Frame by Frame

It is the eve of my Animation Mentor beginning, and I did a few more sketches today. I realized I hadn't practiced in a while and decided that I should get some of that in today. Seeing as I have another life drawing class tomorrow, as well as starting out in AM, it was as good a time as any to draw. I suppose I get some inspiration from my cousin's kids. I drew a couple portraits (kinda crappy ones) back a while ago, probably 3 years, maybe 4. Either way, 1 of the 3 kids was not born yet, and she happens to be the subject of most of my drawings today. I'm not nearly fast enough yet to do some real world action sketches, so these are just some random pictures we took last week at a birthday party. You might notice that there are no faces on them. I need to learn how to do faces in this style before I try or else they'll just look stupid. For some reason I can only do faces when I do them all realistic and rendered. I can't sketch a face for crap. Weird huh?

Just picked up the Blu-ray of the entire collection yesterday. It contains the films "A Grand Day Out", "The Wrong Trousers", "A Close Shave", and "A Matter of Loaf and Death". I've definitely seen the first two, and I think I've seen the third as well. It also contains a whole bunch of "Cracking Contraptions" shorts and behind-the-scenes documentaries. I hadn't seen any of these in a while, and saw that there was a Blu-ray released this week a couple of days ago. I then watched a few of those "Cracking Contraptions" shorts on youtube and was instantly reminded how amazing these guys are. They all excel in story, humor, and animation. The ridiculousness of Wallace and the emotion you get out of Gromit is something to admire. If you haven't seen any of their stuff before I really really recommend watching them. It's something everyone should have in their lives.

So yesterday before that mantis fiasco, I had my first life drawing session up here. I kind of liked this one better. The instructor gave some pretty good instructions. He had us start by drawing the body as just boxes in 2 min gestures. I kind of got the hang of that, but I sent a step back further today and played with stick figures. On some of them I drew the boxes over the basic ovals, and even drew in the body on a couple. For the rest of them I was just trying to convey the poses in as simple a stick form as I could. I think it was pretty successful for a first off.

So I was going to go downstairs to get some milk and something by the door caught my eye. Some tiny movement. I inspected. It was a fucking praying matnis! How the hell did that thing get in my room? How long has it been in here? WTF?!! Took me a good 15 mins of collective bravery to try to catch it. But the thing looked like it knew what I was doing. I saw it anticipating my moves so it could fly around. I didn't even know that dam thing could fly! After hiding on top of my tall bookshelf for a minute or so (sneaky bastard), I starting shifting some stuff around with a rolled up magazine, and I saw him hiding there. He didn't even budge when I was disturbing stuff that was touching him, or even moving him. Then eventually I just smashed the bastard under a picture frame it was hiding under. It didn't kill him though, still kind of trying to move. After another light smash (didn't want to smear the thing on my shelf) it calmed down more, and then I scooped it into a jar

When I first saw a trailer for this movie attached to "Up" I thought it looked pretty entertaining. The trailer for it certainly stood out over anything else I saw a preview for that day. Anyways, I wasn't really planning on seeing the movie in the theater until a week or so ago. I started seeing a few clip of the movie online and I thought the animation looked really well done and entertaining so I said I'd give it a shot. After asking a couple people to no avail, I ended up going with my neighbor after lunch today. We saw the 3D version of the film, and I have to say that I thought the 3D element of it was much better than for "Up" (although with that said, I was pretty far up front for "Up" and a good distance back for this movie. The effect felt the same, but for me at least, it was much sharper and produced less strain on my eyes. Again, that could have just been due to my different seating positions (although with the "Avatar" previ

I've been looking forward to seeing this movie for a while since I first saw the preview. Not only did the trailer look pretty interesting and original, but I loved the look of it. After having seen the movie earlier tonight, I am still very impressed by the production design of the movie. I very much like the sort of futuristic robots as would be imagined from around the WW2 era or so. The animation was pretty top notch as well. I loved the movements they made, and how their eyes were animated. The robots were also very cool and intricately animated. The movie as a whole however I thought was a bit disappointing. It seemed to jump into the story a little too fast, introducing characters and then taking them away too quickly before you get a sense of where the story is even going. It probably took about 1/3 of the film to even see where the whole thing was headed, and even maybe the last 15 minutes to mostly know how it was supposed to go. It might have been me, but I didn't re

My Animation Mentor experience is staring to gear up! I've now created my username/password for the campus, and got to watch a whole bunch of introductory videos. Most of the stuff is pretty easy to figure out on your own, but there are a few helpful tips here and there. I've also set up my profile now too, although we haven't been given access to be able to see other people yet. So I guess this is more just like getting my profile ready for when class is ready. Anyways, I've also added my Animation Mentor Student badge over in the right. Look at it all nice and shiny :) I was going to put a fan one up earlier, but I figured I'd just wait until I was able to get my student badge to put up. Good times.