Oh no, Mr. Bill!

Oops. Tonight's post is a little late. Had an interview on campus and a special event dinner tonight. Biking around in high heels... not so fun.

Anyway, I finally have the solid list of scenes/shots/whathaveyou chalked up! Huzzah! The ending will be decided tomorrow in class. Put on your thinking caps...

((SPOILERS!! But who's keeping track...))
I thought I'd figured out a way NOT to kill Penny, but it turned out to be very... unfulfilling. It just kind of ended with a pretty bow tacked on in the middle. Well, that's not what art's all about! So. Penny will diminish in one way or another. Will leave her eventual death somewhat ambiguous, but you'll see the trajectory all laid out there. This is one thing that I've decided I must stand up for. This is the real root of the whole project: what it is to create and what it means. Where art comes from. The price of something beautiful. The price of expression. At what expense one opens up to the rest of the world for all to see. It's everything.

So, here I am, all set up in my home-away-from-cubicle captain's chair, screens and tablets all around, papers propped against the wall, and my fratty neighbors (for the time being) quiet. Animatic will be presented tomorrow in class.


Wasting no time: the new intro drops us quickly into the world, shows us the art-people, and presents us with Penny and her... "problem." Don't worry, these are just the thumbnail versions. It is actually a lot clearer than this...

Get on 'board

Been putting together, pulling apart, and putting back together my animatic. Finally hit on a scene to speed up and simplify the whole "time goes by" part that shows how the populous' hands wear away as they age. There will be some awesome shadows involved that will be a lot of non-animation animation. Woohoo for creating tension by NOT showing something! They were on to something with that whole "Jaws" deal. And to think, all because of a crappy animatronic shark that didn't work, it became one of the scariest monsters to grace the screen. Not that mine will be scary, it actually won't be at all...

Imagine Penny sitting against the wall with the cast shadows moving over her. I'm really excited to see how the lines would bend around her (implied 3D) 2D shape. Should be interesting.



No pictures of stuff in-progress right now (it's all on the computer in my cubicle... whoops) but next week I have my in-class presentation so that will bring a truckload of new stuff to play around with and I'll get it up on vimeo.

ready or not, here i come

I'm starting to animate! A few scenes are solid and ready to be Flash-ified while I'm still working on a couple others as boards still. The ragtag systems is working OK: animate in my cubicle every afternoon and on weekends, revise boards while I'm home at night. With a tablet setup in both locations, I can easily shift to animating at both when the time comes. Here's a little .gif teaser from the scene I'm working on right now. Penny is leaning into a wall and sighs... hope that's what it looks like. Pretty wonky angle, had to
use Kristina as reference from below.

make animated gifs like this at MakeAGif

INK: THE REBOOT!

Hello all! Big news. Over the last few months I've teased apart the long and confusing threads of my old thesis story and come up with a much simpler, sleeker, and overall better version. The character designs have changed a bit but are still true to their art-person nature with chalk/crayon/charcoal/ink hands. A few new things have crept into my inspiration folder, including Evan Dahm's "Rice Boy"


the popular kids' book "Harold and the Purple Crayon", and the overall texture of Norman Mclaren's "Blinkity Blank".



The rough redone animatic will be up this weekend before I dive head-first into animating. No more 3D environments either! Going very minimalist with the whole thing. The world will be created by those who live in it and so will fade/erase over time. I wonder how Penny will solve the problem...