Goodbye, See Ya Next Year

I watched the Korean movie The Bow Steve Hickner showed during his presentation at SJSU. Following the movie when reading about it online, I did this quick sketch for fun.

Update: Eunsoo and I have began production on our stop=motion project! We are not going to rush anything but based on our progress we should be finishing production by the end of winter break, leaving us a little more than three weeks left. I feel weird being in the dark again all day, but I guess it's not as bad compared to summer when the sunlight is just begging you to come play outside. I do say it is easy to start from where you left off; just a bit of dusting and voila! Wish us luck! Happy New Years!

Hai-ena

I went to eat at Mitsuwa today and watched Eternal Enemies, the documentary that inspired The Lion King... tahdah, quick sketch for the night!

Bitty Winter

Merry Christmas! This I did for Eunsoo, Haha! sorry for the poor photo quality. I didn't manage to get a copy of the pictures I made for my family, so maybe next time.

Tule Lake coming soon! A few members of the crew are putting the final scenes together for the semester premiere. This is my favorite frame from the short film! I will be switching gears to finish the stop-motion project Eunsoo and I started last summer.

Applied Materials

Crazy Flower Lady

Look what I found on one of the school computers today! It's the keys I did for Miyuki for my friends Emily Johnstone and Brian Kistler's film Bloom. It was animated in the winter and then finished over the summer of last year! It's been getting a lot of attention lately and receiving positive reviews and recognition.

So now this is the only footage I have from this project. I don't have anything from No Robots, a film a group of us did two summers ago.


If you haven't seen it already, please check it out!

Kids, Cats & Fats???

The Animal Shelter is like a free zoo that is closer and easier to get to.

2nd and a Half BFAnimation

Been working hard lately between projects: BFA, Tule Lake, Applied Materials, and so on and so forth... My BFA Animations have both taken very interesting turns, from the quirks of thinking characters to the difficult mechanics of a walk cycle.

This was for my 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea test in which I was assigned to do a shot with Van Gogh, age 17. I did the research, learned a lot of interesting facts about an artist I never really knew too well, and yes he was pretty crazy!

This is a walk cycle based on a book titled "Jennie" or "The Abandoned." I chose a character in the book to animate in a walk cycle. We well do further test with this character so stayed tuned!

Lizard Supreme

I decided to paint this little character yesterday after I was getting sleepy from reading... I sketched this guy during one of my lectures because I saw this weird shape from the shadows of the window/curtain and thought, hey that looks like a chameleon!

I have an idea for a weird animation based on this character! Man, it was really fun to do this, I haven't painted in photoshop for a while! The best part was getting all those gnarly scale textures in there!

First of BFAnimation

So our first test was an 80 frame reaction test involving two characters in a conversation. The ultimate goal of this test was to show two unique characters, each with an appealing personality. we were recommended to choose one as our primary character while the other is more of a support character. The real challenge here was to SIMPLIFY; in a 3 second test, one really have to make your character's personality apparent and clear.

I thought it would be fun to round-up all my playblast that I saved during the assignment... ooooooo you can see the evolution!

First of BFAssignments

BFA group vid I organized with tremendous help from Paul with editing and Eunsoo the cameralady. Dream come true honestly, always wanted this to happen!

Update on Life

Wow, it's been a while since I lasted posted, mainly because I spent the whole summer on my stop-motion project with Eunsoo. So let's start off with some sketchbook pages. These are some of my favorites!

I've been meaning to go out and sketch whenever I grant myself some time. I managed to check out Music In the Park during the summer, SJ Jazz Festival, and went hiking in Lake Tahoe. I've also been making time to swim, I will probably stop once it gets colder. As of now I am occupied with BFA, Tule Lake, and Stop-Mo. I really miss going out and drawing with everybody like the old days. Sometimes it happens, thank goodness our first BFA assignment was to go out and draw people. I realized all my assignments this semester will involve animation! Makes sense, after all this is the senior year and I will be working towards my demo reel. But then it hits me... I have to make my demo reel!!! Yah, this time around, the pressure is on! Wish me luck!

Stop-Motion Ahoy!

I hope you enjoy our trailer.  It might not make any sense because we only have shot about 18 scenes (out of 102) as of now.  I won't talk too much about the progress until it is fiinished, but basically I have been working with Eunsoo since the summer break started.  Most of the break was spent designing the story and building the set.  It was not possible to shoot a single shot until the week before school started due to all the unpredictable technical bumps.  Because none of us has ever attempted to do a stop motion before, we really have no idea how much longer it will take.  While Eunsoo continues to build props, I am averaging about 3-4 scenes a week just to put it in perspective.  With school deadlines it has been a challenge to squeeze in time to work on this project, but we are managing to get things done slow but steadily.  So thank you all for the encouragement!  It will be very exciting when it is completed!

