Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Cool stuff

I love the pretty colors.

YAY!

By the way this scared the Hell out of me!

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Animation BG 1



Originall layout done by Tiana Scott. Arie Monroe did the finishing touches and stuff. happy to be back working on our project. ~Arie

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Monday, April 23, 2012

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

plympton on creativity







Bill Plymton animation interview.

Very interesting interview with bill plympton and bobby chui on his life as a independent film maker.

Bills 3 rules of sucess in making a short film.

1. Make your film short. 3 minutes or less.

2. Cheap ($1000 a minute)

3. Make it funny!

Saturday, April 7, 2012

Thursday, April 5, 2012

Students paying companies to work for them? WHAT!!!

 I was sent this article the other day and it really brought some interesting incite as to the direction our world is heading in when it comes to working and getting paid for your work.You can check out the article here, http://www.cartoonbrew.com/ideas-commentary/john-textors-free-student-labor-comments-has-staying-power.html.



I think any smart person will know exactly where this is going. It is bad enough that many times artists are underpaid and undervalued. People saying things to us like, "well don't you like doing this stuff", "I am doing you a favor", "if you work on my project you will get a lot of exposure for your work!"

Well I am sorry to hurt all you people out there working so hard to get me exposure for doing what I love for a living, but believe it or not most people get paid for the work they do as well as get exposure at the same time after they get there pay check. Doesn't matter what field you are in. You get paid to do a job, you do an awesome job and the person that paid you tells all there friends and shows off your work and thus you get more work!

People forget that doing art for a living is really not much different from doing anything else for a living. I use my materials and time to create something for you that you could never create yourself and you pay me for it. End of story. Its part of the reason I never really liked the idea of a paid internship cause I always felt like something was fishy about them. Students get out of school and go work for a company for free for six months and then from there jump from internship to internship all along begging to actually get PAID!

I think we are being victimized here. I mean when is the last time a student took the time to actually look at the law and see what it really means to be an intern. According to the NewYork Times,

" Ms. Leppink said many employers failed to pay even though their internships did not comply with the six federal legal criteria that must be satisfied for internships to be unpaid. Among those criteria are that the internship should be similar to the training given in a vocational school or academic institution, that the intern does not displace regular paid workers and that the employer “derives no immediate advantage” from the intern’s activities — in other words, it’s largely a benevolent contribution to the intern.

"No one keeps official count of how many paid and unpaid internships there are, but Lance Choy, director of the Career Development Center at Stanford University, sees definitive evidence that the number of unpaid internships is mushrooming — fueled by employers’ desire to hold down costs and students’ eagerness to gain experience for their résumés. Employers posted 643 unpaid internships on Stanford’s job board this academic year, more than triple the 174 posted two years ago."

In 2008, the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that 50 percent of graduating students had held internships, up from the 17 percent shown in a 1992 study by Northwestern University. This means hundreds of thousands of students hold internships each year; some experts estimate that one-fourth to one-half are unpaid.
In California, officials have issued guidance letters advising employers whether they are breaking the law, while Oregon regulators have unearthed numerous abuses. 

“We’ve had cases where unpaid interns really were displacing workers and where they weren’t being supervised in an educational capacity,” said Bob Estabrook, spokesman for Oregon’s labor department. His department recently handled complaints involving two individuals at a solar panel company who received $3,350 in back pay after claiming that they were wrongly treated as unpaid interns.  


Many students said they had held internships that involved noneducational menial work. To be sure, many internships involve some unskilled work, but when the jobs are mostly drudgery, regulators say, it is clearly illegal not to pay interns."

In other words, it is illegal for a company to have you do work for free on any form of production work that benefits the company. Internships are intended to be opportunities to learn a job not help the company make more money while they keep their costs down. On top of that, it is not just happening in animation, it seems to be happening everywhere in the US.  Internships are intended to be almost like apprenticeships. People should be learning how to do the job they are interested in doing not getting coffee and sweeping floors cause no one wants to be bothered with the intern. Nor should the intern be working like crazy and not getting paid anything for being there.

