Continue reading »]]> Well… I saw The Avengers twice opening weekend… I love Marvel

So anyways, I’ve decided to take a bit of time and try out something I was going to have to try out anyways… nows a good enough time as any.  I took a few photos of my almost 5 year old son, and am going to get him to Hulk Out.  I looked on YouTube to see things like this, but the only real things I found were very short clips of people using after effects things or just tinting video to make themselves green… well… I want him to really hulk out… so I’m going to build a model of him, and then I’ll create morph points so that he actually grows massive muscles.  I’m guessing it’ll take a week or two to build him normally, then probably the same to create the enlarged version, which I’ll have to assign morph points for, unless I discover a better method in the meantime.

Alrighty… off to model!

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This past Friday I visited Evans Elementary school, giving a presentation for Career Day.  What I’m aspiring to do is quite a bit more fun than my day-to-day work, so I thought I should try to encompass the industry a bit more than just what I do.  I started off talking a little about my education, 3rd and 4th graders don’t seem to care about college, or that I learned more and more programs through life… they did react to when I said I was 33 and just finished taking classes for 3D animation… Yeah, Kids still don’t like going to school

I then would talk about some of the tools I use, Pencils and Pens, Computers and Graphics Tablets, they really enjoyed using my Wacom Bamboo, although when I saw some kids jamming the pen onto the tablet I hurt inside.

I got to show them some of the projects I did in my 3D course, which upset some of them to find out that my 1st Person Shooter girl wasn’t going to actually be in a game, but made me a bit happy since they liked seeing her.

The big thing though was the portion about animation, for the last year or two I’ve been creating simple 10 second flash animations for work, but I never did anything as elaborate as this undertaking!  I equipped my graphics tablet, hit google and youtube and educated myself on the workings of doing real animations in Flash, about 3 and a half weeks later, I had a minute and a half video created and ready for having the students help me to fill in the blanks!

The video below is the completed video for almost a months worth of work for this years career day, I thank the students of Evans Elementary for taking an interest in the world of Graphic Design and Animation, and Helping me to finish off my video!

I apologize it it repeats some of the audio at the end, the original file doesn’t do that, I think it might be a streaming issue, the file is almost 3mb!

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so… I’ve spent the last couple of days really thinking about what and how I am going to pull off this presentation at my daughters school… I’ve watched a few tutorials on the internet, learned how to draw in flash, add bones, import audio and sort of lip-sync… that’s quite a bit of stuff!

Anywho… I drew up a Sporticus, SVSports’ mascot, who will be making a very short appearance in the flash animation.  Then I re-drew him in parts in Flash, painted him, added bones and all that stuff… this is what I got done in about 2 hours!

ENJOY!

(I removed the clip since it autoplayed on hitting the site, it’s included in the final animation anyways… please enjoy it there)

Continue reading »]]> My daughter’s school is having a career day later this month, she really wanted me to come up with a presentation for it… I said yes.  So… What do I do???  I work full time as a graphic designer for Schuylkill Valley Sports, local retailer.  I freelance as an artist for a local screenprinter and I also dabble in 3D graphics for use in Animation and Games (for use, but not yet used).

I think that the whole animation side of things is the most attractive part of what I do, so I thought I’d put a buncha effort into developing a cool relevant animation that the students would enjoy… what better than to use something they are all familiar with?!?!

I’m developing it in Flash, because I’d like to be stronger in it, and I also would like to do similar things for SVSports for some of their marketing campaigns.  so I took an avatar of myself, and broke me down into a bunch of pieces, and had me walking up to my daughters school.  Take a look!

Continue reading »]]> got a little time to shape the head more, it’s coming along!  I thought I’d also take a shot at trying to pop some eyes in there and see how they would react.  since I didn’t learn anything about animating features like this in class, I’m kinda on my own…  Check it out… it IS a work in progress… I’m sure I’ll find a much better way to do this, I’m not a fan at all… just thought I’d share it so far.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

I made a couple of quick changes… here’s the result of that…

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Continue reading »]]> Well… Several things came up in my regular day to day life… so I wasn’t able to get to modeling…

Now I’ve gotten a little time to start the process… I spent a little time this week trying to troubleshoot how I’m going to be able to animate the eyes on an anime head… since they are so large.  I think I’ve come up with an idea, but I’ve got to get the head fairly built to test it all out…

So… here’s the first image of he process… I’ve still got a lot of work to do… I roughed it out, now I’m starting to smooth the cheeks and work on the eyes and nose.  I’m happy with the little time I was able to put into it so far… hopefully I’ll have more time this evening!

