layout and character sheet.

This week has been totally redickadonk. It's halloween soon and i don't quite have my costume together. DX of fail. so many things to do. :(

Anyways, I've been letting my film idea brew in my head. I really like it. I really do. :D I'm gonna try to draw/write something up rto show it to my story teacher. I really wanna be able to make this idea work.

I sorta started to think about this sorta changing....sheet thing..i forget what they're called...or something they walk past and come out as different characters. I dunno. lol. I still need to come up with some sort of villian. i was thinking that they could imagine the teddy bear as a villian. :D

ugh just thinking about it i get all excited. :D

I have some designs for the girl character

When pitching my idea to my friend, my friend said that she COULD be an imaginary friend of his. Though I wonder if that's really a good idea. I"m sorta like...I dunno. conflicted. She could be an imaginary friend but then why isn't she more imaginary? I sorta like her as this child hood friend that he plays with. It's also 2 minutes long so I can't get into too much. hahah


I used them for my layout assingment. lol.I love these characters the more i draw them.

I feel like i'm reaching another level lately. You know when you work really hard and your style starts to change and you just feel a DIFFERENCE? That's sorta how i feel. :) I'm getting better and my worth ethic is a shitload improved ffrom last year. :D

I'm really hoping that my film comes out the way I want it to. :)

BAKU!!

Mkay so. I basically am in love with these damn spirits.
I did a quick google search for japanese monsters and I saw this. I was totally in love with them.
Baku's are essentially dream eaters. They devour both good and bad dreams. They're supposed to have elephant heads and tiger/lion bodies.
tis amazing


I love em. :D
So I went off to draw them. The assignment was to draw a monster and two kids. I was more intersted in the monster. hha





The Japanophile within me became really obvious for this assingment. hhaha
I used a couple of sites
http://www.dicts.info/dictionary.php?l1=English&l2=Japanese_Romaji
and
http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~danken/kanjidic.html

lol
I'm such a japanophile.

I was going to paint these but I'm SOO BEHIND THIS WEEK. Like oh my god. It's about 5am right now. I still haven't TOUCHED my animation since last week. I'm NOT going to bed. gonna force myself to stay up. I have crap to do for wednesday too. aw FML.

woking out characters.

So i've been not sleeping lately. lol. I wasted an entire day doing nothing. It's not 6:27 am and i'm totally freaking out because I haven't done anything. I need to get my character designs done by monday. I'm thinking of doing some cool asian-y-like designs. ahha. Who knows!!

Anywho, i finally put together a sort of sheet for my main character. Obviously i needed a ruler, but I think I'm able to understand this stuff pretty darn clearly. lol.

As you can see, i've simplified the character! hhahahaa. For the best honestly. hahah. He's a lot easier to work with.
I have a scene due on tuesday. If i can work really good, I wanna put it through after effects. We'll have to see though

Film idea Developments-TREEHOUZEE

:D

So last night while trying to figure out my layout assingment, I THINK I came to another realization.

When I was younger, I ALWAYS wanted a treehouse. I begged my parents but I never got one. :( To me, tree-houses are so...defaulty fantasy. You know. Living in trees? It's so whimsical. :D
So I decided that i wanna put my flim in a treehouse. A rickety, unstable treehouse that transforms into something fantastic when the imagination of two gender swamped children act out different things during dress up. :D I thought about the film startingout the same. Mom catches him trying on her clothes. He's reprimanded and sent to his room. The next day he wakes up and goes out to play with his friend. Before he leaves, mom asks where her pink hat isn and warns him not to play in the treehouse. He doesn't know and he goes outside to play. They act out fun scenes with eachother. The boy will fall out of the tree house, getting hurt. the mom will rush out to see if he's ok. Boy ends up going to the hospital for recovery. To make him happy, she gives him the pink hat that he took from her and smiles.

So it's a character arc of sorts i guess. I really wanna develop this. really bad. ugh. I'm worried about time but i THINK that i can do it. I've been watching some commericals lately. There was one Malyasian commercial in particular that was about 2;30 long and it was able to get a great amountof story in that short short amount of time.

Here it is. :D


Soooooooooo. yeah. I think i can do it. It's all gonna be about WHAT to show. What i need to add what i need to cut. Once i figure that out, i can do it.

