Alien Babes

Fancy Goat

Attended my first life drawing class the other day, and my fancy goat made it up in the Character Animation hallway! This is a great honor. The class was extremely fun, although I don't think I could handle it every week... I'm allowed to stop by as long as there's space, so hopefully I can build up my portfolio soon!

Habby Valiumtimes d4y

Grecian Urn

Some doodles inspired by a history of theatrical design class I'm taking, scanned in and made fanciful in Photoshop. The texture is a sample image of marble tile from Home Depot. Thanks, internet!

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.