jelani

January 26, 2009
0

(Flip Book) Baby in a Blender

Posted by | ITP, Methods of Motion | No Comments

So the idea was to make a flip book. At first I was going to take Ken from street fighter and do his shoryuken finisher. Then I realized that this is a flip book and that the animation is probably only going to last about 6 second. So… brainstoming time.

I let my brain have at it and the logical progression was thus:

Shroyuken = martial arts = punching = the point of impact of a fist on an object = fist to face = face getting blown off by force of punch, leaving a skull = baby-in-a-blender.

So I’m in the process of making a baby-in-a-blender flipbook that will be title’d “Impact.” Sounds good eh?

So I’ve storyboarded and timed it out in my head and I think I’ll do it by hand in pencil. I’ll use a soft pencil to trace out broad outlines, a softer one to fill and color’d pencils for the blood n stuff.

i’ll post the results once i’ve finished it.

January 26, 2009
0

Waltz w/ Bashir

Posted by | General, Methods of Motion | No Comments

So I saw Waltz with Bashir a few weeks ago and I have to admit, I was impressed. Setting the story aside, the animation was beautiful. Very crisp and clear and a mix of different styles were used to great effect.

I was actually pretty disappointed at the end of the movie. I think they were trying to go for some sort of shock value, but they failed in that. I actually got more emotion from the scene right before the end where he’s walking through the sea of mourning women than from the real footage. But that’s the only place where I felt the movie failed. The storyline was very engaging.

January 22, 2009
0

Spirit Animal

Posted by | Animals, People, and those In-Between | No Comments

The spirit animal is a guide. It appears different for any given person and interacts with each person in a different way. My task this week was to represent it.

So how to go about doing that? The spirit animal is thought by some to be a piece of your soul. A person’s soul can also be represented by their shadow. Someone without a shadow could be considered souless. So I’ve represented my spirit animal through my shadow.

I chose a spider… or a monkey… or a spider-monkey. Really, a trickster animal. Kind of like Anansi, who can be a man, a spider or a monkey. Sometimes all 3.

January 16, 2009
0

4-in4: My favorites.

Posted by | ITP | No Comments

Unfortunately, not everyone who participated blogged about their work, so I didn’t get to see it all, but here are are my favorite projects from the blog.

  • Daniel’s glowing pickle. I saw him playing around with it live. It was pretty cool to watch.
  • Lieje’s tesellation. It’s a cat! It’s a dog! It’s super squirrel! It’s pretty cool is what.
  • Ben and Alex build a Rube Goldberg Machine. This is pretty sweet. I like how they ended it with the camera shutter being triggered. Watch the video.
  • Adam’s key frequency analysis. The visualization on this is really nice. In an earlier version he just had a bar graph but it’s alot easier to read this data. This would make a nice app to run as a background for your desktop or something.
  • Lieje’s 5th element make up thingy. Because any project that references the 5th element has got to be gold. I really want to go rewatch that movie right now.
  • Matt’s diamond art. This really appealled to me. I saw him working on it and was hoping he’d go with his idea of poking the lights through the holes on the bottom, but it seems like he had problems with them falling out. The spiral thing is ok too though.

    • Read More

January 15, 2009
0

4-in-4 (Day 3): Storytime

Posted by | ITP | 4 Comments

Below is an excerpt of the story I did for Day 3. Download the full version here.


i to rule the world.
the winds to rule the next.
ground break and sweep
the remnants into the crack.

Boy woke up and shivered under the covers. He had to pee. It was the night time. Time for stillness and sleepings. Carefully, he pulled down the covers, bare feet quiet on the floor. Slowly, slowly he crept to the door. It hurt, the cold wood on his feet, but speed meant noise and if caught it would mean extra beatings at punishment time. Almost there, he looked down at Fat Girl; her chest rising up and down. This was good; if she woke up she would tell. She always got extra servings at feeding time.

No lights. No washing hands. No flush. He was careful to spray against the side of the bowl where the water would make less sound. Relieved, he started back. Slowly, slowly bare feet on cold floor. A hand grabs his wrist.

Fat Girl smiles, small teeth white and strong. Her other hand stretches out, stubby fingers palm up. He shivered. He’d seen other kids in this position. She wanted a gift or she’d scream loud and painful. Then the beatings would come. Hard and fast. If you were lucky. If the Captain wasn’t on duty. And if he hadn’t been drinking.

January 15, 2009
0

4-in-4 (Day 2): Sweet music

Posted by | ITP | No Comments

Today I chose to finally write a full song. I’m relatively satisfied with the results. When I started in the morning, I wanted a more relaxed piece, but over the day the music took on a life of its own. I had to starte over from scratch twice.

Download 4in4mix.mp3

I’m not really too happy with the beginning of the song but I really like the middle and end.

January 15, 2009
0

4-in-4 (Day 1): Comic – Happy Story / Sad Story

Posted by | ITP | No Comments

On Day 1 I wrote a full comic/manga. It took longer than I thought it would, though it did get faster as i got more familiar with both my Bamboo tablet and Manga Studio (both great tools to use in this sort of thing).

I finally have something decentish to add to the art page on my website.

Here’s the content, after you read it then you can optionally look at the after paragraph to see if what you read matches with what I was trying to go for.

So my goal for this project was to create a comic that doesn’t really rely on words to tell the story. The images should (hopefully be) clear enough to relay the storyline. I considered using splashes of red to portray blood, but red is a tough color to work with. When I tried shading with it, it tended towards pink, and I didn’t really feel like going with the darker reds. I like how the story ended up. Hopefully my drawing gets better over time as there are some important story details that could be missed if I don’t draw them properly in later chapters.

January 15, 2009
0

4 in 4: Intro

Posted by | ITP | No Comments

So I worked on the 4-in-4 event at ITP. My projects can be seen at the official website here, plus I’ll also post them on here in a bit. I really enjoyed working on all of these projects. I havn’t had a chance to do any of this stuff in a while.

January 09, 2009
0

Felix the Cat

Posted by | General | No Comments

Ever since the collections services cracked down on the number of stray dogs roaming the streets in brooklyn (seriously, i havn’t seen a stray dog in over 3 years!), the number of stray cats has risen tremendously. Were the dogs eating the cats before this? Or perhaps it was a lack of food resources with both cats and dogs roaming around? Anyway, the stray cat population has gone up. I suspect this is also because it’s alot harder to catch a cat than a dog.

Which brings me to Felix. Felix is the name I’ve given to a black and white stray cat that roams around the block I live. Felix has an obsession with my garage. I suspect this is because it’s cold outside and my garage exudes heat. So every so often, as I’m outside sweeping up leaves and the random garbage that passerbys feel is OK to drop in my space, along comes Felix.

His usual pattern is to watch me, and then slowly, cat-like, slip past or behind me when I’m not looking and into the garage. Or rather, that’s what he would do if I weren’t vigilant like a hawk. He’s gotten past me once without me noticing. I just saw the end of his tail dissapear under the old broken-down Bug that’s sitting in there. I was in a rush that morning so I just closed the door and forgot about it.

Now, I usually enter and exit my place through the garage every day, so I expected he’d leave after a day. Nope! 4 days later Felix finally pokes his head out, looking all kinds of weak and waits for me to turn my back before finally leaving. I saw him again today. He tried to get in again. I really wanna take a picture of him as he tries to sneak past. It’s hilariously cute.