What is to stop a company from hiring nothing but interns and swamping them out every 6 months with more replaceable free labor? I have always had my issue with internships cause personally I couldn't afford to go 3 - 6 months without actually making money at a job that required me  to work for 8 hours a day. Increasingly, when I go to apply for a job somewhere there are always openings for unpaid interns that are just graduating from school.

But even worse then that is the idea that a company might choose to work side by side with a college so that the college can provide them with employees that will be paying tuition and working full or part time for free. In other words, students paying the company to work for them.

Rebecca David Social Media Ninja over on http://www.blogger.com/goog_1485907152 made some really good points about this issue in her article about the Digital Domain Institute. Since I really can't say it any better than here I thought I would post a piece of the article here.

"Let’s name a thing that you should never say about the work you do:
 
I pay someone for the privilege of doing my job. 

That sounds pretty ridiculous, doesn’t it? I mean, the whole point of a job is that it makes you money.  In exchange for your services and time, you are compensated.  Now, around here we have opinions on unpaid internships. I don’t like them. To be specific, I do not like it when eager students take positions where they do work that is part of actual production that then goes on to turn a profit. I get all shake-y and incoherent just thinking about it. Now, let’s turn things up to 11.

Digital Domain is charging students tuition dollars to work for them. They have opened up a school of sorts, where in exchange for student funds and government subsidies, they will allow you to work on their films.

This is happening down in Florida, where it’s being portrayed as a magical happening. And it sounds fantastic, doesn’t it? Go to Florida State University, pay them all the money you don’t have for tuition and then some extra for food and shelter while you’re there. Then go meld yourself into a workforce at Digital Domain, where they let you work to your little hearts content on Ender’s Game or some other project (they apparently have many). Think of the opportunity! The connections! The work experience! The projects you can put down on your CV!  The goddamn EXPOSURE you’re going to get.

This is not okay. It’s not okay at all. Now I’m going to tell you why.

1. You’re taking work from people who want to get paid.
If you’re paying to work, then you are a taking a seat from someone who would like to be working to get paid. That could be someone who has been in the industry for a decade, or someone who just graduated and is looking to pay off their student loans with their brand-new skill set.


2. You’re teaching ‘the suits’ that they aren’t required to pay you.
Business folk are business folk, it is their job to make as much profit as possible. If you remember junior high math:

Profit = Revenue – Cost
Cost is things like rent for the building, the rights to whatever content you’re producing, the software for the production, the hardware for the production, and the crew that makes all the wheels spin. That’s you. You are part of the cost, so if they can pay you nothing they will. Except now you aren’t just free, you’re counting yourselves amongst their revenue. So now the equation looks a little more like this:
Profit = Revenue + Your Tuition + Government subsidies – Cost.
The suits of the world knows how profitable it is. They’ve picked out Digital Domain Media Group as a business to keep an eye on, with their potential profit margins.

3. The education system will indoctrinate you into thinking your work is not worth any money.
In fact, it’s teaching you that you are worth negative money. You are in debt to these people for being permitted to work for them. We exist in a market where people are constantly trying to undervalue our efforts. They think because you’re doing something you love that money doesn’t matter. They don’t understand the process of the work, so it must be easy, why would they give you a living wage?

My teachers were wise, they told me never to work for free, to always get a contract (even though that won’t always save you) and many other things so that I would be prepared for when someone tried to screw me out of money I deserved. Instead, this program will teach you that you aren’t worth paying for. They won’t tell you directly, but it’ll be there, under your skin.  So when you graduate, you’ll hop on over to an unpaid intern-ship with the promise of paying work in the future, only maybe they forget to pay you ever.

4. You’re skewing the curve for the rest of us.
The one thing that could be said for this program is that I guarantee you will learn mighty fast. They can coach, lecture and tutor you all you want, but in an industry like this one they aren’t lying when they say that nothing beats hands-on experience. I learned more about ToonBoom Harmony in my first 2 weeks of work than I did the 2 years they taught it to us in school. It has nothing to do with the competence of my teachers and everything to do with the fact that if you do something every day for 8-16 hours a day and it has to be done right because it’s going to be shipped somewhere else, you’re going to pick it up quick because there’s no other choice.

