#45 I'VE MADE SO MANY COMICS THIS PAST YEAR AND...

I HAVEN'T TOLD YOU ABOUT IT UNTIL NOW. I'M SORRY.

This is definitely a new medium I've fallen in love with. I like creating visual stories. Animating takes too long and storyboarding is too limiting.

Comics is a great artistic medium for the individual. I've learned that film/animation is mostly a collaborative medium. I feel like comics is a good medium for one to indulge in on their own. Sure, it could be a collaborative medium, but I'm saying it allows more of an opportunity for someone to thrive on their own, artistically and maybe professionally. I haven't commercialized anything. I'm just trying to articulate why I think it's so satisfying.

If you want to look at what I've posted, you can go to my website:

http://sanbles.com/comics-1/

This next part will just be the progress work. I like exploring the medium, so in a lot of these I'll talk about the motivation behind creating them.
_____________________________________________________________________

When Does The Happiness Kick In?

I just dug around for the draft and I think I like this version more. I think the reason I went with the imaginary girlfriend scenario is because this version resolved the conflict too easily and it felt too... angsty? If that makes any sense. I think the published version is way more angsty now that I think about it hahaha

Dan's Soup

Something I started doing from this point on was doing a lot of the sketch and draft work on my sketchbooks. With this system, I'd only use Photoshop to make the final version. And I don't usually record what I do in my sketchbook. Here's a screencap of my photoshop file, because I can't show you the really crappy versions of this, because it's buried in some sketchbook somewhere, because I don't take care of my sketchbooks, because they're all filled with bad scribbles, because I'm A BAD ARTIST.

So yeah, this idea started off as a dream where I kept running away from animals that kept coming to me around my college campus. I forgot why I added the boy. Probably so the comic could have a plot. I hadn't done a story about an old person, so I wanted to do that. Oh, and I really wanted to make a picture book. The dream plus wanting to do a picture book is what motivated me to make the thing. Everything else was secondary.



Barking Dog

I wanted to make a wordless story. At some point, I had the idea of making it about a person who goes to prison just by being at the wrong place at the wrong time and then showing his life after that. And then came the next idea which was to parallel everything that had happened pre-prison to post-prison. Pre-prison would be from the victim's perspective, post-prison would be from the criminal's. I had A LOT of issues trying to make this story work, and I still didn't land it with the final version. I still don't know if anyone actually got what happened within the last few panels. But eh, it's done.

For the art behind this, I wanted to have a style where I drew the lines and shadows on paper, but I colored digitally. I wanted to create something with texture, because I didn't like how clean Dan's Soup had turned out.



Down

I'm going to start this one off by saying that for most of the stuff I post, I like having the whole project done before anything about it goes online. Down was made for Inktober. I hadn't even started planning the story when I posted the first image. I think I completed it halfway through october. And even then, I just created the panels super quickly without giving them much thought. It was in the middle of the school year, and there's never any time to do what I want to do during the school year. But luckily, I was able to come up with this. And it gave way for what's going to be my thesis film.

The reason I made this was to test out the web format. The vertical/scrolling format. I knew I wanted to test the format out with Inktober, but I couldn't come up with anything. Then, two days before October began I just thought what can I make that emphasizes the scrolling aspect? And me with my dark humor, I got this. Even with how fast I had to churn it out, my only regret, and it's a big one, is the title. I should've called it Going Down. Ba-dum Tiss.

Here are the scanned Post-Its. Yeah, they were done on Post-Its. I thought it'd be fun to tack them up on my wall as I finished each one. Halfway through, I realized I changed the Post-Its I was using, and they were different colors. I don't know when I realized this, but when I did, it was too late to change it. Good thing color correction software exists.

Hah, I wrote the most for the comic with the weakest art. I might be trying to justify myself too much.

The Well

I wanted to make something traditionally with Ink. This was during the school year when I was reading a bunch of comics from the school's library. They had some beautiful Ink drawings, so I wanted to try it out. Also, I wanted to make a horror story. I don't know why I wanted it to rhyme.

I made the draft on Photoshop and then inked it all on paper. My brother gave me notes for the draft...



