GUARD FROG

Happy belated Halloween and Thanksgiving. I hope everyone enjoyed the holidays. I spent thanksgiving with a bunch of friends from school who like me, live too far away from family to make the trip this year. I got to eat some good home cooking (something I haven't had in ages) and afterward we all had a hell of a good time playing the new Nintendo Wii system. A couple of the guys at school were fortunate enough to score these game systems on launch day, but they had to camp out to get them. The rest of the holiday weekend was spent back at school... work, work, work.

Life here is blazing by at a ridiculous pace. Time is rapidly ticking away on our 4th block project. Just a quick refresher, the whole class is working together to make a short animated film called "Creepers." We've been working on it since the end of September and we're down to just two weeks until our deadline on December 8. The remaining two weeks of the block will be spent making our demo reels. You can check out other 4th block projects that past classes have made here.

I still can't really say anything about the movie, but it's going well. It's fairly common for 4th block classes to miss their deadline and have to continue working on it up until and sometimes even after graduation. My class still has a lot of work ahead of us, but we appear to be on track to just barely meet the deadline. When this is all over, I think the movie will be pretty cool.

This certainly hasn't been easy, and the hours I'm putting in to the project, on top of my time at work have left me completely exhausted. I even got sick a few weeks ago and was breaking out into cold sweats with a fever of 103. I've just never been so physically drained... ever. I get up every morning at 7:00 and I usually don't get home from work/school until 1:00 a.m. I'm honestly concerned about what the long-term effects of prolonged sleep deprivation may be. Seriously, if someone knows anything about this, shoot me an e-mail. I'd really like to know.

On a completely different note, I was woken up several nights ago by a sound at my bedroom window that kind of sounded like "thwap!" I can normally sleep through a train wreck, but this was enough to wake even me up. I looked out my window and didn't see anything. I thought maybe it was a bird or just a palm leaf smacking against my window. I decided to hit the bathroom and while I was in there I heard another sound. I again looked out the window and found nothing. Little did I know that the sound was actually something hitting the inside of my window, not the outside.

By now I was wide awake, so I sat down in the living room and turned on the tv. A few minutes later, I heard another strange thwack sound. I turned on the lights and found that a frog was on my wall. And this was not just any frog, this was my 'Guard Frog.'

Back in February I posted a couple of pictures of a small frog that was sitting on the railing right by my front door. Well, since then, he has grown, and I see him all the time in nearly the same spot - as if he were waiting for me to come home, and protecting me from insects. I figure he must have gotten in a couple of nights earlier when the pizza in my oven set off my smoke alarm and I had the doors open to air the place out.

I like frogs, especially this one, and so I didn't want to hurt it. So, for the next two hours, I chased this frog all around my apartment and tried to trap him in a small box. He stayed pretty high, jumping from one wall to another, and even tried to camouflage himself in my fake tree. I got close to him several times, but every time I thought I had him, he'd jump away and just laugh at me.

Around 5:00 a.m., he zigged and I zagged, and finally I caught him. But once I got him outside and into the grass, he didn't want to get out of the box. Crazy! I seriously think frog catching could be a new Olympic event. It would certainly be more entertaining to watch than synchronized swimming.

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THREE DOWN

Friday was the last day of Block 3 at school. To me, this felt like the fastest block yet. The last two projects I did were definitely the most fun. The first was a project where we were to put ourselves into a locked-off camera shot from a feature film. I went with one of my old favorites, "Beetlejuice." I put on a monkey suit and was filmed in front of a green screen. I then had to key out the background, match the film grain, colors, lighting (and lightning) as best I could. I'm the guy on the right that throws his glass into the hole.

The final project for Block 3 was to design and model a robot and comp it into live footage. We were each assigned a different task for our robot to perform. I was assigned the task of window washer. We each then had to come up with a brief story (15 to 20 seconds), write a script, draw storyboards, and then shoot the scene in hi-def over at Universal. We had to have two shots, one locked down, and one in motion. Originally the two humans in my scene had a line of dialog each, but the quality of the recorded audio was not good and so I made the decision to cut their lines completely.

Rather than doing keyframe animation for the robot, we used a motion capture system. This is where a person wearing a specially designed suit with motion sensors all over it, performs the actions on a stage and that movement data is recorded and applied to my robot model. I still had to tweek some of the movement by hand, but the mo-cap system gives you a really good head start.

