Found my music to animate to!

Now drawing with no music sucks pretty bad, so I went out and tried to look for some awesome romantic music to animate to so that by some voodoo magic it'll affect my animation. Sure theres lots of Japanese songs on the subject and I was really going to use an album when I stumbled upon one of my favorite 8bit artist. He just released a new album on love and all it's joy and hardships so I added it to my "Ralph's Letter" playlist. I urge you to try the genre out. It's nostalgic and incredibly fresh at the same time.

Nullsleep emerges from the darkness with Unconditional Acceleration – an exploration of romance and tragedy in the 21st century. Five songs, limitless intensity. Ecstatic bursts of cascading waveforms race toward uncertainty. A feeling of ever increasing separation develops. Unattainable distances are approached and sheets of white noise issue forth from the fissures of an obsessively restructured reality. The sound surrenders in memory of another time and place to which we can never return. Download Album

I suggest Fearless Flight, Salvation for a Broken Heart and Galaxy Tonight.



***A little background here, back in the days of Elementary and Middle school and being a HUEG gamer I became a HUEG fan of video game music. Sometimes I would turn on my SNES, plug in MegamanX and just listen to the music of the stage as I would get ready for school. In Elementary with my gameboy and earphones, I'd just chill at the Elite 4 just to peep the music. When High School rolled in I achieved 8bit enlightenment when I found out that people like you and me (well, they were better at music than most of us) began making music not for video games but for general listening...and the rest is as you'd say, history.

Hoooooleeeeee shhhhheeeeeeeitttttt

"For the sake of protecting you, Naruto, the thing about dying...is that I'm not afraid."



It took a while for me to translate that line, but damn it was fucken worth it. Just proves my point that Hinata is vastly superior to Sakura

Love and Trust, the story of trust...love and a lama

So now that we're starting our animation, I figured I'd look back into my own experiences with the subject to superimpose some of it onto my character. Opening old high school notebooks, I was specifically looking for notes/writings I did whenever I sat next the girl I liked back then. Maybe there was some mystical primordial subconscious oozing out onto the page while I tried to control my panic attacks sitting next to her, I dunno.

Horrified by my own handwriting and anime 'phase' from way back then (10th grade) I found a really really really interesting(terribly written and depicted) story about my thoughts on Love and Trust that I KNOW I showed her just to get a reaction. I'll have to ask her what she was thinking about after looking at this.



Amazed at my own literary and illustrative prowess, I was dumbfounded at how much this made sense admist all the nonsense. Well, maybe not the Lama part, no clue where that came from but the whole trust, love and not paying attention to the person you trust could lead to a bad end for the team.


Oh, and I apologize if you couldn't read any of that. I didn't start writing in capital letters until College so until then its all chicken scratch D:

Healty distractions

While staying up all night working on our projects or studying for midterms is fun and all, sometimes little pleasures sneak up on you and drag you off to distraction land. You know, those things you'd rather do than doing the stuff you were suppose to be doing? I admit we're all guilty, some more guilty than others...Jose... but thats what makes us all cool and awesome.

Whenever I'm at that mental exhaustion point, I play a song with just instrumentals and then imagine up a mini-movie in my head that matches the song. Not only that, I imagine out everything in that world works in great detail. It relaxes me and lets my mind stretch.

Good example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9K4RKM_hzzI
Like what they did with Gurren Lagann. Take the soundtrack and re-envisioning the entire world. Like this one where Kamina is the bad guy. My mini-movie of this song revolves around this Samurai and his Ninja sidekick as they fight off this giant 20 story Oni within a city. Good stuff.

Bad example:
Same song, but turning Gurren Lagann into a Yaoi fan-fiction with TOO MANY details and stuff you don't want to think about. You can do it, but keep it hidden away from me D:


Its my way of meditating and coming up with ideas. Try it sometime when you need a break, let that inner child out and play pretend in your head :3

Break time & Test animation

Just scanning in my frames now and figured I needed some downtime from homework. Homework? That reminds me! Here are some projects/assignments that some of my students have done that I absolutely love. I wish I had all the toys they have now back when I was in high school.


