DA

I reopened my deviantART gallery to run in conjunction with the blog. I wanted to be cool again, I guess.

Any way, here it is.

There you have it.

New URL

I'm in the process of renaming the blog, seeing as "The Animated Life" is already a blog for the New York Times.

I am open to suggestions. In the mean time, the URL is now "cscharrer".

Future Project

The title says "future project" but it takes a blast from the past to understand.



I did this for my Digital Form, Space, and Lighting class (same class as painting with light, violin, and the violin gone bad) and we had to use ONLY basic polygon shapes (cubes, spheres, cylinders, cones, toruses) and piece together some sort of aquatic figure or scene with the shapes. And we could only use the three basic manipulators (rotate, scale, translate) on the shapes. No extruding, sewing seams. I was pretty proud of my outcome.

Another future project idea? Model the character in my title bar. She's got talon feet, that'd be fun.

Now I want to go back and take that same idea and make a new model of it. Fun! First I need the time. I should be posting the progress on my senior film soon. Models and rigs oh my!

Freddie will cut you

Except her sword broke so the tip is jagged Q_Q.

Sorry, she still doesn't have boobage, maybe when she gets some better armor.

Still in pencils, now that I look at it I want to fix the hair... must fix...

Thundercats, HO!

I didn't get to watch Thundercats much as a kid, but my brothers did have a couple action figures. The cat-people were amazing to me, but my mother found cartoons to be brain-rotting and I couldn't discover their source till later in life. Now there is talk of a CG movie in lieu of other 80s cartoons becoming movies, and the talk has been buzzing for a while now... well, kinda. It's been pretty silent for a while actually. I hear Warner Bros has delayed its production, but thanks to the folks at MovieLine, we have four concept images!

This is a mostly personal blog, so I have decided that only one concept image will be displayed here. But not just any one concept image, no, but Lion-O himself. Why just one? I love characters, and Lion-O looks good. Perhaps I have a particular liking because his face is much like the face I tried to employ on my Caprean designs like Dallas and Jestir.

I hope that production continues on the movie. It's currently being said that Jerry O'Flaherty is directing the film, and he's credited as an art director from video games such as Gears of War and Command & Conquer: Renegade. An art director being a film director? Interesting. I really would like to see how this could turn out, especially with the pretty concept art they've released. (Yea, the movie could still suck, but if it can look pretty while doing it!)

FINALLY!

I got Maya yesterday. Couldn't get it to work though, and it made me an angry panda. Today I got Sims 3, and the disc was scratched. Two softwares not working and frustrated with my job, I began to crumble.

Then it happened.

My dear Tim was trying to help me yesterday with Maya and to no avail. He attempted to help again tonight with Sims 3, but there were no quick solutions for me, and so he returned to the Maya issue. And resolved it. In two seconds. Done.

Freaking miracle.

And for some reason, having that fix just sent a wash of relief through me. Fine, Sims 3, be stupid, I have real work I need to do any way.


Back in action!

Waiting

I'm waiting for maya to come in so I can start working again. Ordered it, but it's on backorder. Don't know how long that's going to last, hopefully not too long.

So, until then, a character sketch I did recently



This is Fredericka. I can't tell you what she's for, but I can tell you that the image scanned a little crooked. I haven't really done concepts like this in a long while. She's... meh, ok, I wasn't trying to go for some super sexy gladiatrix, but she isn't terribly interesting to look at. It's a solid start to a process.

Seven Weeks Left

Till I go back to Savannah.

My re-doings of holiday t-shirt imprints at work have resulted in my privilege to redo the imprint design sheets we show customers at work. Not only do I get to reorganize the imprints on a sheet of paper in a fashion that I deem logical and easy to read, but I get to rework a few holiday imprints to better work for general occasions. Too bad this isn't available online, but it should give people more reason to stop by the store and take a peak at the imprints I reworked. (Sorry art department peeps, but an art student who ain't allowed to work with ya gots to do something. You guys still get to say you did the original design, I just made them more... usable. :D )

Summersnoozefest of '09

I've only been back in Michigan just shy of a week, but seriously, it's boring. I'm pretty broke so I cancelled my WoW subscription (temporarily hopefully), and the internet doesn't like to keep me online long enough to get a good game of Warcraft III finished with Tim. That's frustrating.

Back to work at the Teddy Bear Co. Not going to talk about that, it's very very boring and certain things drive me crazy. I like to keep myself occupied by finding random mundane things to do. Like going on our imprint computers and finding interesting and rarely used designs and tweaking them so they fit my needs (Like a "congratulations" design to a "bff" design or a mother's day design to a little boy's... or two little boys'... personalized bear design) and discovering in-store sewing kits and fixing up the bears with holes in them. But, this is not enough... still bored...

And then my Maya (3D software) has expired on my computer, so if I want to work on my senior film (like I originally planned) over the summer, I have to be a code-cracking ninja or cough up $200 for 14 more months of Maya which will probably be updated within the next five. Or completely outsource my work to volunteers. I think I'll come up with the money so I won't have anyone to blame but myself when my models don't work right.

At least I'm beginning to hear of signs that I still have friends nearby that I might be able to occupy some interesting time with. That would be nice.

I need a hair cut, i have a strange mullet O_o

I know, I know...

I know I was harassing my blog over the weekend about my film production blog, Elementary Aviation, but now it is for realskies done now. It has all the required content and everything. You know what else is awesome? My pitch books are also done, and they got picked up while I was in concept class yesterday. Now all that needs to happen is finish working on my modeling work, pack up my room, move it across town, have the bf graduate, and then relax for awhile.

