last post…possibly May 14, 2008
So this is my probably my last post in awhile since tomorrow is our last class of Career Prep. It’s not that I dread blogging or anything, I happen to enjoy it. It’s the only time where I can relax and put my ideas and thoughts out there. However, nearing the end of term 2 and entering our final term I doubt I’ll even have time to eat or sleep.
We just finished our rough demo reel previs assignment for our project portfolio class. It was awesome just to spend the class watching reels and sharing our ideas. After completing the previs, I have a better idea of the overall pace and how everything should flow together. I spent a good hour and a half last night looking for music for my demo reel and found a two tracks. One is by an Australian alternative-rock band called Silverchair who I was obsessed with in High School. One of their albums was titled Freakshow and the theme of the album was sideshow/freakshow based. That album, a carni episode of X-Files and the show Carnivale all inspired me choose that theme for my reel. I am debating whether or not to use “No Association” by Silverchair, although it might be to hard and intense sounding. The other choice was music from Stephen King’s IT movie. Just watching the videos on youtube last night of that crazy psychotic clown was creeping me out. The music was eerie and creepy which I think would be perfect for my reel. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to add the music to my previs on time.
I think this overall fear and pressure of completing my demo reel has actually prohibited me from starting my reel. I did all my concept drawings and one rough face model, but it’s difficult me to actually start modeling. Well, the other day I made an eyelid for my Sad Clown model. I guess that’s a start. Even though everyone tells me I should get started NOW, I haven’t really yet. I know once I get into it, it’s going to be hard to stop me.
Happy Graduation April 08 Class! May 2, 2008
So the Animation Class ahead of us has graduated and their industry night was yesterday. It’s sad to see the late night crew go because they were quite the entertainment during our stressful nights at school. You know who you are. A whole bunch of us went down to the event at BCIT Downtown Campus. I also went to the October 2007 Demo Reel night which was at Radical, and I personally like that venue better. The room was a lot more spacious at Radical and the atmosphere was kinda cool and dark, whereas the room at BCIT was small and very warm, and bright. It was still a great night. Good Food, packed and exceptional demo reels. I got some good advice and ideas from speaking with the graduates and hopefully I’ll be able to learn from them and avoid issues they ran into as best as I can. The most common one was “Start on your demo reel, now.” I was a bit anxious because we have only 5 months left! Time has flew by. Some of us ended up heading back to school at around 11pm to get some work done. I think I’ve got a good start. We just developed character concepts for our demo reels and model sheets. Here is the more refined version of what I had so far:
Loosing my Wisdom….teeth. April 27, 2008
So I just got one of my wisdom teeth pulled out this afternoon and I’m all drugged up on Ibuprofen and antibiotics and I am blogging. If I’m not making much sense, you’ll know why. I have a dental phobia which prevents me from seeing a dentist on a regular basis. I have a very low pain tolerance and my last dental experience was not a pleasant one. I think the fact that I went to a dentist that allowed my family to pay under the table says something about the quality of work they do. Anyways, I just remember each appointment was a painful experience. It had been a REALLY long time since I’ve seen another dentist but I’ve been paying a standard only dental insurance that I haven’t used for 3 years now and along with the dental benefits I am getting from school, so I thought I should go. Also, I had a wisdom tooth with a big cavity I have been ignoring for awhile, not to mention the tooth was growing horizontally into my other teeth. I must say, this new dentist i’ve been seeing has been AMAZING and i’ve never had such a pleasant dental experience. My teeth cleaning was 100x less painful then before and I hardly felt any pain getting my wisdom tooth pulled out. I got to watch tv during the whole session and almost fell asleep at one moment. I think I have finally overcome my dental phobia.
Now for something Animation related. For Design class we started working on character model sheet for our next modeling assignment. It was recommended that we design a character we would most likely use in our demo reels and I decided to do a sad, hobo clown for my carnival/freakshow demo reel. Here is a rough sketch.
I was looking for reference for the fat clown and ended up using the contestants from the show “The Biggest Loser” for reference. I wanted to draw a really obese man and the before pictures on their website were perfect reference. I also found some head reference on the site www.3d.sk as well and looking through pictures with the filter MEN – age 40 – 50, OVERWEIGHT, wasn’t very pleasant. There were some really graphic and unpleasant full body shots and poses, i must say. I felt kinda weird browsing through these pictures at school. Oh well, I need all the reference I can get.
