. I'm sure some of these projects I'll be posting things about here, but in the meantime I find myself occupied with all kinds of fun and recreational events! Besides getting some continued use out of my Disneyland annual pass, the South Park crew visited Las Vegas this past week to both celebrate the end of the run and to spend some quality intoxicated time with a beloved member of the crew who will be leaving us. Upon return, I decided to take a moment to practice some typography and do a title treatment, since I hadn't designed one in a while.

This is what came out. Clearly it has been some time since I've designed title treatments, but I suppose that's what practice is for. Anyhow, hopefully more artwork to come in the near future!

The End of a Super Phun Time for now

2008-04-24T00:28:00.000-07:00

Well, tonight marked the mid-season finale for South Park, and the end of my first run ever at South Park Studios! Overall it was very challenging and a bit stressful at times, but always fun and exciting with each new episode we got to work on. I was officially invited back for "season 12.5", so I'm of course very happy to be coming back this fall! I imagine this will be the last post regarding working at the studio for a while, so I thought I would show a tiny slice of what I get to do at the studio.

As a Technical Director, I create and rig lots of sets, characters, props and effects animation, which 99% of the time we're given specific approved guides from Art Department to follow. Yet, every once in a blue moon, a montage will happen that has a lot of mini-bgs within a larger bg, such as a location within a background that has been pre-designed, but needs a specific angle for a shot. Art Department has more important backgrounds to create than to spend time creating angles that aren't as critical, so this responsibility will pass directly to a Technical Director. Such a case occured for me on our mid-season finale "Super Fun Time" in the "Super Phun Thyme Montage" sequence. I was asked to create a POV within an arcade machine for a video game Butters and Cartman are playing, so I sketched this up at my desk quickly:

On the top is the initial layout, and then some variations simplified for our Animation Technical Supervisor to take a look at. Once it was approved, I went ahead and created / rigged the final setup, which ended up looking like this in the final show:

Hooray, I'm helping! This may seem super minor, but it still gives me great pleasure and excitement to see something I created displayed on network television, assembled with the rest of the fantastic work of my talented colleagues at the studio. Anyway, it's been a blast so far, and I look forward to busting out the remainder of Season 12 when new episodes are in October. Until then, it's time for some sleep, vacationing, and thesis work!

Wacom time

2008-04-12T22:49:00.000-07:00

Working the long hours during the South Park run gives me very little time to doodle anything, and I've been wanting to draw some stuff since I bought that new Wacom tablet for home, but yesterday I got a chance to practice using it a little. Often times I'll stand in front of my mirror and make various facial expressions and poses to study how they look and feel, and this was one of those poses that I figured would be a good one to get more used to the tablet on.

Fast Times at South Park Studios

2008-03-25T01:05:00.000-07:00

Hey y'all (whoever reads this thing). It's been over a month, so I think I really ought to give an update! Sorry no artwork this time, I've been super busy at the world of South Park for the past several weeks! So far I've helped with cranking out the first two episodes of season twelve, and it's been an exciting experience. I was so stoked to see my name in the credits of a show that I'm a fan of, that I took a pic and wrote a nerdy net-slang excited statement on it:

Of course, somehow somebody at South Park found this exact image and posted it in a visible area in the studio. Then, apparently whoever saw it mistook "OMFG!!1" for "Look how awesome I am as #1 on this list", and decided to play a prank on me for the following episode by taking my name out of alphabetical order and tucking it on the very bottom:

I of course had to respond with the above image, since I'm excited just to be in the credits at all, regardless of placement! (But still, very funny guys ;P) It's fascinating to me to see how the show operates from the inside out, and while I don't think I'm allowed to mention anything about what that entails, I can say that the team works incredibly hard, and it's awesome to see them doing what they do best at top-speed now that the run is in full swing. Personally I'm still ramping up my speed a little bit every day in hopes to become on-par with the rest of the Technical Directors soon since speed is definitely a major factor in working at South Park, but I feel like I'm getting the hang of things and am finding my place in the pipeline as my supervisors continue to give me more responsibility with each episode.

On the whole, the experience has been a fascinating one thus far. It's hard work, but rewarding with each episode that rolls out, and getting to work on a new script every week keeps things fresh and fun. More updates to come as the experience continues, and hopefully more drawings!

"Yup", it's official!