Anywho, figure drawing was prettyfail this week. I'll upload it laterif i feel the need to

but here's my layout assingments.




I've GOTTA work on my draftsmanship. I've been trying to draw stuff straight on the computer lately. I realize that's not really workin' out. Gotta get back to pencil

Well this is a new week. I'll see what i can do. :D

Film idea and Classmates. :D

So Im sitting in the mac lab trying to draw my assignment for layout. Then I was going to do somehting from my film. However, the more I think about the settings of my film, the less excited I get. I mean, the film I had in my mind had 3 phases. The house, the car and the kindergarten. and well I'm struggling with the setting and the characters. I like my designs but i'm not sure about bringing OTHER children into the equation. I'm also unsure about what it's actually like to be in kindgergarten and I'm sorta like not caring to do the research and find out. As I'm sitting here thinking about the setting for the characters, I started to think about maybe placing them in a setting that is perhaps more familiar to me. I started to think about when I was younger and I used to go off for adventures in the park. Me and my friends would play make believe and run out into the forest until it would get dark. Our mothers would be so worried hahaha. So I thought that maybe I'd change the setting to the park or a forest and have the two characters have this sorta established relationship and this story that they'd be acting out for the longest time. My film would be just a look into a day where they are out on an adventure. I'm so into adventures and imaginations.
I would have the two characters acting out a damsal in distress role and the valiant knight to save her. Gender reversal of course! I was thinking maybe the beginning we can show the boy dressing up in his mom's clothes, being caught and then lectured and sent to his room for bed. Then the next day he leaves with his friend and they dress up in the clothes around the house before en barking on their journey into the park. Mom gets worried and is relieved to find her son and realizes that loving her son is more important that how he identifies. lol

So i'm gonna have t keep working on that. ahha


To keep myself sane, I've been drawing my classmates.

Julia, Sara, Mayumi, Ellen and Natalie. :D

Procrastination station.

mkay so i've been procrastinating for the longest time. This week is so overwhelming. We have so much crap to do. :(
ugh.
I'm so annoyed. hahaha
But here's a lo awaited update

Here are my bearth heads.
lol .

Some figure drawings

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I've been trying to change up my style lately. I've been working a lot with trying different style. so much that i've sorta decided that i need to simplify the style of my film. lol.

I'm sorta excited. :D

I'll be working on my scene for animation.

I hope i can catch up.

BEARTH.

Hey gaiz. I has bearz for you. :D

I love this assingment. I think i'm a furry. :D

I still have to do the expresssions.

Bt here's what i have so far.

LOL. Bearth are so cute. :D

I tried to draw the same character, but let it develop. Differnt bear shaps different demenors.

lol. it's fun

NOW TO WORK ON MY HORRIBLE ANIMATION ASSINGMENT.

My film's evolution/story beats

This weeks assingments have been mostly film-based. Well at least two of the larger ones, Story and Layout. We had to do 3 story beats and some character designs. :) I'm really falling in love with the character. :) I need to really do some animation tests because I feel like I'm totally not sure if I can animate him. My animation teacher told me that I drew like a child. Which sorta pissed me off. I had to really hold myself back from strangling him. hahaha. But I guess in essence what he told me was sorta helpful. He didn't like tha ti don't draw much construction to my characters. I've just been drawing th eway that's easiest for me. lol. I think drawing too many things would really overwhelm me after a while. Gotta find some time to do some animation tests.

My story has been sorta changing. I think there's two different directions I can go in.

I've been sorta working with the idea of an abusive disapproving father that would try to "beat" the masculinity into the little boy. So he would go to day care with scratches on his face or something. I don't really know. I want the audience to feel sympathetic towards the character and i'm not totally sure how to do that yet also fit that into 2:30. Thing with this angle is though, that if I wanted to go this way, I'd probably want him to do something more surreal than play house. Maybe go away to this imaginary world where he is accepted. Who knows. I gotta work it all out. My older idea is sorta more...i dunno, it would make a tad more sense, but now i"m introducing another character and I'm not toally sure how well they'd mesh/how to involve her. I know i want to though. I think ove rhte course of the next few days that I"m gonna start to write up a little and see what i can come up with. I'll post here of course!

