Grim Natwick Film Festival

To celebrate Wisconsin Rapids' native, Grim Natwick (lead animator of Betty Boop), Wisconsin Rapids held a Betty Boop festival August 5-8. Part of this festival was the Grim Natwick Film Festival for WI aniamtors. My two short films, The Arctic Shoulder and Barnyard Mayhem, got into the festival so I got to spend the last two days hanging out with the other filmmakers.

It was a really great experience and I got to meet a lot of cool animators. Most notable was Nina Paley, creator of 'Sita Sings the Blues'. She married the film and completed this feature length animation in 3 years by herself. It was quite inspiring listening to her talk.

Here's a break down of the weekend:

Friday:

-Luncheon: Got to sit down and have lunch with the rest of the filmmakers and some of the Betty Boop festival committee. Betty Boop herself even made a brief appearance! It was great meeting the fellow animators, half of which were from the UW Milwaukee.

-Nina Paley Panel: After the luncheon we made our way to the Cultural Center where Nina Paley had an exhibit going on. It featured stills and painting from 'Sita Sings the Blues' as well as some of her comic strips. The panel included Nina Paley, David Farmbrough (filmmaker), Frances Auld (academic professor), and Cathy Meils (festival director). The discussion centered around 'Sita Sings the Blues' as well as the free culture movement which Nina Paley is heavily involved in. She released her film for free and there are no restrictions on it. She welcomes people to do whatever they want with the film. The only money she makes from it are through donations and merchandise. She's been fairing quite well that way. For more info on her film, visit the website: http://www.sitasingstheblues.com/

-Film Festival Screenings: The screenings happened in two parts, one section for the UW Milwaukee animators and a second section for the rest of the local animators. It was cool to see everyone else's films; a lot of stop motion pieces which was neat. After the screenings, there was Q&A sessions. It's always interesting listening to filmmakers talk about their work!

-'Sita Sings the Blues' Screening: Watched the film which is a musical, animated interpretation of the Indian epic the Ramayana. The screening was followed by a Q&A with Nina Paley. It's quite the beautiful film. Very nicely done. After the screening, I chatted with a couple of the other animators who's work was shown in the festival. Nina Paley came out and said, "Hey animators!" and talked to us for awhile. Pretty cool.

Saturday:

-Round Table Discussion: Seriously the highlight of the festival for me. All the filmmakers at one table discussing animation was totally awesome! I didn't do too much talking but it was fascinating listening to everyone else talk. Nina Paley had some great things to say about the industry as well as the owners of Believe Animation studio in Green Bay. Robyn Van Ert who produced the film NONAMES participated as well and talked about the making of her film. Frances Auld was there too. She had some very interesting things to say as well. The passion for animation was so apparent throughout the whole 2.5 hour discussion. Great stuff.

-Grim Natwick Museum: During some free time, I stopped by the museum to check out some of Grim Natwick's drawings; quite inspiring I must say! Stephen Worth from the ASIFA-Hollywood was there talking about Grim Natwick's life and animation. I wish I could've listened to him talk all day! He knows so much about animation and is quite insightful!

-Film Festival Screenings: Another set of screenings followed by Q&A sessions. Afterward, I had a nice chat with Tina and Darren from Believe Animation. The goal of their studio is to bring animators back to WI. I always enjoyed listening to them talk about their company. You can tell how passionate they are about it.

And thus, ended my first film festival experience! It was a wonderful time! I left inspired and ready to rock this Senior Project! Bring it, MCAD!

Barnyard Mayhem Take 2

Just in time for the Merit Scholarship competition, I decided to revisit my short film from last semester and finally finish it! I added an extra scene and addressed some continuity issues that popped up. Some textures were revamped and I ended up using Maya's Physical Sun and Sky for the lighting. My professor wants me to do a HD render of it at some point, so I want to touch up just a couple minor things before I'd do that.

Barnyard Mayhem from Hannah Strenger on Vimeo.

MCAD Animators

A Silent Film for my Intro to Film class. The only requirement is that it had to be a diary. I chose to do a diary of sorts on animators here at school. Brought a camera along with me to the computer labs to capture the moments that happen. Some are a bit exaggerated, but all a good representation of the life in the computer lab. Focused working is broken up by random moments of silliness and frustration as well the need to act out a scene to analyze the movement and help out friends.

So here's an insight into where I spend the most time and with whom.

Sound will be added on the next assignment.

MCAD Animators from Hannah Strenger on Vimeo.

Commercial

Our latest Storyboard assignment was to board out a commercial for any product of our choosing. It had to incorporate some sort of Rube Goldberg machine or at least flow smoothly from one thing to another. I went on Rube Goldberg's site for some inspiration and found out there is going to be a competition to make the best Rube Goldberg machine that will dispense some hand sanitizer. I decided to run with that theme for my commercial.

