Moustaches - cool or creepy?

I'm currently working on a pilot episode of an educational kids show for the UCSD Autism Center. My team consists of five men and one other woman, and we needed character designs.

One of the characters is a giant talking oyster with a face. I tried some designs with different eyes and different mouths, but honestly, how much can you do with an oyster? No matter what I did, he had a very large expanse of FACE, and not a lot of features to fill it up with. So, being the genius that I am, to break up the space, I gave him a moustache.

It started out as a joke, and I never intended for the moustache to make it to the movie. To be honest, my own drawing creeped me out. But all the guys on the team jumped on it. They LOVED the moustache. They thought it was the greatest thing ever. Then the other girl and I pointed out that it was creepy, having an old guy with a bushy moustache just approaching these kids and wanting to play with them. We wanted to get rid of the moustache. It took us at least half an hour of debate until finally, the ladies in the group pointed out that if moms think the moustache is creepy, they won't let their kids watch the show. Thus, the creepy moustache was scrapped, and all the men in the room lamented its loss.

Color coding in animation

My current project is about a flying squid, and after three months of pre-production, I'm finally animating the first scene. This is my first time animating an eight-legged creature in 2D (I've done it in 3D) and one of the first things I realized would be an issue was keeping track of which leg is which.

The solution here - color coding. Leg #1 is red, leg #2 is green, and so on. It looks something like this:

Makes it a lot easier to keep the tentacles separated. The same method works great for animating quadrupeds, insects, spiders, and aliens with prehensile antennae.

CTN-X 2010

So, I attended the first annual CTN animation expo last year, and it was excellent. I got to meet other animators and industry professionals, I got to see some panels on everything from storymaking to producing indie films to copyright law, AND I got to shake hands with Don Bluth. THAT was pretty cool.

So I went again this year. I took my portfolio and my demo reel with the intention of talking to some recruiters and hitting people up for jobs. Well, I still don't have a job... But I did get to talk to a few people about my work and what I could do to improve my chances of getting my foot in the door.

Chris Sanders, one of the co-directors on How to Train Your Dragon, and the character designer on Lilo and Stitch, told me about Kathy Alteiri, a production designer at Dreamworks. I plan to get in contact with her soon.

I also spoke to Dice Tsutsumi, who works for Pixar and does AMAZING things with color and lighting. (And, funnily enough, he grew up about a hundred miles away from where I started school in Japan). I'm sending him my portfolio for a review sometime in the next week.

The last person I spoke to who I really felt gave me some good advice was Victoria Ying, a Disney artist who worked on Tangled. She took a look at my paintings and my color script (saying it's really obvious which ones are newer and which ones are older. Yay, improvement!) and says she likes the direction I'm going in with the color script work, but first of all, I should start working digital. (My preferred mediums are oil paint for large paintings and acrylic for small color tests, but it's not industry standard, and I really do need to work on my digital skills). She also told me that she wants me to keep building my knowledge of color and light, and I should be doing at least one daily color thumbnail from live-action film. NOT animation. I think this is a FABULOUS idea... and I'll start in a month. For right now, impending graduation and porftolio show don't allow me for any schedule changes. But definitely later.

For anyone who's interested, the CTN Animation Expo is an amazing place to meet people and make contacts in the animation industry, get a new perspective on your artwork, get advice, get sneak peaks (we saw Tangled 4 days before its theater release), and get inspired.

8mm film projector

So I ordered a 1952 Keystone Sixty 8mm film projector off of ebay. Everything works but the light (which I can replace for $25) (and I get paid tomorrow!). AND it came with an old 8mm copy of a mickey mouse cartoon called "Peg Leg Pete." I'm excited!

My brother and I spent a good hour trying to figure out where the film goes, since it didn't come with a manual, buy we finally got everything working. We loaded the film in, it runs, it rewinds, and everything seems dandy.

The downside here is that I can see this becoming a very expensive hobby.

I have discovered something phenomenal!

3D printing. Someone from the art institute introduced me to it. Basically, you can model something in Maya, send them an .stl file (never heard of it) and their 3D printer will create from that file a perfect model of... whatever you modeled. They ship it to you, it arrives on your doorstep, and you hold your 3D creation in your hands.

