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 :)

Colors on colors

This week is all about finalizing my animatic and rigs! Yay! The next step is texturing Noemi and Milo, so I can start getting ready to animate. Needless to say my production schedule is a little all over the place because I had some unexpected delays, but I spent most of the filler time playing with concept art/colors and learning more about layout and composition. Here is an example of a color/mood test that I did for Noemi overlooking the neighborhood:

Kinda rough with the shapes and brush textures, but I wanted to experiment with a more drastic lighting effect in the backgrounds that really highlights the darkness and the sunlight. Speaking of struggling, I realized that I am pretty awful at making things contrast well. Some part of me just wants to make everything the same tone, and when I try to highlight/darken something, within 10 minutes everything else gets lighter/darker too -__- #artiststruggles Also I discovered that messing around with curves in photoshop is my best friend. I have to run off to chapter dinnerrr buttt if I have more time I'll post up some more work I did this week :D

peace out cybernerdssss

Photoshop or Flash?

So over the past few weeks I've been trying to rework and rework my animatic, and finally decided that I like using flash for a rough animatic better, but photoshop is so much cooler for fleshed out results. Although the danger in using photoshop is that I'm tempted to be super detailed and get tunnel vision (aka focusing on tiny details instead of the big picture.) So. I'm going to stick to flash from now on.

Still got quite sidetracked this weekend because I've been helping people out with some other projects; I did some character design for some of my friend's films! I realized that I really love character design- thinking of weird quirks and stylized figures are super fun. Too bad it's such a ridiculously competitive field. (which is saying a lot considering how cutthroat the animation industry already is)

Rigsrigsrigs

So my characters are really starting to get rigged! Milo is in the final stages of modeling and Noemi has her body almost all rigged by now- I need to start getting her facially rigged though. The majority of this week was still most of my reworking my animatic, putting things together, and thinking of the story.

So, this past week has been a bit of a strugglefest for me in terms of staying on top of things since ADX rush has been taking over my evenings/life. Overall, nothing in particular went wrong other than the fact that production schedule might have to be pushed back. It's just been one of those weeks where I've been working so hard on everything but it feels like I still haven't really accomplished anything :(

Projecting Images

Happy Monday everyone! I'm so thankful for a mercifully cooler day- a good change from the freaking oven LA has been baking in for the past week or so. Unfortunately, USC internet is being really ridiculously slow which means that I am ridiculously unproductive right now because I can't upload/email/send anything :(

This past week I've been continuing to finish my storyboard/tighten up my story. I've been meeting up with various professors who have all given me really cool tips, so I'm hoping to be able to apply them to my story! This past weekend I went to an Intervarsity conference called Ignite, where I met a lady named Noemi, who ALSO has a heart for social justice/the urban city. Isn't that so cool? We pretty much freaked out when we met each other. She also loves the italian language and is Mexican, so that is another bonus.

Sheila Sofian, one of my professors, gave me a .pdf from Brad Bird's notes on composition; reading it made me realize how much more practice I still had to do on my drafting/perspective skills, and how I still have a lot to learn about cinematography and composition. Time to go back to the drawing board! On the other hand, Eric Hanson, my mentor, showed me how to project images onto a plane, which can give you really really awesome camera effects! I was pretty much mindblown at how easy it was and definitely hope to use some of these techniques in my film. Below is a quick demo he showed me using the image I illustrated last week- you can see the effect with the tree branches on the left:

Merp Class

For some reason it totally slipped my mind that I needed to post a blog entry before class today: how embarrassing, I missed my first assignment! But at least I wasn't unproductive :3 This week was full of me running around to classes, trying to figure out my thesis story (still,) and talking to multiple professors and asking their opinions. I finally got a rough animatic in to narrate the story, but it still needs so much work! Something that I really need to work on this week is tightening my drawings, look into more composition/cinematography, and really layout my "world" for Noemi.

On the bright side, Trixie, my professor introduced me to this freaking heaven-sent ipad app called Procreate, which basically helps turn my ipad into a mini Cintiq. I drew this: 

And everyone seemed to like it a lot so IM SO EXCITED! Trixie said that I could use procreate to paint final backgrounds for my thesis which makes me a very very happy camper. 

It's kind of weird knowing that I'm blogging for a class now, because every week I have to say what went right, and what went wrong. Hopefully they don't grade me on my grammar because I am terribly casual... So anyways, if some blog posts seem kind of drafted, it might be because it is! But I will still try to continue to post blog posts outside of class to remind myself of inspirations, ideas, and to make me feel better on weeks where I feel like this film is going nowhere :)

Rock on cyberworld!