Here are my drawings. I'm sorry the page layout is lazy and boring, but I swear to you that one of these days it will be littered with designy stuff and really French looking secondary colors.
In the meantime, feast your eyes on my magnificence. I may update this with more life drawing later...in fact I probably should, as I have much better stuff.
Took a class called the Architect's Sketchbook last semester. Found it singularly difficult learning to draw all the thing I specialize in failing to draw, but ultimately my work turned out alright toward the end. Planning's not a strong suite of mind (as you might guess from my ultra-scratchy drawing style) but it was a learning experience being forced to worry about things like datums and perspective. A harrowing one even (how I envy the things architecture students can pull off) but a fruitful one.
Now, if only I can get proportions right.....consarnit!
Architecture Building
The garden near the Natural History Museum
Architecture Building Library
Columns at Mudd Hall
SCA courtyard
In other news, I'm also attempting to break out of my Luddite ways and get better at Photoshop. Here's a first attempt. Unfortunately, while I love the look of this thing in PSD form, the JPEG form reveals my own silly attempts at subtlety fall apart when the whole thing's darkened. Alas, I'm unable to share that version online. Still, I hope what gets across is some feeling of what my year's been like (ie, not pretty).
Saturday, October 27, 2012
The Kickstarter with Yuasa's Kickheart has proven a marvelous success, and I couldn't be happier. Yuasa'a a fantastic mind in animation today, but his work seldom makes bank, so to see that fans are enthusiastic enough to fund his work themselves does me ol' heart good. There's still three days to go, so keep putting in cash so we can see those stretch goals.
I'm hoping to write up something about Yuasa at some point, since his career is long and fascinating. In the meantime, however, here's some wonderfully animated graphic nudity:
In case you can't read Klingon, the big news is that Watanabe, he the man who waited years in between Samurai Champloo and Kids on the Slope, is putting together two new projects: a comedy at Studio Bones about space travel, and a more ambiguous darker project at MAPPA, the studio behind Kids on the Slope. Here's hoping the Bones one is visually inventive and full of cartoony goodness. I've always been a fan of Watanabe's deadpan, un-anime sense of humor, so we'll probably see plenty of that.
Liborek3 on twitter has alerted me to Ryuotaro Makihara directing Robotics:Notes Ep 3, something I'm very excited about. I haven't yet watched the new show based on a Visual Novel from the Steins:Gate creators (I can only hope it possesses that show's humor and atmosphere) but anything by Makihara shoots to the top of my must-watch list. Makihara was one of the top directors on the show Kaiba, and then blew everyone's mind by directing the one great episode of Guilty Crown, a disappointing though well animated mediocrity otherwise. The man uses his sense of layout and pacing like Pollack uses a paint bucket, taking potential nothing and twisting it into something emotive and riveting. Hopefully Robots:Notes is better than that, but even if it isn't I'll be watching episode 3.
So, it's been forever since anything of worth was posted up here. Summer was absolute brutality on a personal level, and this semester is well and kicking me in the head for my arrogant presumptions that I would have free time to work on things like a blog. But fret not, there lurks light at the end of the tunnel. Many high quality drawings sit on my person just waiting to be unleashed on the internet, so they may go viral like Gangnam Style. Can you even wait?
But really, I'm hoping to have some time to pull that off fairly soon. In the meantime, I want to direct your attention to two recent kickstarters that just delight me with their possibilities.
The first comes from Production I.G. and Masaaki "Mind Game, Cat Soup, Kaiba, Kemonozume" Yuasa, likely the greatest anime director to arise since Satoshi Kon, or maybe even Hayao Miyazaki. His films don't exist to cater to the unfortunate moe-obsessed fanbase of recent years, but only to appease himself and anyone who loves animation as an artform. His work's distinct, spontaneous, and kinetic, yet shockingly humane and nuanced in its storytelling. It's been two years since his last show, Yojohan Shinwa Taikei, and now he's looking to put together a short film with a new studio for him, Production I.G.
The initial goal of 150,000 seems on track to be met, but a new goal has been set for 400,000, which would allow for a film forty minutes in length. Ten minutes would be bliss enough, but forty would be an absolute experience to end them all. Imagine another Yuasa featurette like Cat Soup, but with so much more money behind it! If you have thousands of dollars to spare, or know someone with thousands to spare, by all means put your support behind this project!
Oh, and if they reach a million, they'll make it a feature film. Anyone have a million to spare?
Meanwhile, you may remember the trailer for Blur Studios and David Fincher's adaptation of The Goon from a while back, if not, here's a refresher:
Eric Powell supplies the kind of manly black humor and violence that tickles me the right way, and with its visual gusto the opportunity was ripe for an animated film version. Alas, development hell ensnared the promising enterprise....but no more!
Fincher and company have gone right to the people for funding, and the results seem primed to occur. I'm certainly excited to see this thing on the big screen...how about you?
