I'm a bit late on the posting but I've been enjoying my first week of summer break by just not thinking about school work entirely but it has been ahwhile since I last updated this and in all honesty there are only so many splatter films you can watch in theaters until they all start looking the same to you. So here are my finals below.
This was my final for Programming for Animators class, we had to make a tool that we wanted to use and then make a video demonstrating the tool without it being a boring voiced walk through, I sort of did a deconstruction of that. What I did for this was make a simple character set based lip syncing interface to make the process of lip syncing in python closer to what I'd do in Flash where I'd switch out the different mouth shapes as symbols. The script worked surprisingly well for me and I was able to get the lip part of this video done in only about 15 minutes, and it looks better than my previous lip sync which took infinitely longer.
Feel free to download the code here and give me any feedback if something in it goes horribly wrong. I wrote the code primarily as a tool for myself to make the lip syncing easier for my senior project next year.
Likewise, here is my Final for AfterEffects class. This was due a week before all my other finals because it was a Communications Design course instead of Digital Arts so luckily I didn't have to do this in the midst of my other projects but it was a lot of fun regardless. Here I took a 30 second clip from my favorite scene from Men in Black and animated the dialogue in it. Cool! Said scene below...
For film history class, on top of a traditional written final exam, we had to hand in a poster based on one of the films we watched in class. I chose the slapstick Obi-Wan Kinobe vechicle, The Horse's Mouth as the source for the poster. Why not?
...and lastly here is the final render for Character Design class, you've likely seen the concept drawings of her earlier on this blog but here it is completed and with a quasi-dark backstory to it as well.
My midterm for the Programming for Animators class at Pratt Institute animated using mostly Python scripting and then a bit of compositing in AfterEffects at the end. Rob O'Neill was the instructor.
and also here are some things I am working on for character design class
That was my initial sketch, she was based off of an ink blot I found on the now defunct Daily Monster blog when it was asking for user submissions. My idea is that she was a fashion model who sold her right arm to the devil to be granted eternal youth; think of it as District 9 meets The Devil Wears Prada.
and the latest revision of her design so she would look a bit better in 3D...
lastly, here is a rendering of a bust of my head I did in Character Design class; the head is toon shaded while I added in the line art in flash.
as always, be sure to check out both my Vivian blog (where about 60% of my homework time is going towards) and my Twitter for more updates on what I'm doing.
Here's a quick art post over here, totally getting mauled by Junior yet picking up and taking 16 credits + an internship on the side instead of my usual jobless 13 credit schedule is taking a bit of a toll on me but HERE IS A LOOK INSIDE THE MADNESS!!
some assignments from AfterEffects class too for good measure
...and here's an adorable movie I starred in, I didn't do any of the editing in or anything but I think it came out quite nicely.
...some more of the shots I did on Ugly Americans are starting to show up on ComedyCentral.com as well.
The shot at the :10 second mark in the season 1 highlight reel with the demon baby pouring whisky down the throats of women, I did the women and my good Pratt buddy and Whale Tales co-writer, April Yim did the demon baby. Also, if you saw the Beautiful World spot for Ugly Americans on Hulu, IGN, Kotaku or during practically any commercial break on Comedy Central, the chances are you got to see the 3/4 fish person walk cycles I did for that. Most of the other shots were inbetweened by the rather awesome aisle of interns...a ton of Pratt people :)
Expect more updates next week however, to see if my MEL scripting midterm and Character Design self-portrait didn't turn out in any way disasterous. If you want more frequent updates from me, follow me on Twitter OR check out the Vivian blog to see how often I can change my mind on an idea over the course of two months.
I just started a new blog for my Pre-Production class, some of the more polished stuff from there will wind up on Cold Milk Soup but most of the rudimentary conceptual pieces will likely go there. It is mostly a log of my progress for my Senior Capstone project but if you are interested in seeing some of my more sketchier work, check it out!
and while we're at it, here is a render of Greg Reaper, still haven't textured him yet (will have that up next week) but I kind of like the way he looks as is right now.