I'm really exicted for my film. :) I can't wait. I can already tell it's gonna be a lot better this year. I hope i can finish it.

Bloggin' to pass time!

Sooo I just pulled an all nighter and I need beffix.It's 7:17 and beffix doesn't come til 7:30. So I thought I'd blog to pass the time!!! :D

I wanted to sorta make a comment about my, what i considered, ironic Character design class review yesterday. Let me tell ya...I love my teacher. I really do. He's simply like...I mean...You gotta take everything he says with a grain of salt, but that aside...he knows what he's talking about. He's not nearly as scary as so many people lead me to believe. I thought he'd be horrible and scary. BUt he's not. He seems like that sorta guy thats just begging to see people do well. Like a lot of Cal arts teachers he seems to silently take note of certain people's strengths and weaknesses and then tries to adress them. I really like him and i know i'm gonna learn alot from him.

Well... I thought that the review yesterday was really ironic because well...I idolize a lot of my classmates. And maybe only one of them that i really look up to got positive feedback. The thing he harped on the MOST was being able to actually UNDERSTAND the Camels and how they're constructed. A lot of people turned in drawings that were, yeah charactures of Camels but they didn't really have the construction of a camel. The bone structure was ignored and turned into what he called "rubber". It was just shocking becuase he didn'tlike MOST of them on the wall. And you can look around and like MOST of them. Hell i know i did. It was intersting to see him point to certain things on the wall and just say "no" or "that's not it" or "wrong".

The last class was almost like...written for me. No joke... I mean... combining both realism and cartoony looks. We have a camel must still look and feel like a camel but has to have character and "charm" that of a cartoon. I was shocked when he picked out most most realistic drawings to be the strongest ones. I felt like I got a slightly more positive review than usual! Which felt great. He didn't like some and he liked the others. I think he really didn't like the others because of their sillouete.

If there's anything that i've learned its that I need to find the happy marriage between both realistic and cartoony styles. I gotta start looking to other art and figuring out why I like it and then go for it! i think/know it's possible.:)

Character Design Rant.

Soooo after my last post, i got the following comment:

"Hey I`ve been following ur blog for a bit (im from the AB forums) and i just wanted to comment on what you said about how getting lackluster reviews. It`s not because your stuff is bad because I think it`s good but it`s just realistic to a point that it lacks style I think. I know you say you don`t get the whole cartoony style but I think that`s something you should try getting past. I`m not trying to say you should conform to a certain style, I just think it would do you alot of good to maybe play around with more cartoony stuff and see how it feels. Character designers usually draw stuff that is even more cartoony and stylized than the final characters that are put into production because the designs get watered down. I think that if you were to become a character designer, you`d have a hard time because these if these were watered down more, it would practically be photo-realistic. I think it would benefit the animation in your films aswell. Haha I don`t mean to sound like a jerk, I just wanted to voice my opinion. I`m sure you know more about this stuff than I do though, so I don`t expect you to listen to my ramblings lol."

Do I disagree?? Not at all.

I mean, ok yeah, my stuff is pretty darn realisticish and yea that's problematic. But like..I dunno. Sure when i was growing up i watched cartoons but I always JIZZED over cartoons that looked more realistic. and I guess that's why my character designs look that way.

I mean...here's my taste:

I mean, fuck, I like anime. hahah. I mean, just trying to come up with images that express the sorta character design i like. I like anime. But like, i had it pounded in my head from a young age that anime=not able to draw/Not gonna get into cal arts. lol. So I toned it down, broke myself down and started to draw more realisticly

I used to draw like this:

Then someone told me that if I wanted to get into Cal Arts, I'd have to be able to draw from life, which I took as drawing realistically. So I started to draw like this:

And that eventually turned into this:

Which eventurally turned into this

And now I'm in the process of dumbing all that down and simplifying it to this:

And well I LIKE that. I really do. but I'm sure people would look at these designs and say "oh, well, they're nice!" and then proceed to drool over something super graphic and "fun". I guess it's just that my taste is really different. I always got excited seeing things that looked pretty realistic but were obviously drawn animate.It would just GET ME OFF. You know? A more realistic animated show excites me more than something that is cartoony and graphic and blah blah blah. I guess it's because I tend to really enjoy more serious stories. Or stories that treat you like you're an adult and not some kid watching TV. Because i guess I've always felt like I was older and more mature than everyone around me. lol

It's really hard for me to draw something like:

and actually enjoy myself. there's nothing complicated about most of these character and I'm sure if I sat down and tried i could draw em but... i don't know It doesn't excite me. And it drives me mad because the things that don't excite me, are amazing to other people. hahaha. I can watch each of these shows and appreciate them. But I can't see myself trying to make them.