2008-02-23T02:45:00.000-08:00

The end of my second week at South Park Studios has a much anticipated and fitting ending. Everyone at south park, from the PAs to the Animators to Matt and Trey themselves, has a nametag with a South Park character of their choice depicted on it. There can be no repeat characters, so everyones tag is unique. In the first week I was asked to write down a desired character for nametag purposes. And then today at the end of the day, as if reward for surviving the first two weeks and making it to the official run, the Production Assistants came around with all the new tags and affixed them to the appropriate cubicles. I attempted to take a picture with my sucky cameraphone, as seen here:

As you can (sort of) see, I chose Thad Jarvis from season 11's "Guitar Queer-o" episode. This choice made because it was not only an episode I had watched a particularly huge amount of times before going in for my interview, but was coincidentally the animation file that was shown to me in my interview, while I was being explained the production process to. So yes, seeing this outside of my cubicle just makes me even more excited for the run to begin, and to knuckle down and make some South Park!!

Headin' on down to South Park...

2008-02-21T00:01:00.000-08:00

So, a while ago I mentioned that I was overseeing some potential job opportunities at several companies, one of which was South Park Studios. Well, in early December I ended up interviewing at South Park and they asked me back in January for a competitive training program, during which time I would be trained at South Park while competing against 2 other potential candidates for the Technical Director position. Well, after the 2 weeks, they decided to choose me, to which I of course said:

The company went on vacation for another 2 weeks, but now the show is back in production for season 12. So for the last week and a half I have been working there as the new Technical Director on the TD team! I drew the above image after I found out the news, but haven't had time to flesh it out until recently since I've also been moving to a new apartment. So anyhow, unless I get canned for being an idiot, I shall be working on the first 7 episodes of season 12!

Big Bad Voodoo Drawing

2007-12-17T18:55:00.000-08:00

Last night, Eji and I went to see Big Bad Voodoo Daddy's holiday show at the Lancaster Performing Arts Center. The show was fantastic as usual, but my brother had somehow arranged with their client-relations person for me to meet the band personally before the show. Knowing this, I went ahead and drew a caricature of the original 7 band members, who will be celebrating their 15th year together in April 08, and gave them this picture before the show started. They seemed to dig it, so that's good! I totally worship these dudes, so I was pretty excited to meet them!

Me and the band, before the show. Look how cool their shoes are!

Joshua Levy (piano) and I. This guy is like, my musical hero basically.

Interviews and Prospects

2007-11-28T21:40:00.000-08:00

Yes, it is time for yet another "Status" post. After applying to a myriad of different jobs over the past two weeks, three jobs finally got back to me, and two of them actually requested interviews. South Park interviewed me for a Technical Director position, while an independent studio in Glendale wanted me as a 3D generalist on a World War II documentary project they're working on for the History Channel. Meanwhile, Lucasfilm continues to look over my portfolio for a 3D Story Art position. With any luck, I'll hear some good news from one of these guys next week.

TIAF07 Booklet

2007-10-30T01:35:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I got a package from Taiwan in the mail, from their annual International Animation Festival. As you probably heard me blab about before, I was selected as an international exhibition piece. Anyway, they sent me back my Betacam copy of Herbie-Fun-Time, along with a beautiful 300+ page full-color book that covered the entire scope of the festival, kind of like half-program, half retrospective. The book itself is a gorgeous insight into the festival which apparently covered "Best of" reviews from Ottawa, Annecy, and Platform. The festival also showcased some of the biggest animated features of the year including Ratatouille. Skip to page 168 in the "Personification" section of the book, and here you will find:

There I am! Wonderfully translated into characters I only wish I could understand! This marks probably the biggest festival that Jungle Gym will ever be a part of. So glad to be part of an event that showcased such incredible works! Ok, enough boasting for now. Back to work!!

Tracking Jobs

2007-10-12T17:29:00.000-07:00

This week started out as a week to make head way on Job Track, my thesis, and has ended up being an unexpected job hunt. Through power of persuasion, suggestion, recommendations and surprising information, I ended up applying to about four jobs this week. Of course, I found out yesterday that the e-mail I used to apply to all these jobs has been spam-flagged and so none of my applications got delivered, so I re-applied yesterday and today to three of the four (one of the jobs I decided wasn't worth the effort). So, we'll see where it goes! In the meantime, hopefully it's back to the thesis!

Thesis work

2007-10-04T19:34:00.000-07:00

Hey y'all. My apologies for how silent I have been on this blog, I have recently been getting back to my thesis production again, so that means drawing lots and lots of boards like the one seen above. I imagine that I'll probably have close to 550-600 boards by the time I'm done with the whole thing, and I have 238 boards drawn so far. I hesitate to post them here, so just snippets of it will have to do for now. Below are a few other shots from the scene I recently completed.

The Odd Couple

2007-08-31T02:55:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine and I often joke about how these two arch rivals, away from the more serious-business world of StarFox, would continue their misadventures in a sit-com paradigm where Wolf is continuously trying to capture or trap Fox, but usually ends up punk'd or pranked by the StarFox team leader, usually to the hilarity of Fox and the chagrin of Wolf, as illustrated in this kind of faux-logo.