30 straight hours without sleep and 17 hours of straight sleep later… April 14, 2008
These past few days have been a total blur. I’ve been stressed, exhausted, excited, horrified and I haven’t laughed so much in the longest time. It all started on Friday morning at 9am, the day of BCIT’s Open House. I didn’t realize it was going to be such a huge event. A whole bunch of us from the Animation Program decided to volunteer and REPRESENT, y’all. Anyways, Serena and I were going to do a very informal Snowman modeling tutorial. I thought our class went really well. A bunch of high school kids and also the general public were coming in and out and there was a point where there weren’t enough computer and people were standing around listening to us. We mostly worked with people on a one on one basis and let them play around and familiarize themselves with Maya. This one little boy who had never used Maya before really impressed me and ended up modeling a spaceship. INSANE. After this experience, I realized that I really enjoy teaching and helping others. I’ve thought about becoming a teacher when I was younger but never really tackled the idea. I’ve always been a little apprehensive about public speaking, but I think when you are really passionate about what you are talking about the butterflies go away. My program head told me that I was a supposedly a star and he got really good feedback from the class. But I wasn’t sure if he meant I was a star because there were a lot people in our room or because I was doing a good job. I’m just going believe it was a little bit of both hehe. I enjoyed the experience either way.
So once the open house was over, it was time to get cracking on our final texturing project due on Saturday. Everyone had to model and texture a junkyard. A bunch of us ended up staying overnight to finish the project. I got a lot of work done, and we were able to fit in some hackysack time as well. You know when you are so tired that every little thing begins to seem funny to you, well I had that the night and day after. I couldn’t stop laughing at every little thing and when I laugh, my eyes water and by the time the night was over my make up was totally gone. My favourite quote of the night was:
Me: “I am just going to duplicate everything in my junkyard.”
Melissa (looking at my screen): “Dupy?”
haha omg that was hilarious. It seems as though she was too tired to use 3 syllable words now. Now, it’s me and Kevin’s new favourite word to use. We ended up fitting in a 2hr nap, except the Amp energy drink hindered me from sleeping so I just rested my eyes for that amount of time. It was like a little slumber party, some of us brough blankets and pillows and pushed some computer chairs together to make our sleeping quarters.
Our texturing project ended up being due at the end of class at 4pm but I had already finished 1hr before class and we just ended up watching cartoons in class until I asked the teacher if I could leave because I’d been awake for 30hours. He was absolutely fine with it and I drove home in a daze and went to bed. 17hours I wake up just in time to go to work and now I’m done work and writing about how this wild experience began. Can’t wait till Demo Reel time……
Here are snapshots of my junkyard project which caused me so much grief:
Another Long Day April 4, 2008
So its 3:00 am and I’m at school, half asleep. I have to drive a friend to the airport at 4:00am. She lives near the school so I thought instead of sleeping at home and then fighting to wake up and get out of bed, I’d stay at school and get some work done. As I said in my previous posts, I have been dedicating a majority of my time to school. I never really felt this motivated and this is the first time ever where I enjoy homework and school in general. I am also glad to know I am motivating others (yay Melissa! woohoo school!) as well.
I had an early 9:00am 3D animation class today, where we learned shape animation in XSI. It was pretty neat playing around with different facial expressions and morphing one shape into another. We have also been animation a marine character in a battleground, where we have to have in peeking behind a wall then running down the street to take cover at a nearby building. It sounds simple enough, but it’s taking me forever.
Our class ends at noon and then we have a 7 hour break till our next class. It sounds pretty brutal, but it’s the perfect time for us to work on projects and everyone was working on the project due at 7pm. Honestly, those 7 hours feel like 3 hours when you are working away. We had to finish a model of a human head. Unfortunately, I was being an idiot and didn’t save my scene after half an hour of modeling hair and the computer just so happens to crash. Poof. Hair gone. So I had to do a rush job on the hair, but this is how it turned out.
There aren’t any textures on there yet, except for the eyeballs. I will put some eyebrows on there soon so it’ll look less freaky. The hair is suppose to be full of curls and I thought I did a pretty good job before, until the computer crashed. Anyways, stay tuned for more work!
