My First Sound Mix on GarageBand

 This my first time mixing song in GarageBand. Fun~
and another one

Graduate Portfolio Day

I always want to do paintings and illustrations in the film industry but I never thought of myself becoming an animator or a filmmaker. I remember three years ago, I attended National Portfolio day at Emily Carr University and the two schools I spoke to, one of it is CalArts. When I applied for college I decided not to apply for CalArts because I wanted to do fine art. I wanted to be an conceptual artist. I wanted to be a painter. I chose SAIC because they have great fine art department.

I got in, and after a year of being hammered with all the conceptual ideas from the school, I realized...I hate conceptual art. It's fun to think conceptually once in a while but not so fun to do it for the rest of my life. (Though, I still love painting)

Today I spoke to CalArts again for their Graduate Experimental Animation Program. (This is coming back to full circle!!) They told me I need more experimental things. I have mostly traditional paintings and traditional 2D animations so it is an expected suggestion.
I always feel like I have to choose between painting and animation.It's like asking people if you want water or food. I need them both.

I'm going to take experimental animation in my seiner year and really pump my portfolio up.

btw. Tiffany is finally back to blogging after 3 months break! 

Zoetrope: Where did go?

Remember the Zoetrope I mention about this summer

October 27, 2012 Our Summer Zoetrope Team went Redmoon Theater's Boneshaker Halloween Party and found out that our hard works was destroyed....

Thanks to Kye Kim, she has a recording of the zoetrope from summer.

Though it is sad but we had a great time during this summer internship. 

Here's more photos of our Zoetrop and the Halloween Party

THe BoX

Those sketches will possibly become the preproduction materials for my graduation thesis film. I temporary named the film The Box. 

ignore left side of the page

The idea comes from my daily observation of people on the bus and train. Every morning when I chased up my bus, I see half of the people looking down at their phone, iPad, Kindle, Galaxy or Nook and they never look up. The don't turn their head, they don't look out the window, they don'e talk to the people around. I find that odd. What it is like 20 years ago when there is no mobile device? Are they closer to each other?

Cat Soup

I need to catch up my updates! Has been busy last week!
Cat Soup (ねこぢる草) is a very bizarre and surreal animation made by Tatsuo Sato and I love it because it is so WEIRD.

It's around half hour long and people have posted the full film on Vimeo.

BTW Wreck-It Ralph is great. It is better than I expected

Nocturna

In the beginning of the year my professor showed 2 minutes of a film called Nocturna in class. I fell in love with it immediately after seeing it and decided to get my own copy. Unfortunately, there are no distributors for this great animation in North America. So I have to search else where than just Amazon.com.

The story is about this little boy on the cover, Tim, who is very afraid of the dark.  One night when he is going to sleep he discovers that his star has disappeared from the sky. The story isn't as excited as I had expected but the world they create is really amazing. The lights in the film is absolutely beautiful. My favorite characters in the movie are those street light (on the cover - standing on top of Cat Sheperd head)

The original soundtrack is in Spanish but I can only find the English version
I also love the music in the film. They are composed by Nicolas Errèra. I need to make more musician friends!

Chicago International Film Festival: 38-39˚c

Last Friday I went to see the 48th Chicago International Film Festival, Screening animation shorts - Blurring the Lines. I like most of them but I'm going to talk about one particular one called 38-39˚c made by Kangmin Kim. I was doing some research on the making of this film and found his other projects. I watched a couple of his timelapes videos (how the film was made) and I'm thinking...I kind of want to go to CalArts to learn what they have there in the experimental animation department. I'm seriously thinking about taking my MFA there.

The film is on his Vimeo now

Side notes: It was raining on Friday night and during the middle of the screening, the theater ceiling started to pour water in above the back row seats. It happen during the end of Oh Willy (another good shorts). The water made funny sounds.  At first I thought the sound was part of the film, but it was coming from behind. So I thought, "Oh, they got really nice stereo," then I saw people getting out of the back row seats and I figured.

Paper CutOut Animation: The Door

This a beautiful paper cut out animation made by a group of students from National Taiwan University of Arts. Everything is cut out, including the figure silhouette. There's is a video of their Making of The Door, which looks amazing and laboring.
I'm working toward a final project for my Sound to Image class and this short is going to be my reference point. I do mostly hand drawn character animation so it will be fun for me to try out something different, like stop motion paper animation with a non-narrative approach. Ohh I'm excited for my final project! First I need to make a storyboard and then I need to record the audio then I have to exacto knife the paper structures and finally start spending hours and hours animating the movements.

Dialog SB

This is a thumbnail of my redo for last week's post. I said that it's really boring to do talking heads style SB so this time I try to use background elements and characters' movements to make te shot more interesting. I was watching Death Becomes Her before I draw this and I was amazed by the camera placements and movements in the move.

The first 5 panels was a single panning shot.

Dialog Storyboard

I did a storyboard last week and I realized it's a terrible storyboard. The worst thing you can do as a storyboard artist is to draw talking heads and that's basically what I did. I'm going redraw the whole dialog scene. I made the mistake but I'm learning.

Bad storyboard example

Fable Storyboard: The Wolf and the Crane

Another storyboard assignment base on fables and this on is The Wolf and the Crane.
update: thumbnails of the Storyboard

The Box

A class assignment I did

a.  A figure enters a room

b.  The figure approaches a box

c.  The figure opens the box

d.  The figure reacts to what is inside