So you’ll graduate with all these skills, and a studio will pick you up for a (gasp!) paying gig. You’ll be great at it, but they’ll pay you half of what you deserve because you’re a fresh graduate. You will take the job, because you’re a graduate and you like eating. As a result, maybe that studio won’t hire a graduate from another school, and their skills go un-nurtured. They go work at EB Games for 10 years. The notion of what a graduate should be able to accomplish is hiked up, so an industry already wary of investing in the fresh-faced and shiny will lean even further into their rut of hiring only people who’ve already been working for 5+ years (and you, they’ll hire you. And they’ll pay you. A bit.)"

One of the things I really feel here in her article is the consistent rise in standards that people have to meet in order to get a job. I have felt like this has been going on a long time I see it more and more on job boards where people are expected to have not just a BA in there field of work but they also have to have already gotten 3 - 5 years of experience before they will get considered for a position.

Where are all the entry level jobs going.

If you get out of school and are ready to start looking for work you cant even begin to do so cause you don't already have experience. You know it use to be people got paid training to do what they wanted to do for a living. You cant even get a job as a janitor now a days with ought some sort of college degree and some work experience. A person would think that with all there years of schooling and interning to get the required experience that it would mean you would get paid more but truth be told you get paid just as little as all the other inexperienced worker bees.

In the end it seems like all this is becoming more and more of a scam, getting desperate people in deep debt because of student loans they were told they had to have in order to get an education and to get a job, to basically settle for doing more and getting less. This can not continue.




Some additional reading:

http://www.bombsfall.com/?p=1018

http://www.canadiananimationresources.ca/?p=5790

http://www.cartoonbrew.com/student/most-unpaid-internships-are-illegal.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/business/03intern.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all

http://www.canadiananimationresources.ca/?p=5885

http://www.wptv.com/dpp/news/region_c_palm_beach_county/west_palm_beach/digital-domain-institute-classes-start-monday-at-cityplace-in-west-palm-beach

http://seekingalpha.com/article/457011-5-futuristic-picks-to-exploit-the-value-investing-bubble?source=yahoo

http://animationguildblog.blogspot.ca/2012/03/dd-finds-new-revenue-stream-students.html

http://vfxsoldier.wordpress.com/2012/03/26/the-paying-to-work-for-free-vfx-business-model/

http://motionographer.com/2012/04/02/paying-to-work-for-free/

http://vfxsoldier.wordpress.com/2012/04/03/la-times-report-on-digital-domain-institute/#comment-5700

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-0403-digital-domain-20120403,0,510435.story

http://www.cartoonbrew.com/business/douchey-digital-domain-ceo-john-textor-free-labor-is-much-better-than-cheap-labor.html

http://www.cartoonbrew.com/business/john-textor-made-16-million-in-2011-while-digital-domains-revenue-dropped.html

http://www.cartoonbrew.com/business/john-textor-made-16-million-in-2011-while-digital-domains-revenue-dropped.html

Thursday, March 29, 2012

Mainasha Running in a Dress

Did this little practice today.



enjoy!

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Do it yourself animation show.

























MY Little Pony!! Animation how tutorials!!

I love the My Little Pony show and I have seem some people online making some awesome animation tutorials for the show. breaking down how characters are made and so forth! I really applaud these fans for being so dedicated. I wanted to share to as I have been breaking down epiodes myself and looking at story telling and so on.









Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Thursday, March 22, 2012

Ten years of animation in one.

was enjoying this old B/w documentary on Richard Williams studio in London. One of his animator was very new and they saw potential in his work so the other animators along with Richard started cultivating his skills right there in house.  they put him on a film that they said would give him 10 years of experience in one year.

I found it interesting.






Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Learnig from scratch.

So One of my goals in preparing my portfolio is to also work through and complete animators survival kit.  I had started this some time back but I decided to start again.