In other news, I'm trying to get invested in anime this season, but nothing doing with a few exceptions. From the New World has problems, but the world is interesting enough and the imagery mostly strong enough to make it worth watching so far. Still, I wish the main character designs matched the rest of the show in terms of visuals. The intro segment for episode 3 was particularly interesting visually, and Shingo Yamashita's gif-style animation is a frequent treat. I also watched A1's Magi, and I think that suffered from similar problems to a much greater extent; very good animation and an unconventional world to explore, but main characters that don't look as interesting as the side characters and who seem calculated to fulfill the studio's moe quotient for the season. A1, Kyoto, Shaft...so many studios with resources who can't quite break from the formulas.
I enjoyed the zany goofiness of the first episode of Zetsuen no Tempest, but then the second episode had to ruin it by updating us on the plot. Less talking, more fighting, Bones!
America's destroying Japan this last year, with Korra, Tron Uprising, Motor City, Gravity Falls, and others really bringing style back to American animation. But, hopefully, we'll see them come around once new studios MAPPA and Trigger bring out the big guns. Maybe they need more KickStarters over there.
Saturday, April 28, 2012
My apologies for not updating in......quite a while. I'll be uploading lots of goodies from the past few months, however, starting with some layouts I drew in Will Weston's class, and will have plenty of new things too.
I'll still do one or two more versions where I clean up some tiny little bugs and futz with sound effects (might even add a little more animation) but you're getting the general shape of it right here.
For the last fleeting fistful of weeks, burdened by college work of all varieties and generally high difficulty, your gentle narrator has been slaving away at a multimedia extravaganza in the underground film labs at the University of Southern California, combining art both digital and analogue and completely original music into the most daring and revolutionary work of art since Stanley Kubrick's Fear and Desire.
By which I mean it's the work of a talented amateur, but I've learned a considerable amount in putting it together. Maybe I can put together a student film that's worth a damn next time. Okay, so there's some very nice transitions and design work here. Perhaps I can make it translate to my painting this summer.
I am very proud of the layouts I put together for this project, which basically deciphered the look of the whole thing. I'm inexperienced in color, but got good feedback and vibes from how these projects looked in motion. I also got compared to Gustav Klimt. That was flattering for me.
I was concerned this piece wouldn't work out, but whatever the flaws (and there are flaws) they don't matter much in motion. Notice I shift the timing around, from twos at the beginning, to threes when he gets knocked the other way, back to twos then to ones as he gains momentum toward the other direction. I'm a big fan of shaking up timing like that.
Also, an old flipbook piece from a class this semester. I really could have done more with the coat at the beginning, but I dig it.
To tell the truth, I really don't know very much about color. I put this together in photoshop as an excercize, looking at Sergio Leone's work, in an attempt to start myself on the path to understanding the wacky world of translating the colors of reality to the skewed world of cartooning. It's no great shakes, but I am putting together some nice midtones and highlights, particularly on the coat. Maybe this Summer I'll find time to paint for real and get my color chops up to speed.
Conan's design is nice and simple, though one still needs to know a bit about human anatomy to make him work. I don't draw specific established characters all that much, but I figure it would help to learn a bit about individual style if I did it a bit more.
Nothing fancy (I'm lying, there's a lot going on here and it still doesn't look perfect).
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
A Hard Day's Night suffers woefully from being set during the Mop-Top days of The Beatles. Indeed, Richard Lester's New Wave-influenced cinematography and editing would have been much better served by such set pieces as John Lennon tripping out on peyote and Paul McCartney shouting at his bandmates and calling them idiots before storming out of the studio. Ringo would still be pretty much the same.
Actually, this is a mightily impressive piece of work on a cinematographic and editing level, though it took me a second viewing to notice since my first time through was fixated on the gags. Which is just as well, because this is one funny movie beyond its influence on the aesthetics of everything from MTV to independent film to Monty Python's Flying Circus. But although it's humorous and slightly subversive to see George Harrison decry the fakeness of pandering to a manufactured youth in one scene, it's even more subversive to see the way Lester depicts the television crew's own manufacturing of the image The Beatles.
Which isn't to suggest this is an especially profound film. It's a promotional through and through, but it's a likable, tongue-in-cheek, and technically innovative one. Of course, The Beatles got far more experimental in their music as they went along, and I think it makes sense that they'd welcome an experimental film like this as part of their image earlier on. I'm not sure if I like it more than Yellow Submarine, which is on another plane entirely and might as well be a product unto itself, but as one of many Beatles fans I manage to get more enjoyment out of the film than merely watching The Beatles fart about.
Interesting how the usual odd man out actually gets the most attention. Ringo's bigger than Paul as far as these films go. By the way, who the hell was Wilfrid Brambell? He practically almost steals this from The Beatles.
