La Tristesse Durera Toujours

Next Year.

2011-07-12T14:03:00.007+09:00

Spending my first summer since elementary school in the States, doing an internship at Acme Filmworks. Living and working in Hollywood is quite the experience, great to have an internship, but I miss home!

Ah, but I should link my second year film here before I forget. It's on vimeo HERE.
It was my first shot at CG, and though sometimes I felt like my brain was imploding, I really am glad I decided to do a film in CG. I learned a ton. I'm hoping all those mistakes I made (my god there were so many) and the things I learned from having to solve them will have me a little better off in making next year's film :)

So, out with the old, in with the new. Some stuff for next year's film idea. Story is underway, but still got a lot to go. I'm collaborating with Cat so I'm not really doing the designs, but here are some doodles I did to give myself a better idea of the film.

Deep Red

2011-03-08T09:17:00.009+09:00

BEWARE, DA VINCI, OF THE RED IN THE DEEP

...was the log line (the film's essence in a sentence) for an assignment for Story class with Robert Lence that I worked on with Katelyn.

It's called Deep Red, and the poster for the film is the essence and soul of the film, beautifully executed and you can see it here in Katelyn's post on her equally beautiful blog. :D

The assignment was to draw two themes out of a hat and to make a story of it, and our pick was Leonardo Da Vinci, and Submarine. We decided to twist it and turn it in to a horror film!

Brief of the story: Da Vinci invents a submarine and to test it out he decides to investigate a spate of sunken ships that mysteriously have had no survivors. Upon investigation he discovers that strangely, the passengers on the ship didn't try to abandon the sinking ship, but rather locked themselves firmly inside. They were in fact trying to lock out a massive number of red, spindly-legged, carnivorous creatures which then proceed to attack Da Vinci.

Here's some of the development for it.

These are sketches by Da Vinci (I joke, Da Vinci could stand on his head and can't make drawings as bad as mine) of ideas for submarines.

I assumed a genius like Da Vinci would look at real sea creatures as reference to design a vehicle for water. The top right is based off of a gulper eel, a grotesque monster of the deep, the bottom is an idea off of a sun fish, and yes that person inside is rowing the submarine by hand.

Da Vinci (haha) settled on an idea that draws its design from the image of an eye peering into the depths of the ocean, and the side silhouette of a sun fish. There is reverse writing on it so the second image is the flipped version.

The submarine contains a titration tank where a chemical reaction takes place with hydrogen peroxide and potassium iodide react to produce oxygen. The oxygen (a) keeps the passenger alive and (b) propels the submarine. The excess oxygen and old air is expelled through two holes in the back of the ship back and forth, so that the air pushes the big fin back and forth, propelling the submarine. But that's just me geeking out. :D

I also designed the creepy creatures. The sketch, again, is made out to look like Da Vinci caught one, didn't get his face gnawed off, and managed to examine/dissect it. For me, more than four limbs = monster, so it looks something like a leech with spider legs.

Again, reverse writing so the second one is the image flipped.

I really liked this assignment. I'm not normally this pleased with stuff I do, but thanks to an awesome duo arrangement with Katelyn, I really got the best out of this. :)

Film Stuff, Finally

2011-03-07T09:59:00.004+09:00

I gravely underestimated the amount of time I'd grossly neglect my blog... last post I joked about my next post being in Halloween, but now it is March.

This also means the blog has no information on my film for this year whatsoever. This post will change that.

---

To start, my film this year is going to be in CG. Though I've touched Maya in my first year here, making a film takes these things to a completely different level. Everything I do is a first and it is scary as hell.

Because of this limitation, I kept my story and characters very simple this year. I took a short story from a story assignment last year and adapted it into my film.

I always start by writing out a short piece on my story. For me, it always helps me spark images and find the plot faster for a story. For this one, I wrote in a documentary-narrative style. Please imagine a soothing British-accent for the following:

"The practical thing for a bird to do when the cold season settles in is to travel south to a place with warmer weather. These birds, however, thrive in a habitat so rich and abundant in food that by the time winter comes along they are so plump, they find themselves bound to the ground by gravity. Migration is not an option for these birds.
They have enough reserve energy stored in the form of excess fat to last them a whole winter without food, but the problem is the cold. Even with extra insulation on their bodies, it doesn't provide enough protection to keep their core temperatures at the required 39 to 42 degrees centigrade. It is during hardships, however, that these creatures discover a unique way of survival. The birds find that huddling together allows them to trap and share body heat among them."