I can't find any of the raw scans, so here's a cleaned up scan. I had to remove the blue lines around the borders, and a lot of pencil scratches. If you want to know more about cleaning up ink drawings, this is a good tutorial. I didn't want to try my hand at lettering, so I let the computer do that one.



I messed up with guesstimating the canvas size if you didn't realize. The draft seems too crammed and the finished version has too much negative space, so I figure there's a lesson in that for next time.
____________________________________________________________

I'm already working on some more comic stuff. There's just so much that can be done with this! It's great. I hope you had a good time reading it and didn't get annoyed by the overuse of "I" at the beginning of every sentence.

Aloha!

#44 Art School Life 4

Junior year... I disliked junior year. I feel like it was the year of depression for a lot of people. This was the year where people realized they were not at the level they had hoped they would be at this point in their lives. I got to see a lot of friends suffer from no sleep, stress, and bad eating habits. And also... DRAMAAA. I asked my high school friends if this happened at their school, and apparently there's less depression and more self-hatred/frustration at their schools. I guess it makes sense, since art is more personal and intimate. If you get a bad grade on something you've spilled your soul on, you're bound to face some identity issues.

How am I doing? Haha, wouldn't you like to know... Let's let the art speak for itself.
___________________________________________________________________________

ANIMATION DUMP:

From Sophomore Year that I failed to put on last year's post:

Sit/Stand




JUNIOR YEAR: SPRING SEMESTER


Silhouette Assignment



Push/Pull Assignment





SPRING SEMESTER

Lipsync Assignment




Wrap-Up Assignment




Boring Behind-The-Scenes


___________________________________________________________________


CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT: SPRING SEMESTER

We only made two animatics for this class and one of them is sad and pathetic. I don't want to put in the effort of uploading and sharing it here... leave me alone. The other one I'll get to further down this post...

VISUAL DEVELOPMENT FOR ANIMATORS: SPRING SEMESTER:

Not putting everything. Just the finished pieces and some process behind it.

Design Lab

DRAMA

Lipsync

Jeez, that's super messy. I made an attempt at making the layout look good, but there's only so much I can do without knowing how to mess with the html.

THESIS

Second semester Concept and VisDev was spent working on pre-production for our senior thesis.  This is the part that kicked everyone in the butt. Students wanted to make something they would care about but pretty much everyone got shut down and told to do their original idea in a different way. Very few people ended up with what they originally wanted to make. Most of the projects were improved upon, but some of their voice (core idea/vision/whatever you want to call it) was lost due to teacher and student feedback. Nevertheless, here's mine. Keep in mind that this is going to be made and animated in 3D to great quality, so if you don't want to spoil yourself of that experience, don't watch this.





Also, here's my story reel I'll use to apply to jobs. The last animatic is the one I made in Concept III. The very first animatic is my thesis, so WARNING again. If you don't want to watch it, start at 1:42.  The password is sanbler.



_________________________________________________________________

Like I said, junior year was a pain. It didn't come without its benefits though. I took a lot out of what I learned this year. I've grown as a person and an artist. I've come closer to knowing what I want out of my life and my work. I understand myself and others more. I became 21, and I'm starting to get a grasp on what becoming an adult means. I got a credit card. Let's hope this trend of improvement continues on to next year. I'll let you know how it pans out.

Bye-bye!

#43 Art School Life 3

Why hi. Here we are again.

Sophomore year was a blast. Way more fun than freshman year. A lot more animation work got done and a lot less drawings were made (which is sad (about the drawings)).

Let me just dump it all out.
______________________________________________________


Traditional Animation II/Computer Animation I and II

Concept Development II







______________________________________________________

One thing I need to clear up right off the bat. You see where it says "Concept Development II" for one of my classes? I didn't put stuff from "I" in the first semester, because all of my assignments that came out of that class were absolute trash. I hated all of it. We were being introduced to storyboarding and creating animatics, and I was having trouble figuring out what the teacher wanted specifically. I could see some readers being sad, because they can't see me in my bad state, but even if I wanted to show you, I wouldn't know where to find the files. I don't think I bothered saving them for myself. I just wanted to forget the whole thing. Luckily, I think I hit my stride this year.