Purell Hand Sanitizer is the only clean aspect of this commercial. Everything else has a sort of 'dirty'/sketchy feel to it. I wanted to contrast the styles to differentiate the machine with what hand sanitizer is all about, keeping things clean!

You Stole From My Kin! Final

Here's the final version of my entry for the January 11 Second Club. Didn't get done in time to submit, but wanted to finish it up anyway.

Now I'm moving on to the February sound clip. This one will be a fun challenge! Animating some swing dancing! Determined to get this one done by the end of February.

Storyboards

Decided to post my Storyboarding assignments. Our first assignment was to storyboard out a Gag Cartoon. I decided to go with a bird getting revenge:

Our next assignment was a Reverse Storyboard where we picked a scene from a film to storyboard out. The goal was to analyze the camera angles/moves and light of the scene. I, of course, did a scene from Up.

You Stole From My Kin!

In my Advanced Animation class, we are able to decide what we want to focus on animation wise and create our own projects. I decided to participate in the 11 Second Club monthly competition. I figured having a new sound clip to animate to every month will give me some good character animation practice... and hopefully some strong pieces to add to my demo reel!

This is the one for January. I know January is over now, but I loved the sound clip too much that I wanted to animate to it even though I wasn't able to submit it in time.

I roughed out the animation and lip sync last week. This week I'll go through and flush it all out and make it pretty! Will also be exaggerating some poses more and pushing the actions a bit more. I'm having a lot of fun with this sound clip and character. :)

NOTE: The sound may seem to be off from my animation for some reason. It all lines up in my Maya file. I swear!

Barnyard Mayhem

After a semester's worth of hard work, I now have a semi-finished short film! I learned so much doing this film about the process of creating a short as well as what I enjoy doing the most of the process. I am an animator. I absolutely love bringing a character to life. Cluckles was especially fun since he was the first proper model I had created.

There was a lot of frustration on this short. Things would go wrong left and right at the beginning of the semester. As the modeling and textures neared completion and animation got underway, the process became more fun for me. The best part for me though was near the end as I was polishing the animation and everything was coming together. That was what got me through all the late nights!

I am proud of myself. This is some of the best animation I have done so far. I'm excited to see what I will be able to do next semester to further my skills.

I'm going to go back and tweak some of the animation, fix some of the textures, and give it a nice render. But for now, here is a version of my short film, Barnyard Mayhem.

Credit must be given to my friend Mary for doing the chicken noises!

Bloopers

So as I head into the final stretch of my short film, I thought I'd share some funny bloopers that have happened throughout the course of the semester. Nothing ever goes smoothly in Maya and

random bugs are sure to pop up. Some are entertaining and some are down right frustrating.

I don't think it's supposed to stretch that far.....

He turned into one-legged chicken at one point.

My all time favorite blooper:

This is what happens when you key the wrong node. XD

Portfolio Site

I'm taking Web + Screen this semester and it's proving to be a very interesting class. We're learning html and css right now and will be learning javascript and action script for Flash later on in the semester. We had the choice to make whatever kind of website we wanted and I chose to update my portfolio site for this project. Here's what the home page design looks like:

Animation Tests

I have been working on some animation tests of my chicken running so I can finesse the weight painting of the rig. I also wanted to settle on a character run to help convey his personality. My first test was a bit too general and not quite what I wanted.

For my second test, I added a slight hop to give it character. I like how it came out, but need to work out a few of the details. I'll do that once I start the actual animation though.... which should be next week! So excited!

Short Film Animatic

So I meant to post this up a month ago, but time got away from me as usual. I'm in the process of making a short film for my Advanced 3D class using the featherless chicken I modeled last semester as my main character. I'm nearly ready to animate now having built the set and extra character. Just have to finishing mapping out the UV's and I'll be on to the fun part!

Here is a rough storyboard of my short film. The basic story is that this featherless chicken escapes from the barn. The farmer chases the chicken for a good portion of the short. When the farmer finally catches up the chicken, he puts a sweater on the chicken. My prof was telling me that when chickens get stressed out, they lose their feathers and there are little old ladies in England who knit sweaters for those chickens so they can stay warm while they re-grow their feathers. I thought it would be fun to tie that into my story.

And now here is a very rough animatic. The timing is so off and I've changed a few things, but you can get the general idea of what will happen.

Carl

Here's a sketch of Carl Fredricksen from Pixar's latest movie, Up. He was pretty fun to draw. A bit challenging though since he has odd proportions and a square head. Even though he rarely has a smile on his face, I chose to draw him with on anyway. I actually drew it for my friend, Chris' birthday. I colored it and wrote a little note on it.

Dug!