No Sleep Till Brooklyn March 28, 2008
Don’t ask me about the heading of this blog. I know it’s really random. It’s 5:30am and I just got back from working on some projects at school. I’m tired and I haven’t been getting any sleep this week and when I think of NO SLEEP…..I think of the line “till Brooklyn” right after it because of the Beastie Boys Song. I was listening to quite a bit of old school Beastie Boys today too. Nevermind that, my eyes are barely open and yet I find myself having an urge to blog. Strange.
My attitude has completely changed from the start of this Animation program to now. At the beginning, I was overwhelmed with all the information we were suppose to absorb and I felt intimidated and unmotivated. Now I’m almost the exact opposite. I am enjoying what I’m learning and feel excited at the same time. Earlier in the semester all I wanted to do is sleep and not have to worry about projects. Now, I’m hardly getting any sleep because I’m working on my projects. I guess its a good thing. I’m getting excited about my demo reel idea as well. I haven’t planned everything out exactly, but I was able to roughly sketch something out today. I think I am going to model a character like this:
One head is suppose to look innocent and the other one is the evil twin. I’m planning on having the camera start from one side of the twin and have it pan up, so you slowly see the sexy body of this woman. Then the camera will pan to the right or zoom out to reveal the other twin and then the entire body. It’s going to be creepy sexy cool! hopefully!
rockin’ it out..contd… March 25, 2008
So I was introduced to Rock Band on Saturday night, chipped in with my boyfriend, his cousin and his girlfriend to buy the game the next day, and just finished my 3rd straight night playing it. I haven’t touched my homework since I first played the game. This does not bode well for me and my school work. I was pretty productive before the weekend though. Finished by cover letter and research paper for Career Prep class and now I just need to get my storyboard done for Project Portfolio.
I never really played a lot of video games. The last system I owned was a Super Nintendo and it’s still sitting somewhere in my room. Super Mario World and Zombie Ate My Neighbors were my favourite games at the time. However, when I do get into a game, I can get completely engulfed and obsessed with the game. I have been told I have a obsessive personality. If I like something I can’t get enough of it. For instance, if I like a song I’ll play it everyday, every hour until I get sick of it. If I like a certain food, I’ll eat it everyday till I’m sick of it. Except for french fries, I can have french fries everday for the rest of my life and not get sick of it. I will most likely GET sick though. Anyways, I did play the odd computer game here and there. I was obsessed with Counterstrike and would play it any free moment I had. When the newer version came out, I prohibited myself from downloading the game because I new I would not be getting any kind of work done. That was 6 years ago and from then on, I have been pretty good. But now that I’ve played Rock Band, the obssessive part of my personality has kicked in. My voice is sore from singing. I was at work all day singing to myself as well and the only thing I was thinking about was “I can’t wait untill I’m off work to go play Rock Band”. So sad. Hopefully I can play enough of it this week so I can get Rock Band out of my system. There was a time when I was obsessed with bingo. I was at Planet Bingo everyday for one week, then I got sick of it. I did manage to buy a Nintendo DS and downloaded a few games. That took up a lot of time one summer and I haven’t put any new games on there yet because I know it’ll be trouble. Well, I finished blogging for this week so I’ve been a little productive. But now I am all rocked out and headed to bed.
Rock Band…um….ROCKS! March 24, 2008
So it is the start of yet, another busy week. But before this presumably chaotic week starts, I needed to relax and I did so by playing ROCK BAND! This video game has been all the rage since it came out last winter and I’ve always wanted to play it. When I was in Nanjing two summers ago, I discovered this interactive drum game at the arcades and was literally obsessed with it. I am obsessed with any interactive rhythm video game. Rock Band comes with a drum set, guitar, bass guitar and a microphone. It is the epitome of FUN rolled into one game. It just so happened that a friend of a friend bought the game and invited some people over to play. I was mainly on mic the whole night because I was the only one whonknew the lyrics to some of the rocks songs. The best had to be my rendition of the Beastie Boy’s “Sabotage”. My voice never sounded so high and whiny before. I think I strained by voice because of that song, but it brought on a few laughs. All day at work today, I caught myself singing all the songs me and “my band” performed. I just want to go out and buy the game right now. The opening screen title was pretty amazing as well. If only I can make a demo reel as eye catching and creative as this one. Check it out.
I would love to work for a gaming company where I can play the game and tell people even something like “I modeled that bush over there.”