Whats your flava? BAGS
Who ate my cookie?
Magic? OMG CLUSTERBOMBS
Fluffy the Bounty Hunter
Yearbook PSA
Mokes and Muppet Talk show
(I was in the room when they filmed this, frowning because they were talking about a sensitive subject and I didn't want them doing a talk show like this, and also trying my hardest to not laugh the entire time)



And my personal favorite, Satisfaction by the Double Deans. Warning, unless you're prone to flash induced seizures or dislike watching a room full of guys strip and dance around with their shirts out, this video isn't for you.

Mind you I had to grade this.



Kick back, relax, enjoy the night.

-Edit-
One part of homework. Tightened up animatic with ultra restricted dynamic camera angles! Rough composition to work with so I'll have to work my characters a LOT in order to keep the them interesting. I love the butterfly as much as I love the recording I got from the two of them, as much as I want to marry the butterfly and recordings, I'm sure that I'll have to cut down the chatter. As it stands, whomever's head the butterfly is flying around, thats who's thoughts we hear. I'll be very delicate with the butterfly, so that it doesn't command attention yet is noticeable.


3rd Animatic
-Sneaky edit-
Added to the beginning. I was falling asleep and this idea struck me right before I entered dreamland. Woke up, scanned stuff in and re-uploaded. Makes the beginning a lot funner to watch.

-Last edit of the night, I swear-

Test Animation (Ralph)


Follow through is wonky at places (sideburns) and missing a few in-betw-ins. Especially between the last two poses.

日本語勉強して参りました。

So one of my New Years resolution, along with reading a shitload of manga, is to be fluent in Japanese by the time me and my friends fly out to Tokyo at the end of the year. Despite the 4 years in High school, I have spent no years in College. So what have I been doing to keep the dream alive? By spending every waking hour being Japanese, all the time.

You know how people go to different countries and come back with a new language? Turns out you don't need to go to another country to be surrounded with culture!


So I've been pretty much watching Japanese TV, listening to the Japanese Radio station, and, AND! Reading manga...RAW! Two birds with one stone, Fuck yeah! Its pretty cool, at first it starting off as gibberish, then picking up words here or there, and now I'm able to pick phrases out once in a while. Don't ask me to say anything until fall semester though, still in my incubation period >____>

http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/about
This site pretty much advocates it, and its been a HUEG help to me. So if you wanna try it out, click the link above.

Just check out this highly scientific graph.

Animatic

Dear Kristen Animatic

Voices are provided by Ralph himself and Chelsea. I had a blast recording, and had a lot of trouble getting rid of my laughing in the background. Theres a lot more funny dialogue between Ralph and his friends but I decided to cut the extra chatter since it was well over 4 minutes at first. Final time is at 2mins 52 seconds, but I still want to cut it down to 2:30.

The scene after Kristen gets the letter is when shes with two of her friends. A tall one whos talking to Kristen and a short one whos obviously really really bitchy. Shes the one who actually circles the 'No'. I feel like I could push the ending, it doesn't feel convincing enough for me. Any suggestions?

Movie Poster

It took a hellvalot longer than I expected to color this piece. Mainly because I was shooting for a coloring style that I more or less hit and missed.

Ralph has this crush and understandably, he has that nervous chill whenever Kristen (his crush) is around. Ralph, being the nice guy that he is, gives her a bottle of water to help her cough one day in class. Being the nervous person that he is however, ends up shaking uncontrollably...spilling A LOT of water on Kristen. Not wanting to studder a mouthful of spit just trying to say sorry, he writes a letter of apology. But thats not all he wrote.



-Edit-

Heres a not so desaturated, more to look at poster.

11 seconds 2.0

11 Seconds playblast

Sweetness. I sure love splines and curves, yup yup yup. I think one more pass around with this and it'll be good.

Didn't get to work on the mouth movements's Spline and curves...next time fo sho.

Concepts and all that shizzle.

Bottom->Up = Oldest->Newest

In super simplify mode now, working on my line economy and making my characters look more interesting. Got a scan of the original note up there too.