Likewise, here's my other character who I'll likely use for my pre-production class. If you have been following this blog you may recognize his design from an earlier post on here (or you can see his progression so far here) and it's one of the ideas I've been thinking of possibly for senior project. I'll have a semester or so to really think on his design so the chances are that he'll go through a few more iterations BUT the Pink Floyd boxers will stay, I will fight to keep them on :P
This unnamed character is a hermit, he lives alone with his spoiled cat (which I think I'll call Vivian) and has been eating a diet of cereal and tuna (which he doubles as cat food) for the past week. His cat hasn't been eating well and he's starting to recollect the time he spent with her. I want to animate his internal monologue like a storybook which becomes more and more like the classic children's book Love You Forever by Robert Munsch. As his story gets more and more sentimental, our main character turns from sympathetic to entirely creepy as we find out that he sang his cat to sleep every night for the last ten years. Ultimately he'll leave the house and put the cat down.
Keep in mind, the idea above is COMPLETELY rough. In the pre-production class we're going to eventually have to start up a production blog for the short, so when I actually settle on an idea, I'll likely move most of the updates to that one.
The only problem with working on a legitimate animated show, is that there is very little you are actually allowed to say about it. Since the beginning of January, I've been coming in a couple of days a week working on some work on the upcoming Comedy Central show, Ugly Americans. The show is looking very funny (am I even allowed to say that) and comes from the same folks who created Adult Swim's Superjail and MTV2's Wonder Showzen among other things; namely the Golden Age shorts which were popular at the Ottawa Animation Festival a few years back.
The clips below come from the pilot episode and are embeddable from Comedy Central's website, they should give a good idea of what to expect from the show when it comes in March. If the thumbnail is any indication, this is probably NSFW...
Surprisingly enough, the show is animated entirely in Macromedia Flash MX (yes, a seven year old version of the program) at very high zoom levels in order to really make amends with the weird line smoothing in Flash, I don't really want to go into specifics beyond that but they treat it more or less like a traditional animation program, very little tweening and rigged animation.
Mostly I've been working on the inbetweens but it is really interesting to overhear the meetings that the staff is having a room or so over and I've been hearing bits and pieces of the show off and on and have laughed quite a bit at some of the lines. The show seems to be pretty deadpan, I'm pretty sure I'd watch it even if I haven't done some work on it.
Apart from that, here are some drawings that I've done over the Fall/Spring semester break at Pratt.
This is a little something for April Yim's Palette Town Project collaboration. I'm working on a full piece as well, but this is mostly just a name card.
and this is a new Header for The Movie Watch. The guy on the right is supposed to be Sherlock Holmes, not sure how clear he actually came out...
This Tuesday I'll be back at Pratt and then the following Monday (after Dr. Martin Luther King Day), I'm supposed to come in with three ideas for my senior project short film. I already have two I'm confident in and one I'm not so sure about. As long as we're on the subject, here is a bit of a sketch I did for one of the ideas a couple of months back which will probably end up looking nothing like the actual short
Hell week is finally over, here are some of the results. The first is my character animation final, will probably fix the pole vectors on the elbows and make he timing more pose based on the second half of the animation before putting it on my demo reel but I'm really happy with how this one turned out check it out! (the embedding on Facebook is a bit funny if the post is not at the top of the page, click here if the videos aren't loading correctly)
I didn't animate this second one but this is animated from a portion of an interview I did for badass, animator extraordinaire/classmate, Eugene. He did a fantastic job translating my mannerisms on to a morbidly obese rabbit. Also, on a side note, this horrifying story is partially true (exaggerated for comedic effect obviously)...but still, this terrifies me vaguely to this day.
Lastly, here's my final for audio class. It's probably the grittiest thing I've ever done, which is weird considering it was originally just a one off joke. If I were to produce this into an actual film, I'd re-record the voices with a professional microphone and make sure to keep the levels in check but I'm really pleased with how I handled the music in this, check it out.
The chords in this were modified from a certain popular Xbox Live Arcade game...can you guess which one it was?
Here's round one of my onslaught of finals, this one for Lighting and Rendering, bask in the glory of an adorable 3D elephant (which has appeared on this blog a few times already)
My lighting and rendering final, we were supposed to composite 3D animation with HD footage...this is a video of me finding a pink elephant in my bathroom.
it's getting towards the final few weeks at Pratt and the work load for the final exams are starting to pile up. Can't say the work hasn't been getting to me, but I'm trying my best to keep myself from going too crazy.
