Going Ons

Hello,

So lots of things have gone on since my last post. Here's my updated and probably the final version, for now, for my pitch in 3d animation.




We then moved on to incorporating sound in our animation. The next main project we're doing is animating a dance to sound. We did an exercise first where we try to match shapes to the beat of the song we're using. I chose a Korean pop song because I thought it would be fun to animate a dance to. Here's that.




In Sketchbook Ideation, we started doing speed forms. I was struggling a lot with these. They're pretty much drawing forms that usually look like vehicles in perspective out of your head. You would design one side, and then transfer it to the other side of the center line so that it is symmetrical. I'm not very good at construction, so it was very difficult for me. Once again though, I haven't had time to scan these. The class did go on a trip to the Lyon museum, which was really cool. The museum had airplanes and cars from WII that were still functional. I was able to scan those sketches so I'll post theme here. :)



For the last two weeks in digital figure drawing, I felt as if I'm not as strong as I could be. At least I'm getting drawings out, so the good ones can come in later. :)


I'll post those anyway. It's nice to be able to track your growth.

This set is the ones I did the previous week.








And here's the stuff I did this week.










Modern and Contemporary is pretty much the same.

With Environment, I'm still struggling in the class too, but Jason knows so much and it's great learning from him. His twin came in the previous week, which was pretty cool. I was talking to Evan, the twin, for a while, and he just started sounding like Jason, haha. What's cool was that Evan was studying to become an anesthetist nurse, which is one of the career paths Casey, my boyfriend, was considering, so they were able to exchange a few emails to talk about it.

So here's my stuff for that class. I did some changes to the boat scene based on Jason's critique. Here's that.



He gave me a few pointers that I could work on last Saturday, so I'll be working on those to turn in tomorrow.

Then I drew a sewer scene. I thought it'd be kind of cool if the family had to run away from the gangs and travel through the sewers. There, they see for the first time a huge overgrown alien plant. Jason gave me a critique in class, which I made changes accordingly.



We're suppose to go to a panel of Tron concept artist tomorrow if everyone in the class can get in. So hopefully we do. I finally got to see the movie last week. The story was bland, but oh my goodness was it some nice eye candy. Lots of ohh's and ahh's at the design they did for the movie. Hopefully we can go.

I've also been working on writing my cover letter and resume so I can apply to internships for the summer. They're going well so far. Hopefully I'll be able to get one. :) Next step is getting my portfolio ready for the art internships and getting a letter of recommendation. Wish me luck.

So that's it for now. Bye. :)

Birthday and Stuff

Thank you everyone for the warm birthday wishes today. They certainly put a smile on my face. :)

So here's an update!

This semester, I'm taking Computer Animation 2, Concept Sketchbook Ideation, Figure Drawing for Animators 3, Modern and Contemp, and Environment Design for Game Art. I"m taking a few game art classes, to help with my visual development skills.

In Computer Animation we started off with posing to help us get back into the grove.

Here are the three poses I did.




We then animated a baseball pitch based off the one found in the Preston Blair book. Mine still need a few work tightening up the detail in the animation. But overall, it's not too shabby. Normally the class would use a Norman rig, but I absolutely dread and dislike that rig, so I found another one. It's called Eleven, and it was made by the Eleven Second club. Here's a link to it in case you want to use it. http://elevenrig.blogspot.com/

So here's my animation. I'm probably going to try and nail it down over the weekend if I have some time.



For Concept Sketchbook Ideation, Kyle, our teacher, completely changed the class since he got pissed off at the previous semester. The class really concentrates on how to draw, getting the correct perspective, construction, etc. Which is really great, because it's one of my weak points. And so, I'm having a little trouble in the class because of that weakness, but at least that means I will learn a lot too. I haven't scanned that work in yet, so I don't have any examples to show as of now, but I post them later when I can.

In Figure Drawing for Animators, we do the drawings digitally now. It's new to me, so it's kinda fun to try that out. I'm pretty pleased in the direction they're going. However, there's still a LOT of room to improve. Here's some of the ones I did on the first and fourth week of class. On the second and third week of class, we did some paper cut outs and white on black paper. I'll upload those once I take pictures of them.









These range anywhere from 3 minutes to 20 minutes.

My Friday class I'm not very fond of. The teacher is very nice, but I'm not really into the subject. It really peeved me when one of my classmates said Capitalism is evil. He should try living in a communist society and see how that's like.

