The · Teeth · of · Stupefying · Odds

Been too busy to think recently, but things are starting to fall into order.

I'll be starting a Maya based Intro to 3D CGI course at the Gnomon School in Hollywood next week.

Spending most of my time getting things settled at work so I can spend all my spare time working on the class and the big animation project. I've finished the script for episode 1 of 9, and have a solid start on episode 2. We're moving along.

I completed building a lovely, lovely computer desk, with sliding trays for both the keyboard and wacom tablet. It's been half finished for so long. It's a joy to sit at it and work, now! Next up, a traditional animation/drawing table, with an animator's light-disk. I think I know how it will go.

Took the 1st Place Overall trophy this past weekend for the Camp Technique Outdoor Fitness Super-Saturday competition. I'm more pleased with this than I would have thought. Not used to winning athletic competitons. I ran 2.2 miles in 16 minutes and 47 seconds. That's the fastest I've ever run that distance.

Last month I spent a week back in North Tonawanda visiting my sister and my parents. Took a bunch of pictures along the tracks I used to walk and the Erie Canal. I'll put together a gallery of those soon.

Busy, busy times!

Here are a couple of regular pencil sketches I did this weekend:

(Picures removed - bad and badderer - nobody weeps for these fallen drawings)

I didn't get as much done on the project this weekend as I had wanted to, for a variety of reasons, but at least I'm still drawing.

I tried something new... took a piece of an old figure study sketch done in real pencil on real paper, scanned it and tried inking and coloring it in Painter:

(Pic removed - this wasn't so good either - I'll make it up to you later, I promise)

Again, about 2 hours. That seems to be a minimum time for me to even approach satisfaction.

In other news, my friend Tom has been designing a workflow for the animation project and evaluating software. We'll probably try some form of a short test film soon, though that still may take quite some time to complete.

My new artist acquaintence Mark and I will probably meet again this weekend to discuss plans for a website/gallery and ways to expand our group.

And I'll probably need to re-commit to writing the scripts for the animation soon. I'll need to put in a few solid, uninterrupted weekends to get that moving.

All in all, still pretty busy!

Did this one in honor of the U.S. Release this week of Hayao Miyazaki's classic Nausicaa:

Took about 2 hours. I'm not getting faster.

As I work on writing, I'm also trying to get familiar with Corel Painter. Trying to spend about 1 hour each night doing something with it. Here is tonight's exercise, a face from no reference, working for about an hour and a half... originally, I intended to do this in a more realistic style, but couldn't get it to go that way, so settled for this effect:

(Pic removed - it was awful - I coudn't bear it - believe me, you're better off this way)

Yesterday I met with another artist at a coffeeshop in Hollywood called the Bourgeois Pig.

I had put this add up on craigslist on Tuesday, January 25th:

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Illustration style artists in training

I'm looking to build an informal collective of artists who work in an illustrative style (think N.C. Wyeth, Chesley Bonestell, the Pre-Raphaelites, Vargas, the painters of 1940's pulp fiction magazine covers... representational art that conveys a story).

I'm 35, I live in Van Nuys and I program for a bank for a living. All my life I've been an artist, though mostly unfocused and untrained.

Are you in a similar boat? Have you dabbled in illustration, maybe in comics, maybe in animation, maybe in painting or figure drawing... but mostly as a hobby. Your life just took a different path, and now you don't have the time or money to get formal training, but you still would like to improve your technique?

Well, that's me too, and I've been thinking that if a small group of like-minded art hobbyists started having regular informal meetings to show each other work, trade tips and work together, they might all help each other improve quite dramatically.

Is this you and are you interested? If so, please drop me an email, and I'll see if I can arrange a meeting between us all, and lets see what becomes of it.

No memberships or dues, just some artists who can all benefit by association.
You don't need to be a master, but you do need to be serious about your hobby.
If we all decide we'd like to meet in a space somewhere, we'll find one and figure out the rent between us when the time comes.

Sound good? Then send me an email and introduce yourself. If you have any work samples online, it would be great if you could include a link when you email, but if you don't, don't sweat it... samples are not required. This is all very low key and informal at this point.

(Unfortunately, I don't really have samples of my own work online... I do have this livejournal:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/billcunningham/

...about an animation project I'm trying to start up on my own. The little portrait at the top is one of my pastel portrait pieces.)

Thanks!

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During the time this was up on the list I only got one response, but it was a good one:

Artist's sample gallery

So we agreed to meet at the Pig and discuss what we might do.

We pretty much agreed to each work on some Corel Painter based work and meet again in two weeks to show it to each other and discuss setting up a website gallery to show off the work.

He's got a graphic novel project that he'd like to develop, I've got an animation project I want to develop, we both need to get back in practice, so hopefully this will be a fruitful association.

We're also still open to accepting in more artists, so if you're reading this, live in the LA area and are interested, drop me an email or a comment below.

Well, I've got a bit of progress to report.

Plot

I met with Kinn again to talk about plot ideas, and the story is really coming together. It will definately fit in 9 episodes, each about 1 hour. It's odd that, despite all the changes the story has undergone all these years I've been working on it, as the pieces fall together, most of the familiar elements even from the very beginning are still in there, still regocnizable.

I finally have a climax for the story, which I never actually had before. I know where it's going, and now it's more or less a matter of plugging all the pieces into the most meaningful order.

