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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
Alright, listen up. Before the big reveal, I just want to say I've done a lot this summer break. Not in terms of content, but in terms of variety. And I'm planning on posting about it all on here. They're going to be separate posts, because they all cover pretty different areas of my (raises pinky and pushes out lips) "artistic life".
In order:
I'm going to post about my "Off-Hours" illustration series,
A new animation, "Far from the Reef",
A short comic strip series, "Leaf and Wall",
And before I begin talking about Off Hours, I just want to announce that I made a website. It went up like two months ago, but I hadn't really told anyone about it until now. I didn't have enough content to justify its existence except for it making me feel good about myself. But with my new series going up, I feel like it's enough to put it out there and advertise it a little just so people know it's there.
It's pretty bare bones, but that's the way I like things. Also, it was one of the free templates Squarespace had. I'm bad with html and css, so templates were my go-to. Anyway, that's it for telling you people what's up. Thanks for reading the most boring part!
This image came to my mind one day and I couldn't put it away. It was just too hilarious to not try drawing. So I pulled out Photoshop and got to work on it.
In about three to four hours, I got it done. This made me realize I was a pretty darn good artist. The drawing is not great, granted, but for the crappy artist I think I am, it was okay. So this just started off my series. I had not planned to go any further with more illustrations, but I couldn't stop after seeing what I could do. All of these awesome images were coming to my mind and I had to draw them.
I came up with a simple system to how I would go about creating these pieces. I would come up with a random character, a random setting, and a random prop. If they didn't go well together in my head, I'd just change one of the things and repeat until I thought I had something that would look good.
The character, setting, and prop wasn't completely random. I just thought of things that I hadn't recently seen. Sometimes this was brides and hell or astronauts and bouncy castles. But the point was, I was just trying to be as creative and different as possible with the situations, using a style that i felt comfortable with.
I wasn't purposefully trying to come up with a series at first. This was just something I had fun doing and could learn with. With every new illustration, I tried changing the colors, the composition, and even the feeling sometimes. It made me feel more comfortable coming up with random ideas and turning them into something meaningful. So in a way, my storytelling skills were improving just because of this random process of putting things together in my head and figuring out how they related to each other.
Also, the need to build my portfolio with some serious illustrations was a pretty big motivating factor. Although I want to be a story artist, so I don't know how this would've helped me land jobs in that field... Still pretty fun though.
In the end, I decided to stop because it was feeling too much like a job. A system was set to keep creating new things, so I think I could've kept on going if I wanted to (probably. My idea pool was also drying up). But you can tell that I was getting tired of it by some of the last few.
This was all done on Photoshop, from start to finish. As I finished them, I posted them to my Instagram (@Sanbles). You can see the rest there or on my website. But yeah, I was glad to have done this because I was able to use everything I learned from art school in my personal work. I'm proud of this. I still think I suck though. Constant improvement equals constant self-doubt I guess.
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Thanks again for reading (or going through) all of this. It sure means something to me. I think I rushed through this post, so if anyone has any questions feel free to ask away in the comments. I'll try to post my animation by this weekend. If not, maybe I'll never post it. You shouldn't trust any promises I make.
I guess this blog will just turn into a place to post my school work. Maybe during this summer break I'll be able to talk about stuff relating more to animation and my secret projects.
This school semester has been harder than the last, but it's definitely been more fun. It's probably because we stopped taking perspective, a class where the most time you'll be spending is on connecting two points together.
I learned a lot this year. Especially on my second semester, I feel like I have a more thorough understanding of how the animation world works. From friends, teachers, guest speakers, and recruiting companies, it's made me realize that getting a job out in the art field is actually possible and not some hopeless dream. All I have to do for now is just keep working hard.
Here's the good stuff. ____________________________________________
*CA, IL, and GA are majors
**CA:Computer Animation, IL:Illustration, GA:Game Art and Design
Figure Drawing II for CA
3D Design for CA/IL
Drawing II for CA/GA
Traditional Animation I
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I made my trademarks smaller this time. They're still pretty noticeable. I guess that's the point, but it shouldn't detract from the work itself. It feels pretty useless still. Maybe next time I'll just make it with a 1-point font.
I hope you enjoyed looking at everything. We actually got to focus on animation this semester, so that's a plus. My favorite class was Drawing II, because I learned a lot about composition, color and light, and design in general.
Traditional Animation was fun too, but it was pretty boring at the beginning. Then again, most classes are like that. It was cool actually getting to work with pencil and paper. But oh boy, do we use a lot of paper. I straight up felt like a tree murderer.
That's about it. If you're a young one, I hope this helps in making you decide whether or not you should go to an art school. It's pretty fun to be honest. People are nice, and you actually learn a lot. The only downside is that you can't talk about what you learn to anyone outside of the art world or you're considered a snob. That's how I feel about it at least. But yeah...
You want to know what I was up to last year? Specifically, between the dates of September 7, 2015 to December 14, 2015? Well, my friend, let me do a mediocre job at answering your question.
Here it is...
You ready?..
Classwork. That's what I've been up to. I was thinking of talking about what I did in all the different classes, but knowing me, I'd probably get bored of typing everything and quit. Sadly, that would leave you with nothing. So I came up with a better solution. I asked myself, "Why not just dump all the art I've done here, categorize them according to which class I did everything in, and leave it at that?" So that's what I'm going to do. You can figure out what the purpose of each class was by yourself.
Obviously, I won't post everything-- just my best stuff. Fun, right? You'll get to see how bad of an artist I actually am. So....
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Figure Drawing I
2D Design
Drawing I / Perspective
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Do you like the stamp with my nickname at the corners of each piece? It's called branding myself. I've done it before, but I felt like I had to address it again. They're definitely noticeable on these. I'm not going to bother making each one smaller though. Tooooo much work.
And yes, I know. I didn't keep my promise on making monthly posts. You know, the promise I made, like, last summer? What? You had forgotten about it? Oh snap, I shouldn't have said anything. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
By the way, how do you capitalize titles? I didn't know what words to capitalize in this post's title, so I just capitalized everything. When in doubt, ya know...