Here is my animatic.

Summer.

2010-06-30T06:45:00.004+09:00

Summer is nice. No school, hence no work, sleeping a couple more hours than we're used to (or rather, sleeping at all), and being back with family.

I hope everyone is enjoying their vacations after a hard, hard year of work :D

You beauties out there better be catching up on all that beauty sleep you missed out on during film crunch time.

I guess I'm updating my blog (which has been left in the dark for months now) because I tend to me incommunicado during summers and I'm -trying- not to be. And also to stop abandoning my web commitments. Just watch, the next time I update will be around four months later, around Halloween.

I miss you CalArtians so much. It's so weird not being in the messy cubes and smelly dorms where you guys are just a few steps away.

It's also just as weird not having a crushing workload or a threatening deadline squeezing the life out of me. Call me a masochist, but I sort of miss it. I miss the chaos. lol I need to go get my head checked out, I think too much exposure to the radiation from a certain Leo H-bomb has given me permanent brain damage. Hey, I'm allowed to make that joke, I'm half Japanese. And for some reason, every time I talk about him I get the feeling he's somewhere watching/reading this and ready to give me a low pass or incomplete. :P

But anyway. I have nothing interesting to write other than that I miss you guys! I love summer break but I also miss the CalArts and Char Anim family XD

Alright, enough drabble. I need to get to bed. Funnily enough, no matter where in the world I am I seem to be in the wrong time zone for my sleeping schedule. I was on Japan time in California. I thought I was on California time in Japan, but apparently I'm more on London time now than California.

Hm? What's that? No, no I'm not hopeless. Just not normal-expectations-worthy. :P

Some Figure Drawing

2010-02-20T20:12:00.003+09:00

Here are some figure drawings I did this week in Corel Painter.

I was going to upload some clips from animation tests I did but for some reason Flash won't let me export. So I will when I figure out a way.

Some Drawings of My Film

2010-02-12T15:11:00.005+09:00

Some artsy stuff for the first time in a while :p Here are some doodles.

And here are some concept drawings and such from my film. I have an animatic but I need to retouch it so not today. Some rough layouts, a doodle of the character I did along with notes from story class, some character designs, and finally the character doing the expressions of 喜怒哀楽 (Ki Do Ai Raku; Japanese.

New Semester

2010-02-02T17:19:00.004+09:00

I haven't updated in ages... agggg. I don't have anything new to put up yet but I just thought I'd post cause I FINISHED MY STORYBOARD FOR MY FILM!

...though I'd probably end up re-drawing half of them.

But Anyway.
Here is what the new semester looks like for me:

Mon
Institute Dance - TA

Tue
Digital Production - Ethan Metzger
Color and Design II - Leo Hobaica
CGI Animation - John Aquino

Wed
Dreaming as Unconscious Thinking - Victoria Stevens
Institute Dance - TA
Story Development - Chong Lee

Thurs
Life Drawing - Steve Brown
Traditional Animation - Mike Nguyen (though he's not really here this semester)

So I pretty much have a four-day weekend, but sadly enough one of those days is used for getting shut-eye I missed during the week, and the rest is split between work and laundry (lol)

Not much has changed, except for Color and Design II which is very different from first semester, a foundation course (that's the Dreaming one) and I take dance which is super fun.

Oh yea, Character Animation had a gallery show and quite a few of the freshman participated, though we all didn't have that much stuff to put up so we shared our spaces. It was sort of rushed and it felt embarrassing to put up my stuff, this one picture made it all worth it...

That is animation legend Glen Keane (who did a wonder-tastic lecture for us on the 22nd) and his hand is on my silhouette cut-outs.

I can now die happy. :D

48 hour film 2009

2009-11-16T20:07:00.003+09:00

The theme this year was "night".

I SURVIVED DAMNIT!!! :D

Helios, the Greek sun god rides his sun chariot across the sky, which is how the day is lit up. When his turbo-booster-ed chariot's engine fails, though, it falls from the sky and the world becomes dark; its night!!

