Roused From Abjection

It happened in 1987

2009-10-20T22:36:00.007-04:00

Check out all the cool things that happened the year I was born in 1987:

On the day of my birthday Final Fantasy was released for Famicom and the Perl programming language was created.

Freaking Legend of Zelda, Metal Gear, Castlevania, Street Figher, Phantasy Star and Mega Man came out!

In 1987 the first version of Photoshop was released.

Microsoft released Windows 2.0

The world's first conference on artificial life is held at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The first National Coming Out Day is held in celebration of the second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights.

The Simpsons is aired for the first time

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated series started

Fraggle Rock and The Jetsons ended

Animator for the National Film Board of Canada, Norman McLaren, died

The Princess Bride, Dirty Dancing, Robocop and Spaceballs are released

U2 released their album The Joshua Tree

Michael Jackson released his second album Bad

Guns N' Roses, and Kylie Minogue released their premier albums

Prozac is approved by the FDA for release in the USA

Prozac (the band) released their first album

First heart-lung transplant performed

The World Population reached five billion

Frobisher Bay, Northwest Territories, changed its name to Iqaluit.

Also; Lil' Bow-Wow, Hilary Duff, Zac Efron and Aaron Carter were born... oh well it can't all be super interesting.

New Semester!

2009-01-14T21:09:00.003-05:00

I had a great time on my holidays, visiting family and relaxing. Since my birthday is in December I went straight from three Thanksgiving dinners to four birthday dinners right in to Christmas where we had many, many hearty meals. Phew! That was a lot of partying/eating!

I'm glad to be back in school now after the break, it's good to be busy again and doing what I love. Our classes are starting to get more advanced, also allowing us to be more creative with the assignments. The next animation we've been assigned is to animate the Pink Panther walking! It seems like a huge leap to go from bouncing balls and waving lines straight to a character walking but I guess you have to take the plunge sometime! It looks really complicated, but I bet it will be a lot of fun. I find that when I get into it the hours just melt away and in a blink I have hundreds of frames done, which is great because I was afraid I would find it tedious.

I've also started a History of Animation course this semester which sounds like it's going to be great. We're going to watch a lot of cartoons and learn all about the evolution of animation through it's inventors and contributors. It's a three hour lecture followed directly by another hour lecture, but it wasn't that bad, since we're learning something interesting.

I've finally uploaded my last animation assignment from last semester, so you can check it out here. The assignment is called "Ball and Tail" and is essentially just that. We got to add a bit of character to our animation for the first time, making the ball into an animal jumping around. It was a lot of fun. I actually pulled off this assignment without having to make any revisions which was great because we were SO busy with other assignments at the time. I think it turned out pretty successfully.

The big item on the agenda right now is the dreaded BONE TEST. I have to memorize 70 bones, and parts of bones as well as be able to draw the human skeleton from three angles from memory. Oh boy, that's quite an undertaking. I'm glad to be getting it over with in the beginning before all the other classes get too hectic. Week Seven looks like it's going to be a doozy with assignments due in every class as well as a midterm.

Finally, Jake and I are moving at the end of the month. We're starting to pack and procure furniture. Hopefully it won't be that big of a deal and we can just get it done in one big, foul sweep. All of this just means that I'm really going to have to stick to my New Years' Resolution to work on my homework as it is assigned as opposed to the day before. Wish me luck!

Massive Update

2008-12-05T18:12:00.005-05:00

I just put up a huge update today; the rest of my bone studies, a character expression sheet and my box fold animation. So please go and check it out!

It's been a ridiculously busy last couple of weeks, which is why I haven't updated in so long. One more week left of school so there was a huge amount of assignments to be done. On top of that there was an issue with my housing situation and I may have to move so I've been dealing with that. I'm 99% caught up now after that issue though so it's all good.

I'm starting to get in the Christmas spirit lately! I can't wait to go Christmas shopping, even though I'm horrible at thinking up present ideas. Mostly I just go to the malls and walk around for hours not getting any good ideas and then the week before Christmas I'm forced to buy something.

Look out for some paintings and another animation soon!

Character Poses and Clouds

2008-10-27T23:11:00.005-04:00

We're handing in our second assignment for character design class today. This was pretty fun to brainstorm and formulate a character. My big project that I'm finishing is for painting, we have to paint clouds. We have to use a technique similar to watercolour which I've never done before now so we'll see how the final one turns out. Besides that I put up two videos from our Digital Tools class today, so check those out. We recreated our bouncing ball and bowling ball on the computer.

Hands and Feet

2008-10-20T18:52:00.003-04:00

Yay it's reading week! That means we get the week off, of course off is a relative term because we have so much homework. So I'm going to be working all week, but still yay. I'll get to relax too.

I finished my animations today and uploaded them, so go check them out. The seaweed and the book page turn. I'm really, really pleased with them actually and I didn't have to tweak it too much from the original.

Here are the 24 hands and feet that we had to draw for Life Drawing on Friday.

Pelvis & Oliver Twist

2008-10-08T21:52:00.007-04:00

Starting off with my assignment today. This is a drawing of a human male pelvis from six angles. The weird white marks are just where I moved them over a tad so it was a little straighter, but I drew them all on the same page, which I thought we were supposed to do but everyone else is doing them one per page and shrinking them in photoshop... just sounds like more work to me.