High Def Exploration

2007-08-13T00:32:00.000-07:00

In preparation for some new film festivals I'm submitting to, and also in a continuous exploration for more effective and efficient rendering methods, I've been doing some new high definition renders for Jungle Gym. I chose to tackle scene 26 this time, aka "Determination shot", since it seems to be a popular image for film fests and poster images, and would be a good opportunity to fix some render errors and layer in some grain, lens vignette, ambient occlusion, and of course amp up the resolution considerably. Here you can see a before...

And after... (click to experience high-def goodness)

Suddenly, braaap!

2007-08-06T22:14:00.001-07:00

This is a little piece that I made for my brilliant illustrator friend, Eji. She was telling me one night about how she has these surprise burps sometimes, and chose to describe it to me in ascii-language as follows:
( '3')
( 'O') !!!
( '~') ...
Which, basically demands to be drawn. So here was my chibi-interpretation! Click image to see full-size version.

Taiwan International Animation Festival

2007-08-01T21:17:00.000-07:00

So I was recently informed that Jungle Gym has been given the honor of being exhibited as an international piece at the 2007 Taiwan International Animation Festival. It excites me to think of such a large audience having to watch 3 and a half minutes of hippo-mation, I just hope they enjoy it and don't start tomato-ing the screen! So anyway, Godspeed to the first overseas adventure of Herbie the Hippo, may he find many tasty treats to munch on in the world of Taiwan.

Stand by...

2007-07-20T17:32:00.000-07:00

It has been far too long since I've posted any new work, so I felt like I needed to post something here. For the past 2 months, I've been employed by the One Laptop Per Child organization as a designer and animator. We're doing a lot of interface design, but unfortunately I cannot talk about any specifics here, else I get fired I think. At any rate, it has been an exciting project but has also been monopolizing my time. I'm hoping soon to get some more sketches up in this space, so that the 2 people that read this blog (Hi James and Ashley) can have something to look at!

Celebrity Sketch

2007-07-02T23:50:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine recently wanted me to create a one-page comic involving actress Ashley Peldon for a favor I owed him. And so, for a few days I was researching many headshots and photographs of this gal, and created many horribly executed caricatures of her. I thought I would post the only remotely successful one here.

Basil Birthday Card

2007-06-19T00:40:00.000-07:00

Last year, for a friend of mine's birthday, I decided to create this card for them. They're a big The Great Mouse Detective Fan needless to say, and they're in college, so this comic was the convergence of those two worlds I suppose. Click images for full size.

Learning how to draw Basil and Dawson quickly was a headache, and as you can see it wasn't a complete success, but it was a fun attempt nonetheless. The inside panel originally had the little mouse girl leaping out of the way of the falling table, but somehow it didn't seem right to involve her in a college drinking party. Anyhow I hope this doesn't ruin your taste for The Great Mouse Detective forever!

Early Dragon Concept....

2007-06-17T11:59:00.000-07:00

This is a drawing I did of a character from an old comic series I used to write called "DavidWorld", mentioned in passing in this post. This character was "Mandy", and she was a powerful mage vixen-like character with a nice magenta-sheen. Her popular ability in the later comics was the ability to change forms, like this dragon-lizard-like form.
When I got into 3D animation in High School, one of the traditions I had started was to always try to model and rig this dragon form of Mandy every time I learned a new 3D software. Now that I've learned Maya pretty thoroughly, I've been planning on doing a rather robust model and rig of this new design. Her old design was something more non-anthro, and was kind of cute but I think this form lends itself better to 3D. We'll see if I ever get around to doing it.

Noode Doode

2007-06-01T23:31:00.000-07:00

A progression of a life drawing I did in Glen Vilppu's life drawing course at UCLA last fall. Sketched on tablet PC, so all the joys of being able to draw in layers easily.

Random Fox n' Dragon

2007-05-29T20:01:00.001-07:00

I've been meaning to put up some more random art, and so here are two sketchy things I did in the past few weeks.

Here is a random foxy dude that I sketched during a lecture in micron pen. I had been working exclusively with tablet PC for several months, so it was a nice moment to return to pen again and remember how much more control I can get.

And here is an in-progress concept sketch I did for a friend. This is his dragon character that he has been asking me to draw for quite some time. I told him I would do some practice drawings to warm me up to drawing a much better final pose. This was the first full-body I did of his character, done on the ol' tablet PC.

Shorttakes 2007

2007-05-25T02:27:00.001-07:00

Last night, Jungle Gym grabbed the Best Animation award at the 14th Annual Shorttakes Festival at UCLA. This year's festival felt more like an animation festival than a general film festival, since approximately half of all entries were animation. As mentioned in an earlier post, they were basically all CalArts entries, and then Raul and I. Some really nice CalArts stuff, I particularly enjoyed Jose y Maria by Edward Juan, and Word Fisher's Secret Piano by Wenchung Lu. Of course, it was awesome to see Raul's Fly on the big screen again. His films always have such great character appeal, and seem to always have epic title sequences, which I adore. So anyhow, Jungle Gym wins it. Incredible. I guess there are people out there who still have love for the purple hippo!

