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.