One thing Richard Williams mentioned in the book that I so many time had disregarded was about how it is important to UNPLUG! Turning of the radio and the tv and so forth and concentration on what is at heand. he point out how your work will improve along with your speed  and ability to complete more at one time.

Its nothing new. I have known it a long time but I think it is time to put into practice. Having good focus can work wonders for your ability to improve in anything.  I want to start regarding my animation time as a sacred time where I give it my full attention.

The other thing he mentioned as being very important is having a good teacher (master) to learn from and how it can do wonders for your improvement as an animator.

I don't think people really get the opportunity to learn from a master in our day and time. It reminds me of the old martial arts films where the student begs the master to teach him all he knows. The master takes him under his wing and cultivates him. I feel so blessed to have met someone like that! Now a days we just go to school and expect to learn things from people that barely know how to teach or they are overwhelmed with teaching  Multiple courses and grading paper and just trying to make there pay check. They don't have time do develop a relationship with there students and cultivate them. We just go to school learn some stuff real fast and hope we can go out and get a job after being spread so then on work we cant even remember what our last semesters classes were.

Not saying school is bad but just pointing out how the format of school is limiting to the student.  I Hope that the next few years on my life will be filled with growth and mastery. I thank God for the blessing.




I wanted to post this to watch later. please enjoy.







Saturday, March 17, 2012

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Virgile

Working title animatic

Here is the first pass on the animatic for our animated short. I added in the street sounds. Just need to get the other 2 characters designed and finish the added part of the board so the joke is more complete.

Tiana can you put a high res copy of the story board template you are using in our drop box?

~Arie

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Mmmm.. cake

Tomorrow is My birthday !

Sunday, March 4, 2012

First Rough Story Boards Pass



Here is a more cleaned version.


Here are the rough story boards. Boards 8 & 9 are for the hiccups. I wanted to really stretch and squash that action in the animation. It would be a lot fun. The last panel is actually the first. I thought maybe a vertical pan would be cool and then a close up into the kitchen.

I really enjoyed this!

Sule and The Case of The Tiny Sparks (Trailer) from The Gibbs Sisters on Vimeo.


http://reelrepublic.com/sule_and_the_case_of_the_tiny_sparks.html


http://adoptedbyaliens.blogspot.com/2010/08/directing-animation-sule-and-case-of.html

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

plausable impossible

Character designs Short Number one untitled

Ok tiana post all your character designs here and any notes on them.I decided to take a little time and look at some cute kid videos. I really liked the look of this little girl.

*NOTE*Tiana, I updated with a few remarks about your disigns take some time and do the same. Once we deside on elemets we want I will do some finalize
d designs using those elements. you focus on the boards and making them look nice.









Arie Designs:Here are the first round for me I will do a few more tomorrow and work on some outfits.
I love her so much. I love the dress a whole lot and her shoes. They are absolutly adorable!I love the girl at the right with the short hair the most. Her hair can bounce with the emotion. Her hair can be as childish as she is with that hair cut. I like the other girls too. They are cute.

I love how stubby the body is. It's a little kids body to the point. It is so adorable. I wanna give it a hug!
I love all of the outfits. My favorite is 1,2,3.












Tiana Designs:
Here is my first pass at the character design. Please forgive me. My scanner sucks ass i'm looking to get a new one for cheap. Do you have any suggestions?
I like the posses a lot here tiana. I am worried though that the curls may become difficult to animate when she is turning her head or that they may hide the face cause they are kind of big. Lets consult Dan about this.


These girls are a lot of fun. Great additude again. I love the hats but I am not sure if we wanted to have a character with a hat. I will leave that up to you. The dress is adorable and fun.
I love the Tennisn shoes on this! it really gives the character spunk and attitude based on clothing I think. I am not feeling the rain coat and boots. I think we should make the seting more of a nice day. I really like the look of the girl in the middle the most.
The stripped stockig on this is really fun.
I like the simple shoes on these 2
I really like the girls face with the little bow on the top of the head and the straight bang with the curl on the ends. Her eyes are closed and she is smiling. I think it is fun and has nice character. She could animate easily.