Anywhoo I'm looking forward to sleeping in tomorrow because my first class was moved to the evening where we will be watching one of the early versions of 'Oliver Twist', most likely black and white. We've watched a few old films and it's really interesting to see the real pioneers of the film media. Almost everything we do today in film they had to invent first. Apparently in one of the first films ever made called "Arrival of a train at La Ciotat"(1895), the people had never seen anything like it. The movie was just like it was called, a train that was filmed pulling in to the station, but supposedly the people viewing the film thought it was so real that they jumped up screaming and ran out of the theatre to avoid being hit by the train. I wish I could see it that way.

There's a bit of a break for now in deadlines but that doesn't mean I can stop! There's a ton of them coming up in three weeks. My goal is to finish them incrementally instead of all at the last minute. Here's hoping that my work ethic can handle it!

EDIT: Apparently Oliver Twist was not when I thought it was, so I guess I will go see it at a later date, yet to be confirmed.

Bouncing Ball Animations, Paintings and Kitty

2008-10-01T15:47:00.009-04:00

So it's that time again! Is it really October already? Week five of animation... I've been super busy finishing off my animations, which I'm about to upload after I finish this. We also had to hand in four paintings today along with all the various ball animations (you can see the paintings below) and we have a quiz tomorrow. It's been very busy. In fact, I have to draw the pelvis from six different views tonight, and I really ought to draw at least three more hands to keep up.

Phew! But my animations are done so that's great. I'm not 100% impressed with them but deadlines come and well, you have to make due. So take a look and tell me what you think!

I know a few people e-mailed me about my website being temporarily down the other day. Turns out the host I'm using needs you to log in to their forums at least once every two weeks or they take down your site! (Who reads that fine print anyways!) So I'm on top of that and it won't be going down again.

Also check out our ridiculously cute kitty, Pumpkin.

Character Rotation

2008-09-24T19:01:00.006-04:00

Now that people are starting to check out my website I just wanted to teach people how to leave comments for people who have never seen blogs before.

To leave a comment on my blog:
Choose a post you want to comment on
Scroll to the bottom of the post and click "COMMENTS"
In the window that pops up type your comment in the box at the bottom
Click name/URL and leave your name so I know who left it!

There that was easy, now it will e-mail me so I know you looked at it! Unfortunately you can't comment on my animations on youtube without having an account first.

Also for those who have never used blogs before, if you click on the images in my posts you can see them bigger.

I've also added the mailing list to my main page so please sign up to receive updates!

Now on to the more interesting stuff.

The image below is the character rotation that we handed in today. I think it turned out pretty good! Better then the character I did for my portfolio to get in to animation. It's a lot less stressful when your not thinking about how your whole intellectual career hangs on the one drawing, so I got to experiment and be a little more free about the design of this character.

I still felt kind of rushed though, we had 4 weeks to do it, but with all the other homework it's really not that long. But the teacher said he's not looking for perfection since it's our first project. Apparently the next assignments will be "a lot more fun" and "less structured".

Somehow the scan turned out all mucky, I think the school's scanners need to be cleaned. My scanner isn't hooked up yet because I keep forgetting to get the cord from home. It's a bit of a hassle to use the scanners at school, as far as I know there are only two rooms with scanners and the doors to those rooms are locked arbitrarily.

Another thing that bugs me is that our perspective class is in a small English room in the E wing instead of a drafting room in the animation building. Our big sketchpads don't even fit on the tables. I know for a fact that the art fundamentals program has big drafting rooms and they are paying significantly less then us... suspicious if you ask me. It's very frustrating knocking elbows and poking each other with our long metal rulers in a tiny, hot room.

I don't mean to complain though, I'm having so much fun. We watch and study cartoons all the time, what can be better then that? I'm learning so much and all the teachers are helpful and knowledgeable, it's great. Especially in life drawing where we're learning anatomy, I'm finding it really interesting. Studying all those bones has been giving me some weird nightmares though.

Warming Up

2008-09-22T07:55:00.006-04:00

It's week Four and things are starting to get rolling. The first of my projects are due this week, specifically a character rotation and storyboard. The real push comes next week when our painting and all three ball animations are due.

As I've been telling people, the ball animations in all are approximately 175 drawings, and that's only for a couple seconds. Honestly though I can't wait to learn longer and more complex techniques.

I'm going to create a mailing list to send out when I update, so keep an eye out for that on my main site and in your inboxes! Once I find out how... I have to change the link colours too because no one seems to be able to tell that they are links! Maybe I will turn them in to buttons...

While focusing on school work I'm finding it hard to find energy to cook, shop and clean. After a long, wonderful summer I guess I just have to get back into being a student.

Don't forget that you can comment on these posts by clicking "COMMENTS" below.

Here's some drawings for two life drawing assignments; hands and bones.

First Post

2008-09-18T07:13:00.006-04:00

I'm really excited because I finally got my domain, my videos and my website up! Yay! So now I can keep everyone updated on what I am doing in school. For starters, go check out my new website and videos.

Here's something I drew in English last week.

Stay tuned for updates.