This is the Lighting and Rendering Project I've been working on, you can see the concept sketch for it in the last post I made here.
Likewise, I've been working on something really awesome for The Onion over the past few days, probably can't post it here yet but in the mean time, here are some of the other graphic things I've done for them...
This is the Twitter background I made for their page, it was originally a parody of the one CNN has but now it's a bit more subdued. Pretty slick.
Likewise this Twitter background is for an account relating to an iPhone application relating to a popular Onion News Network video and will be in use whenever the application gets approved for the iTunes store.
and this was made for a screenshot for the following Onion article over here. I'm quite fond of the logo I made for it...
Likewise, this is my latest Facebook profile picture, my roommate last year Devin is Mr. Peabody in this because he was a rather significant history buff.
This is another project concept sketch for lighting and rendering, for this I'm thinking of having a bug zapper light the scene with a blue hue.
Firstly, here was my entry for Pratt's 24 hour animation competition, Bring Your Own Pixel. It's a little rough in spots but it was able to nab me second place, still unsure what prize it would actually entail but from what I heard its a pick between a WACOM Tablet, a 1 TB HDD and a 20" LCD monitor, all are really awesome prizes.
The same week, I also had an assignment due for my character animation class. I'd polish a few more things, and add some titles first before officially putting it on my Vimeo or taking pieces into my future demo reel but it's a fun piece nonetheless. (blogger seems to not want the video to upload, BLECH! I'll find some way to put it up eventually)
Also here are some things that I've been doing for my lighting and rendering class as well, check 'em out, this is the rendering based on the concept sketch I had in my last post. and while I'm at it, here's some concept art for a compositing project I'll have in that class and here's a bit of an over saturated rendering of the 3D model I'm making based on the concept art I've already filmed my video segment for it, but I'd rather post that up here when it's all done.
if you read my Twitter, you may have seen this already but this is the concept art for my lighting and rendering midterm, I'm still modeling the 3D part of it right now but its supposed to be a messy room from the perspective of another cockroach. Its looking pretty rad, I'll post up the final version of it when I'm done and dusted with it.
I just submitted this to Mountain Dew's Can Design challenge, its for the Dewmocracy contest this year and from what I've heard it may be for a new tropical flavor of Dew, so I made my can accordingly.
Likewise, here's a little visual piece I made for my Digital Audio class. It's a time line for the acoustic song "Green Leaves of Summer" which was used in the classic John Wayne spaghetti western film, The Alamo and more recently to open up Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. It may be a good idea to view the larger version of the image while seeing how the music (conveniently embedded above) syncs up to it.
Lastly, this is a little bouncing ball exercise I did as a quick assignment in character animation class. Ideally, I'd add a bit more of an easing in for when it goes off the ramp and I'd have the target crush the ball at the end, maybe work a bit more on the rotation too but I figured I might as well post it up here, why not?
My character animation teacher wanted us to go to the park and draw a some of the poses that squirrels make, and then make it into a quick little animation using what we had. Here's what I did...
My rate of these has gone down lately (I got a job and I have a bit less free time) and this will probably be the last post of this sort this summer which puts the final number of drawings down to just about 40 people. Which is pretty good considering my first post came from an outside request and the rest were just from a flood of comments after I mentioned "if you ask, I'll draw you". While I have skipped a few people, mainly those I haven't really seen since Middle School or something, the majority of the requests up until July have been granted. Here's the latest batch of drawings below.
Marissa suggested a photo including her boyfriend Josh in it as well. She was among one of the many people I met more than two years ago on AIM before ever stepping foot into Pratt and she was one of the few people I already knew that were on the Healthy Choices floor foundation year. She does a lot of paintings and is a Painting major I believe. She also has a couple of tattoos, it could be more but I know she has a Peace symbol on her back and her last name on her hip.
I know Josh really well too, since he's a 3D Animation major in my year and there are only about 20 or so undergrads in my class, I pretty much had every major class with him last year including Intro to Modeling, Rigging and Editing class, I think that was all of them, there could be more, I'm not too sure. I really found his advanced Alien facial rig to be pretty rad, he was great at modeling in Maya too.