Monday, February 27, 2012

Sunday, February 26, 2012

Portfolio: This weeks Goals.

Working on developing and illustrating 5 - 10 ideas for short animations that demonstrate the following.

Layout
StoryBoard
Acting
Character Design
Lipsync
Drawing on model
Backgrounds

Tiana please edit the blog with your ideas under your name. you can upload pics if you want to as well.

Arie Ideas

1. (Lol playing with the wig ides a bit) Ariel is on a rock starts singing "I dont know when I dont know how but a know somethings starting right now" and in the middle of the last word a bird flys by and poops on her head, or steals her wig. can her someone scream "cut" off screen.

2.
Razunzel is singing when her wig flys off and she looks back to see the prince tangled in her hair. ( get it Tangled) lol ok bad joke.

3. A girl is petting her cat and the cat is rolling around purring and meowing and the a guy sitting next to her say "hey why dont you ever pet me like that" the girl and the cat look up at him and says "hun you know I am allergic to dogs"

4. Girl walking down the side walk and sees a puddle. jumps over it as she is crossing the street. a car drives by and drives through the puddle and she gets drenched in water instead.

5. A guy and a girl are having a intimate moment on a park bench. the guy starts walking his fingers up the girls leg and they kiss. suddenly they are splashed with water. the camera zooms out and a guy is standing there with a bucket. He yells at them " Get a room" and he throws the bucket down and walks away. they look at each other and they look at the camera and blink in confusion.

6. I women is standing on a bus stop waiting for the bus in a short dress and heels. she takes out her makeup compact to check herself in the mirror and when she pulls it out of her purse she drops it on the ground just as a guy walks by. she bends over to pick it up and the guy grabs the bottom of her dress and flips it over her head and runs away laughing. the women stands up confused and you see her granny panties. her arms are tangle over her head in her dress.

7. a women is walking down the street and two guys are watching her. one guy says to the other. "Man look at that booty looks like 2 midgets wrestling under that dress." suddenly the women screams and 2 midgets fall out from under her dress and start complaining "We just dont get paid enough to do this" the guys watch them walk by and one says to the other, "well what do you know"

8. a little boy is doing his math home work. a kitten jumps on the table. the little boy is counting on his fingers the cat comes over and lays on his paper. he hugs the kitty.

9. Kid keeps playing ddr and cat is sitting next to him watching. He is losing over and over again. finally the cat stands on 2 legs puts up a paw and the kid steps off the mat. the cat plays and gets a perfect score. then walks away. kid crys

10. cat is stuck in a tree meowing. you see the top of ladder bounce over then lean up against the tree a dog climbs up the later as the cat look at him from his branch. when the dog is at the top he looks at the cat and starts barking. the cat is started and falls out the tree. dog climbs back down takes later and it bounces away.



Tiana Ideas


*1) A little girl asks her mother how did she meet her father and how did you know that he was the one. The mother has a flash back and remembers the day she meet her husband. The children look about 6 ears old and they are waiting at the ice cream truck. The little girl is mesmerized by the little boy and snaps out of it and then slaps his ice cream cone onto the ground. He looks at her confused. Then you hear the mother say "that's when I knew I was in love".

*2) SUSAN (age 4) was drinking juice when she got the hiccups. ‘Please don’t give me this juice again,’ she said, ‘It makes my teeth cough.’ - found this a long time ago when reading funny things kids say.

*3) Birds laugh at man as it mimics his car alarm. The birds start to sing the car alarm sound as a person runs out franticly to check the car. The birds start cracking up.

*4) A wife and her husband are sleeping and fighting over the covers. The bed rolls them off and then walks away. and mumble " i can't get any sleep around here!" The couple holds each other as they are scared and confused.