It might've been because I changed from storyboarding on Photoshop to storyboarding on Animate. I figured out that if I want to animate on Photoshop, it's better to only use it to make frames prettier and add awesome effects. Flash still works better for me in roughing out everything, despite all the learning I made myself undergo to animate in Photoshop.

Besides that, I definitely feel like I latched onto a style this year that could benefit me in terms of speed. In terms of exploring art direction in each of my projects, it might end up hurting me. But that's all. Hope you enjoy. I can't think of much more to say. I'm tired. It's 2am. I started waking up early because I notice I work better in the mornings. Any questions? Comment. You know the drill.

Good night :)

#42 "Leaf and Wall" Comic Strip

This is coming in late. Long story short, I went back to college and lost track of time.  But there's another reason that I'll get into later in the post.
 ______________________________________________________

So to begin:

Leaf and Wall is a comic strip I began doodling in my pocket-sized sketchbook while visiting a family member in Seattle. I was feeling very melancholic at that time and asked myself a lot of questions about the type of person I am and why I do the things I do. These same questions kept coming back to me, and they were starting to annoy me. So I did what I usually do when I can't get a thought out of my head: I began writing about it. In the form of comics, I created about fifty very crude versions of leaf and wall.

 

At first they were stick figures, but I realized I could make different characters, more cool-looking, and still not put that much effort into it. Thus leaf and wall came into place. I wish I had those rough sketches with me, but they're lost somewhere in my stack of sketchbooks. Either way, they don't look much different than this. The most you could learn from seeing them is by noticing how much I scratched out dialogue and what words I changed/left the same. Just note, it's okay to rewrite something a million times.




















After coming back from Seattle, I drew all of the strips on Photoshop. I didn't use the same drawing for any new strip, because I wanted to show, subtly, that I cared about every strip. Probably nobody even noticed, but it made me feel good.



The final step was to post them online. I didn't want to just dump it all someplace on the internet, so I resulted to posting them daily on my Instagram (plug: @sanbles). That way, I could maybe build a following. Long story short, after about forty days, I have like ten new followers from when I started posting. Pretty good in my opinion! But that's why I didn't want to make this post before finishing posting it.



This is probably the most personal work of art I've done. And it's in the simplest form I have ever done. It's funny...

If one were to ask me what this story's about, I don't think I'd have an actual answer to give. For me it's about a lot of things. The thing is I didn't really aim for a message throughout the story. I just wanted to convey what I was feeling at the time, and I think I got it down well-enough. At least now I don't think about these things...

as often.

If you want to see the whole thing: It's on my page.

http://sanbles.com/leaf-and-wall-1

PS. If you feel like I was sounding pretentious throughout this post, don't worry. I did too. I think art school is getting to me.

______________________________________________________

Yaaaayy, I completed my promise to you! Those are the things I did over the summer. hopefully, you were able to take something out of it. In the end, I'm not really doing this for you anyway. I just like keeping track of my work, sort of like a diary. SO YEAH. YOU DON'T MATTER TO ME.

<3

I don't really know when I'll be back. um...

bye

#41 "Far From The Reef" Short Animation

WOOHOO!

Let me slap this on your face: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wVA4CyGqMo



I made that. Pretty cool right? No? Yeah, you right.

I like it though. And I want to talk about it. So sit back and let me explain how many stupid changes this thing went through--mostly in the story phase.
__________________________________________

The whole thing started as a story I  put together in half an hour for my literature club at school.

But I really liked the visuals it sprouted in my head. So this summer, I decided to animate it. I didn't want to use the original story as the script though. Mostly due to the fact that it didn't have an ending. I mean, there were other problems there (Hank wasn't really a relatable character. He was just some d-bag who was addicted to bubble plants. Why would anyone want to watch a story about him?). I also wanted to flesh out the possible themes in a story like this, such as exploring the effects of love compared to drugs. I know it's a bit pretentious to talk about such complicated ideas like that but as I'm growing up, I'm realizing that it's really these themes and complex ideas that turns entertaining stories into works of art. And like, c'mon. What artist doesn't want to be the next Leonardo da Vinci?