Stick Figure Ballet

2009-11-14T13:50:00.002+09:00

Most recent animation; a stick figure doing ballet.

Some better(?) animation.

2009-11-14T13:10:00.002+09:00

a figure with a ball head, cylindrical body, a hip, and suction cup-like base assigned to us for class.

More Animation

2009-11-09T10:24:00.002+09:00

an animation of a fox tail wagging.

Some Animation

2009-11-08T03:50:00.002+09:00

an animation of a can.

Long Time No Update

2009-11-07T15:46:00.008+09:00

School has been so damned busy!!
It's already been 8 weeks since school started I think, but it's been a fast 8 weeks... mostly because the 8 weeks have been one deadline after the other, and we all know how fast time flies when you've got deadlines.

Here is some work I've done in the eon I haven't updated in.

This is a CD cover design for Color and Design I did. We used out own finger prints to use as inspiration to make these.

A silhouette cut-out assignment for Color and Design, themed Victorian.

These are the details of the silhouettes.

This is a model of a hand and arm I'm working on in CGI Animation class. Awesome fun to make something out of scratch. But texturing is a bitch.

I'll also put up some animation in the next post.

Story Assignment: Liutenant Rooster...field

2009-10-01T16:06:00.005+09:00

This was my homework for today's story class... Chong seemed pretty happy with it :D I love this class.
This rooster is boss of the farm yard, and is very military-like and machismo in his ways. When he walks, he goose-steps. He always sticks his chest out. His red thing on the head (no-one in class knew what it was called either) is tilted like feathers in a hat. He's impressive from the front, but his round butt and poofy tail makes him look silly from the back. The only time he ever breaks his perfect posture is when he's after the girls (red crouching pose on the right).

This sketch of the rooster doing a one-handed push up seemed to be everyone's favorite.

It's Red Again :D

2009-10-01T15:20:00.014+09:00

I re-dyed my hair... it is no longer a weird orange-ish tint :D The idiotic smile I have on the pic shows my joy for the simple things in life.

Here are some pics from the Color and Design homework I handed in yesterday.

The first is the original magazine cut out. The second is the "line" part of the assignment.

This is the "texture" part of the assignment. It was a pain in the neck, if you can't tell... and the next one is the "value" or light and dark part of the assignment.

There IS another one that's "shapes" and it's done in color but I don't like it so I'll refrain from putting that up.

Oh yea! Yesterday was the President's Picnic at Chouinard Pool. We had a random nude people musical interlude thing and this is what it looked like:
That's Calarts for you. Random nudity mixed with art/music.

My Cuuuube.

2009-09-29T15:19:00.005+09:00

Here are photos of my cube I finally got. Painted it to look like a forest :D

Went Shopping With Mallory and Hyojin.

2009-09-29T13:36:00.005+09:00

After class today, I went to the mall on Valencia Blvd with Mallory and Hyojin.

Hyojin having fun on the panda. And shes 19. lol
The guy is a janitor named Rodrigo who came up and asked me to draw him. He liked the drawing and took it with him :D

Second Week Gone By Already!

2009-09-27T17:00:00.006+09:00

It already feels like I've been here for AGES... I think its the long classes and work they pile on us that gives me the illusion.

But the classes are great fun. The assignments are relatively easy so far, since it's only the beginning of the year... and I'm having a lot of fun with them.

Here's the one I did for Color and Design this week. The theme was "cafeteria meal", and we had to do a 8.5 x 11 colored piece on illustration board. And then spend $1.22 to send it via mail. To his office in school. I still don't get the point. Leo is strange that way.

