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This is a character animation piece I finished today for my motion design class. I first conceived of the concept for the piece and recorded the audio (yes, that’s me… with a little tweeking of course!). Then I went about designing the characters. The basic mouse template was sketched out and then fully digitalized / colored in illustrator. I also made the background in illustrator (Look! I can make a vanishing point!). From there it was just a matter of creating the animation in after effects. Finally, I popped in some music and sound effects to round out the piece. Overall it was a really fun little assignment to do, even though I thought it was due yesterday and was really stressing out about it (given everything else I had to do). Thus, I was quite glad to discover that it was actually due today.

The motion and flash pieces are still coming along. I’ll upload a little sample of where my flash project is going over the weekend sometime to show a little of what I’m trying to do with it. Overall though, it looks good!

Stefan, Leah and myself were involved in a great deal of work developing a style, t-shirt and banner for this large website. While we don’t have the full details (the project lead hasn’t told us yet), the client was really happy with the vast majority of what we put together and will likely use it instead of what they originally planned on using.

All in all, this is quite a happy thing and it makes everything worthwhile!

Oh, and Jessica, I’d post a picture, but I’m sure it is covered by the NDA.^^

Well, I was pleased to discover that one of my main assignments, the character animation, is not actually due till tomorrow. Huzzah! That means I’ll have more time to spend on that assignment rather than having to rush and try to just get it in under the perceived deadline (today by 6). Maybe tonight I can get an equal amount of sleep to what I’ve gotten in the last two nights combined: 7 hours.

In any case, I’ve still yet to hear about how our work was received from this morning’s deadline which is a little nerve-wracking, but hopefully things went well!

Tonight will be quite long. It is entirely possible this will be the first night I don’t sleep in a long, long time. Well, we’ll see how it goes. Oh, and I have a 9 am class. Exciting.

I got my first taste of recording audio sound effects today. For my motion piece, the main character rides a skateboard through different worlds so I needed a good SFX of skateboard sound on asphalt. Well, I rode down and pushed up the same hill about 3 times, recording as I went. Then I figured out how to actually record sound on the portable device. After that, I went up and down a couple more times recording some good sounds. Haven’t given them a listen yet, but I’m looking foward to it!

It appears that at some point the javascript on the site broke the XHTML strict compliance that I had. I suppose I will have to fix that at some point. As it doesn’t jeopardize the usage of the site so much, it’ll go on backburners but I’ll return to it and fix it at some point.

Hey folks,

Things have been really busy around here. Yesterday I was busy with projects, class and meetings from 7 am until around midnight. There were some brief periods of breaks, like walking to and from school, but in general it has been really rough. It seems that this term will likely be remembered at the most difficult one, though I have a feeling it will also be one of the more rewarding for me in terms of work level and quality.

In terms of my projects, there are two primarily ones: a flash website and a motion graphics piece. I managed to capture the vast majority of blue screen footage I’ll need on Saturday (6 hrs in a hot production studio with no ventilation takes its toll), but it appears I will need to go back and do some final shooting to get everything I need. I suppose that’s the problem with trying to imagine what kind of footage I’ll need without actually working through the site layout first. Lesson learned! In any case, I got everything I need for the motion piece, so I’ll probably start on that this weekend. I don’t think I’ll have time to do anything on it before then due to a large number of short-term deadlines this week. The website that I am helping to build has a fairly major deadline on Thursday morning, so I’ll have to buckle down to get it done for then. All I can say is that Wednesday night might not be fun. Of course, this is not to mention the many other smaller assignments or those that are of the “slow accumulation” type.

So yeah, things have been extremely busy. In general I haven’t been too stressed about things, especially when I don’t have a choice in the matter. Still, I have been able to get my assignments in on time, so I’m rather happy about all that.

Well, class starts soon, so I better be off.

This is a piece that came together as I got more tired. I wish I had more time to improve it, but such is the way of 20 minute assignments.

In other news, I’m getting ahead on my work for this term, which is very good. However, there is always more to do, so merrily we roll along!

This term at school is looking to be a rather difficult one. On top of that, I have joined a team developing a large, important website that will reflect majorly on my school and on myself. As a result, I may or may not really exist these next two months. I’m going to try to get updates here, but we’ll see. Wish me luck!

Good morning everyone! This is the 20 minute piece that I wanted to do last night but couldn’t get inspiration. Well, I opened my windows this morning to be greeted with a brilliant red sky of the rising sun and well, this is what came out of it. I think this is my favorite so far of these short audio pieces!