Cool, huh? I'm currently modeling a squid that I intend to send to be 3D-printed. That's my project for the day (and by 'day,' I mean "several days.").

The TARZAN Chronicles

I love the Disney production art books. It's one thing to see an amazing movie, but it's a thousand times better to see how the magic happened.

Tarzan is by far one of the best movies in existence. Great story, spectacular animation, and the most gruesome villain death in Disney history. Naturally, I've been longing for this art book since I was a budding wee animator. Unfortunately for me, it's been out of print for quite some time, and the only copies available on Amazon and ebay go for about $150. And when my choices are an art book or grocery money, well, you can guess my priorities.

So I walked into Book-off (for those of you who don't know, a japanese-run used book store that also accepts american books) and sitting there on the shelf, between a book on Monet and a book on Van Gogh, was the TARZAN Chronicles. In a temporary loss of dignity, I did a little dance, paid $15 for it, and left the store waving my treasure in the air and singing a glorious song of victory.

Squidley. The Flying Squid.

I'm finally starting work on a project I've been wanting to do forever. I wrote the concept and did some rough boards about three years ago (before I'd ever done storyboards or took a camera class or anything important like that) and they were AWFUL. But the concept was fun. I spent a day reworking the story, another day reworking the boards, and about four hours last night designing characters - some cute and cartoony, some realistic, and one that was just abstract and weird.

I took the designs around to some of my animation buddies, and with some feedback I settled on a chibi-ish and kind of derpy character. Once I get to a good scanner, I'll upload some of the doodles that didn't make it to the animation board.

New Software!

Got Toon Boom in the mail the other day. I finally had a chance to sit down with it and try it out. My first task was very simple - make a very basic animatic. As of now, it's entirely on one's... and backwards.

Ah well. This is what you do when you get new software, you break it. That's how it goes, and that's how you learn. I think for the sake of getting it done on time, though, I might have to take it into flash.

Toon Boom!

Toon Boom came in the mail yesterday! Installing it was easy peasy. Figuring out the program might take some time, though. It's similar enough to Flash (only a million times better) and the only drawback here is that I don't have someone who knows it already to sit down and teach me. Ah well, that's what internet tutorials are for.

Rest assured, as soon as I figure it out, you're gonna see something AWESOME!!!

Checking out the studios

The Women in Animation student chapter took a trip to Burbank yesterday to visit Disney and Nickelodeon studios. I'd already visited both before, but why turn down an opportunity, right? And I was lucky I went. We got to sit down with Eric Goldberg - yes, you read right - and he walked us through the challenges of designing and animating Louis the alligator. He's a fun guy, doesn't take himself too seriously. He looks like a walking caricature. I decided that drawing cartoons for several decades must have that effect on a person, and I started wondering what I will look like when I'm old.

We also went back to Nickelodeon. I got to sit down for a few mintues with Peter Bennett, who hand paints the backgrounds for spongebob. I started out as an oil painter and switched to animation a few years ago. Now don't get me wrong, I think it's the best career I could ever have, and I'd never want to work outside this industry. I love animating. But if I could take a job doing traditional painting, I'd be so stoked.

Honestly, I love the atmosphere at Nick, but I don't really like some of the shows they're putting out. *cough*fanboyandchumchum*cough.* But I loved the Butch Hartman shows, and I hear a new one is coming out. And if they can come up with something amazing to take the place of Avatar, I'd want to be a part of that. If they did it once, they can do it again.

The internship application deadline is coming up soon. Wish me luck!

Nosey Paul

In November, I started pre-production for a short animation that I'm still in the process of doing. I showed my brother and sister the character design, (he has a giant schnoz) and simultaneously one of them asked "Is his name Nosey?" and the other asked, "Is his name Paul?" Thus, Nosey Paul was born.

I spent my entire winter vacation painting the backgrounds with oil paints. I'm really happy with how they came out. All together, there's... I think 19 of them.

I'll upload both backgrounds and characters as soon as the paintings are dry.