Production Updates - November 28

So even though we had thesis this Monday, I didn't bring in a thing to show. Doesn't mean I didn't have new stuff though. I was just really tired and got two hours of sleep and felt a little rebellious. Ha.

Backgrounds for The Packrat have been coming along now, and I've slowly accepted that they will all be hand-painted instead of digital. Also been tweaking out some of the story kinks I kept getting stopped for and re-laid out scenes.

Lookit all the storyboard craziness!


Good thing about all this tweaking is I believe it's making the film a tad bit shorter. Which means more room for padding and any extra animation that sneaks it.

I'm using so much paper. Thank God it's free. I grab printer paper from one of the offices on campus that gives it out since it's apparently "unusable" because of four butt-end text characters left at the top of the page when they're done printing out audits or some such nonsense. They don't get in the way at all though and I'll take a huge chunk of the freebies and get them acme punched in our equiptment office. At least it's sort of like my school is funding my film in a roundabout way!

Mmmmm dead trees.


Here's a little background I'm working on:


k thnks bai! =)

Mmmm tryptophan...

it's the TURKEY OF WONDAH!



have a great thanksgiving everyone! =)

Still here...busy as always

Not much in the updates department. The Packrat is going along a little slow and going through a few story revisions and changes, and some bigger changes like me dropping out all use of dialogue. I'm trying to get a whole scene mostly finished by Monday but I somehow doubt I'll get that far done.

Working a bit too on some freelance for Asterisk, Inc. inbetweening on a feature they got a few minutes or so of to work on. That's going well but it's suuuuch a detailed character. Thank God I'm only inbetweening.

I'm excited for New Years this year. I'll most likely be going to the grandest New Years party ever. Check it out at

www.scythianmusic.com

. Scythian is perhaps one of the grandest bands out there kids. I can't say it enough. Though some of my friends hate that. =D

Feeling Crappy

For about a week now. Good remedy: search "puppies" on YouTube...

Coloring Scare

So I hit a big roadblock recently when I was asked to put together a color test using a shot in my thesis film this past week.

Wow, a lot harder than I thought.

Now I can spend hours or days musing over colors in an illustration, but I have well over 100 shots to layout and make bg's for...though some I'll be reusing, and some will be very simple and quick. So I don't have days to spend on each bg, and barely a few hours each really to meet a deadline next semester.

My first color test looked like this:



Bleh. It's nice and clean and professional looking, yeah. But pretty bland I was told. And I really started to see it afterwards. It only took me around 45 min to complete this one...but it shows. I was proud of getting it done fast, because I want to breeze through color without much of a thought and have a fully colored film. That's a big mistake though. I hate the way this is colored now. It's pretty flat, and the colors are really typical. My thesis professor pointed out how it looked too nice, too predictable, and others commented on how it was just looking like "another student film". I didn't want to think about color because I didn't want to make a statement in revolutionary looks or anything, but now I realize that if I don't pay attention to it at all, my whole film can suffer.

So I've been musing over color all evening, and practically at the point of pulling all my hair out. I'm without a tablet at the moment so I'm doing everything by hand. It was a real struggle at first, dabbling in watercolor again and getting it to look just right. I didn't know what kind of colors to use really, to make a scene...a mood...a good environment.

Then I finally came up with this one:



A ton better I feel. More texture too (at least for the bg), which I want to show in the film. Maybe not exactly what the final look will be, but a much nicer mix of color (not to mention an actual style now that might work a ton nicer with my animated characters). It's kinda Calvin and Hobbes - ish, but I like it. It was a lot easier to mix colors you wouldn't normally use for areas right on paper. We'll see how this goes more this week later...

By the way...John K happens to be ranting and raving about color uses in cartoons over at his blog...which I highly reccommend everyone check out. It's quite a nice coincidence that he happens to be talking about color right at this point and time. =)

Doodles and Such

As such things go...=) Some doodles of Peridot (that's her name sillies):



and my thesis movie poster! everyone loves posters!



this means my film is pretty much moving up from pre-production to production. exciting!

I suck so bad...

I hate art history. Really. Very very sick of it. I just can't seem to get the hang of taking it for, oh, 3+ YEARS OF SCHOOL here. And that's not including how many times I'm retaking a few of them. =(

I had a midterm for it today. I studied pretty last minute but was doing ok on the ID's. It's the essays that were killing me. Strange thing is they usually don't. I just totally went blank though a little more than halfway through. This is what I did for maybe 40% of the time spent on the test:



horray for spaceships and dragons! sorry...but they're just way cooler than Neoclassicism. Take THAT David!

I also kept doodling myself on the exam booklet doing things like stabbing myself in the head with a pencil and hanging myself at the end of it. They were kinda funny actually...I hope my professor doesn't have me call some help hotline.

Hrm...well at least I'm going to go see Bill Plympton's Hair High tonight and hang out with some cool peeps. Maybe that'll cheer me up. Maybe.

Website Blues

So, sorry if you guys ran smack dead into this but the website is down for a bit until I pay for more bandwidth. Aye be a poor college student and hafta scrape me together a few dubloons to get it back up for this month. Hopefully this will be soon. Peace.

Agony and Torture!

i finally get in the mood to start animating...with all my new gear...and i can't find my pegbar. anywhere.

=(

Theatre Jessica presents....

...some youtube favorites. On friday the 13th waaauuughhhdsljfkdifoda! =D





and of course, footage of a 99 year old master. he'll kick all yer arses.

Too tired right now...