Devin and Collin were my roommates last year and were pretty much in all my foundation classes. This strip is a reference to the one time we decided to eat in the separate "dining" area of a local sketchy take-out Chinese restaurant. While the food was the same as their take-out, the prices were about 1.5 times higher than they normally would be and generally the place felt like it was about to fall apart. We did however, enjoy the large fish they had in the place though, its just not worth the price of admission to see them again.
Most of my memories with Devin and Collin came from LCD, 3D design and Drawing class foundation year. Each of those classes lasted about 6 hours long and met over 30 sessions. The most horrifying of the bunch had to be Drawing class which had to be one of the most exhausting classes I've ever taken, the professor came off as a bit strict at first too, but that was mostly because she cared so much about what she was doing. It was great fuel for conversation however and also a great excuse to let off steam playing a lot of Smash Bros. during the 2 hour lunch break between two 3 hour chunks of each class.
Jason is an industrial design major and a friend of Collin's, he used to have a mohawk when I first met him Freshman year and I kind of wish he kept it. Regardless, he was in a fairly cool pixelation video that he made for Beth Warshafsky's 4D design class in like 20 minutes. We weren't in the same class together but we had the same teacher.
Ed Waters has really awesome side burns, I really hope he doesn't shave them off. He's great at Smash Bros. too and is a pretty vocal Nintendo fanboy.
Lately, I’ve been winning a lot of small things off of Twitter. Starting from the most minor stuff, I got some custom stickers from a graphic designer I was following, followed by three Rock Band songs from Pepsi, a free KFC meal from Oprah an advance copy of Muramasa: The Demon Blade for Wii from Ignition Entertainment and lastly four free tickets to the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus.
While I don’t consider myself an incredibly lucky person, I feel like all the recent Twitter winnings are more a result from corporations not really understanding the “actual” size of social network websites and trying to bank on the so-called popularity based on all the media hype. While it’s true there are 12 million accounts on Twitter, only five percent of them have over 100 messages written while all the rest are just fairly dead. I’m pretty sure I was only among a handful of people who entered the majority of the given contests.
Which leads me in to this blog post, when I won a set of four forty dollar tickets to the Circus at Coney Island. After writing a fairly negative post on Coney Island, I was auto-followed by their respective Twitter account, I followed back figuring it could help me figure out some cheap-ish things to do on one of those many lazy Sundays. One post in particular, directed me to the “ Be a Circus Supermom” contest; it entailed retweeting a post on the account and then sending them an e-mail with your Twitter username. I half sarcastically entered, only to receive notification that I won tickets a couple of days later.
After gathering together a few friends (all of whom have been drawn on this blog at one point or another) who could make it to Coney Island on a few days notice and working around my work schedule (I wouldn’t really want to bring my laptop to the circus) I was ready to go with my expectations set fairly low for the place. The initial e-mail suggested coming in a bit early to get the tickets from the booth, which was an ample excuse to hang out and to check out the cold dead corpse of what used to be the amusement capital of New York City (there’s a billboard for the dumpy Playland amusement part right by Nathan’s now, for god’s sake).
While it’s unfortunate that Astro Land is no longer the centerpiece of Coney Island, a lot of the carnival themed businesses that surrounded the location still remain in tact. Including picking up. Also, I was surprised to see that many of the rides at Astro Land are still running after being rented out by independent vendors, while I know it will inevitably be taken down, its still comforting in a way as if the apocalypse has been delayed by a couple of years or so despite the entire sleazy post-apocalyptic vibe that Coney Island has ALWAYS had.
So I ate a Corn Dog at Nathan’s and got some Banana soft serve Ice Cream over at the neighboring Denny’s Delight and then went over to the ticket booth. Getting the tickets was fairly painless after a quick flash of my Driver’s license. We arrived a couple of minutes late to the actual 7 o’clock showing but they seemed to keep the opening pretty low key, mostly of a clown whistling and amping up the audience.
Granted, most of the circus came off as pretty low-key, this is the second circus I’ve seen, and it could have easily been just the novelty of seeing it the first time when I was six or something but I found the experience just a bit underhwhelming.
Most of the acrobatics while very impressive where spread out pretty thinly among some underwhelming comedy bits and a few shows that were just completely unimpressive; mainly a troupe of trained dachshunds that could jump over six inch bridges, I’ve seen more impressive stunts at dog shows on Animal Planet. Luckily, all the cool stuff is in the YouTube trailer, including some things, such as Zebras that never actually made it into the show.
