Chapter 1 - Intro

Class 4!! Woooo!!

Congratulations for everyone! We make it to class 4! Half way through the program folks!
I'm glad that i make it this far :) Honestly speaking, it was hard to keep myself motivated and staying in front of computer for 24/7 did not help at all. One thing that hit me, i realized that i have to have a life beside of studying. My biggest fear is to start to have a feeling that this is a burden, which I clearly don't want that to happen and I won't let it happen because to hate the stuff that you want to do in your life is just silly :| Back in my uni days, i encounter some people and including myself said that it's a love and hate relationship with Maya or with whatever we dealt with. I guess if you love to do something, this thought should not exist. So, from now on, there is no such thing as love and hate relationship :) Let's fill everything with Joy! *cheers :Dand um .. a quote from my favourite writer, "The greatest expression of rebellion is joy." - Joss Whedon
Unlike last term, I feel less anxious when this term started. Last term i was very anxious because it was my first time to have different mentor! I guess this pretty much explains why i feel less anxious :| So, moving on to this new term.. we all have new mentors for sure.. and get ready for the big reveal .. ... .. My New Mentor .. for Class 4 .. is .... .... ... *wait for it ... .. .. ... ...
It's Dimos Vrysellas everyone!!
I remember I watched his lecture back in class 2 and it was really really great, i still remember the last line that he said on that lecture! .. but i'm not so sure if i could or should say it here.. :| oh well.. let's carry on~
So this week, we have to plan our shot and it should have contrast in emotion. I think this is harder than it sounds. I always want to create something that is unusual. I don't know if this is a good thing or not :/ sometimes.. actually most of the time, my ideas are a little bit hard to be understood by a lot of people.. and this has been going on for quite awhile :| i brainstormed some ideas and i have my brainstorm pages here:

I had couple ideas such as concert ticket, prison break, home alone and toilet idea. I had to narrow it for sure. Some of these ideas were based on personal stuff, except for the prison an toilet! or .. maybe just the prison :| anyway! i decided my theme which was home alone. At first i was going to do a shot about a kid who thinks that she has to protect her home when the parents are away. I like this idea, however with 250f frame limit.. i doubt that i could set up my story. My class 3 mentor teaches me a lot about setting up a story and i learn that setting up a story would need a decent amount of time. I also had an idea to have 2 characters on my shot. I have a doubt about this idea so i decided to mail my mentor and he suggested to keep it simple and to use only a character. I went back to my sketchbook and just wrote down couple ideas, kind of make a list about what usually happens when someone is home alone (see the second page above). After couple hours of random YouTube browsing :| the Ghost idea came up.. Well, the story that i'm about to use for my shot has never happened before in my life. However, i believe i saw and heard something in the past .. D: So, i guess this still counts as personal experience and i decided to use this idea. 

Before I started my planning, I had already have this image of a person drawing, painting, and i think he's actually writing calligraphy in his home office. He's either an artistic European uncle with funny hair or mid 30 Japanese hero look writing calligraphy. In the end, i lean more into the artistic European uncle with funny hair inside his.. living room. (In my head now i have him living inside a mushroom house ... uh well i have funny imagination -o-" ). 

The next step was preparing my character. I finally able to do something i have not really done nicely before, which is customizing Stewie! I did not customize the whole body, I only re-shaped his head and this strangely made me happy :) I finally made that big round head thinner :D

This time around i took my video reference first. I set up my living room so it would look like the setting that i want to have on my shot. Afterwards, I narrow down the shot that i like and i did something new here. Instead of finding my key poses and draw it right away, I frame through my video reference and analyse what is happening on the body. This is something that i learn greatly from my previous mentor. I wrote notes beside the poses that i trace. Yes i traced the poses instead of drew them. As I carry on, i realized some problems on my planning. Half of my body was covered behind of the table and the shot was shot from front view. I feel that we should avoid this angle if we can, the reason is because orthographic view would give less dimension for our character. So i decided to shot another reference from 3/4 angle and sketched new poses in 3/4 angle and use my first drawing/tracing as my reference. This time around i didn't do 2d test.. I sort of want to test my timing skill.. which unfortunately is still very off :( I almost went over the frame limit here. I was worried because the video reference itself went for approximately 20s for each takes. On the following week, i found out that i still have some space. We'll talk about this on the next post. Here are the drawings and the character:

first drawing/tracing :| 

new planning

the artistic European uncle with funny hair

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