Shoah Updates

Some scenes I made recently. The walk cycle isn't complete--it will repeat, and the background move behind him. The spider scene will play with the concluding words.

GGJ Creation GAIA GRAVITON with The Artists Formerly Known As The Artsy Hipster Gamers

So Jabril and I collaborated with The Artsy Hipster Gamers (a freshman interactive group) on a Global Game Jam Project. The Global Game Jam requires teams or individuals to create a game within 48 hours. This is what we came out with. In the game you play as this elephant-tree-force-of-nature-monster, who tramples the bleak concrete buildings to reveal beautiful green grass. However, as the monster you must avoid trampling the same ground twice. If you do, the grass becomes infertile dust, and you decrease your score. Even while worrying about not retracing your steps, you as the monster must avoid small red soldiers wielding swords. You must also terminate the blue hammer men who will attempt to rebuild the suburban jungle. To destroy both these hammer men and the red warriors, you can place your cursor over them and then click to kill. Green vines will rip from the ground and drag these poor souls through cracks and into the Earth.

The link to download and play our game is here: http://www.mediafire.com/?hdedndbb2mkk5g6
Go here to see our game on the official Global Game Jam page, and please rate us favorably!
http://globalgamejam.org/2012/gaia-graviton

Had a lot of fun working with these guys! I'm really proud of our product, and can't wait to see what I can animate for them next time!

Also, some screen caps of the game for the bandwidth-challenged. Click for best view:

USC Science Film Freshman Victory

Andy Su (Scientific Consultant), Maria Raykova (Director), Mara Guevarra, Kayla Carlisle, Jabril Mack

So the freshmen animators have made another conquest! We've been awarded second place, and the prize of $1,500, for our 10 minute cartoon about the atomical composition of life, the universe, and everything in it, which we entered in the school-wide Science Film Contest. (We were the only freshman team.) The competition was meant to unite those of us at USC studying media with the members of USC's science and math departments, in the hopes of encouraging aspiring filmmakers to help these guys educate the masses. Andy (a fellow freshman studying aeronautical engineering) was our scientific consultant, and we were directed by the talented and determined Maria Raykova.

Some of us came over-dressed.

Shoah Foundation Film Progress

I'm working on an entry into USC's Shoah Foundation student film competition. The Shoah Foundation was founded by Steven Spielberg after making Schindler's List. During the filming of the movie, Spielberg was approached by many Holocaust survivors who needed to share their stories. He realized that if these stories were not recorded soon, they would be lost forever. The Shoah Foundation is based on the USC campus.

I'm collaborating with my friend Will Merrick on an entry for the annual film competition. I'll be animating, and he'll be editing. Right now all we have is big plans and the beginning art pieces I'll turn into the final animated scenes. The film will be a combination of animated sequences illustrating the stories of the Holocaust survivors, and clips of these survivors telling their stories.

Here is what we have so far:

A demo of an interview segment concerning the transportation of the Jewish people from the ghetto to Auschwitz.

I'm thinking on reusing this assignment from last semester to conclude.

 A segment will be based off this photograph relating to one of the survivor's stories.

Only the eyes will move for this scene, and there will be shown the air coming from the nostrils.

So that's all for now! I'll update more as I get farther along. I'm hoping to use the song "Strangest Things" from Radical Face's album Ghost, which, for the record, is one of the most unique and imaginative albums of all time. Of course I need to write Ben Cooper first, and ask for his permission. It would be unbelievable if he said yes!

My Intro to Animation Final

Our final project assignment for our first semester frosh animation class was to create 3 books that used 2 or 3 of our assigned objects differently, giving them different contexts or meanings. Can you guess what my assigned two reoccurring objects were? Some of my classmates couldn't. (Answer at end of post.)

A walk cycle experiment made difficult because I noticed too late the model I used had scoliosis.

What's happening here, because I know it goes pretty fast: A girl in rags gets a fairy godmother, she gets a dress, the fairy talks to her about the midnight clause, then with a lecherous smile and wink makes a line of princes she can choose from poof into appearance, the girl looks turned on, she inspects the line, she chooses the ugliest one possible and attacks his face with her mouth, which he somehow doesn't want.

My animations seem to flip back and forth bipolarly from Disney-inspired to nightmare scrawl.


(My reoccurring objects are hearts and dresses!)

Night Hawk Concept Art

I'm working on a hand-drawn, short animated film with some of the other freshman animators. It's a black-and-white film noir with some cartoon humor, but lots of gore, and the characters are all animals. My characters are the rich widow (the pigeon), the manic bartender (the bunny), and the cat burglar/lackey/kidnapper (the worm). Here are my model sheets:

Figure Drawing with Tom Mahoney & Bonus Museum Sketches

So Tom Mahoney, of Disney Concept Art and CalArts fame, taught some weekend figure drawing classes I attended a month or so ago. Mahoney does not like students to focus on realism when drawing, and encourages us to use markers or ink and contour techniques. In this way he hopes to cause students to discover new ways and styles of interpreting the human form--especially as monsters. All of these poses were around 7 minutes.

