School Work #2

This week was a little crazy and sleep-deprived, mostly because I failed to manage my time effectively. Hopefully this will be a lesson in the weeks to come. Though I will be very lonely the rest of the semester... a certain someone will be in Japan until Feburary. I guess that gives me plenty of time to work. (I'll miss you Shigi!! I love you!! <3)

But onto more school stuff I guess. Ah, school. Sometimes I don't know whether to love it or to hate it.

PRJ300

Here's my little key-storyboard for projects class. I got my little dude, running, jumping, landing and walking off. When it was showed in class today I was rather surprised by the good feedback I received, and the very meaningful critique I got as well.

Make the recovery keys more clear (panels 10, 11, 12)
Add more emotion in the poses, rather than relying on facial expressions to convey it
Expression should read without facial expressions, use body language!
Needs better posing to clarify the actions
End needs more nuance, clarification on exactly what he's feeling (WHY is he prideful? Because he thought he couldn't make the jump but he did it? Or did he know he could make it all along?)
Perhaps play with some camera angles.

Pretty much the gist of the critique I received, so I'll be working that in to the story keys due next week.

CG305

Ah, CG. Burgess more or less approved my character design, but like a few others, he needed more context. Basically he asks me, what's the catch of this character? Perhaps the environment would provide more context. So I added a little bit of an environment into the character sheet.

It's hard for me to be objective about this, because I already know where my character exists, so looking at things like this I'm unsure of if I'm conveying that properly. Basically what I'm trying to show here is that it's not a generic Steampunk guy in a generic Steampunk world. What I'm going for is a guy, lives in mid-1800s London, but it's without all the kooky Steampunk-ness.Yeeah, the only Steampunk thing about this place is this guy, a genius inventor who's quite a bit ahead of his time. I sort of got this idea from watching that Will Smith movie, Wild Wild West. The setting is pretty much what you expect from a western movie, except with a Steampunk twist. Kind of what I'm going for here. So imagine this dude walking down that cobblestone road at night, holding one of those old-timey lanterns or something. the people in the town think he's insane. And maybe he's a tad crazy, but what he creates from old junk heaps miraculously work.

ART350

Should've probably put these up yesterday, but here's just a few of my sketchbook images that I'm real happy with. Our assignment was location sketches. Basically drawing stuff outside because... being inside is lame, or something.

The other part of the assignment was to storyboard a scene in a movie that you enjoy. here I chose to do one of the opening scenes in Despicable Me. I LOVE that movie. I chose the scene that introduces Grue. It's a great scene, done completely without dialogue, the character's actions tell the story. Kind of reminds me of the kind of assignments we got in the last projects class. Expression and body language make it work.

Pfff. I'm far from a master storyboard artist or anything, but I enjoyed this. I focused a lot on the character silhouettes more than anything to try and stand out. And by doing this I learned a lot... about the composition. Love how the entire time Grue is just standing over this poor child, even when he's trying to look compassionate it really comes off as condescending.