Sunday, October 30, 2011

Character Design & Bio Sheet

Character Design Sheet 1:

Full Size Image:
http://img191.imageshack.us/img191/3725/characterdes.jpg
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Janet Watson just turned twenty seven, her birthday was on the day after Christmas. A total let down as usual. But that's not something you'd hear come out of her mouth. On the outside, Janet has a rather simple demeanor and personal aesthetic. Black pants, cuddly sweater, and the winter hat to top things off. Physically, she's about 5'1”, medium weight with a flat top and thick thighs, petite feet, and baby hands. She's naturally pale as a ghost, (though living in her parents basement habitually hasn't helped that too much), blonde-white hair, so light she might as well not have eyebrows. Her eyes are a hazelnut, with a droop so strong that people ask what's wrong, to which they hear “that's just my face... sigh”
There's not much Janet really looks forward to in everyday life, until now. Janet's living off 2,000 in savings, hitchhiking from state to state from more or less strangers she's met online. At this juncture in her life, she's never tried a sip of alcohol, and god forbidden been around second hand smoke. Only ever going to one sleep-over in her adolescence and absolutely hating it, this is the big turn around. Her parents are currently hiring a private detective to locate their baby. She's much too young and unexperienced to be out in this cruel, cruel world. The biggest problem is she's twenty seven and the most grown-up thing she's ever done is keep a cashiering job at the local grocery store, and made it through a 2 year associates program at the local community college.
This drastic, careless move of Janet to run away from home to the west coast, but not quite since she's been living twenty six years of her life being a mooch at home while playing Second Life, Gaia Online, World of Warcraft, witing Fanfiction, Ragnarok, and other various fantasy online role playing game forums where she can escape anything to do with her actual self as a person. She's never been one of the people to take the fantasy art of drawing or fiction to any point that actually mattered in the real world, but more of one of those creepy people that likes to stalk everyone else and life, as if some kind of 'social life' leech, listening to every and anybody's stories. This is how Janet's come to meet so many acquaintances.
One of Janet's redeeming qualities is her undying loyalty and absolute kindness to any and just about everyone. This has left her pretty fucked when it comes to life situations, namely the high school experience. This was just a joke for Janet. After her 'best friend' decided Janet was a total square over the summer, Janet never really recovered from this tragic, earth-shattering event. How could anyone, she asked herself! This was still a subject Janet shared with every one of her online friends when they were close enough to share reasons they hated the real world experience. But wait, most people do get over high school? Yeah, that's the problem with twenty seven year old Janet.
But there's a lot more to the girl-woman. She has hobbies: collecting Japanese ball-jointed dolls, ranging from the 600-1000 price range. This quirky obsession is partly why she has no money and lives at home. She also enjoys knitting and making larping costumes, but she's never larped in pubic, except for one bad experience in middle school where it was just 'too intense,' for someone like her. Despite her secluded inverted personality, she does have love in her life. Never any public school crushes, but the strongest warrior on ragnarok did indeed capture her heart completely. He's asian and is now 31, and is the only person she's ever shown her actual self to online. He's from California, and works at an outlet mall in one of the many shoe stores there. She's been dating him online for five years now, the real reason she's leaving home.
Her family that's searching for her now, never even questioned Janet's living situation or life choices. Her parents are now in their mid sixties, have always been a conservative protestant Christian kind of bunch. Janet was their only miracle child, when a doctor had told them they were too old to have children. They subconsciously hoped she would never marry, and thus never leave them. Not that she did much to help around the house. She would bake though, and an eerily obsessive sort of way. There was always fresh bread, pastries, or cakes in the house. This was mostly to deal with the times when none of her friends were online. She did use to write quite often, more of the classical literature influence, but that was brief and didn't hold her interests for too long. One thing Janet always prided herself on ways her skills in upper level mathematics, but again, something realistically worthwhile that she would not ever follow through on.
Now, she's in way over her head, meeting friends online that seems so different and frightening than what compared to the images and fantasies that she conjured up in her head. She's almost out of money but is so very close to meeting that imaginary boyfriend. Somehow she's managed to wrap herself up in her own reality so much that she's totally thoughtless to the family and silly job she's left behind. Soon things will come crashing down, and this online lover isn't all she thinks he is. Reality check please.

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Some of my artistic influences:
Kaori Yuki, Craig McCraken, Aya Takano, and Prodigy-Bombay.

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Craig McCracken:

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ProdigyBombay:
http://prodigybombay.deviantart.com/

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Kaori Yuki:



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Aya Takano:





Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Spring 2011 Final A-Sleep_Sickness



The culmination of 13 weeks of work. I began with my first final from fall semester of sophomore year. I experimented with limited animation techniques and photoshop animation, while utilizing watercolor on hand-drawn, and painter for digital backgrounds. This was also an experiment with screen direction and cuts, although there are a few too many cross fades that I would've liked to avoid, but I felt that it really helped the continuity of the shots. After this undertaking, and the inspiration of finals from the other class, I know I'd like to take time over the summer and in the future to work over the principles of full frame animation.

The content of this piece is taken from experience and others around me, it was very personal and something that I could not seem to get off of my heart, and it kept begging, telling me to finish it off. While there are still issues, and things that I would like to rework, I'm done with this piece for good now, and ready to move on. I feel like I've taken a lot away from this semester, even though I do wonder if how much time was spent on coloring and rendering was the best choice so early on in my animation experience.

Monday, April 25, 2011

spring 2011 final (progress 2)

There's more digital animation that's been cleaned up and finished. I plan to color and crop the traditional scenes, adding digital backgrounds, such as the trees. If there's a lack of time, I will most likely be using solids for the backgrounds, for atmosphere, leaving the animation as it is.

Untitled from Rhianna James on Vimeo.