A Week Late Culmination of my Final Projects

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.

Lip Syncing with Python #1 -- Digital Sausage Tutorials from Chris Cookson on Vimeo.

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.

Men in Black Kinetic Typography from Chris Cookson on Vimeo.

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...

Chris Cookson Demo Reel (Spring '10) from Chris Cookson on Vimeo.
This is the demo reel I made for pre-production class to send around for internships, check it out in all it's one minute glory.

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.

Hey look, a blog post

Jumper Crash (Experimental Animation) from Chris Cookson on Vimeo.

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.

Audio was the track -Jumper- (ID: 168734) from the Newgrounds Audio Portal by user Waterflame.
http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/168734

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.

Hey! some of my Ugly Americans stuff is online now...

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.

Just a couple of things

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.

Some Really Early Character Design Stuff!

The drawings aren't quite perfectly lined up right now for modeling, but I don't think I'm going to be looking at the images directly on an image plane in Maya quite yet, if so I'll probably adjust the drawings a bit.
Anyway, here's the character I'll probably model for my first assignment in Character Design class. He's Gregory Reaper, the 15-year-old son of the Grim Reaper. Is generally a wimpy guy, watches a lot of animé and has a job folding t-shirts at The Gap. When his father gets a cold and has to take a sick day from work, he gives his son the task of arriving to kill an adorable 12-year-old girl. Greg is too nice of a guy to go through with this, so instead he fakes the girl's death, fabric of space and time related hijinks ensue...good times.

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.

Had a bit of a busy break, but working on something really awesome

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

The last batch of finals and stuff

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?

New Video: Fear and Loathing in Willoughby

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)

Fear and Loathing in Willoughby from Chris Cookson on Vimeo.

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.

my fifteen minutes are up...

Over the last couple of weeks I was working on a parody of Twitter to accompany an Onion article, this was what was on their homepage last monday...

Here's the parody of the Fail Whale I made for the page, I'm really happy with how it turned out

you can find the article here and the accommodating website here. It's also doing pretty well on Facebook apparently.

busy, busy, busy (and some older Onion stuff)

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...

Another October Art Post

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.

and here's a little gem from Twitter

October Art Update

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.

Requiem in D Cup Major from Chris Cookson on Vimeo.

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.

Some Concept Art and Mountain Dew contest follies

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?

some squirrel doodling

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...

the quickest way to lose all your friends part 7: near the end of summer edition

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.

the quickest way to lose all your friends part 6: creepy animé fetish edition

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.

the quickest way to lose all your friends part 5: attack of the clones

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.

the quickest way to lose all your friends part 4

The series continues in this McG directed installment featuring, none other than Christian Bale as John Connor...there is no way this could possibly go wrong. Last week I hinted at having a job interview at a certain vegetable related satirical newspaper, well the place was The Onion, I got the web intern job and I'm absolutely ecstatic to start my work there. The current batch of drawings continues below...



In my senior year of high school Paul was in a handful of classes with me, including AP English, Russian History, Economics and Video class, he may have been in more but after two years high school is a bit of a blur. The image above relates to a debate in English class on Death of a Salesman; in the class room I was the only student who felt that the character Happy was selfish for ignoring the needs of his family despite being completely ignored as a child. The class was heated in debate over this issue and the teacher seemed to be enjoying the surprisingly on-topic classroom discussion. Since then, I still had a few opportunities to debate this with Paul. He was in a band called "Punt the Baby" during high school, they broke up...he's probably in a new band now but I doubt the name is nearly as perfect...

Paul was also the guy representing Team X-Blades in my final dumb little High School short, Dragon Ball Zebra Slash Brink 2 which has received such rave reviews on YouTube such as "the gayest video i've ever seen"...I'm honored.



Mike Banom was practically in all of my classes foundation year, save for maybe 4D and the second semester of Art History. He is a drummer which may explain the large arms and a devout fan of blink-182 and Alkaline Trio. At the end of the first semester drawing class we drank some of that weird Mountain Dew Game Fuel, no one else in the class wanted to brave its flavor. He has a sick sense of humor as well so we got along quite fine.



Vikki was in practically all my classes sophomore year and I hung out with both her and her roommate April (you can see her in tons of posts here) quite extensively the second half of last year. Vikki is a huge fan of cute things and has the tendency to let that out in her animations which include the likes of ghosts with orange shaped heads. I'd often abbreviate her name as V-Ken, because I'm incredibly fond of making horrendous nicknames for people and that would probably explain the reason why I have her performing a signature Street Fighter move in the drawing above...



Craig is weird...in a good way. I had him in my Video Editing class and he tends to have a creepy presence that follows him in just about everything he does and I mean this in the most sincere way possible, you can get an idea from seeing his YouTube channel which includes videos of his friends vomiting to the carnival style music of Beetlejuice. With that being said he loves most things related to Tim Burton and has a sick hand at graffiti art.



Rachel is a self-proclaimed "ditzy girl with big boobs", with that in mind, I think I came pretty close with this one. Rachel was one of my floor mates on the "Healthy Choices Floor" at Pratt first year. I've played scrabble with her a couple of times and commented on a couple of her things on Facebook. She is prone to draw characters that she calls "Miltons" who's name comes from the character in Office Space, one of her Milton paintings was featured in an art gallery in Brooklyn, I believe.



Jess was another one of my classmates foundation year and is perhaps even more crass and sarcastic than me; which is a fairly admirable feat I may add. In one of her videos for 4D design class she dressed up as an old lady and danced to Snoop Dogg, Unk's "Walk it Out", or Li'l Wayne, or something, I'm not entirely sure. During the first few days of sophomore year I watched both the Power Rangers movie and one of the direct-to-DVD Little Mermaid prequels with her, it takes a certain level of sarcasm to be able to not just walk-out halfway through.