But first, I'm going to level my death knight for a bit.

New Blog! (UPDATED)

I'm not moving, I just set up the blog (in its barest form currently) for my undergraduate senior film.

Elementary Aviation


Not much there right now, but check back in a couple weeks.

UPDATE: The film and blog have a new name (Actually, the film has changed completely but you don't have to worry about that)
Keep up to date!

Jerk Wad

Got to see Coraline last night with a large group of people. It was kind of funny seeing the movie theater packed with fellow Animation students. All in all, the movie was amazing. I wish I had the patience to do stop-motion, the effect of it was beautiful. I randomly found an interview with the director, Henry Selick, this morning and he made an excellent comment on how the Other Mother had hand made this world for Coraline, so using the stop motion technique, that is all hand done, was a good compliment to that idea. I agree with that idea and it worked well. The only thing I disagree with is showing the film in 3D. I don't understand this 3D craze that is going on lately, half the people I talked to afterward said that it gave them a headache or was just uncomfortable for their eyes. My depth perception is off to begin with since I have uneven astigmatisms in my eyes, but I was even wearing my normal glasses under the 3D glasses and it was still obnoxious. (Maybe I need a new prescription?) But, that was the only thing I have to complain about, and it's not even that big a deal. Not all showings are in 3D, and when it comes out on DVD, that won't be in 3D either. So, if you're reading this and haven't seen Coraline yet, go see it. Now. Do it. Dooooooooo iiittttt.

-Insert Clever Title Here-

This is mostly just to fill room between posts, since I don't see this as a posty-posty blog.
But let's face it, the software developers at Adobe and Autodesk are not being paid enough. Why? Because they manage to spit out new versions of their software way too often. I've been using Maya for just under two years and this is the fourth version I've encountered. (Maya 8, Maya 2008, Maya 2008 v.something, Maya 2009)
Seriously, slow down! And Adobe CS4!? We're still getting used to CS3 over here!

So. Moral of the story- if you're going to punch out so many versions of Maya and Adobe products... pay your people more. Or something. Or just slow down!

Tying Bottles of Eau de Cologne to Mah Cat's Tail

I tried posting my 3D character setup and animation final last week, but the file was WAAAYYYY too big for blogger's uploadermajig. So I have to compress it before I post it, and I've been too lazy to do it lately. And by lazy, I mean I was busy playing WoW and getting my tauren druid up to lvl 80, then discovering I was sucking at being a DPS feral druid and switched to BOOOMkin, but now I'm just bored with the game. So, in my boredom, my character sits undergeared in Dalaran, awaiting to get her fuzzy cow butt handed to her during this weekend's raid, while I decide that my time is better spent on...

redoing my other final.

Yea, that's right, I'm animating during my break. The Acting For Animators final was a total flop. I got an A on it, but I think it was an A for Attempt. So, I'm forgetting that horrid piece of pencil test disaster and going back into a different direction. I'm going to pound out a satisfactory animation using the newest Moom rig, using my final voice take (that I am not satisfied with either), and will hopefully get a good piece of dialogue animation out of that. From there I might use it as reference for yet another animation that will actually use the Sophie Rammeyer character I created for the project. (In the essence of "I like what I did here, so let's do it over here..." not for factual reference)

I have a mirror behind my computer on my home desk, so referencing the facial animation is going to be fairly easy... might make that a necessity for all my desks in the future... my desk is technically a vanity table...

So, enough blogging! On to animating!

Doing Disney Better than Disney

Don Bluth is a great man. For some reason I thought I had seen Secret of NIMH when I was a kid. Maybe I just wanted to fit in with the cool animation kids and not get taunted for having "missed one of the greatest things to life" and how my childhood must've suffered. (Let's face it, some people can be annoying when you haven't seen certain movies.) And, now I can actually say I've seen it. And it's amazing. And Rock-a-Doodle is hard to watch when it's been chopped up into 16 four-minute long segments on youtube.

I'm trying to write my thesis paper on Don Bluth for thursday now so I don't have to worry about it tomorrow night when I'm standing in line for the new World of Warcraft expansion. Though, I'm nervous. Truth be told, my ADD acts up when I'm supposed to be concentrating on something like a paper (i.e. this post) and all the WoW servers are still down from their scheduled maintenance. In fact, when I checked the realm list... realms were just plain missing. Odd. Good problem to have two days before the launch of an expansion. (Not)

Back to the paper and Don Bluth.

Belated Update

While I'm at it, I should probably post some of the character designs I did last year for Troy Gustafson's classes.


Jestir was done for Animation 1 with Troy Gustafson. An original character of mine that I've had for some time now but she had to go through a bit of a make over to fit the criteria of the project. Let's just say making characters look as fancy as possible sometimes doesn't go well with getting things done on time.




Dallas is another original character I've had for some time along side Jestir. Wyatt I made up for the sake of the project but he's a usable character still if I decide to take these guys any further in my animation projects. Dallas and Wyatt I did for Troy Gustafson's Character Design and Visual Development class. (That was a wallop of a class : / )

Some of the results of the character sheets...

My Animation 1 final featuring Jestir.

It's supposed to be super rough looking, I'm not a slacker.

I would show you the results of the maquette I had to make of Dallas... but I broked him the night after I turned him in :(

This is how he looked in progress, however, before I broke him, and before the terrible gray spray paint... and before everything went to shit for the poor guy. Since then, I've tried to reuse his base to start making a maquette of Jestir... but I lost interest in doing that awhile ago. Her wireframe is still hanging out somewhere in my room, so I could always go back and keep going.

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.