From Now On... It's Personal

And so commences another summer and end of grueling school semester. The word for this semester was "animation." My goodness, I have never jumped from animation to animation so much in one semester, animating for class, animating just for fun, it was a lot of hard work and long nights in the art building. I was actually quite disappointed that I hardly went out this semester to enjoy the sunlight. My only breaks were to take walks and occasionally sit in the grass. I am pasty... I was always sad whenever I realized it is not possible to animate outdoors. apart from missing the fresh air, this semester consisted of work on a special project, Green Ninja. The Green Ninja is an animated short (soon to make its public debut) to raise awareness of the green movement, saving our planet one frame at a time. I always thought it was a project of redemption for animators. We used so much paper just for this short, at least we used it for a just cause. The project was all on the side from my other school work and the final week of production was brutal meeting the deadline. The Green Ninja project prevented the progress of DCM, alternative animation that a couple of my peers and I tried to complete during the semester. We will attempt to revive it now that school is finished and Green Ninja is done. I'm already looking at two aniamtion projects during next semester in BFA... I'm scared and excited.

Anyways, 129B reel for this semester. I lost the file for the first test, that's why it isn't rendered. And yes I know I spelled environment wrong.


Green Ninja, the dreaded banana pan.


Fun scene for Green Ninja, crushing water bottles into a faucet filter.


Fun animation done in flash. This character reminds me of Zelda, it can totally be a game!

This summer I will be working on a stop motion short with Eunsoo. The short is going to be a hurdle but work for the love of the art. We don't really have any professional ambitions for the project, but I will strive to make it look good. But more so, the film is a secret but it is a fun little story that I think people will like when it's finished. I hope to see the sun from time to time this summer even though I'll be most likely indoors working on the stop-motion.

BFA next year!!!!!

Sketchbook and more soon!

Gum Helps the Cough

Been feeling sick lately... Cinequest just passed, and I managed to catch a good number of movies. I recommend any one to watch the compelling documentary I Am by Tom Shadyac (director of Ace Ventura), unexpectedly thought provoking and insightful view of our world! Google it I mean it!

DCM continues!

Slime Time

This semester, I'm enrolled in an elective figure painting class. It would mark the first time I have ever used oil paint and I must say the class is the perfect finish for my VERY occupied Tuesdays and Thursdays (I dread my Tuesday/Thursdays....). Painting with oil is meditative and interactive; I very much enjoy the ease of mixing the paint right on the canvas. This painting marks 4 classes into figure painting. I began the class with a slight alla prima approach with unsatisfactory results, so this last piece I decided to take my time a bit more to keep my edges refined and my colors neatly blended. The next 3 classes with be devoted to one painting only versus new paintings each class, so I am definitely looking forward to that! I think in the future I want to play more with color and stylization, feel this is the elective to do so without getting too much criticism.

It's the Season For Loving

2nd Floor Art Building SJSU!

DCM! This is Chaos!

Dia de Los Muertos

To Jose, From Chris

This year's Cult28 Xmas exchange was themed, Tarot Cards, organized by my good friend Kristina Wayte! I received death and Jose, and I chose to combine those two elements together to great a luscious cover girl ornamented with patterns seen in Mexican Day of the Dead costumes. The death card not only stands for actual termination, but termination in a more metaphorical sense, transition, and metamorphosis. The death card is also not to be taken as a permanent event; the setting sun reminds the reader that as one day passes, another is soon to come.

CULT28 Tarot Cards - Black Gallery SJSU Art Building, Feb 21-25!

5 Weeks, 5 Spreads

Well, considering that I was bound the duties of two projects over the last 3 weeks of Winter Break, I'm glad I got at least 5 spreads in my sketchbook. I did get to do a lot this winter break and explore different areas of San Jose. It's a shame that I didn't really get to sketch during a good number of those events, mostly because they were more social events and I figured it would be rude to ignore people to sketch instead. But definitely a new year's resolution of mine will to be more habitual about carrying my sketch book around more often.

SF.

I do not have a clue what I was writing about, I think I was a bit intoxicated, but humorous nonetheless.

SF Bus. More intoxicated writings on the left, D(drawing)UI.