P.S. Sorry this is another "informative" post. Stay tuned for artwork.

ShortTakes Ahoy!

2007-05-16T13:47:00.000-07:00

The official entries have been announced for the 14th annual UCLA Shorttakes Student Film Festival. The entire animation category for this years competition apparently consists of my film "Jungle Gym", my fellow colleague Raul Cardenas' film "Fly", and then a million entries from our friendly neighbor CalArts. I'm really interested in seeing it this year since I rarely get to see the films from the CalArts kids. I'm sure they're totally awesome, but Raul and I will be rooting of course for the home team underdogs!

Olde Timey

2007-05-15T22:52:00.000-07:00

Lately I've been drawing a lot for my MFA thesis-in-progress, so I haven't had much time to produce any new original non-school related pieces. So thought instead I would dig way back into some ancient artwork of mine! I found this grade-school gem in an old black notebook I used to draw in that I brought back with me from my last trip to my hometown in Michigan.

This is a fancy looking image of a character "Troy" that was part of a game / comic series I drew when I was little called "Davidworld". When I was 12, I apparently thought not only was I such a good artist, but a well known artist that it was important I number my different drawing styles for my adoring public. I particularly love the crap-tacular tiled image whose pattern dies miserably as it approaches the right side of the page. Strangely enough, I even remember drawing this image at a hotel / restaurant called "The Virginia House" in Cape May, NJ. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this masterpiece from the past...erpiece.

Something Rotten in Westwood...

2007-05-09T23:51:00.000-07:00

Today the School of Theater, Film and Television at UCLA released the nominees for the 2007 Directors Spotlight award. There were a lot of brilliant animation pieces submitted this year along with the live action pieces from the production program in our film school. However, for some reason this year, zero animations were accepted.

Normally I wouldn't be bothered by this result because I want to believe in fairness and I think it is possible that there was enough high-quality live-action pieces to drown out the inevitability of an animated nominee. However, two things bother me. One is that I know two of the pieces submitted this year have gone on to compete in the 2008 Student Oscars competition (congrats Michelle), and one of them has even made it to the national finals (congrats Brian and Robyn)! The other of course, is that Spotlight has a category for outstanding animated short!

So, none of this seems to add up. I've seen some of the pieces that win Spotlight, and my feeling is that any short that can make it to national finals for the Student Oscar, can easily get accepted to UCLA Spotlight. Something is fishy. Could tensions have ran high enough between the live action and animation programs that they decided to eliminate us from Spotlight altogether? Are there some new rules in place that the animation department has not been made aware of? Which live-action piece will end up winning the UCLA Spotlight award for animation I wonder? Well, at least there are still non-bias venues such as Slamdance, Austin, and apparently the Oscars for us bruin animators to submit to. I just hope future generations of the UCLA Animation Workshop will not have to suffer this crime.

Rhythm & Blues

2007-05-08T18:38:00.000-07:00

I received my annual "we got your reel and we're checking it out" postcard from Rhythm & Hues today. I should start making a wall out of these things! And now I play the waiting game again. Animation gods have mercy!

Silly Sir Sketches

2007-05-03T01:08:00.000-07:00

My friend James Suhr is currently at Nickelodeon as a storyboard artist on a show in development called "Making Fiends" created by our department's very own Amy Winfrey. He was hanging out in the UCLA animation department tonight, and visualized what I would look like were I transported into the bizzare world of Making Fiends.

Character Animation Exercise

2007-04-29T01:44:00.000-07:00

This past week I completed a personal character animation exercise. It had been just a little bit over a year since I had animated anything, and decided it was time to get loose again. It also made for a nice additional dialogue piece to stick on my animation reel for Rhythm & Hues to look at. The final animation can be viewed here.

I had been reading about Keith Lango's Pop-Thru Animation technique for 3D animators and thought this would be the perfect opportunity to try it out myself. Up until now I used either straight-ahead animation technique in 3D or a kind of linear-tween pose-to-pose method. I must say, both feel incredibly inferior and wasteful after using this alternate method. The feeling achieved through this pop-thru method feels very much like rolling or flipping in 2D animation and as Lango mentions in his article, is designed to bring the focus back to posing and timing.

I understand that most major studios employ this method as a way to get maximum efficiency out of their animation department since it allows animation supervisors to get a feel for what their animators are doing early in the week, and so changes can be made with minimal waste. If you check out some of the in-progress animation in the Ratatouille video podcast, you can see this method being used in some of their shots.