And then of course there's the difficult task of matching the lighting, the color saturation, shadows, reflections, etc. The robot has to look like it was really standing there when the scene was filmed. The final touch was adding some dirt to the window and then removing it frame by frame to give the appearance that the robot was wiping it away.

As a joke for the class, I made a second version of the scene with alternate dialog. Check it out here.

So, with that all behind me, tomorrow I start Block 4. This is the big one. This is the whole reason I'm here. Block 4 is where the whole class works together in a production environment to make a short film in three months. The school takes these films very seriously. My two instructors for the class are both Emmy award winners for visual effects, and the quality of work they're going to expect will be nothing less than top notch.

Sometimes these films are live action with a lot of visual effects and sometimes they are complete CG animated shorts. I've seen the script and the storyboards for our project, and it's a pretty cool little animated short story. Just as with a real feature production, until it's released, I'm not going to be able to talk about the story or show any images from it. It's possible that the school will release some information on it at some point, and if they do I'll post links to that.

This project is no small task. In order to get this done, we're going to have to work day and night. It wasn't easy juggling work and school for the last three blocks, and the prolonged sleep deprivation has really taken it's tole on me. Our deadline is just a few days before Chirstmas, and while that may seem far off, with the amount of work ahead of us, that seems frighteningly close.

So, to all those who read this, and who I communicate with regularly, please don't be surprised or offended if you don't hear from me for the next three months. This project will determine my future and it is going require 100 percent of my focus and energy.

Wish me luck.

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SUMMER 2006

Remember me? Yes, the summer has come and gone, and I haven't posted a single word in three months. Can I really be that busy? Yes, yes I am.

Somewhere down the road when the dust clears and I look back, I think I'll be able to safely say that 2006 was the busiest year of my life. Considering the hours I put in when I lived in DC, that's really saying a lot. These are very long days for me, but I'm not complaining, because I'm very happy with the body of work I've produced at school in the last eight months. Sure, it hasn't been easy, but it's been a whole lot of fun... and the best is still yet to come.

It's been a great summer, and although I'm completely exhausted at this point, I'm still very happy with my decision to move down here and go to animation school. The days are long. I'm averaging about five hours of sleep a night and as unhealthy as that is, I'm making it through each day. Sadly I have to neglect a lot of things like updating this site and keeping in touch with my friends. It seems like the turnaround time on each e-mail I get is about two weeks. That's not cool.

There's been a lot going on this summer. Work has been really busy, but we're now finishing up some really big projects. On the 4th of July, I was able to stand on my balcony and in the distance, see the space shuttle launch (see photo above). I also traveled with the school to Boston to attend the Siggraph computer graphics conference (and returned to Orlando to a dead car battery). And then last weekend, two friends took me to Disney World for my birthday. It was soooo hot, but it was a lot of fun!

And then of course there's the work I've done for school. I'm now just a few weeks away from the end of the third block (quarter). The focus of this block is on compositing, realistic lighting, particle effects, and camera tracking. We've done a lot of little assignments that get us familiar with the software and the many techniques we need to know for the remaining larger projects. Most of our focus so far has been on how to composite 3d elements that we make into real video or film footage. Most of these don't hold up very well when you seen them as shrunken, compressed clips, but here are a few samples:

Ninja Chick: This was the final project from Block 2. It was a pure character animation assignment using low-polygon models. The assignment was to animate her getting to the top of the rock wall.

AT-AT Missile: We had an assignment early in the block where we had to hit our Imperial Walker with a missile. I'm now messing with this project on my own, trying to get an accurate walk. The feet still need a lot of work.

MiniMates: This was a really fun project. We were given video footage of a small computer monitor with lots of little MiniMate toys standing on the monitor. Our job was to add and animate two more toys to the scene and make them look as if they were really in the original video footage.

Robot Walk: This is a test for our current assignment. We each had to design and model a robot for a specific task. My robot is a window washer, so he has a squeege for a hand. We each had to come up with a brief story and pitch it to the class in the form of storyboards. We are now about to shoot our own video footage and we will comp our robots into the scene. This is a test to see how the robot will fit into a real scene.

Hopefully it won't be another three months before I post another update, but with my schedule you just never know. To all those who I've neglected over the past eight months, thanks for your patience and thanks for sticking with me.

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