Environment is another difficult class for me. A lot of my classmates are very skilled, so it's a bit intimidating. It's a fun class none the less. This semester, the class is run more like a studio. The project we're doing is a post apocalyptic world due to alien plants.

Before we decided on the cause being alien plants. I thought of the idea of a flood. Kind of similar to Atlantis.

Here are my thumbnails for that.


After we decided on the content, I tried doig a few thumbnails with the different environments we discussed in class. Jason, my teacher for this class, gave me a lot of good feedback, so hopefully I can incorporate those in my future thumbnails.




And then for this week's homework, I tried doing some ideation for some of the alien plants. I also started trying to take one of the thumbnails to more of a completion. I'm still working on that though. I'll still post the graphic sketch I have for that so far.

So here are those.




That's it for now. :) I'll be posting more as I do them. Toodles.

Winter Break 2010

So over winter break, I tried to practice some digital painting.

So here's the stuff from that!

LCAD Fall 2010

Kay! So now onto what I did in the Fall Semester of 2010. This semester was pretty frustrating and slightly depressing. I took two animation classes at the same time, and that is not a good idea. Animation takes a lot of time to work on, and having two classes just didn't give one time to work it so that the animations are perfect. It made me realized that I don't enjoy animation as much as I thought. However, it did make me want to try visual development, so that's a good thing and I'm excited for it.

What was cool this semester was that I was able to attend the Creative Talent Network Expo. It's pretty much an expo with the top animators and people in the animation industry. I was able to make a business card and a portfolio to show the studios.

Here's what my business card looks like. It was my first ever business card, and I'm pretty happy with it.




I was able to show many big time studios my work as well as many other admirable artists. They said I was heading in the right path, but like what my other teachers said, I need to work more on the construction, and understand the body mechanics and how it works. But hey, at least I'm heading in the right path, and now I know what I need to work on.


So now onto the semester classes,

First off, on Tuesday, I had Animation Two where we worked on dialogue and our film that we started in Animation One. What was interesting was the class only had three people in it, so it was great for student and teacher time. There was even this one instant where both my other classmates were gone, so it was just me. But as I said before, having two animation classes was very difficult, and unfortunately I didn't get to fully finish my animated film. But what I do have of it, I think I improved from what it was originally, which is always a good thing.

So here's the first project we did, which was the dialogue scene. I was really into The Office then, so I decided to choose a line said by Dwight.

Idiots from Alex Vo on Vimeo.

And here's our final animation.

Aqua Stone ~ Some Animation from Alex Vo on Vimeo.

For my next class I had Story boarding. It was right after Animation, so I was a bit tired, but it was a really fun class. We were divided into groups and had to come up with a story to create an animatic for. I had an awesome group, and they chose my story to work on, so it was fun. I did a couple of character designs for the project. Which you could see here!





And here's the animatic for it. We decided on naming it Bouy Call. I drew the scenes with the starfish and puffer fish as well as when the octopus is fainting. I also did 1/3rd of the editing. Enjoy!

Bouy Call from Alex Vo on Vimeo.

We also did a personal project that we had to pitch to the class. There's a lot of images for that project though, so I'm not going to post that here unfortunately.

I then had Wednesday and Thursday off which was a nice break to catch up on homework.

Then Friday morning I had Western Art 2, which is a class that covers from Medieval Art all the way to Van Gogh. It was an interesting class, and it was nice seeing all the different artwork, but I HATED the quizzes and tests. We had to memorize all the artists, names of the paintings, and dates, for everything we covered. Even though our final wasn't cumulative, we still had at least 54 sets to memorize on top of all the vocabulary and content we needed to know. It was just too much. I did pretty well in the class, but yeah. I honestly don't remember most of the artists anymore, so I wish that memorization time could have been used for something else.

After that class, I had Figure Drawing for Animators Two.We made an end of the semester portfolio similar to what we did in Figure Drawing for Animators One so it's nice to compare the two and see where I improved in.

So here's the portfolio:






















Cool. And then on Saturday, I had my other animation class, Computer Animation One. This class was also a bit frustrating, because I felt like it was a bit rushed and there was too many projects. I still did well in the class, but I think I could have done better if I was given more time. So here are our projects we did for the class!











And that's what I did for the Fall 2010 Semester! Onward to Spring 2011. Like I said previously, I'll try to update more often as oppose to by semester. This way there would be more frequent posts, and it wouldn't pile up at the end. :)