Playing with After Effects

This took me a lot longer than my brain led me to believe it would.

 

All After Effects masks with some super subtle puppet tool. Maybe a little too subtle... Also some drop shadows. Ooooo~                         

SPREAD THE WORD: HARLEY'S AN ARTIST

Today is the last day of my school's Interim, which is basically a short period before classes start where you have to take a two week intensive workshop in your program. Of course, Experimental Animation was the only program in the school of Film/Video to have an Interim session, and since I only have two classes in my program this semester so I can get my Critical Studies out of the way before I start working on my thesis film, I had most of my normal classes in addition to an Interim workshop. I'm not complaining, though- this class was awesome. I not only learned a lot, but I can now add many more items to my list of things to think about while setting up a shot, animating, or planning my next film. Also today we get free pizza. Any teacher that ends a class with free pizza knows what they're doing.

As a result of this workshop I got to make probably the best 25 seconds I will ever produce. BEHOLD!- my first ever "serious" film-thing (does 25 seconds count as a film?). Up until now I just wanted to make people (and, frankly, myself) laugh, with stop motion as the most fun way of accomplishing this, but now I have successfully made something "pretty." It was a lot of fun, and I love that I was able to make something like this, but animating for laughs is my true passion, so now that Interim is done I'm going to return to my Marshmallow brethren.

Extremely Photoshopped still!

Side-note: I still have another major project hanging over my head aside from my telling of the Great Marshmallow/Chocolate Bar War, so I haven't been doing a lot of work that I can post here like drawings that I'm happy with or cute sewn things and whatnot. I have instead resorted to writing long blog posts which comes kind of easy to me and covers up the fact that I don't have much else to put here... Walls of text describing how I feel about my work and what I've been doing lately are a great way to take up space and act like I'm being productive, but that's not necessarily what I want on this blog. Soon, I hope, I will be posting more production shots, animation tests, and drawings and the like. I want this place to be more about visuals than writing fancy posts saying that I've been doing stuff to try and prove that I have been. I guess it's better than ignoring this place altogether, but more actually arty things are coming soon!
I'll still be writing those posts about past stuff that I talked about in my first post, and those will have walls of text because they are more about the stories than the product.

I'm still writing my novel-book-thing! Hopefully it'll be done sometime this summer, but in the meantime I might print up some previews to give out to those who ask very nicely. Stay tuned!

Ah, how the time goes.

I've unearthed some stuff from my first year at CalArts, and uploaded six new videos to my Vimeo.

This gem is from my first semester, and was my first time working with hinged cut-out puppets. I had done back-lit shadow puppet cut-outs before, but this was a little more audacious for me. It was a lot of fun, but I think it came out pretty flat. I would love to try some forced perspective stuff with a multiplane system.

Looking back at these videos I realize how much I've learned in such a comparatively short amount of time. I can't believe how fast my years at CalArts are going... hopefully I can continue to make the most of it.



Speaking of which, our extremely talented character animators held their annual gallery show last night, which consisted of gorgeous work surrounding a mob of people lined up for their free caricatures. Here is my face as depicted by the hilarious Yon Hui:

I can't believe how quick and effortlessly this and many others came out. Well done, Character! I can't wait for what you have in store for next year.

THE WAR RAGES ON

Let's talk about S'mores.

Few people know the true history behind this classic campfire treat, but it's time this old yet important chapter in confectionery history be brought to the world's attention. It was a terrible time of unnecessary violence and anguish, a time long forgotten and buried under the destruction of war. Too many good men had chocolate syrup on their hands, and it would leave a guilt that would haunt them for the rest of their lives. The cause was important and many thought it to be good and true, but it led to the fall of a nation, once powerful and towering high above the rest of the candy industry, now damaged by the suffering of war. This is not, however, a story of mistakes made by fallible minds corroded by sucrose, but of understanding and the first glimmer of hope and peace that brought an end to that terrible war of 1937. This is the story, of a short-lived but powerful and inspiring friendship.

Coming soon to a Bijou near me, a Harley Scroggins production will grace the silver screen, although it's really more of a beige at this point.

As my second year film enters the animation stage, it seems more of a reality and simultaneously excites and terrifies me. Here's hoping for smooth sailing! (I say as my set performs a daring act of spontaneous combustion and my puppets run far, far away to join the circus.)

Stop motion is a wonderful thing.

It's time intensive and sometimes painful, but boy howdy is it fun. I'm currently building a puppet for a SUPER SECRET PROJECT in the works, and the armature is mostly done. Marvel at its beauty:

Low res more like BRO RES AM I RIGHT?

Also thank you, Barbie, for making my life so much easier.

Thumbs up for altered Barbie clothes and badass signs that have my name on them!

And thus I enter the world of animation...

I'm officially rebooting this blog, since I've never kept up with it or any of the others I've tried to start. I think my problem is that I was thinking about it all wrong-- I somehow got it in my head that an art blog should only be new, finished material. I considered it to be a portfolio, rather than what it really is; it's about the process, inspirations, random thoughts, and activities that all go into making my art. Once I get my portfolio up and running, it will become a completely separate tab like my animation and resume. This part of my internet presence is not necessarily for my professional work, but for what makes me a person and excites me, things that I want to share with others about my work or random occurrences around me. So, something I'm going to start doing either weekly, monthly, or just whenever the mood strikes me, is revisiting past projects. I want to bring them back up to the surface and explore them in a hopefully witty and informative manner. So I invite you, all three people reading this, to join me on a beautiful journey through the inner-workings of what brought me to where I am today. Laugh with me, cry with me, stress with me and feel my pain, the pain of not knowing what I was doing when making short films of the animated variety. We'll start with my very first, a stop motion film created in 2009; Batspork.

Batspork was the result of a wonderful class taught at LA Mission college in Sylmar, CA by the one and only Shayne Hood. In this class you learn many Experimental Animation techniques, and some accidental history along the way. Your final project is to create a short animated piece, and with this knowledge I decided to figure out a way to make every assignment in the class relate to what I wanted my final to be, so in the end I could combine everything into a longer, more intricate piece; a music video for Octopus's Garden by The Beatles. It was the third to final class, and the next class time was to be dedicated to shooting the final installments of this piece, when I remembered a funny picture I had seen on the internet, probably through a Neopets forum. The image was a spork with the middle tines broken and a caption saying "My spork thinks it's Batman." Suddenly, imagination ablaze, I feverishly scribbled storyboards for what I thought to be the most brilliant and comical piece of entertainment known to man. I spent the next week gathering material, trying to find sound clips online that could build a coherent story, and I used my class time slot on one of three animation stations to make this beauty come to life. At home I edited the animation to fit the sound clips and anxiously exported the footage, with a few minor technological hiccups along the way. They always say that the best films have the most production complications-- time restraints, low budgets, actors that are actually goats in disguise, etc. I believe wholeheartedly in this concept, as I still consider Batspork to be my finest work to this day.