*5) Older brother takes cookies out of the cookie jar and puts on to the table to eat. You see a little boy stealing his cookies.. Kinda like one of my favorite scenes in the rescuers down under http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPgTj46X5tg&feature=related



6) A princess ( Disney's Rapunzel Probably) is singing in the wind as her hair is blowing freely. Then her wig flies off. Revealing a short brown haired woman. Maybe after the little credit we can show the wicked witch from snow white right before she tries to give her the apple pick up the wig and go "hmmm" wipes it off and then walks away from the cottage.

7) A little puddle gets up and positions itself on the ground as it is raining. A man looks at the puddle and decides to jump into it. He disappears into the puddle out of view of the camera. Then words pop up on the screen. Attack of the puddle snatchers!

8) The Thief (a dog has a great time playing in the laundry basket. he pops his head out to reveal that his eyes are covered by a bra. He tries to take it off and realizes that he can't. He relaxes for a bit and the bra falls off his eyes. He is so happy he begins to run and trips over the basket. The end.

9) ( something i used to do a lot as a child) in a super market there is an automatic coupon dispenser machine. A sneaky little kid runs up and down the same aisle taking the coupon and about the third time a worker is there.. The kid runs into him and all of the coupons fall out of his pocket. Then he runs away as the worker shakes his head in disappointment.

10) There is a forest counsel of animals that are trying to ban Rapunzel from the forest. Her hair is getting in everyones way and the show the tapes. The birds can't fly because they get tangled in her hair. The squirrels nuts get stuck in her hair, or whatever is funny. Really short stuff.

The ones with the stars are the ones i really like. Lets pick and choose all of the ones we wanna get started on . This is so awesome

YAY! this will be fun.


Hey tiana I am enjoying all your stories. I like the following ones most.

#'s 1, 2, 3, 4, 10 I like the others as well but I think maybe they could be tweeked a little bit more for a good punch line of laugh.

Let me know which ones you prefer. once we do some character designs we can use them over and over again.

Arie:
OKAY LMAOOOOOOOOO i love your ideas Arie especially 1,2,3,7,9,10. I was cracking up

Thursday, February 23, 2012

Animations I liked

This one feels really unfinished to me but I enjoyed the story.

Friday, February 17, 2012

Cat Walk

MEOW!! I thought I would share this this week. I did this a while back but never uploaded.

more cool stuff3

Monday, February 13, 2012

Mapa Cel a bration

Chico and Rita!

I really want to see this film but cant find it anywhere.





the music in this film is wonderful.

First animation in a long time.

Yep I havent animated in a good while but lets consider this an ice breaker. It really felt nice to do it again. Felt like riding a bike once I really got into it.

This is a rough walk cycle shot with a web cam. will Scan these later for a much better look. I need to put some clothes on her. would also like to do a roon cycle of her in her clothes.

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

ianimate.com

I have been searching the net and looking for online ways to get my animating progress back on track. came across a cool website called ianimate.com

Looks pretty cool but it seems like the cost for learning would be like $1000 per class. I wish there were some much more cost effective learning tools online that really gave good insite that were not as expensive as going back to a regular college.

I am so tired of the school game. It is such a waste of time and money. I went to school for over half my life and I am still struggling. What ever happened to hey go to college get an education and all your dreams come true. I feel like I have wasted a lot of time and money sometimes. and I am not the only one either.

I have many friends that went to school for animation and now all they do is work to pay student loans doing something other than what they went to school for. Oh and they all live with there parents.

Anyway came across an awesome animator online so check out her stuff. I am loving her progress work on a music video she is doing.

All hand drawn and then cleaned up digitally! I love her stuff. I love the music! Oh and check out the blog!


Animating alot!


I have been animating a lot. It all slowly coming back to me how much I love it. I am doing a walk cycle of Mainasha. As soon as I get done I will shoot a pencil test and upload it if I can.

In the mean time here is a cool animated video I found.




I have found that I really Love animated music videos. I mean I really <3 them a lot. Some of my favorites are the Gorillaz videos. I would like to do that. A friend of mine wrote a song a while back and I am thinking about getting this blog up and running by working on it a little at a time. Now that I have a job I want to start making time to animate more.

~Arie