After a bit of a posting hiatus, I thought I'd share a sketch I drew of Dug for an Art Jam over at the Pixar Plant forums. I'm doing a collaboration with another member. I was in charge of drawing and now she will ink and color the piece. I'm excited to see how it turns out. And in case you are wondering, that is a Nemo chew toy in his mouth. Nothing against Nemo. Just wanted to add another Pixar creature to the piece. :)



Also, I've been painting a wall for a former high school teacher. She has this random white brick wall in her basement and my job is to make it look like the brick wall of Wrigley Field. The brick is done (updated since the photo on the left was taken though) and I am in the process of painting in the vines; not as dense as the actual wall is. The picture on the right (cell phone photo) shows the back side of the wall without the numbers of the field. More detail as been added to the vines since it was taken. I plan on taking decent photos of the wall once it is complete

Last Project

I now present my last final project for the Spring 09 semester! We could do anything we wanted for our Ideation final. I'm a quiet, reserved person who keeps most of her feelings on the inside. I tend to remain quite composed, so I decided is was high time that something should be done about that! Inspired by my room mate, Jenn's, silly antics with the Photobooth application on our macbooks, I decided to do a stop motion with pictures of me making a variety of faces. My brother gave me the song suggestion, which worked really well. It was a fun project to make. A bit weird though since it's a bunch of pictures of me being weird. Not used to being so exposed. But that was the point of this project too. :)

The Arctic Shoulder

My first animated short film is finished!! I had so much fun creating this. Animated with classic Disney tunes in the background and danced around. Usually Amber was animating next to me, so that was pretty fun. Although it got frustrating at times, especially using the support rig to get the penguins off the ground, I learned a lot through the process. Mostly about timing, but also a lot about implying 'dialogue' through expressions/emotion. Since I am most interested in character animation, this was a good task for me! After nearly two months of working on it, I'm glad the short is finished, but I will miss the class!

Cluster Balloons

This past Monday I had the wonderful opportunity to help with the Up Cluster Balloon Tour even in Minneapolis to help promote Up, Pixar's latest movie set to be released May 29. Amber, Meg, and I go to the Metrodome before 3 am to help set up. We filled the huge balloons with helium and attached them to the chair which is a replica of Carl Fredrickson's in the movie.



Before the media arrived (it was a media only event), the crew got to go up in the balloons! I am afraid of heights, but it was really really neat. Since we were inside the Metrodome, we got to go higher than they have been able to go on the tour so far; 130-150 ft.


Then around 7:30 am, the media started going up and we all got to help send them up and pull them back down.



And finally around 1:30, we started deflating balloons. For the 12 hours spent there, it sure went by really quickly and I never ceased to be amazed by the large cluster of balloons! It's an experience I will remember for the rest of my life.


More images can be seen here.

Fun Time in the Black Studio

I am currently in the black studio taking a bit of a break from animating. Shooting the last scene today and I have the first pass done. Now just to make my penguin fly and I'll be done animating! It is quite exciting. Although, I will miss this class. I learned so much about animation in general from this class; timing and weight especially. Doing stop motion has made me think about animation in a different way. Definitely been beneficial. Made me a better animator. Shell's been a great teacher. Super helpful.

Anyway, last night when I was in animating, I decided to take a few pictures of myself and my studio space.

Strata!

In the midst of working on our short stop motion films, Shell gave us an in class assignment to create a strata cut animation. I opted to just play around and see how it would turn out. No rhyme or reason to what I did. It was pretty fun though. We all got to sit around and work. Jenny said it was like a knitting party since she looked up and we were all talking and working away. It was so nice out that day so it was hard to stay put in the black studio. When Amber and I finished creating our strata cuts, we decided to go take a walk outside while we waited to shoot our strata cuts. I got to enjoy the day somewhat.

So here is my finish piece. I shot it and then decided to smoosh it all together and shoot it again to see what happened.

Penguins!

I've been meaning to take a picture of my completed stop motion set and penguins. I've already started animating, but I figure now is a better time than never! Plus, I won't be posting any of the animation until it is completely done. Things are going fairly well on the animation front. A few problems here and there, but nothing too bad. It's pretty fun once I get started. I tend to drag my feet to start, but after the initial push, I'm alright. I'm at a stand still at the moment since I need to talk to Shell about my support rig. Wasn't working how I want it to last night. I'll figure it out tomorrow and progress will commence! My goal is to finish animating by the end of the weekend so I miss the madness of people rushing to finish. Then I'll have a week to do all the post production.

The main set piece is a two in one piece: A slide and a cliff!



In other school news, I finally remembered to upload a photo of my complete featherless chicken for 3D Modeling! All the modeling is completed. Now I am working on the rigging. The process is alright.... ok, it is a bit frustrating. Stupid paint weights. And I'm just not in the mood for it right now as stop motion has taken first priority on my To Do list. So here's Cluckles. I think there's been some minor changes since this screen shot was taken though.