Character design is also confusing to me. Because I grew up with characters like these:

Who yeah, have some more graphic shape-based elements but are still rather realistic. So when I hear my character design teacher appreciate yet pass over my drawings it makes me a shade confused. lol.

I don't know. I feel so lost. I enjoy drawing the way I draw and anyone that would look at what i just posted would be able to tell that I HAVE opened my mind to other ways o drawing and I still AM open to drawing other styles (hell, you have to be!!) but you know, my default style isn't really inspired by TV shows on cartoon network or things from Hanna Barbara. I in fact wasnt' really exposed to cartoons and such that weren't available at blockbusters (which is why my taste is mostly anime).

I"m changing and I'm willing to change, but I doubt that i will be able to grow a personal aestethtic that is more appealing to most of the people in the program. lol. I'm so stuck! haahaha.

CYAMYALZ

So for this week's character design assingment we had to draw Camels. This assingment made me slowly start to love Camels .ahaha

What i love about camels is that they're all so different! I dont think i found a photo of different camels that looked alike to eachother. hahaha. For this line up, i really wanted to draw camels and show how different they were from eachother. :) I tried to play a littl emore with shape and stuff than I usually do but it's still very slight. lol. I just can't get into the whole crazy shapes and sticks for legs. lol. I just can't. It doesnt make sense to me. i'm trying to keep an open mind about character design but at the end of the day, i'm gonna enjoy what I draw. I was gonna do some camels with riding gear on them but I figured that would be a little too much. lol. And I'm trying to think if i can actually animate some of these. Because I feel like that's one of the main focuses of the character design class. To draw what we know we can animate and possibly what other peopel can animate. I'm pretty sure i could animate most of these. Camels were perfect for me. lol. They have such prominent eyelashes. lol. I never really know what to do for character design. lol. I'll figure it out someday. That class is sorta frustrating since it's what i want to do but like with everything I always get lack luster reviews or "oh that's fine". lol. I wonder why people always look at my work and have decent things to say but never anything too extraodinary. lol. Maybe im not cut out for this. hahaha. I'll keep trying to prove them wrong though. :)

I'm not the Batman...not at all.

So for figure drawing class we have ot take the model and change it into batman characters..

Well I like the idea, but...I JUST WANT TO DRAW. Damnit. I just wanna draw from life. :( We're always doing creative stuff and I can be creative and still draw from life. :( I dunno. Maybe it's cuz i'm not as classically trained. I just wanna draw proportional, full body drawings from life. lol. There's so much pressure in figure drawing to be creative. I dunno, creativity was always more fun when they told us to be not creative. haha.

In similar news there's a lot of controversy over our current animation teacher. I'm super frustrated about it because i feel like I don't have and haven't had the formal teaching about animaiton that i really should get. We're paying 600 dollars a class to have some egotistical guy teach us his book. Each chapter is a week. You know, there's part of me that likes this guy and I feel that he has to capacity to teach us and the things he's attempted to teach us in the past have been things that we really can use, but the order we're learning it in and the fact that we're gonna be busy with films and such... I dunno, it just bothers me. I NEED to know how to do dialouge. I can't believe that I'm spending so much money to NOT be taught how to animate. It frustrates me. If i knew that at Cal arts they wouldn't teach you how to animate, i would have waited a few years, learned to animate and then come to Cal Arts. It's so frustrating. I need to get my moneys worth. ugh. I"m gonna stop now before i get in trouble. lol]
'

Oh and i colored it.

SEKSHI RADIE RAYOUT

oHHH SECKSHI RADIE. PARTY TEA!

lol. I wanted to do some japanese animals drinking tea for my layout assingment. not sure how good it is but i had fun so fuck it.:D

Gonna color if I feel like I got time. lol.

I went to figure drawing today. I only had ONE drawing I'm proud of. Will upload that later.