Vanilla Skates

Did a little logo animation for Vanilla Skates recently, with like a few hours turnaround. I love getting quick little projects like this; keep me on my toes! It was my first time using certain simple lighting effects in After Effects, though I think the colored version was a lot cooler (they wanted a greyscale one instead). Here is the Vanilla Skates 2014 promo video :) 

CTN sketches 2013 2

Excited to have spent another day at the CTN animation expo! I met up with some old friends met some new ones, and took in some new ideas on animating, directing, and creating animated features, and won myself some nickelodeon tshirts in a raffle! I also bought myself a new tablet, an intuos pro, because my old one from like 2004 is finally crapping out on me after a long productive life. Lastly, I bought a book called Ideas for the Animated Short, which was cowritten by my professor and has some images from his personal short film in it, including frames from a scene that I worked on and am credited for! Super stoked. So much overwhelming awesomeness in one day, and another day tomorrow. Here is a sketch from today's model session. 

HRCloud

Been doing freelance work recently for my friend Jeff at HRCloud, and here is one of the videos I contributed to:

I drew the 2D characters in the scenario sections of the video, starting at about 2:00. It's really great being able to do a little character work after doing motion graphics for so long! Hope the fun little project goes on for a long while :)

iDrive

Did a small animation project for a start up company recently. Pretty rushed job but the client was happy with it :)


3 Easy Steps to Get Home - iDrive Transportation from iDrive on Vimeo.

Wellcast

Sooo a while ago my awesome friend Jeff invited me to join the Wellcast animation team at Mahalo. And it's been great! With a group of about eight of us, we've already wrangled over 8,000 subscribers and over 300,000 views! The animation is very rough, but its more the content that gets the viewers interested. 

One of our videos was featured once, so it has a ton of views! BUT the second most viewed video is one I worked on, called The Party Survival Guide for Introverts. Again, the animation is rough, and I have like three days of turnaround time (ok, like seven, but I always procrastinate... plus I have my full time job too!), so it's not the most amazing animation. But its been a really fun time working on these! And now I have a partner to work with, so the workload is much better. We just put up our first joint animation, fittingly, on Procrastination. 

As I said it's been a fantastic time working on these, and we have 100 episodes to do all together (two released each week), so it'll be long time until we complete the project! And the viewers love it! We've been getting a lot of our ideas from comments. Soon Jeff said we'll be sharing our portfolio websites with the viewers, so I need to get working on mine... finally buy a domain haha.

Mother's Day

This Mother's day I gave my other grandmother (not the one I live with) a piece of artwork from my Senior art show. She has arthritis and was not able to make it to my show. She and my grandfather moved here to LA from New Jersey when I was eight, and helped raise me and my three sisters while my parents worked. She is a great woman and a fantastic babcia whom I love very much. Also, I gave my other grandmother (the one I live with) a painting a few years back, and felt like it would be nice to give this grandmother a piece of my artwork as well. It's based off of a Polish Church in Krakow with influence from Polish artwork, from my film in progress.

Old Animation

Since I got my computer back, I've been going through all of my old files, deleting drawings I don't need and re-organizing ones I like. I also came upon a few animations that I made back in high school. My brother or family got me a program called Jasc Paint Shop Pro, and I found an animation maker attached to it a few months later. I played around drawing straight ahead in the program and importing the files into the animation program. Here is an incomplete animation from 2006, during my Danny Phantom phase. I remember adamantly following Ben Balistreri and Stephen Silver back then, freaking out over everything they did. It's weird that at the time, even though I spent most of my time doing things like this, I did not even consider going into the art field.

Baby Muse and Getting Underpaid

More drawings of the best roommate ever! (I'm pretty sure I posted some of her before)
She is my baby! She also has a rabbit tail, as you can see. She and her 'brother' Boots are what keep me going! I should draw him more but he doesn't sleep in my room as often as she does, plus Baby has groovy stripes.
In other news, my computer should be ready soon! Then I can actually get some work done. I also spoke with my mentor/former Canadian professor  (in that, he is formerly my professor, not formerly Canadian) about what to charge for animation work. And I came to the realization that I have been going about things all wrong! With contracts, payments, etc. Hopefully I can fix some things before I dig more holes for myself haha. But it's okay! It's a learning experience...

Aquarium Sketches

I haven't posted in forever, and hope to start updating more often! Since my last post, I have been improving my online portfolio and working a bit on my film. I keep wanting to start new animation projects, like animating parts of songs and working in Flash.. but then I realize that I should probably finish my film or I'll never finish it. I should probably post what I worked on last semester sometime soon.
In conclusion, here are some drawings I did at the Aquarium of the Pacific recently. I hope to go to the zoo sometime soon and get some drawings there too!

Title Card!

Here's a wycinanki-style title card for my movie. Still not sure how to do the type... I may end up washing out the color a bunch so you can see the words once I put them on top. We'll see how it goes. :)

First Colored Scene!

First colored frame of my first completed scene!! I feel like I've passed a milestone for my film and I'll soon be able to bust out these puppies super quickly, though let's be honest... um, no. It's not completely done, though. I still  need to work out how to animate the leaves. I've done some tests but they aren't quite working out yet. I'm mainly focusing on my Mongol sequence, so hopefully I'll be able to post some new tests from that soon, once they stop looking so crappy :\

Starting to Scan Movie Scenes!

My first scanned frame for my first cleaned scene! Excitiiiiiing! My friend Robbie helped in between some frames and now it's all ready for ToonBoom! I hope to have time tomorrow to color the scene completely before my meeting with my professor.

Background 14

Cut outs for a background for my film :) Made with painted water color paper, gouache on black paper, and black construction paper. I'm going to scan in and animate the leaf parts bc it's supposed to be windy in the scene.

Mongol Run Cycles

A quick composition of two run cycles for my film. I'm really proud of them but still have so much to do! More characters, backgrounds, and foreground elements before mid-December!