My other issue with the circus, was that the entire performance seemed biased towards the center while the left and right sides got the bum-end (literally) of the spectacle. Mainly, then they had a group of trained elephants form a congo line of sorts, they did this trick twice and both of the times I had nothing to really look at besides a few elephant asses forming a pose that may look a bit objectionable in an Animal Planet sense of the word.
My entire disappointment could be more a result of a lack of revenue for the circus, greatly crippling the gimmicky thrills of “The Greatest Show on Earth”, the entire tent was less than a quarter full and the ticket booth seemed relatively vacant thirty minutes before the performance. This could be either a sign of a recession or more a sign of the times, where greater spectacle can be viewed on the internet for free at your own convenience.
Don’t get me wrong, I plenty enjoyed some of the more low-grade thrills such as a man on a foot-long bike run it through a flaming hoop, and I thought the bit with the White Tigers was quite novel but I can’t say had I paid the forty dollars that I would have walked out satisfied and considering the fact that the entire circus thing is dying down, its probably a good idea to take a small child to it because I can’t really imagine the type of entertainment lasting that many more years.
Still, I greatly appreciated the free tickets that they hooked me up with and it made for a great night with my friends, just, if given the choice, I’d probably have more fun spending a few nights at the movies with the figurative amount of money.
Also, I’m working on another Facebook friend post, with ten days until I’m back at Pratt, time is starting to run a bit fast now.
I’ve been slacking on the Facebook friend pictures at the moment, I did one or two more since the last update but I’d rather post them in a batch of five or so than dedicate a post to each drawing individually. Even though its only a few days a week, the Onion has been taking a bit out of me between the train going into New York City and all but apart from that, I’m loving the work they have for me. I was able to get my background used on their Twitter page, so I’m already pretty satisfied, plus the guys I’m working for are all incredibly nice, and I’m not just saying it, I am surprised at just how friendly they come off as. Anyway, here’s a slightly less exciting life related blog post…
When it comes to Broadway, most of my experiences were with the more satirical plays. When it wasn’t rehashing quotes from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Spam-a-lot consisted of a lot of jabs at traditional Andrew Lloyd Weber, likewise while Avenue Q was not directly a satire, it was definitely a send-up of the coming of age story that often plagues the theater. Now, that I think of it, the only real traditional one I saw was Spring Awakening during Pratt’s 2007 orientation and I have a strong feeling that it was one of those love-it or hate-it kind of things (with my feelings leaning more towards the latter than the former).
So when my Pratt friend April wanted to watch The Lion King on Broadway, I was definitely excited due to the fact that I’ve been watching that DivX file of the Disney film on my Desktop for quite a few months (If that thing wasn’t in the wretched Disney Vault for so long, I’d probably even have the DVD of it) but I didn’t feel like it could outdo the film, not at all, especially given all the limitations of the Broadway format. Looking back however, I feel like the limitations were what made the Broadway adaptation so successful, they had to compensate with extra creative muscle, but I’ll get more into that later.
I got the tickets for the thing about a month and a half in advance and decided to come in at around 1 PM or so to have some time to hang out before the 8 PM show. This involved a run over to some of my favorite places, including familiar spots like Forbidden Planet and what would have been the Virgin Megastore (totally closed down), followed by some Bubble Tea at Saint Alp’s by Astor Place and then a stroll through the delightfully bizarre but all too brief Toy Tokyo.
On the way there, I passed by 99 Miles to Philly, which was a restaurant I’ve always wanted to visit ever since I read a post about it on Philly based animator Bryan Brinkman’s Twitter. Consequently, I wound up eating there for lunch and I can safely say that my “Steak wit Wiz” was definitely on par with the sandwich I’ve had in Philly and it was miles ahead of my own cheese steaks I’d make at home. I think I’ll heat up the cheese whiz a bit more and get even thinner steaks for my consequent attempts. The place was a good deal though, for ten bucks they gave you a sickly foot long greasy cheese steak with some waffle fries and a coke, for a non-chain in New York City, this is a pretty good deal.
