Time Machine

WOW... it's been a while.

There's so much that's happened since I last posted.  Reading through this journal is surreal - I kind of don't recognize myself but... still do at the same time.  Miss writing openly like this.  At any rate, I thought it'd be fitting to have this all come full circle:

Since the birth of this blog, I wrote so feverishly about wanting to go to Ringling.  A LOT has happened between then.  I graduated back last year in 2016 where I collaborated with a good friend, Sana Srinivasan for senior thesis.  And... here it is... the culmination of everything...

Right now I'm writing a book about how we made the film, so I won't go into detail about this work like I have for any other post I've made.

After graduation, some other dreams came true (that may or may not be foreshadowed by another post in this blog).  More on that later... but yeah...

I fucking did it.

I fucking did it, guys.

...

Thanks for the wild ride, everyone.

Thesis Kickstarter!

We need your help on the biggest project we've ever attempted!

Sana Srinivasan and I are tag-teaming to make a fully-animated 3D short film titled, "Illegal Move," and we need the kindness of friends, family, and the public to provide a quality musical score and sound effects.

Our full Kickstarter pitch is right here! Thank you for your time, and we hope you enjoy the sneak peek!

Kickstarter Campaign Title Card

Flavor

"Hollywood is not about authenticity, but having enough of its flavor for the audience to recognize it."

This blog will be a desert for a little while yet since the next year is dedicated to thesis, but we were talking to our film's composer the other day and he dropped a few interesting knowledge bombs.  It's not word for word, but this one gave me the most food for thought.

Mystery Skulls ZBrush Sculpt

When I first saw Mystery Skulls' "Ghost," I remember thinking, "Damn, that design is just screaming to be sculpted." Better late than never - took a few liberties to make the design more appealing in 3d space, but this was lots of fun...

Self Caricature Emotions Animation Test

Haven't gotten around to posting much again (finally working on thesis!  But much of it is secret for now, so shh...), but in the meantime we fully modeled and rigged self-caricatures that we designed back in the fall.  We animated our characters to test a few verbal emotions (no coherent story needed).  Mine's not perfect but I'm still pretty happy with what I was able to get considering that I started my animation over entirely from scratch about 3 days before the deadline.

Head Sculpt WIP

 

Push Pull Animated

Made some adjustments to my Push Pull character, making her armor a lighter value and adding reflection to her armor via layered shaders.

Desperate to join the Corps, Katsuye Kimura engages in a training simulation where she is determined to get from Point A to Point B.

Drama Painting

Painting for DFA Class.  Learned a lot of neat-o new tricks like clipping masks and using Maya more to help achieve perspective.  Wish I could keep going but it's time to move on...getting closer to tighter rendering...

Push Pull Model

Pose renders / sneak peak at my newcomer CA Push Pull Model: Katsuye Kimura! Still lots of work to still be done, as per usual.

Evil Con (Collaborative Animatic)

Mixed things up in Concept class by collabing with Luiza Alaniz on a story!  Super cool experience because the story has so much more time to breathe and be high concept.  Plus, it felt a lot more fluid and organic bouncing off story and cinematography ideas off with a friend who shares the investment of making the ideas execute.

Logline: Tai, a brilliant but rotten little girl with an agenda, pits two of Evil Con International's featured evil genius' against one another.

Also, kudos to Kevin Temmer and Valerie Sattazahn for their usual awesome voice acting

Doodle break

Pretty stoked for Big Hero 6.  I think I've been listening to too much Fall Out Boy today.

Also, seeing the clips for this and discussing films in my cinema class have made me realize I'd really like to do a genre film for thesis...

Push Pull: Modeling WIP

Zbrush is gr8

Live & Learn from the Works of Yesterday

Cutting myself off (rather than working things to death), and moving on seems to be the golden lesson from this year.  EXAMPLE: Learning from the mistakes from the last DFA assignment on knowing what constitutes cleaner line work was much easier to identify after allowing myself to fail on a few fronts.  Anywho, below is the final design for the self-portait Lip Sync caricature that we'll be putting through the whole animation pipeline next semester.  

It's-a-meeeeee

Also, story class had us develop a 'High Concept' idea into an animatic.  It's not perfect, but I did like what I got from the overall evocative rhythm that the story progresses through.

On a side note, we worked with a few local actors from Florida Studio Theater on this project to help figure out specific acting beats for a specific snippet of our stories.  What was interesting is that they would make the most out of a rough 10-second story moment and stretch it to be as long as one minute (while of course feeling incredibly natural).  Started thinking about how smart it is in regards to thesis prep how Ringling has been disciplining us to keep our Animatic time low so we don't kill ourselves later in the animation phase, especially when we want to milk a key moment or two...

Waiting...

Artie's got the jokes but not really

Junior Year: First Month

First month of Junior year!  Academically, things have been going much more swimmingly by working smarter instead of harder.

We had our Artie silhouette assignment, which was really fun because it's so graphic-looking and you can cheat the rig like crazy.  I got my teacher to laugh, which was awesome because I'm finally able to get my work to evoke a reaction like humor.

Speaking of humor, DFA has also been more fun than I anticipated.  I was really close to cutting out the Bitten-Turtle character in favor for another character to use for the final, but he did get a laugh.  A good buddy of mine once told me you always want to keep anything that gets a reaction...

Design Lab II and Scrapped Force-Fit designs for DFA; I had a lucky random word selection of Ornate, Firefly, and Tank.  As much as I liked these, I nixed them out because the one on the left doesn't read enough as a firefly and the one on the right wasn't as dynamic (except for the legs).  It also still felt a little too similar to the one I initially chose for the final.

Random DFA Classmate Sketch Warm Up for Caricatures

Nothing to report on the Concept/Storyboard end of things since we've mostly been doing PrePro stuffs for the waiting assignment and been doing some acting training with Florida Studio Theater.  I haven't really been on stage since high school and I almost forgot how much I loved it...

Instead, here's a random logo I made over the summer for a Latino community group my Dad helps out with.  I'm not sure how this measures up Graphic Design-wise, but the clients loved it.  They also used it for advertising on TV... so hey, I'm on TV!

Ringling College: Guaranteed Character Appeal Notes

Quote of the 4AM

"It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose.  That is not weakness; that is life."

-Jean Luc Picard, Star Trek TNG

Back in the Labs

Silhouette Artie is excited for the new Smash Bros

Ode to Junior Year

This is a little belated, but I really feel blessed to meet almost all of my personal art heroes during my time at Ringling. This past Friday I met Lindsey Olivares, who was demoing her techniques on caricatures. I jumped at the opportunity to volunteer to be one of her models and got this awesome souvenir for it.

School can get rough sometimes, but always remember we go to one of the best schools in the world and become tougher for it. Count the blessings.

Kaiju

D:<