Color tests/Composition Experiments

Lately, I've been learning a lot about composition and cinematography, thanks to a class I'm taking taught by Gil Zimmerman- the head of layout on How to Train Your Dragon 1 and 2. It's on a Friday night, and my only Friday class, so that really stinks, but judging from the material I've learned from that class I'd say it's worth the sacrifice. Before taking this class, I assumed composition was simply placing cameras and your shots in a way that looks aesthetically pleasing, but I'm starting to realize more and more that cinematography can play such a huge part in playing stories! Gil showed us this video series called Hollywood Camera Work, which used stand-still figures that slide around to show how camera angles and composition can tell a story. That blew my mind. 

So anyways, I've gotten back into a streak of working really hard and I've been on a roll for this past week! Aside from studying cinematography and reading books outside of class (Framed Ink and The Filmmaker's Eye,) I've also tried to do this exercise where I crank out one digital painting in an hour. The first one took me two hours, but the last two I did in one hour, and ended up playing around with colors towards the end. I realized that my color choices are actually usually pretty crappy, because I end up wanting to use every color of the rainbow, and then everything turns really muddy, so I had to constantly go back to find references of artists like Pascal Campion who is a genius at color. I also needed to look up a bunch of films and see how they composed their shots and mimicked those shots. 

testing out skies and a simpler way of painting

p.s. side note: the above image was inspired by one of the pictures I took at the Leighton house! I wanted to capture how the sky looked and thought it would be really cool reference for the final transformation of my little town. 

Reference photo for  the sky

Noemi looking out to her gloomy neighborhood

Also I started studying the houses around Vermont Avenue, and combining them with the houses of Hooverville during the great depression. I love the colors of the houses in Vermont, but the hooverville houses have soooo much character! Here is a quick sketch that I did of both types of houses- I tried to make Noemi's shack more hooverville-looking in my last painting exercise.Hopefully I can somehow bring in characteristics from both types of houses.

Below is a drawing of Noemi's shack, that I based off of the hooverville houses I found online.

I was too lazy to draw Noemi in the house, but this is when random neighbors pass by and she gets scared

playing with different color choices

more colors! This is more sickly-looking and reminds me of The Backwater Gospel

Anyways. I'm super excited and really hope this animation buzz will last me throughout the year. One can dream!

Reference Photos

I've been volunteering at this house called the Leighton House by vermont for the past semester. Every Wednesday I would go and tutor kids with their homework and help them with their reading. For those of you who don't know, USC is in a not-very-nice place of Los Angeles, so the education of the kids that I meet in this neighborhood are way below proficiency level. It's heartbreaking because they are so eager to learn and so excited everytime they move up one grade in reading, or everytime they complete math problems that I give them. They have been calling themselves "math ninjas." 

Fun fact: only 5% of the students in the public high school/middle school closest to USC are proficient in their education. (this includes the kids I teach.) Most of these kids will end up incarcerated. However, 98% students at the high school in La Canada (only 15-30 minutes away) are proficient, and most of them are above average. Sadly, the more I see of Los Angeles, the more I realize that America is not a nation founded on equality. 

So this past Wednesday, I realized how similar this place was to the little slum Noemi is in. The skies were particularly incredible due to the rain, and the lighting was quite magnificent, so I decided to take some reference photos to capture the sky and the look/feel of the neighborhood. It's not your american dream neighborhood, but I love it to pieces. 

check out this sky

I really love the color variety in the houses

check out how the sun shines through the house!

more house designs

I love the fences, rubble (the house next door is being redone,) and the colors of the houses against the sky

Transitioning to Fully 3D

Oops, I was supposed to have this post by yesterday at 5pm but in the midst of everything I totally forgot to hit the publish button! Typical.

Anyways, this week I talked to Jordan, a friend of mine, who gave me the brilliant idea of first making a rough 3D model of my city/town/hooverville in Maya, and then storyboarding from that. It took me quite a while, but now I can play with layout/composition, and lighting so much more than if I was hand-drawing everything. I'd like to think I'm a decent artist, but I am certainly not up to par with story board professionals who can whip out perspective drawings like nobody's business. So, it might seem like cheating, but if there's one thing I learned about animation/art/life in general, it's to fake it till you make it! Here are examples of me boarding over my 3D images- this has also cut so much time out of my boarding/experimenting because I can focus more on whether or not these layouts help tell the story instead of stressing over if I got the perspective right.

rough renders of my layout

POV Noemi's shack

drawing over these babies

POV Noemi putting down the picture

I'm still, unfortunately trying to figure out what to do with my story, and while I was biking the other day I wondered if the story would flow better if I cut out everything with  Noemi being afraid to go outside/meeting Milo, and just having them jump directly into passing out flowers to the townspeople. But I think that makes it lack a lot of content. I've also been slacking on meeting up with professors soooo I need to get on that! Last night I also relearned the importance of saving frequently in Maya (I haven't used it extensively in a while,) and I must have modeled a couple buildings multiple times because I kept losing them. -__- 

It's strange because I basically only slept one hour last night because I've been working so much on this lately, but for some reason the lack of sleep has renewed my motivation to work on this! (I've been going through kind of a lull latel.) Maybe I need to pull more late nights. lol! 

Also, I forgot to mention, but I'm thinking of transitioning this film to a film that is fully based in Maya instead of a 2D/3D combination-hence this title. Only the townspeople will still be in 2D because ain't nobody got time to model and rig a bajillion townspeople. 

And now I'm off to see if I can cram in a 20 minute powernap between classes :)