 

BONUS MUSEUM SKETCHES?!

Week 12: Portrait Reflecting on Personal Time Perception

This is a self-portrait type animation, and is rather on the sloppy side. Mostly I just wanted to relax and see where the style I was experimenting with would take me so as to develop it further.

 

This animation was based upon the portrait I doodled of myself, as seen below:

Week 11: Freakish Scale Challenge

So we experimented with scale.

Week 10: A Very Spontaneous Gorilla

So we were supposed to be spontaneous this week--that was the prompt for our flipbook. So we went to a museum and were supposed to find our favorite room and animate something there. As I admitted to my animation professor in class, a walk cycle isn't exactly spontaneous. But I did make the spontaneous decision to teach myself walk cycles this week, and I did decide to make a walk cycle from scratch--based on a youtube video of a gorilla--come hell or high water. There's a lot of mistakes with this cycle--ones I don't feel like pointing out--but considering this is  my first effort with walk cycles, I feel pretty good about what I did this week.

This week's flipbook is dedicated to my dad, because I was listening to a bunch of 1970s protest/political activist songs this week, most of which my dad showed me at some point, and one that stood out was "The Pretender." The lyrics I used in this video are my favorite, and I thought they would be pretty funny/ironic when applied to a gorilla walk cycle.

USC Alphie Results: Animators Win Grand Prix

Yes, the USC animators, collaborating on just one entry (Aha Moments under the direction of Jabril Mack), conquered the USC Freshman Short Film Competition, beating the dozens of other live action entries submitted by the rest of the cinema school. That said, all the other entries were amazing--most incredibly funny, and some surprisingly thoughtful and emotional. It was a great competition.

Week 9 Color Exploration to "My Body is a Cage"

(Please listen with audio, as the music enhances the meaning of the film.)

So the theme this week was color, and the color I was assigned was yellow. While people typically associate yellow with its positive connotations--such as sunshine, energy, happiness, youth, and enlightenment--there is actually a darker side to the meaning behind the color. Yellow can also represent loudness, decay, cowardice, age, waste, and sickness. I was very interested in the fact that yellow means both youth and old age/decay/sickness. I also wanted to incorporate the loudness of yellow, making it feel like my character was screaming or moaning. Enlightenment and cowardice were also contrasts I wanted to work with. I thought following the life span of someone who could not come to terms with their aging process, body, or mortality--and who faced both their birth and death with gracelessness and fear--would be an effective means of exploring each of yellow's connotations through my character's facial evolution and expressions.

Miscellaneous symbolism: Upon their death my character reluctantly receives enlightenment as signified by the growth of long hair that halos their face. When you see the character at 30 with a mohawk, the orange tears he cries are actually the male sign (O-->). This represents his inability to accept his adult form or the gender roles society imposes upon him. The opening and closing doors illustrate the rapid speed at which life passes him by. Doors of opportunity open for him, but he is too caught up in his imminent death to notice. The doors then close for him forever.

This is probably my favorite animation so far. In this short film I am telling a story that is actually important to me, in a style that is very much my own. I hope I can continue to tap into the source I used for this in the future. I think it actually helped that I did not use any pencil work in this animation, so my lines were bolder and more free. I enjoyed this loose, flexible style.

Week 8 Rectangular Color Scheme to "Tangled Up in Blue"

This week's challenge is dedicated, of course, to my twin sister. This may not be her favorite song anymore, but I thought she'd enjoy an animation about Dylan. I like the characters in this piece, but next week I want a real story and not just reactions, and I want to animate a more realistic character--maybe even use sources. I keep jumping to cartoons without exploring the 3D realm.

I actually stayed up so late making this, that I was still shooting it at 9 in the morning though I started work at 5 the night before. I was so exhausted that while the file was converting to Quicktime around 12, that I just laid down on the classroom floor and slept. Forget that I was using the room containing the graduate students' cubicles and that many of those cubicles were occupied at the time. I was so tired that sleeping on the floor in front of strangers without warning seemed perfectly normal. I was only hours later when the adrenalin hit to keep me up the rest of the day that I started facepalming myself.

Reference

Aha Moments! A Frosh Animation Collaboration, Amalgamation, Alphie Application

A short film for the Alphies--a USC Freshman film competition. Jabril decided the USC animators were going to enter this generally production-dominated competition, and directed this film created with the aid of most of the freshman animation class. We made the film in 2 weeks, and learned a lot about the complex collaborative process needed to make an animated movie in a timely manner. It was also incredibly fun.

That said, this took two intense weeks to create. TWO WEEKS, production students. Not one weekend. Especially not the ONE WEEKEND RIGHT BEFORE the SUBMISSION DEADLINE.