Punched Ticket

Today I was able to get my ass up and start importing everything into Blender. So far I have this: Does not look impressive whatsoever, but I am pretty happy with it. However, the bigger issue is that the animation itself is gone! I have spent an hour trying to import it into Blender in a few different ways, but it seems that I cannot get it to have a transparent background. I blame Steve Jobs. Okay, so there are two options from here: I try just one more way of importing an mp4 with a transparent background. If that don't work, I'll have to import my animation frame by frame... Fortunately, there are only 15 or so of them. Still, ew.  In addition to that, I've more or less "finished" my soundtrack for the animation and have started to work on both of the other scenes. The soundtrack is odd, and I'm not really sure I'll include it at this point, but I'm happy with how the two other scenes are looking. They should not take me long, the whole process is

"at the core of the work, I'm thinking about the edge between life and art and trying to have the viewer move in and out of it all the time. So that's something very familiar juxtaposed with something that's very unfamiliar." ( 3:15 ) An awesome professor at Columbia University's School of the Arts, Sarah Sze is a Chinese-American Installation Artist whose work ethic I find very irritating. But I'm not gonna talk about that. Rather, the biggest fascination lies within her ability to "transport and display those things deemed uninteresting, cheap, and culturally unworthy" ( All Kinds of Everything ) by utilizing all kinds of random everyday objects into her often titanic in scale installative works. In other words, Sarah Sze’s art highlights the hyperrealism of quantifying and measuring information through redefining meanings of everyday objects in abstract installation work. Sarah's work encompasses a lot of planning and spontaineity, but the

 This is a very smol update; I felt that I have not done in a while, and they are very important to me. Blog Updates help me keep myself accountable and reflect on my project's status and direction. So, here are some new things: I've made little progress on my audio! I've learned to add grooves to Ableton tracks, and it makes the song flow so much more organic... Let me know if you cannot tell a difference- I should probably change it up some more then.  [to be honest, I'm not sure if I will include this in the final project, but it is very fun to work on] I've completely finished all of the moving aspects of my 1st animation and everything else for the 1st shot. The last step is to add lighting, which will be kind of troublesome to do because I'll have to edit a ton of shots for this... So far, the whole thing took me roughly 5 hours.  An animated gif of a person (short wavy orange hair, blue crop top and jean shorts is their outfit) driving a car (no car pictu

   Picture: an image of one of Alexandra's mural works; two front pages of "The NY Times" on a very large scale, put on a red brick wall, side to side.       I am so jealous. To walk up on stage and spend the first 5 minutes of the talk causally conversing about last night's adventures with so much comfort, vulnerability, and personality... I want to do that too! Before all other things, I was so impressed by Bell's speaking ability; her introduction made me extremely excited about seeing her art much more than any more formal biography hints would. It felt that she belonged on stage, and wasn't demanding my attention at all; it was a conversation, though I only could respond with nods or laughter.          Alexandra's work centered on the issue of a "desire to hide white crime" by racializing (although it is already inherently racialized like most Western societal constructs) black crime. I found it exciting and scary that Alexandra had the cour

Working from home is never a good idea, so I just don't work when I'm home. The Reading Period was extremely delicious, but the improvements from last week are rather conceptual; my flow has been disturbed by a food poisoning, too, and only now am I getting back into the pace of weeks prior. Here's what I've got so far: caption: an animated character posed as driving a vehicle, positioned in a side view, facing right. They have short pastel orane hair, are wearing jean shorts, a triangle earring, and a crop top.  A full animated chacater is done! I might be making small edits to this in terms of timing and additional motion on clothing/feet, but that would come much later. I am trying to prioritize narrative of technical aspects, and that's still a struggle... There is a long-standing habit of doing work to become more skilled and throwing away any meaningful story in the process. Unlearning is hard, duh. With this initial stage done, I now need to put the whole thi

       After brainstorming the environments and scenarios of my simulations, I've decided that both will be set in a setting that should not  have smartphones. Using the smartphone as what defines texting and driving, it is central that this element remains as recognisable as possible. I've considered perverting the smartphone itself instead and using the act of texting + driving- looking away from the road, being distracted, having one/both hands engaged in an activity that should not be taking place (for example, a knight writing a letter while riding a horse). However, smartphone itself is a better connection to the "real" than the act of texting while driving itself, in my opinion. Altering the environment without altering the smartphone will be an interesting exploration in relative alignment with the perversion of basic realities on a dual scale.      First, my settings will be finctional, but based on already existing traditional fictional material, directly re

 This week was a bit crazy for me- I reframed my entire schedule and now have much more time to be learning and doing art (yay!). However, Week 5 was extremely busy for me academically and job-wise, and I feel behind the schedule. According to the timeline of the previous blog, this is what I have completed so far: 👍 Flour Bag Drop 👍 Ball Bounce (kind of) 👍 Simple Human Motion  👎Dialogue 👍 Full Environment Animation (WIP) 👎 Create 5 thumbnail animations depicting my narrative through keyframes  👍 Learn how to use Alight Motion 👎 👍 Learn 2D animation for Blender or DaVinci (no Blender) A reference to Simulations : it is a bit funny and frustrating to be learning all these various elements of animation. Simply because mainstream animation had established things like "ball bounce" or "flour bag" to be the pinnacles of practicing the 12 Animation Fundamentals (which also are a construct), I am now practicing them too. Are they even relevant to my final project

First, an update on my technique progress so far! A small 40-minute study from baseball (hope to make a complete animation out of it, with camera movement, background, and more movement over the weekend):  With the gears shifted, it's time to establish a clear path towards creating an animation that values narrative over demonstrating skill and proficiency. First, a rough timeline should be established: WEEK 5 Continue learning basics of animation on a daily basis Ball Bounce- Tue Simple Human Motion- Wed + Fri Flour Bag Drop- Thu Dialogue- Sat Full Environment Animation - Sun Create 5 thumbnail animations depicting my narrative through keyframes -   Blog update Learn how to use Alight Motion Learn 2D animation for Blender or  use DaVinci WEEK 6 Pick the narrative for my animation  Blog update Continue learning basics of animation base the exercises on the narrative- don't develop skills I won't utilize Finalize design choices for every scene Blog update sketches of environ