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:

http://www.toxel.com/inspiration/2009/09/07/17-cool-zipper-inspired-designs/

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.

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.

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.

http://www.gabrieleprotti.com/PAGES/tutorial/scarpa/makingoftheshoe.htm

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.

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.

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

http://elibrary.unm.edu/

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.

Weekly Blog: October 26th-30th

Hope that everyone had a safe Halloween. I had to work, so I didn't do much. Though, being inspired by Halloween, I thought of the jack-o-lantern and the way that light shines through the pumpkin to reveal it's face or image. So, my sketch this week is of a sad jack-o-lantern. It's not the best sketch, but I wanted to try shading and light with the pumpkin.

My next entry is an amazing artist on deviant art that I found through google when I was looking up images of pumpkin carvings. The guys username is Revelation-Six and his stuff is really amazing.
This is one of his carvings from 2007 of the late John Wayne. The detail and the way the light shines through is amazing.

Working at a theatre, it's easy to see movies that have just come out. I didn't see all of it, but one I saw the end of was Astro Boy. Based on the classic Japanese anime, it is sort of a kiddy version of the series. The animation was beautiful though even if parts of the story were so predictable. I watched the way the camera moved, and it didn't move very much. It did move for some action sequences when it followed Astro as he flew away off screen, and another particular shot I remember is when the floating city is crashing down, the camera pulls back from the city and has Astro's friends looking at the chaos. It was strange to watch a movie trying to notice these things, but it was much more interesting than the story was sadly.

Astro Boy poster from shockya.com