Current Projects

Da Bears! (I couldn't help it.)

2006-08-09T14:24:00.000-07:00

Coming soon (VERY soon) to the Anchorage Community Theater! Anton Chekhov's The Bear Directed by Brandon Lawrence. This is the first and hopefully not last time the Anchorage Community Theater has asked me to do a poster for them. Tickets are $5 for all seats. Hey, it's cheaper and has better acting than most movies out today, so why not go?

Edit: Uploaded the wrong picture last time. Here's the good one.

BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND!

2006-08-05T14:30:00.000-07:00

The Eagle River Community Theater has been asked to bring the melodrama back for a performance at the State Fair. Now, I know there were a few of you out there who didn't show up to the last performance, so this is your chance to make up for it. And I don't want to hear that lame "I live on the East coast" excuse, either!

On another note, those of you who actually know me know of my recent loss that has really taken its toll on me and I want to thank all of you for the support even though I haven't exactly been the must fun person to be around lately.

Life has slowly started returning to normal and I'm hoping to be able to get back into creative mode soon. Right now I'm just taking care of the projects that I've promised to do and really not much else. But life goes on and I go on with it.

2006-07-03T15:32:00.000-07:00

Ze poster, she is finish! It actually turned out better than I had anticipated since I promised to have it done Sunday night and I didn't even have an idea of what way to go until Sunday morning. Luckily I took enough pictures of the cast to piece the image together along with a photo of the railroad tracks I got Saturday when Jennifer and I took a trip down to Whittier.

Honestly, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. But now that's done and I can get back to the When You Go video.

P.S. Check the poster for the date and time and I expect to see everybody there. Yes. Everybody on the internet. I'll be counting heads, people!

Storyboard Found!

2006-06-22T10:18:00.000-07:00

I was embarassed to admit this, but I ... misplaced my storyboards. Readers Digest version: Lost the electronic copy, couldn't find it, was getting ready to re-scan them and found it again. Now here it is in all its stick-figure glory! We still have to get the timing down and all that, but this will give you the basics of where we're going with the whole thing.

2006-06-20T12:17:00.000-07:00

This was too cool to not share. Len did some seriously great work on a poster that will be used in the video. It's almost like he read my mind. Amazing work, my friend.

On a similar subject, I'm looking for a place to tape Jennifer's choreography. With my programs, I'll be able to import video of her performance and map the dancer's motions over her performance. All I need is a place. Brandon thinks he has a place, but it's very tentitive at the moment. So, we'll see.

A new project has popped up, but shouldn't take away from the video. The newly formed Eagle River Community Theatre is working on zero budget at the moment, so I volunteered to make some promotional posters for them. Their first performance will be a melodrama at the Bear Paw Festival. If you're in town at the time, stop by and give them some much needed support.

Dancer

2006-06-19T17:03:00.000-07:00

The beautiful ballerina. Jennifer and I looked at many styles of dress and we decided that for this song, a flowing dress would work best. Eventually, we decided on this style and after much trial and error, here's the final result. The textures are just temporary until I figure out exactly which ones to use. My only concern is the amount of time the cloth simulations take to calculate. But the results should be worth it.

I've decided to redo the man. I'm just not happy with how he turned out at all, so I'm afraid we'll all have to wait on that one.

Okay! You win!

2006-06-18T17:46:00.000-07:00

Well, I finally did it. I jumped off the cliff. I came over to the dark side. I took the plunge. I sank the SeqQuest. I ... ran out of metaphors. What am I getting at? There is now a Mac in my house. The PC zone has been penetrated and, frankly, I'm not regretting it as much as I thought I would be. Yeah. It was worth it, being an artistic standard technology and all. Plus most of my programs will still work with it and it's faster than my PC. Now I just have to figure out how to get them both hooked up at the same time in my limited space. The problem is that I disconnected that one and after getting the Mac set up, I realized that I forgot to copy all my source files to the external hard drive for transfer.

That being said, a verbal description of the next update will have to suffice for a little bit. I've virtually completed work on the characters. My attempts to make them look like Jennifer and myself were only semi-successful. But they still look pretty good. I'd do further modifications to try and get them to look closer to us, but I'm really getting tired of working on them. So now it's time to move back to the scenes and props.

P.S. Why exactly do you think the Apple people felt the need to label the bottom of the keyboard with the word "Keyboard"?

2006-05-19T10:23:00.000-07:00

Okay. We're back. Yesterday MTA had a major "incident" and everybody in the city who has their service was without internet access most of the night. If you ask me, the whole thing is one big spastic colon. On a brighter note, Len and I got to talking yesterday and he drew up some great characters for the video "The Future Soon." It's always nice to have at least 2 projects going so I don't get burned out on one of them. I'll be working on the models tonight. Updates to come! I promise! Either that, or I'm practicing to become a politician. Either way.

2006-05-16T19:51:00.000-07:00

Aside from the headache, it's been a pretty good week so far. We've added a new member to the team. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm proud to introduce (drumroll) Len from Jawbone! If you've never heard of Jawbone, shame on you! Okay. Until relatively recently, I hadn't either, but it's good. It's one of the only podcasts I've actually subscribed to. Go find it now. What else are you going to do? Sit around here looking at this stuff?

Len's been working on Jonathan Coulton's "Visual Thing A Week" and has some mad skills in 2D art. I'm really looking forward to combining our talents on this project and beyond.

There's not a whole lot of progress to update on right at this point. Primarily I'm working on the storyboards and ironing out the story progression. More to come soon.

2006-05-15T19:31:00.000-07:00

to catch up from the original "Current Projects" page:

05/02/06:
Inspiration has struck! That explains the headache. After getting in contact with Jonathan Coulton, I've decided to go ahead on the first in what I hope to be a series of videos for his music.
05/12/06:
When You Go will be the first, and hopefully not last, video. (Also in the works are videos for That Spells DNA and I Feel Fantastic) It all depends on how it turns out. As some of you may know, I've had a recent run of bad luck in which I had some fairly severe injury to my wrist and it's taken a long time to heal. So long, in fact, that I had to drop out of the CGSociety challenge because I simply had no time to finish the image in the way I feel would do justice to the original idea. All is not lost, however. The set that I've built for that challenge will be resurrected for this video. It's a fairly happy coincidence that the set fits perfectly with the script that I've written. Below is the image of what had gotten done before I had to stop.

Neat, huh?

I'm not alone in this! Jennifer (trying to hide my big, goofy grin) is working on the choreography for the dance sequences and the costumes as we speak. Brandon's filling in the gaps with his directing expertise. Meanwhile, I'm working on the models and storyboards in my spare (hah!) time.Why can't I be rich so I can just do stuff like this all day? WHY?!?!?!? No, seriously, why?

I gave in!

2006-05-15T18:57:00.000-07:00

Allrighty. I finally found a use for these things. It became obvious that this would be the easiest way to keep up with the current projects (for now), so my promise to never have a blog has been broken. Sue me.