The rest of my classes are going pretty good too. Here's a brief run-down:

Perspective - Dan is a great guy, awesome teacher to have. We're still learning the basics, but sadly these "basics" include a lot of stuff I never was taught formally、so it's helping me out tons. The homework for his class so far is easy too, so I like this class :D
Color and Design - Leo makes this the work-load-from-hell class. The class itself is not bad, but because of the illustration board shortage, doing the assignments for this class has been a damn pain in the neck. This is probably the most expensive of my classes as well... the gouache costs an arm and a leg.
Digital Production - Ethan, awesome Calartian who sort of reminds me of Jamie from MythBusters, is our teacher for this class. We haven't done much yet, but apparently we're kicking it into gear from next class, so we shall see.
CGI Animation - John is so buff!!! ...On a more relevant note, we just got the basics of Maya crammed into our heads last class and I thought my head was going to start dribbling out of my ears. It wasn't hard, and I think I have a good feel for the program now, but it just was so much information. Looking forward to making models though :D
History of Char Anim - this is for my Metier credits. It's a great class, since we get to see clips, and analyze them which works out great since the clips are so interesting. The exams, papers and flip book that's coming up worries me though.
Story Development - my favorite class by far. Chong is everything everyone said he'd be (funny, awesome, etc) and the assignments for this class are great fun. I've found I LOVE pitching, and we get to do it every class :D Chong is teaching us a bit of character design to start us off (for which I am grateful for) and I can't wait to see what he has in store for our next class.
Life Drawing - Steve is a really nice guy, with a unique taste for music. The Okinawan Folk Rock he put on for our first class made me want to disown my nationality. Not that Okinawan Folk is bad, I love songs like Nada Sou Sou, but his collection was just festival music like Souran Bushi... the class starts at 9, we have lunch break at noon, and ends at 4. It's long, even with the abundant breaks. My brain feels like a dry sponge after this class. Toughest class so far.
Traditional Animation - Mike is one of the most philosophical teachers I've come across, but I love to hear him talk about how there should be life in our drawings, and we should never forget that. He animated a short scene with a boy kicking a ball last class, and it was rough, with poses I couldn't fathom how they'd fit in to the movements, but when he played them on the lunch box, OH MY GOD. OH. MY. FRICKIN' GOD. It was amazing.

That's my CalArts experience so far. Oh, I got a camera today! So when I go to school I'll take pictures of my cube and post it up. :D

Cube Sign-ups.

2009-09-16T14:09:00.001+09:00

Will not type. Must... sleep... noooow.

Caught a Cold... And Classes Start Tomorrow!!! D:

2009-09-14T11:57:00.003+09:00

Runny nose... coughing... how can I catch a cold the weekend before classes start?! D:
NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! *runs around wildly like a headless chicken*

Nah, I've had classes with worse. A friend of mine said something along the lines of nothing short of the black plague... no, I think he said even the black plague itself (lol) couldn't stop me. Wise words, that.

And a doodle I conjured up.

I like this one a lot... I think it's a manifestation of me missing my brother though.
Though anyone that knows Mikey knows he ain't this... slender. But that's not the point. :)

Curly Hair

2009-09-06T03:28:00.003+09:00

Sort of weird to post this drawing when I just got my hair permed straight...
but yes. When ever I ignore the little voices in my head going "no, don't do this that's overdone" or "no, do that it's less cliche" or "*siren sounds* manga/anime alert!! you're doing it again!" things like this come out.

but you know what, I should stop caring less. I actually like this better than the stuff I came up with when I was trying to "get away from manga-ish styles". Besides, it doesn't look THAT manga-istic does it???

Doodling at the Embassy

2009-09-06T02:07:00.008+09:00

So I had an appointment to get a new visa (so I can get to school) about two weeks ago.

The thing with these things are, no matter how much time you put into preparing and double, no, triple, no no, quadruple checking that you have everything right, THEY ALWAYS FIND SOMETHING WRONG WITH YOUR APPLICATION.
Thanks to this invisible yet very prominent rule, I got at the US embassy in Tokyo at 7:45 for an 8:15 appointment (7:45 is when the doors open, so you can't really get there earlier...) and finally got into the waiting room to wait for the fingerprint scan and interview at 9:15.
If me going to CalArts didn't depend on me getting that lazy piece of pretty paper in my passport (aka a visa) I would have shot myself to save myself the pain ages ago.

But enough with the complaining.
Of course on an occasion like this where I'm trapped in a room full of people from many different backgrounds sitting quite still out of utter boredom is something that I wouldn't miss for doodling.
Here are a few I did that day:

...why are napes so sexy? XD

*ahem* h'anyway.

Legs intrigued me that day for some reason. How the lady sitting had them crossed and you could see the soles of her feet, the angle that the sandals made the other lady's feet slant at...
Or maybe I was just being envious of their slenderness. :P Most likely.

