Where did I go?

So easy to fall off the internet when you’ve got your nose too close to the grindstone. Lots has been happening. Art, Animation and the usual. I keep my personal blog ( http://dv-girl.livejournal.com ) updated far more frequently than this one. For the most part, I’ve been working on music, sewing, and traditional art (DeviantArt gallery has a link over on the right)

Here’s a bad webcam photo of some beadwork I did recently. (Just the necklace for the ocarina, I’m afraid, not the other necklace) Though speaking of photos, I met Michael Olsen of ZorkMagazine last night at an event for the Timothy Leary archive and he snapped a couple photos of me. His photos of the event can be found here. Met a lot of really amazing and fascinating people there. For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been downloading tons of video off archive.org to put together a retrospective of the late Dr. Leary. I’ll post some updates on this blog when there’s more to show.

Book Review

If you love making animation and haven’t yet heard of the AnimationPodcast, let me strongly recommend it.  http://www.animationpodcast.com  Terrific host, guests, and content.

Clay’s most recent guest, Eric Goldberg has a new book out titled, Character Animation Crash Course

Since I’d just come off a long animation hiatus and my character animation has always been stiff, I bought a copy and the hardest thing has not been just ripping through it cover to cover.

This is the absolute best book I’ve ever read on character animation.  His style of writing is easy to read, his examples clear, and it just makes everything click for me in a way that it really hadn’t before.

Curiously, before getting his book, I’d decided to take a stripped down character and re-animate him doing the same ‘take’ over and over in different ways to convey character, emotion, etc.  In his book, Goldberg had taken this exercise one step further, starting and ending with the same pose and doing different in-betweens.  Very good stuff.

I’m also really appreciating his information on timing.  I’ve long understood timing in a strictly mathematical and mechanical sense.  I can graph parabolas like nobody’s business, and I understand how they relate to good motion, but it hadn’t clicked.  I had all the right steps in there but it was still stiff and mechanical.

Somewhere between reading Goldberg’s book and freeze-framing through Clampett animation, it all just suddenly clicked and, like Victor Frankenstein, I now feel as if my corpses have been brought to life!

Two thumbs up!  (But four frames apart to avoid twinning!)

Fantasy Worlds of Samantha

Vist my DeviantArt Gallery

After a long interlude, I’m finally returning to doing some animation. In the interim, I’ve largely been working on still art, writing, and sewing.

One of the many projects I created during this hiatus was the creation of a fantasy blog. Rather than post art and stories with the continual disclaimer of ‘This is just make believe.’, I created a blog where faeries are real and the writer lives in a strange world. The writing still takes the form of short stories but for some reason, the framework of living in a world of fantasy helps me bypass a form of writer’s block that would otherwise impair the work.

So. Hang on! Animation is coming soon and in the meanwhile, how about a story? Please check out my fantasy worlds with The deviant spirit, wanderer of the twilight worlds at http://dvnt-spirit.livejournal.com

Adobe Premiere CS3 Product Review

Premiere was the first serious video editing application I used, starting with versin 4 around 1996ish and as such, it holds a special place in my heart. We’ve had some good times together. I was very disappointed when MacOS-X came out and Premiere was not ported to it and for years afterwards, I faithfully ran it in Classic mode, right up until my purchase of an IntelMac.

Happily, Premiere has returned for the Mac. I purchased the CS3 production suite and paid a visit to my old friend.

Godzilla: Guest of Honor

Work on the Godzilla project is now complete, though perhaps not exactly what I’d ideally have liked. There were a number of problems with the shoot itself stemming mostly from the green screen being too small and outdoors with a short shooting schedule and some costume problems. However, aside from a few problems with the screen and enough jump-cuts to make any film student cringe, it came off reasonably well.

NaNoWriMo

November is national novel writing month. What the heck! I’ve done a fair bit of writing in the form of short stories and scripts for my animation. This seems like a fun new venue to try out. In addition, it should generate material that I may be able to use for a podcast I’ve been considering setting up some day soon. (More on that when it develops) In the meanwhile, if you are looking for me in November, you can probably find me over at NaNoWriMo as DV_Girl

Doing NaNoWriMo yourself? I’d love a peer group and support network! Friend me!

Current Events in the Studio

The past couple of weeks have been an exciting time. I was contacted by a Kaiju group to help them film their next Battle Royale! They’re fun people and they really enjoyed the quick sound-editing job I did on one of their live battles. It turned out, they also needed a director and storyboard artist, so I’ve been running through pages of layout and screen writing.

“Kaiju?” you ask? Men in monster suits smashing buildings! Click that link and watch!

When I’m not playing fangirl to the biggest monster movie star ever, I am still keeping busy! I’ve done a lot of still-art lately. (Check the DeviantArt and FurAffinity links to the right) And, thanks to the encouragement of podcasts like Michael Stackpole’s The Secrets and Mur Lafferty’s I Should Be Writing I decided it was time to dust off some stories, edit or finish them and send them out for submission. My first submission Thylacine went out last night and more will soon be on the way.

I’ve also taken on a project to try to help a friend finish an ashcan comic, AND I’m going to finish that hideous baby animation that’s been sitting on the corner of my animation desk for the past two years! Really! I mean it!

Dozens of other things in the queue, but let’s get through these first! At any rate… I should be writing.

Hey Kids! We’re going to Disneyland!

Flash animated slideshow

I’d never been to Disneland before. The lines are incredibly long! Ride-queues are a great place to get a lot of drawing done and I made dozens of tiny sketches. When I got home, I decided to color all the little drawings and make a slide show of my trip. Much more fun than taking photographs! Please keep your hands and feet in the ride at all times and enjoy your trip through the wonderful world of my head!

PHP… Meet Flash!

PHP is really cool! For a long time, I’ve had little directories that were full of short animations that weren’t really great enough to post about or put in my main animation archive but were fun enough that I wanted to keep them. Rather than make a database to maintain them, I just threw together a PHP script that looks for stuff with the same names and creates a web page for it. Better yet. I made it smart enough to recognize flash animation and create HTML for it on the fly if it didn’t have some specific requirement. Keen, and a lot less hassle!

So. Here’s a couple of directories of weird little bits!

Artist’s Ambush Entries The Artist’s Ambush is a weekly get-together I sometimes join. The original idea was: A topic is created, you have 30 minutes to draw something based on it. I decided to be even MORE insane and try animating a concept in the same 30 minutes. I’ve had varying levels of success. You can find more on the Ambush at this location.

Flash Class Oooh! Holdovers from my school days taking a Flash class. Of course, it was never any fun just doing the required assignments so I always did additional weird and crazy stuff. Have a look.

Bunnies Like to be Counted

This is just a little short I did in a couple of hours. A friend posted this audio clip online and I felt compelled to animate to it. Yay for found audio!

Bunnies Like To Be Counted