Modelling

Started building a hand in Wings 3D, the Subdivision Surfaces modelling tool I decided to use. Here is a screen shot of my progress so far:

(Photo removed - it was just a cruddy wireframe cluttering up my flickr account - you'll just have to imagine it here.)

I had to delete the thumb, because it was a mess. This is just a wireframe model of the back of the left hand, not detailed at all yet except for the beginnings of knuckles.

This started as a cube... however, I also found tonight some Wings 3D face sculpting tutorials that work with a rounder shape to start with, so I may go back and redo this using a technique closer to that one.

Purchase

Also picked up Corel Painter this weekend. It was a bit pricey, but it is a beautiful piece of software. I'll be learning that as well, and plan to do most of my design sketching using that.

Software Inventory

So far, these are the software packages I'm learning to prepare for this project:

Wings 3D - a subdivision surfaces modeller, for creating the character models to animate.
Poser - to build skeletons for the models and animate them.
Terragen - to create landscape environments.
Bryce - general rendering.
Corel Painter - conceptual art and design... possibly also the creation of textures for texture maps.

At this point I don't know what I'll be using to actually edit the film, record and mix sound, put in any effects, and author DVDs. I also don't know how to create texture maps, or how to apply them to figures. I may need more software still.

It's going to be a busy year of pre-pre-production!

I'll be back!

I had a good talk with my friend Kinn yesterday, who has been my soundboard for ideas related to the story for the project. I came away with a determination to get the length and scope of this story under control. He thinks, and I agree, that I should aim this story at 9 one hour episodes to tell the whole thing. My first instinct is that 9 episodes is not enough, but upon reflection it probably is. I just need to tighten things up, and resist the powerful tempation to digress.

The downside of this is the first episode may need to be rewritten to a large degree.

The upside is that I have so much organizational work to do in order to set up the production that it almost doesn't matter. I have time to re-write. The re-write will require that I plot out the full 9 hours in detail, and that will aid production planning.

I've been watching extra material on the Return of the King DVD set this weekend. The more I see of the production process on those films, the more I'm reminded of the way I felt when I first saw the behind-the-scenes stuff from the original Star Wars movies as a kid... this is what I want to spend the rest of my life doing.

Maybe I can't do it full time, but I can still do it. It'll be a hobby. A very elaborate and time consuming hobby.

I learned how to build a doghouse in Wings 3D and did a bunch of spreadsheeting of production processes. I've been posting around the following places to solicit feedback on the collaboration concept:

Sequential Tart Forums - Equitable Legal Frameworks for Collaborative Art
This is a comic book centered community I've been participating in for a couple of years that has a higher than usual level of discourse. Most people there have valuable things to say about a variety of topics. So far, the conversation on this idea has not taken off.

TalkAboutComics Forums - The Delicacy of Collaboration
TalkAboutComics is the forum environment for the Modern Tales Family of websites. Modern Tales is a subscription based webcomics service founded by Joey Manley, who also has a terrific head for business, and I'm hoping to get some practical feedback there as well.

Renderosity Forums - CG Film Opportunity
This is a call for volunteers from Patrick Wells who has formed a volunteer production company he is calling Death Valley Studios to produce a fan film based on Terry Pratchett's novel Reaper Man. He has obtained the author's approval to do this as a fan project, having no rights otherwise in the property. He was kind enough to respond to my questions via email, and I'll hopefully be following the progress of his project as well.

Animation Community's Journal - LiveJournal - Collaborative Projects
This is a community I found here where a discussion about something similar to what I'm working on was already underway.

So far, on all these fronts, response has been slow. Maybe the topic isn't so interesting, being theoretical, and in two cases posted to comic book centered, not animation centered communities. I did get some feedback from Edward J. Grug III who draws a comic strip called The Bizarre Life of Charlie Red-Eye at Modern Tales. He said what he'd be looking for if he were considering such a project would be to see if the person running it had ever completed any animation before.

It's a valid point. If you're going to ask others to follow your leadership you need to establish legitimacy. If it doesn't come from money it has to come from respect. The only way I can establish respect in this context, I think, is to actually have a short film to show people.

So, planning for the main project will continue, but I think I'll combine my education in the 3D software with a small side project. I was working on it as a short 16 page comic story, but I'll switch gears and do it as an animation. If I can put that together myself and use it as a calling card, and maybe make some of the models available as freebies at Renderosity, and maybe some of the process of making it available as Renderosity tutorials, it would go a long way toward establishing legitimacy.

Most things that could be never will. Of all the possible people, genetically possible, only a small fraction will ever be born. Observed Richard Dawkins: "In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here."

It's true. Everything is so staggeringly unlikely, that we all might as well pursue our most outlandish ambitions. Universally speaking, they aren't really more unlikely than the fact that we exist at all.

In that spirit, I'll come clean.

I want to create a long term dramatic animated science fiction series. I don't want to sell the idea, I want to make it myself, maybe with the help of like minded hobbyists. I'm not going to quit my day job. I don't think I have to. Chaucer had a real job too, and we're still reading his amateur endeavor.

Let's see if I can do this. I'll be keeping this journal for that purpose, as well as anything else that comes along. Hopefully I'll meet some other ambitious folks here. Or even some jovial layabouts. Life is good.

Thanks for giving us an eye or two. I'll be back soon.