It feels weird. My peers and I have not really had a holiday in three years, and I have no real idea what to do with myself. Get to work I guess.

My screening is on the 24th, and graduation on December 19th, and then I am officially educated. Unofficially however, I am still bottom rung.

Creative wise, I bring you my showreel and a short film some friends and I made for our Digital Compositing assignment. It was pretty much put together in our last, very strenuous, week.

Take it easy, Internet.

Last week of University. I am greatful for my time here, even if there were some.. bothersome times. We put Defective Detective down onto tape Monday gone, and it felt like a physical weight had been removed from my shoulders. Not quite Atlas level weight, but still, significant. Oh, here is the teaser trailer for it.

I should write up some of the things that I learned, so hopefully future students might be able to actually find an explanation for their obscure-as-shit problems. Fucking technology man.

Speaking of, I have one final assignment to do, and it’s quite safe to say that its a little out of my comfort zone. We’re doing 3D camera tracking and inserting 3D and hopefully 2D animated characters into live action footage. It’s taken me probably overlong to figure out how to get this working, but it was just superbly-underdocumented online.

Little bit of progress on that painting from awhile ago. Slightly different style developing I think?

Started today on the right proper compositing. So many AE crashes.

If you’re going to use Swfs in AE, disable OpenGL.

(And) Here is a sketch for something NOT DD. From a stimulus.

Hey, what’s up. I’ve been busy and neglectful, a terrible blogfather. Good news is that the animation, and most exhausting phase of our short film is almost over. I’m starting to make the transition into the COMPOSITING stage, which for us is putting in fake lights and colours. LIKE ‘DEEZ.

“Rodriguo!“

“They’ll never think to look for us here“

“…Who.. won’t think to look for us here?“

We’re hoping to push the envelope in terms of what we can achieve using flash. Sure straight flash can be entertaining, but look at Newgrounds as a prime example. James Lee’s ‘Tarboy’ gets released into the portal and is immediately furiously masturbated over. Why? Because he pushed the goddamn envelope.

So with this little bit of extra time that I might have, I am hoping to make either (for the class screening or just personal) something that brings together live action and animation. The.. integration, if you will. Three examples here, and you will notice a bigass step between them. The final one, if you havn’t seen it, is one of the most intense short films that I have enjoyed. (And it is totally gratuitous!)

Have not updated in awhile, but eyyyyyy.

Went for a walk today through my graveyard to get some footage, in the hopes of being able to practice my camera tracking skillz.

I had my first run in with Mocha (planar tracker) and found it pretty damn cool.

I think I might start throwing together a few tutorials, as both a repository for my own knowledge and to..maybe increase traffic a little bit.

So I saw THIS video, via motionographer.  Some wonderful asshole ‘playing’ Particular 2.0.

Oh well. I really loved the Storm effect that he’s got going on and tried to reproduce it. W/o the live action component unfortunately.

I’ve also started looking into Maya, to expand my super basic understanding of 3D. It just seems logical because it ties in with motion graphics and live action vfx. Hell, it all ties in together. Freakin’ Mental Ray takes forever to put it’s dress and make up on. The above frame took something around ten minutes to render. pfft.

Spent monday fixing up Defective, and then some boozey life drawings.
Both went rather swimmingly.

Heez a BG of the new first act, and some nude studies.

Trying to get into Life Drawing form again. After not going to outside classes for such a long time, my skills were starting to suffer.
So the last few days i’ve been trying to draw some from a mixture of imagination, memory and soft porn. These two are starting to get.. somewhere.

Yaya, and hopefully not to jinx myself, but i’ve started a bit of work on the film for the holidays. Fuckin finally, right?
This is a hopefully a near done version of the Diner, where the climax starts to begin.

So this is Og, from that second year film that never really took off. I had a goddamn insomnia induced epiphany last night about how I could revitalise the project. Man, the temptation to just skip other work and go for this is super strong.

I’ve hit holidays, which should be pretty good. Unfortunately, i’m starting to get a bit bored at home. I know that I really should have started work on the film as soon as I got free time, but hah, fuck that. I’ll start soon, but for now i’m going to go and get some more TF2 achievements.
Oh or maybe replay Fallout 3.
Decisions, decisions.

Done and done. Going to hand this in tomorrow.
I thought uploading it at it’s larger size to vimeo would increase the picture quality, but I guess you have to be one of their $59.99 USD Plus members for those sort of high definition shennanigans. So yeah, i’m a bit pleased with how this turned out in the end, and extremely pleased with how much it taught me about AE and Motion Graphics in general.

Come to think of it, Motion Graphics is a fucking stupid term. After all, isn’t ALL animation graphics.. in motion?

Those titles in motion, here are they.

Currently working on my After FX film. It’s based around the idea of, ‘Self’. Yeeeeeeeah. So i’m making use of my camera and taking some nice photos of a few of my favourite things and places. Here is hoping that it doesn’t all cock up.
PS: You can use fractal noise for pretty much anything.