Monday, August 25, 2008

Summer 2008

So I haven't had anytime till just now to really just sit down and breathe. Honestly, it feels like it's been from one thing to another. I worked all summer long at the Chelsea Teddy Bear Co. store here in Chelsea, Michigan, and when I wasn't there, I was thinking about being there. I didn't help myself either when I became addicted to World of Warcraft... heh, oops. I've been a terrible friend this summer, not keeping in touch with my friends from school or from home! They're all at most twenty minutes away and I've only seen them a couple times this summer. Also, I've gotten nothing creative done this summer.

Now I just have two weeks before I head back down to Savannah and stay at my boyfriend's house for a week, then move back in and start up classes again! I'm surprisingly not very stressed about the idea. I'm trying to have a more Hakuna Matata outlook on life, seeing as I can get so pent up over next to nothing.

I have managed to see a couple movies this summer. I got to see WALL·E earlier this summer.



Absolutely adorable movie! Disney/Pixar score again in my book. However, I am not a fan of the use of life action filmed people in these animated movies. Happy Feet was an enjoyable move for the most part, but not one of my favorites. I was especially turned off when I saw the filmed people towards the end of the film. It felt cheap to me for them to use real people like that. There's something about an animated film that just has its own feel and character to it that is interrupted by the use of mish-meshing medias like that. So when I saw the clips of Fred Willard being used in WALL·E, I was afraid. But, I was pleasantly surprised with how they used it this time. The progression of how people became what they were in WALL·E's time was very smart. Showing the captains' portraits, up to how they become, fat and baby like, was ingenious and reassured my confidence in the film. So, just having those few filmed clips didn't bother me as the film progressed. The minimal use of dialogue was amazing. In our beginning animation classes, we're stressed to on how to animate things without having to use verbal cues, and still being able to portray action and emotion. Now, in WALL·E, we still got sound effects and little blips of language, but for the most part they had to rely on expressions and movements to get the emotions across. This, in my book, puts WALL·E up there as one of the best pieces of animation I have seen to date that has utilized non-verbal cues like that.

I didn't get to see Kung Fu Panda, so I don't have much to say about that. I did get to see Dark Knight, and was very impressed with it. It's a shame we had to lose Heath Ledger, he had quite the future ahead of him. But, on an animation note, I've been told that part of Harvey Dent's burned half was actually animated. If this is true, then that was some damn good visual effects right there. If not, then that was some damn good prosthetics job.

However, as a side note to all this animation talk, whoever made the rigs for the cat forms in World of Warcraft needs to be slapped. Cats can't sit without a disgusting pinch at the hips. Yes, I understand it's just a video game and it doesn't have to be a neat as a feature film, but a good rig can't be so hard to ask for! Even with a certain polygon count. The texture people can't cover all the imperfections of a polygon model!

Oh, yea, and PS-

I've given up on DeviantArt. It's gotten too fancy for me.

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