Factor in some hanging out in Times Square and a relatively fancy pizza place and it was time for the 8 o’clock showing of Lion King. My initial impressions of the theater were incredibly favorable. They had some of the fancy African wood costumes behind the glass and a few fairly extensive gift shops throughout. Seeing all the merchandise, I should have been disgusted but for some reason I was impressed by the amount of detail and attention they put towards the effort, I could totally understand how the show had legs on Las Vegas whereas efforts like Avenue Q could only strive in New York City.
Our cheaper $60 tickets were literally against the wall in the highest mezzanine so we got a pretty decent view of the crowd going there. I was surprised that only about half the crowd consisted of families, while the rest were just Average Joes and middle-aged tourists going in to take a show. This could be because I was seeing it on a Thursday night and that is less than ideal for most families, especially ones with young children to see it, but I’d like to tell myself its because The Lion King is as synonymous with Broadway as Phantom of the Opera.
Watching Lion King on Broadway was an incredibly nostalgic experience for me, often I’d get chills down my spine, not too different from the chills I got when I first saw WALL-E, from something being so perfect its depressing and from it hitting an emotional chord with me. Especially when this was paired with a room full of people cheering and clapping incredibly loudly at every joke, punch line and dance sequence. Its weird, it was almost comforting to be around so many people that were that taken into the show.
While I’m pretty sure much of the praise for the show has already been said and much better than I possibly could write about it over the past 11 years of its run, I was completely taken away from the imagery, especially the dancers which would represent things as direct as giraffes and elephants, all the way to the more abstract such as blades of grass. The show kept things classy, even by Disney standards and the African art direction never came off as forced as it seemed in the commercials for the play. A lot of the more difficult sequences were pulled off in silhouette or with shadow puppets, while some of the characters were controlled by Avenue Q style puppetry with other objects being portrayed with kites and streamers, further making the play feel like some weird African themed Kabuki theater of sorts.
I was particularly impressed with the set for the show, which was rigged full of steam powered jets and was fully movable with trap doors and a lot of the pieces being on wheels. Absolutely every scene from the Disney movie was pulled off on the set, from the stampede all the way over to the climatic fight sequence off the cliff of Pride Rock. It was all a visual overload of sorts and I feel it goes without saying that the music was incredibly strong as well, like even topping the phenomenal score from Elton John and Hans Zimmer for the feature film.
When it ended the entire packed theater gave the thing a standing ovation, which is something I’ve never seen for a Broadway play. My only real complaint with the thing was that I haven’t seen it earlier, particularly when the thing was new to Broadway. Had I known I’d like the thing this much, I would have put the thing a lot higher on my priorities list.
…and no, I have not sold out to the Disney corporation…but I totally would...
I thought it was impossible but I've almost caught up with every request I've had on my Facebook album for a drawing. While I have skipped a couple of people, namely the ones that I've never seen since Middle School, I've gotten most of them in and all of the ones in the massive avalanche of comments during the first day I've uploaded it. Here are the next batch of five...
While I've already covered Adam Dreifus earlier, Nikki wanted a drawing but is one of the few college aged students I know without a Facebook account, she also wants to stay relatively anonymous on the internet. Nikki was in practically all my foundation classes in Freshmen year and I virtually hung out with her every day to do homework after that. There was a bit less hanging out in sophomore year, but I've still played 8 hour marathons of Rock Band on occasion and ate an incredibly suspicious looking bacon wrapped torpedo meat product with her when her roommate made it. Nikki is into science, grammar and anatomy too and is an avid comic buff, the comic above is a reference to her creepy obsession with eroguro art. Eroguro stuff is pretty disgusting, I wouldn't recommend doing a Google search for it...
Frances was also in all my foundation classes. One of her movies that she made in her 4D class involved me as a street thug robbing a girl on the street, only to get tackled by a cop. It was possibly the greatest film of all time and it had a huge response in class, if you've been reading this blog for ahwhile, the chances are you've seen it.
James is a painting major at Pratt and was one of my classmates in Animation 101 class and was a fan of Robo-Nader since the first time I mentioned the idea passing him. He does some pretty cool experimental stuff, I wish he had an account on Vimeo or something so I could link you guys to his work, I went to the opening for his paintings at Pratt as well, its all VERY cool.
Ben has a cool last name that rhymes with Ravioli, so that makes him a pretty cool cat in my book. He also knows Griffin Newman a funny guy I met during a summer animation program at Tisch, its weird in a 6 degrees of separation kind of way...