Besides that, I don't know why I changed the names and terms of everything from the original story. I wish I could've kept the "smasher" term for the fishes that popped the gas leafs. I actually don't have a reason for these changes.

If you go through the script, you'll notice that it's missing two scenes. It's completely devoid of Wermill (the crazy yellow worm fish) and it's missing Ali finding the swordfish to pop the huge gasleaf. Wermill just came to my head because I felt like the script needed more stuffing. I wrote his scene in the storyboard phase and found that it fit. Only later did I realize that it worked because it showed Barry's actual point of view on the gasleafs. It showed that he was only popping them because of/for Ali and actually hated doing it.

The idea of Ali finding the dead swordfish came because I felt like she needed more screen time. I felt like, as an audience member, I'd want to see more of how she thought. And also, I wanted to show that she wasn't some dumb addict. She knew she wouldn't be able to pop the huge gas leaf by herself so she went looking for something to help her. And although she found a wacky solution, it worked.

Look at that character reference sheet. Good, now look at it again.

If you look very closely, you'll realize that Jim isn't a crab. I made this sheet before recording the voices. After my friends helped me capture the lines, they joked about Jim actually being a crab. Only so at the end when he freaked out, it would be funnier because he would be crawling around, snapping his pincers. I liked the idea because it would introduce more variety to this universe, but it also created that more entertaining ending. Even writing this now, I remember how funny it was when everyone was recreating their idea of how Jim would act when he freaked out, everyone clasping and unclasping their hands.

Now watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLD4w_Vozbw&feature=youtu.be



After getting the voices, I drew the boards. I wanted to shade it all so I knew how the values would look, but it was taking a long time so I gave up pretty much right at the start.

After I finished the boards and added in the scenes with Wermill and Ali, I placed them on (Adobe) Premiere, and timed out each board so everything flowed together. Then music. Usually the music added now would be temporary, but I liked it so much I knew I would keep it for the finished animation.

I drew the backgrounds first and then I made the animation. Nothing that different here. Just a lot of grinding, lip syncing, figuring out what would be the most economical way, time-wise, to animate the fish. The idea for how the gas bubbles would react when popped came from this visual development piece I drew one day.

I didn't record any reference to help me animate the fish, if that's what you're wondering. If you couldn't already tell by the very constrained animation. So yeah, most of the animating process was boring and I barely remember any of it because I also spent it watching television shows.

After the animation was done, I added the sound effects. This was a REALLY fun thing to do. Post-Production might just be my favorite part of the whole process. Visual, sound effects, and color correction feel like things that I can just really mess around with until I land the right look/sound.

I wish I had taken a picture of how I made the underwater sounds. I have the next best thing though, a really crude drawing.

I'm not kidding. I risked my hundred-and-something-dollar microphone by putting a cup around it and putting that cup halfway down my bathroom sink. Most of the sound effects you hear from the fishes moving around is my hand just moving around the cup underwater. Everything turned out pretty successful in the end, and no water got on the microphone. Fun Stuff.

The popping gas leaf sound was made by standing up the microphone next to the sink and blowing up water balloons full of air underwater in the sink. All of the other sounds I created are pretty boring so there's no need to talk about them. Just as a side note, I added a lot of effects on to the sounds after recording them. (Adobe) Audition let me add some sweet pitch shifters, some chorus effects, and a whole bunch of other stuff just to get the right feel.

The mixing of the sound effects took a pretty long time, but it was so worth it. It added a lot of atmosphere to the film.

As for the visual effects, I just added in this vignette for the scenes in the "gas leaf fields" and some shaking effects to the scene with the swordfish and the rumble explosion at the end.

Color correction, I just made the psychedelic trip green instead of a blue color it originally had. I needed to convey that that wave was full of gas that was causing that trip. Then I just made the color correction fade so we could see the blue orb flying towards the pink blob in its natural colors.
__________________________________________

This was way long. I'm just hoping I didn't cover a problem that I hadn't already covered in another one of my process-of posts.  Remember to comment if you have any questions. As usual, I feel like I rushed near the end of the post. My mind tends to die out after about thirty minutes of intense concentration.

Kisses.