Friday, December 11, 2009

Weekly Blog: December 7th-11th

The final blog entry!

Okay, so here is my sketch:


It's basically a bunny. I was inspired to sketch this because at my movie theatre, we received a new poster for Alice in Wonderland coming in March, so that made the think of the white rabbit from the story.



This is a really cute short story from the guys at Pixar. It's a small short until Cars 2 comes out. All that Pixar does is amazing, but I was inspired by the lighting in this short. I don't like Mater so much, but this short is really cute.


My final entry is for Disney's new animated move The Princess and the Frog. I haven't seen a traditional style Disney movie in a while, and this one is really well done. It's not as realistic as a Pixar, but it is very nostalgic growing up to movies like the Lion King. The music numbers are breathtaking, and if you have time to see it, I would recommend it just for the gorgeous animation.

Friday, December 4, 2009

Weekly Blog: November 30th - December 4th

Okay, I lightened up the image, so here is the render of the shoe.







This is a coca cola commercial from a few years ago, but it's playing again at our theatre. It's a little bit fuzzy, but it looks great on TV. The animation is amazing, and the humor in the commercial is great. It's a great advertisement.



While looking at animations, I came across this Wall-E promo animation from pixar. I had never seen it before, it but it is so cute! The best part about pixar is how well they can bring a character to life.

Sunday, November 29, 2009

Weekly Blog: November 23-27th



This first entry is a close up sketch of the zipper on the Zippur shoe. I spent a lot of this weekend trying to figure out how to animate the zipper, but I'll need to ask for help. I'm trying to animate the zipper along a spline, but when I path deform the zipper, the spline changes and moves in weird directions.



While looking around for inspiring zipper things, I came across this image from Boingboing.net
This zipper dress is inspiring because it's made entirely out of zippers, so it can be changed and shortened or lengthened with whatever you feel like wearing.


This was another really inspiring piece from this website with other cool zipper things:
It's a hightop shoe that can change into a flip flop. It's so amazing and inspiring for the type of shoe that our group is making.

Sunday, November 22, 2009

Weekly Blog: November 16 - 20th

My first entry this week is a first render of my shoe model for the group project. The bottom is basically a canvas shoe with an changeable top. Here are two examples of the shoe.



This is a music video of Michael Jackson's song Black or White. Professor Castillo mentioned it in class on Friday, so I decided to look it up for inspiration. The scene changes from one place to another, and this is similar to the idea that we had for the project.



I've noticed an interesting phenomenon with animated movies over the last few months. No matter how good a movie looks, (this one looks great) it seems to always be compared to Pixar. They are the kings of animated storytelling, but it's interesting that movie reviewers always say that they are never as good as Pixar. Anyway, a new computer animated movie came out this weekend called Planet 51. It thought that it was funny and enjoyable, though you might not remember it like you will a pixar movie. Working with 3d environments, it makes me appreciate how much time an effort are put into these movies. It's basically the story of an astronaut to lands on a planet that is already inhabited by aliens who believe that the universe is only 500 miles long. Some parts are pretty good, though there are a lot of cliches.


Sunday, November 15, 2009

Weekly Blog: November 9th - 13th

This week has been so stressful. First with premiere not working, and now that I'm trying to model for our group project, it's not going well at all.

Anyway, here are my blog entries for this week.



This is a movie poster for the new blockbuster 2012. The story is that the myan calander predicted the end of the world in 2012, but no one really cares about the story. The world blows up with spectacular special effects. I was inspired by this because of the incredible effects in the movie. They really do look amazing.


For our group project, we are planning on doing a shoe with interchangable designs for one shoe. One of my tasks is to model the shoe, so when I looked online I found this tutorial on box modeling a shoe. There were a few using nurbs, but they did it with some kind of plugin that I don't have.

This is my sketch this week. It is the basic idea of the shoe. The body would be one color, and the top would be connected with a zipper so that you could interchange the top design.







Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Assignment 0.7 - Animation

Here is the first output of my animation. It's a spiritual animation.

This is my first attempt at animation. I really tried hard on it, but I've had a lot of frustrations my first time out. It's 300 frames long like the assignment, so it's only 10 seconds long. It does have sound; the song is a piece by Andres Segovia. My idea that I tried to represent was walking through fog. That is a very spiritual experience for me.




Also, I hate to admit it but I've head many headaches with this assignment. First, premiere couldn't download onto my computer, so I had to install it on another one and transfer. Secondly, when I tried to put music to my animation on premiere, it would only render it out as an audio file for some reason. So, for now I had to make it on Windows movie maker, but with a converter it is in avi format. It was so frustrating; I just want to smash my computer to pieces. I like the way the animation turned out thought for being 10 seconds long.

Sunday, November 8, 2009

Weekly Blog: November 2nd - 6th


First off this week is my sketch. While thinking of animations, I though of rabbit jumping through the air. And, I also thought that it would be fun to do in cubism style. So, this is my quick rabbit cubism sketch of a rabbit jumping.

The new interpretation of Charles Dickens "A Christmas Carol" is an odd one. If you see it for nothing else, it is a great example of Live Motion Capture animation. It is incredible the detail of all of the characters and their expressions. It's actually pretty scary how realistic they look. I was working on Saturday, and a little girl and her mother came in. She had to get a refund, because the movie was too scary for her. It's stunning to look at, and the new technology is very inspirational.



If anyone needs to find tutorial books for 3ds max or any other programs go to
Click the Library Catalog Tab and enter the name of the program. For example, I entered in 3ds max and it came up with help books on the subject. Any of the searches that have [electronic resource] will give you the books online that you can read anytime. They were pretty helpful.