...so....really I've just been too tired/busy/lazy to really keep up with updates on here, what I've been drawing, etc. But I did get to build my desk finally last night to put on the most beautiful hand-crafted animation table made for me:



haha drawing in progress up there ^

Keep in mind, I did NOT make the piece on top. Mister Lee Rubenstein's dad was wonderful enough to make one for me (with payment of course...though I feel like I robbed him for such awesome handiwork). I just build the shoddy-looking table underneath. But I'm so happy though...my very first animation disk and desk. The lightbox has now officially retired. =D

Also, Ottawa and Orlando were a blast this past month of roaming around the country. I put more accurate updates on those two trips on my portfolio website, which I finally got up and running: www.jessica-plummer.com. There's pictures too, yaaaay. Everyone likes pictures!

I've been drawing a bit...started memory sketching. I'm just...yeah, too lazy to put them up yet. Want to color them actually. Been coloring a bit.

Yay.

Convention Updates

Some of you may already know that I'm heading up to Ottawa tomorrow for the International Animation Festival. Fellow Pratt students and I attended last year, and we obviously had a spectacular experience last year, since we're setting aside the time and money to go once again. Hope to run into some fabulous animators and such up there. Not to mention running into the parties that happen to be going on....

I also have a scheduled trip to head back to Orlando first week of October. I've just recently applied to become a member of the NCN, because their annual convention will be held that week for their organization. I originally wanted to go backto Orlando in the first place to take advantage of the resources around home for voice recording, but hey...when there's a caricature convention conveniently going on at the same time down there, who wouldn't pass that up!? Heheheh.

Sharing some Classics

I was oogling over some old Disney cartoons with Dan recently on good ol' YouTube, and just wanted to share one of my favorites. Disney had such a spark back then making shorts like these. Their studios really had balls. And yeah, not like today at all.

This is one of those awesome examples for most creative use of animated cycles. Haha. I die laughing at the end every time. Lol whale.

The New Beast

Bwahaha, the Monster has arrived. Well it actually came Friday, but I'm just now getting around to showing it off. This was my back-to-school present for the year, and probably my early Christmas present...for a good couple Christmases to follow. Hahaha. Nice new slick PC notebook, with a gig of ram and 80 gigs of diskspace. More than enough for senior year's work. Next to it is the good old Millenium Falcon (so dubbed by me in numerous jokes about the old thing). My friends joked that they wanted to hold a fundraiser for me to get me a new computer when I brought that thing into class one day. Another friend wanted me to take a bat to it. It nearly died last year. I'll admit, it pulled off some amazing feats of usage, and I'm still pretty suprised I was able to do so much digital work on it for two years. See that white paint can behind the screen? Yeah....holding it up.

So yeah, I'm friggin flying on the new one. Pure bliss. =D

Yay Pratt!

So now school's begun, the last trek before the big leap into the wide world of work. Well, not like we don't work our butts off here at school. Some strange feeling I get tells me that real work will be full of a lot less BS work than there is here...

I started the year off quite shakey. Lost my wallet first day of class (and now, funny thing, I seem to have lost it in my room), and then my wildlife hero Steve Irwin passes away. I loved that man very much. It was one of my life goals to meet him.

That aside though, my senior class animators and I are really digging into our thesis films, and for some of us...reality is hitting hard. I'm having a bit of trouble wondering where I am going to get voices for a little boy character. Then again, some of my friends here do frighteningly good little boy voices...

More production updates later, but for now, here's Gary. Gary looses his teddy. Gary's in my film ^-^.



Also, I finally got an email back from the artist's alley staff for the NYC comic con, with an application and everything. Let's hope that goes well.

Wizard World Chicago, 2006

So in an attempt to look like I update here more than I really do, I'll make a few posts individually covering what I've been doing for the past month. Heh.

Attending the Wizard World comic convention this year was a blast, and I had a lot of fun being introduced into the convention scene (as well as being introduced to two of the fine young Sketch Tavern members). It was a great experience, selling prints and sketchbooks for the first time (and I was suprised how well the books sold). I helped work the booth for The Sketch Tavern, and work with two of their artists, Dan Schoening and Tim Kelley, as well as Tim's friend Ian Seniff. All three were great guys, and we all felt like old friends after only a couple days. Much comic antic-ing and Denny's eatery-ing followed suit, of course.

I even got to churn up some commission sketches, my favorite ones being for a very friendly member of The Disney Club, who was commissioning several artists at the convention to draw their own versions of Disney characters that he would pick for them. I found it quite neat that he prefered all this original art collecting rather than his peers, who all just drone into the mass-reproduced cel art in their homes. My favorite one I drew was a Tinkerbell.



So since Chicago was such a great convention experience, I'm attempting to get a booth at the second annual NYC Comic Con at the Jacob Javits Center in February. Apparently it was a super hot venue last year in its debut, so I'm definitally crossing my fingers that I get a table!

Summer so far....

So...trying to get myself up and running with websites and publications...hopefully soon will have some of my work in print to really be able to sell myself, even still being in school. Never hurts to start now!

Right after classes ended I was up and out in LA attending the coveted E3 convention, as a reward for my hard work illustrating in a contest. Had a blast hanging with all the artist out there in the most suped-up gaming environment ever (even though the most advanced thing I own personally is an original 1989 Nintento Gameboy...that I've even been recently playing...). After that, going home and crashing was on the agenda. I've been pretty non-existant to most of the world.

But I've got some projects in my scope. Some are underway (a bit of design work and flash animation for an up-and-coming virtual pet site), as well as some publication offers I've just gotten. Yes, I'm still an animator, but it's a ton of fun getting into illustration and comics. Plus, it's paying me right now!

Also, August 3-5 is the Wizard World Comic Convention in Chicago, where I got a generously offered spot at an artist's table, so I'm gearing up to sell work there for the first time ever. Should be exciting, and I'm making sure I come super prepared.

Under Construction

I have just added this site to my list of many ones involved with portfolio sharing, but at the moment it will be unavaliable for regular art until I get this gorram thing lookin cool.

-=jess=-