Continue reading »]]> last night proved to not be a very restful night of sleep… I had several dreams, and some of which had a recurring theme… Here’s the details of one that I’m still able to recall…

I was at work, as you can find me during normal working hours… The phone on my desk started ringing, I answered the phone with a “Hello.”  The person on the other line wasn’t coming through too clearly, he tried saying his name and where I was to remember him from.  Several moments later the line was disconnected… I didn’t know what to make of it, I couldn’t remember the name, and didn’t understand what he was talking about… something about soup or something.

The phone rang again, and being the dutiful employee I am, I answered.  ”Hey, this is (can’t remember this detail) again, can you hear me now?” I could, and so he continued.  ”Great, so, about this Soup Movie you said you were going to be in…”  Uh-What?” I replied, I didn’t know anything about a soup movie, or that I was going to even be in a movie for that matter.  ”Yeah, a few months ago I spoke with you about being in this movie, it’s about a guy who travels from Minnesota to Iowa, consuming nothing but soup.”  He went into some other details about it that I cannot remember, but I was concerned about how much of my time this was going to take, and the monetary compensation… since I was sure I wouldn’t be able to maintain my normal job during this film project.  I do not recall what the payment was going to be, but I believe it was better than what I was getting, and if the movie was successful, I would get more.  I was also inquisitive as to what this role called me to do… after some more conversation with the man on the other line… Not a whole lot, I was chosen because I looked like who they envisioned for the movie as well as being pretty humble in my mannerisms, they thought that the role would be easy for me to pull off.  I asked how much soup I was going to have to consume during the course of making the movie, the answer was more than I could have expected… over 6000 bowls of soup… This was a bit of a concern, considering that it’s probably all I would consume for the next few months.  I looked around for my wife, but she wasn’t there… what was I going to do?

I’m pretty sure I thought about asking for some time to think about it, but it also feels as if I had already signed on to do this… this call was more of a “when should we be expecting you” call than a “will you still be doing it”.  I agreed to meeting up with the guy, and that’s when this phase of sleeping ended…

I think I should stop eating Goldfish Crackers right before going to sleep… seems to have an adverse effect on me

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I was able to get some more information our of my teacher for the 3rd module of my class… over the last several months he kept referring to a “Project Brief” and that I needed to reference it, telling me it was on this particular page… well I would always respond stating that I didn’t see it, scrolled through everything and so on… but I wasn’t given any more information about it…

I would ask “so all I need to do it this, this and this and I’m done?” and I would receive a response telling me that I needed to review the brief, and this, this and this needed to be done… so I would do those things, and mention that I still couldn’t find the brief… eventually I did everything I was told to do, and had all of that submitted… the reason why I got a poor grade… I didn’t submit everything the Project Brief said I needed to…

I asked again where it was because I couldn’t find it anywhere, and asked that if I submit the missing pieces if it will improve my grade… I FINALLY find out that if I click back to the 1st lesson, it’s there, at the top of the lesson, not where I had been told the rest of the time.  I was also told that the grade was final…

Kinda sucks to find this stuff out afterwards, each lesson should have the required elements listed in it rather than a few reference to a file that is easily overlooked or possibly forgotten at the very beginning of the class.

I’m glad to know that my grade wasn’t low due to bad work, just to the lack of other materials… like an essay explaining why I wrote the backstory this way and what references I used.  It’s kind of like doing a math problem, understanding all the steps thoroughly in your head, getting the answer right but graded low because not all the work was shown (which has also happened to me)

Since there’s no chance of increasing my grade, I’ll be spending my time working on new projects then focusing on this old one.

Continue reading »]]> Took a few weeks to get my grade, which was quite a bit lower than I expected… not exactly sure why… got a C.  Based on the statement he made on the work previously it sounded like he only had an issue with 1 of the videos and noted that the 12 principles were not as polished as the final ones… which I would have thought would be the case for anyone…

Whatever the case, it’s all complete now… Perhaps he’s more critical than others… My wife says that she’s noticed several of my professors and teachers being rougher and harsher on grading me due to the quality of the work I’ve done.  If this isn’t the case, I feel bad for other students taking the course who’s stuff isn’t nearly as well done as mine.

Oh well… Now that I’m all completed, I can start working up my Resume’ and shoot that out places and start working on perfecting my skillz!