Sand!!

2009-08-19T08:15:00.006+09:00

I went to a park with a (man-made) beach with my family the other day. Awesome time, despite the other children wreaking havoc on the various sand objects me and my brother built.

This was the sole survivor of the day, made AFTER the meddling kids left.
It started out as my brother's foot with tentacles instead of, well, a foot, but then he got tired and pulled out so we just let it morph in to an octopus.

And a final touch by my brother:

The Underwear Fiasco and the Attack of the Tombstone

2009-08-09T19:15:00.007+09:00

I did a lot of set painting back in high school, mostly because I was in the plays themselves that the set was for, and other kids considered it way too time consuming. I enjoyed having the KICK-ASS sized canvases to work with :D Homework? ...I'll finish it during history class or something. ;) jk

I briefly mentioned the "Rika has paint on her underwear?!" fiasco in the last post. Here is a cartoon depicting the incident...
I assume the hand palette is to blame, something like me pulling my pants up while painting, but my friends had an awesome laugh, and being the creative people they were (lol) they insisted that I had been painting naked. Despite the fact that those very people were the ones that were painting with me for the whole session in which my clothes never left my skin. I assure you, I would not do such a crime against humanity as to strip in public. :D

Here's yet another incident with set painting.
We were painting tombstones for the set, but our ingenious friend B couldn't do his math right and so we had defective tombstones that wobbled horribly as we painted them.
I was not surprised when the tombstone finally tipped over on top of me.

Thanks to my hand palette, the only thing on my mind was "my hands have paint on them. I mustn't ruin the tombstone!!" and so I didn't catch the falling painting.... only to realize that of course, with nothing to stop it, it falls on my face and gets ruined anyway.
I had to later be rescued by friends, who were trying not to laugh at my feeble calls for help from under the wooden tombstone.

some more drawings, and the second bit of color on this blog

2009-08-08T23:28:00.021+09:00

More drawings.

These ones below are done from pictures. Which my high school art teacher will kill me for doing- but it's still practice. ...Right....?
Besides it's hard to find people with naturally light hair colors, and they're best for practicing drawing hair (2nd drawing) though this one didn't turn out so well.

But above all I love drawing kids. Everything, like their posture, proportion, their baby fat (lol) and the way they move, still trying to figure out the mechanics of their body. Seeing a kid run is always so awkward. They're so off balance! The kid's toes lifting up in this one... he's gotta be uncomfortable, but he's too busy playing :D

Some fantasy-ish stuff here. It's some kind of crustacean hybrid tree. There is some reason behind this madness. lol

The setting is a world where the rain is strongly corrosive, and only the plant species have developed methods of surviving in this environment, one of them being this tree. The girl is borrowing bark and a leaf from another plant to keep herself safe from the dangerous rainwater. Of course her hands holding the leaf need protection too but I was too lazy to think of something.

This one is done in watercolor. I didn't do any outlining, just went straight on with the paint and adjusted as I went along... in hindsight, outlining might have been a good idea. But ah well. They're the adorable kids of two wonderful teachers I had back in high school. The older girl also happened to be my brother's classmate. The fact that he recognized her from the drawing brought me so much relief it was almost not funny.

And I have a horrible habit of using my hand as a palette when I paint (I REALLY need to get rid of this habit) and so when I do colored things my hand gets painted on like this:

But this was one of my more "tame" sessions. When I start with opaque paints like acrylic and gouache... it looks like someone ate paint and barfed all over my hands and arms up to my elbows. I'll make sure to post a picture of my so-called hand palette when I have one of my more typical examples.
There once was a time when I was working on painting the background panels for a set for the school play/musical Grease (funny this was I was also doing Rizzo... but they needed help on set), so with bucketfuls of paint and a huuuuge canvas to fill, naturally my hand palette had evolved into a hand-and-arm palette. I had to catch the bus, otherwise I'd have to pay 70RMB (for reference- you can buy a nice dinner with 70RMB) just to get back home, and I had 5 minutes to clean the buckets and brushes. No time for my hands. I had to run to the bus stop with my paint-dripping hands out in front of me like a zombie, and my teachers and friends had a fun time wondering if I was really doing set painting, or just getting eaten by the paint.