And last but not least, here's Marc Freundlich, he sat at my lunch table in high school every day and would often be the one commandeering the mini-Chess in a Tin matches going on. We'd also play cards occasionally, that is, before the school ruled "card games" as "gambling" and practically outlawed every game of "BS" we'd play...'tis a shame. More recently, Marc went with me to the screenings of Tokyo Gore Police and Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl over the past couple of years, he's obsessed with the New York Asian Film Festival and plans on volunteering at the festival next year so he could get into all fifty of their movies for free.
This batch comes a few days before I get back my Red Ringed Xbox 360 in the mail, its currently in Massachusetts coming back from its three week long pilgrimage to Texas. Which means I had to keep myself busy doing something besides watching a ton of movies (which I did a lot of mind you), this week's batch comes in a slightly more comic style, though there are still a few simple standing ones too.
Lyla starts this batch out, she was one of the few other animation majors (albeit she was a traditional animation major while I was CG) I met at Pratt's accepted student open house. At that time she had purple-ish hair and was way into unicycles. We've hung out a few times and discussed our hatred for the Shrek movies (and this was before Shrek the Third) as well as our love for crude humor and MTV2's short lived sketch comedy series, Wonder Showzen. I also had her in my Animation 101 class where one of our discussions on the ratty old couch in the traditional animation room lead to the inspiration for the piece above.
Daisy was one of the crucial members of Pratt's Super Smash Bros. community last year which started in the smaller Cannoneer dorm and ultimately spread to huge popularity in my Pantas dormitory. The group of players were much more tight-knit in the Can as most of the students played the game on the same TV, while most of the players in Pantas would often hang out in my room or a few other places (like the HDTV in the lobby), I recall. I used to actually skip lunch just to get in 2 hours of Smash Bros. in between classes and I went from 70 hours on my Melee save to 210 hours, while the sequel Super Smash Bros. Brawl reached the 180 hour playtime mark within the couple of months I had to play it at Pratt. Daisy was good with Jigglypuff, so was my roommate...those Jigglypuff players are tricky I tells ya...
Julian was a year younger than me in high school but I got to knew him fairly well between AIM and lunch antics. He's one of the few people that I know apart from myself that still watches Heroes and is a great person to vent all my Tim Kring related frustrations to. He has pretty awesome tastes in movies, games and anime as well and anyone with the guts to set their Google Chat status as "black McLovin" for 10 months is cool in my book. I watched the rather disappointing The Curious Case of Benjamin Button with him and played him a few times in Soul Calibur IV as well, he thinks my play style with Sophitia is cheap...I have to agree.
Matt is a fan of my drawings, I'm a fan of my drawings too! how could I possibly deny his request? :)
During the last semester in High School, the administration forced a "senior project" on our grade, while the requirements were nothing more than a scant twenty or thirty slide Powerpoint presentation on ANY subject you can possibly think of with a few slides dedicated to how it ties into what you learned in high school, the very thought of additional work set my entire senior class up in arms.
One of the more intriguing senior projects came from Greg Farenga where he wrote around 30 slides about how its like to drive a truck, which was inspired by all the questions he receives every day when he parks at the school. The Powerpoint served as an FAQ of sorts and had a hilarious Tootsie Pop commercial tone going on throughout. Greg was a very tall guy and the teachers gave him the nickname "Tiny", he was one of the nicest guys I've met in high school which was funny considering that he could have easily been cast as a bully in a John Hughes comedy in the '80s, and I mean this is the most sincere way possible.
Asking the fated question is Marc, he was another person who requested a drawing on Facebook and was in both my Russian History/Economics class senior year as well as the pathetically easy Survey of Computers in my Freshman year. His Xbox Live Gamertag is "ROLF u Got SARS" which often leads to parent related confusion every time they see the notifier when he signs on while I'm watching a movie.
Hi there! I'm a movie and video game geek that happens to draw things. Currently I'm a Junior 3D Animation major at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.
I'm also a colorblind student at art school, people tend to go crazy over that and yes, I had to take Color Theory class Freshman year and of course it sucked.
For film history class, on top of a traditional written final exam, we had to hand in a poster based on one of the films we watched in class. I chose the slapstick Obi-Wan Kinobe vechicle, The Horse's Mouth as the source for the poster. Why not?