This hand palette thing has also been the cause of incidents such as the "why does Rika have paint on her underwear?" fiasco. Though the more popular theory for how I got paint on my underwear was that in my eccentricity, I paint naked.

I'll draw a cartoon for this one along with another hand palette anecdote for my next post.

Sad Attempt at Something Less Anime

2009-08-02T05:44:00.005+09:00

So I tried a style a little different from my usual, or something I intended to be a little different. The end result may just suck anyway.

I used a character generator to speed up the process for character creation. Though this first one, you really can't tell... but I blame it on the character generator for not giving me much to work with!! :P

Solemn woman, eyes like windows opening out to a cloudy sky, angular body, straight medium-length white hair, hourglass build.

This next one was interesting... I might color it in later, because the generator specified that she wore "a lot of red". She turned out to be some obnoxious character... like an aunt you hate to meet on the holidays. My brother says "oh, like Patty and Selma from the Simpsons". Yes, only pretty.

Argumentative woman, droopy eyes, elegant nose, large mouth, curly yellow hair worn in a complicated style reminding you of a chandelier, wasp-waisted, angular body, clothing with a lot of red.

Doodlez.

2009-08-02T05:22:00.012+09:00

Random doodles.
I designed an evil kitty, for example.

Or even more random, a bunny. An overly obese, bunny.

Some slightly more serious drawings... This is a tree-person...thing... er... did I say serious? That was purely relative, just so you know. -Back story- the tree is holding spheres which are worlds, tangled in strings of extravagance and luxury which is doing more harm than good... and he is untangling them, string by string, but in the effort he himself gets tangled in the strings.

Here's a slightly manga-ish touch. Some dude with feathers in his head, not hat.

This may be my FIRST colored drawing on here... it also happens to be my first attempt at gouache paints. It had an interesting texture to it, but it wasn't overly difficult. I should probably get used to this before I get to school though.

And back to less serious doodles. These are what I call the "stupid plane" series... I was on some Chinese airline on my way to Shanghai this May, and I had a lot of complaints, but only my paper and pencil to express them. lol

I do feel like there is a manga/anime-ish touch to my drawings though... mmmmmhhhhh.

Some Drawings.

2009-08-01T20:16:00.013+09:00

Here's some older stuff of mine that I drew... though nothing here is older than a year. Anything that has been drawn by my hand and been in existence for more than 12 months usually makes me want to burn it.

These are from my first (and so far only) nude figure drawing class, at CalArts last year.

I started out with indian ink, which is quick and hence great for the really short poses we started out with... then I frantically switched to pastel when I ran out of water in my brush (a pentel watercolor brush which is great for working in water soluble paints and inks, but this was the first time I ever ran short of the water in 20-30 minutes; so intense!)

Then we did 4 different view points for one same pose.

And finally this last one. Added a little color on the frame of the body to bring it

Officially Cleared to Return to CalArts!!

2009-08-01T19:59:00.002+09:00

Now that my excruciatingly long-seeming (yet in reality only a year) medical leave from CalArts is officially over and I'm returning as one of Character Animation Class of 2013, I should probably make an attempt at this blog that's been rotting away, void of anything but the title and profile picture of me with a sword at my throat. My blog, if it were animate, would probably feel like putting a sword at my throat like in the picture for the utter abandonment and lack of love from me.

Just to re-cap on things, this is my portfolio from last year, and thanks to the generosity of the faculty at CalArts, I didn't have to do one over for this year. *PHEW*
MY PORTFOLIO ON PHOTOBUCKET
I look back on this now and think; how the HELL did I make it in again?
I've been talking to my future classmates on AnimatedBuzz Forums and I see 40+ pieces per portfolio, sketchbooks included, nudes, stylized figure drawings, color... all of which you will -not- find in my portfolio. Instead you will find four useless still lifes I put in for the sake of reaching the bare minimum of 20 pieces. I had never done nudes in my life until that fateful day when I had my first figure drawing class at CalArts, and because I left for medical leave shortly after, that still remains to be my one and only nude figure drawing session so far.
I'm just glad I got in. If it was a mistake on behalf of the admin of the Char. Anim. Dept., well, I don't care; you can't get rid of me now!!!