alive...

What's this? A post!? I am sorry to say I have neglected this here blog of mine for the last 8 months or so (as graduates often do), but I've been keeping busy on other things. Well, mostly just work actually. But it's fun work. The show airs next month, and Disney's started showing stuff from it recently.

Voila: http://disney.go.com/junior/pre/index.html

That's All Folks (or is it?)

Well guys, 4th year (and my post secondary education) is over, and I've got to say, it's been a blast. I mean, high school for the quiet artist type like me was not the most enjoyable experience, but coming here where all the quiet (and some not so quiet) artist types from around the world have gathered to do what we love was the best decision I ever made.

The program here was a little hit and miss, but the atmosphere and the people here have made the last 5 years the best I've ever had. Non-animators don't understand when I tell them that I spend every waking hour at school and still love it, but I guess what they don't realize is that we are all doing that. While other college students go to lecture halls filled with hundreds of people they will never talk to, and then spend their off times getting drunk enough to forget how boring their homework is, we go to an open studio space, hang out, draw, and try to figure out how we can make a living doing it. I think that is an amazing way to spend our college years. And the people in our class of 2010 have made it all the more amazing.

Being with the same hundred or so people for the past 4-5 years has been an incredible experience. Looking back on it all, I've kind of thought of our relationships with each other like this: In Art Fundamentals, we became acquaintances, strangers, with common interests (which, considering how weird our interests were was a pretty big deal). In 1st year, we became friends. In 2nd year, when we got our open studio space and really started living at the school, we became a family. In 3rd year, when we had to work together on a group film, we became a dysfunctional family. And in 4th year....well...I don't really know. It feels like I'm moving away from home again. It feels really weird to be leaving this place behind forever. Its kind of a relief to be done, but I'm really going to miss this place, and especially the people that have inhabited it. But I guess there's no sense dwelling on the past when the future could potentially be even better.

I was fortunate enough to get a job at a studio in Ottawa called Mercury Filmworks and will be working on a very cool looking TV show, the details of which I should probably not disclose here. And it seems that many of my Sheridan bretheren will be joining me in a couple weeks, which is awesome! I had contacted the studio pretty early this year and was able to land a job even before industry day, so I guess preparation and persistence pay off. Although part of me wishes I could stay in a state of limbo and relive the past five years over and over again, another part is excited to move on and start my career. And Mercury seems like a very cool place, and with some of my old classmates being there as well, I think it will be all the more awesome.

I think I recall about 5 years ago my high school guidance councillor thought I was nuts for going into animation. I had pretty good grades so I guess he thought I was going to go to university to get a fancy degree in business or something like that. I mean, why have a fun, art based career when you can sit in an office and type in numbers all day, right? But a relatively smart guy going into animation? He thought I was crazy. Nah, I'm not crazy. Crazy are the people who choose their careers based on the size of the paycheck. Crazy are the people who spend 40 hours a week doing something they hate for money. Money doesn't matter. Money is just something you have in case you don't die tomorrow, and if you give it any more value than that, then you've got it all wrong. I'm not crazy. I'm the only one who's not crazy. Well, not the only one. I can name about a hundred more not crazy people. And its been a pleasure working/hanging out with/growing up with every one of you. I wish all of my classmates the very best of luck in the future and I sincerely hope we'll meet again some day. (reunion in 20 years, anyone?)

Cheers,

Adam P

What Happened on Virmire

Well, I just recently finished playing through a game called Mass Effect, and it got me thinking. Video games are awesome. And not just in a "that was pretty cool" kind of way, but in a spine tinglingly good, amazing storytelling kind of way.

Mass Effect, like Fallout 3 (another game finished recently) had a better story than most films, books, or TV shows I have ever seen. And I think the reason for this is simple. Storytelling can lend itself better to video games than any other medium. In a film, you've got to cram in as much story as you can into two, three hours tops. But a video game can be thirty hours long. A story can be so much richer and more complex when there is more than enough time to tell it.

Although few games have caught on to that, a couple (namely Mass Effect and Fallout 3) certainly have. The stories are so good, and there's character development and plot twists that rival the best Hollywood films. And because you spend so much more time with the characters, it has an even greater effect.

And especially in RPGs like Mass Effect, a lot of what happens in the game is based on the player's choices. Entire story arcs are often affected by what the player chooses to do. Sometimes its simply how other characters will react to what you say, or sometimes its a matter of life and death. In Mass Effect, there's a planet you go to called Virmire. There's a part where two of your teamates are in trouble and you have to choose which one to save. And the one you don't dies! And not just "oh, we'll bring him back to life with a phoenix down," but actually dies for good. I remember how big a deal it was when Aeris died in Finaly Fantasy 7, but in Mass Effect, you have to choose which of your teammates, and you can't save both. That kind of thing can never happen in a film. You just watch what the characters do, so there can only be so much emotional involvement. In a game, you are the main character, and its how you act around the other characters that determines what the story is going to be like. There are a whole lot of other WTF moments that happen on Virmire, as well as at many other times throughout the game but I won't give anything else away.

On top of all that, there's still so much more to come with video games. Books have been around for millenia, and films for a century, but games have only been here for a few decades. They are only in their infancy in comparison.

Basically, my point is, video games get a bad rap for being a waste of time or money, and the people who play them are generally looked down upon by film buffs and book enthusiasts, as if they are a lesser form of entertainment. But they shouldn't be. Don't get me wrong, I love films and TV shows and books too, but video games certainly belong on the upper tiers of entertainment with them. And if you don't think so, then you obviously haven't played Mass Effect or Fallout 3.

Electropolis Online

Our 3rd year film from last year, "Electropolis" will be online from November 6th to Nov 15 for the Puchon international Student Animation Festival. Due to swine flu they decided to make the entire festival online, so that it can be accessed from the comfort of our own fallout shelters. You can check it out here .

EDIT: okay, it turns out you have to create an account on the PISAF website, and even then it doesn't seem to be working. I'll get back to you on that...

EDIT: okay, I'll be honest, I have no idea how that website is supposed to work. If I figure it out I'll keep you posted

EDIT: okay, it doesn't seem to work for me in Firefox, however, it does play in Internet Explorer (albeit not very well). So, if you want to see it, you can create an account and watch it in something other than Firefox.

Bloor Cinema Screening

Mark Mayerson, the second year animation teacher has been awesome enough to organize a screening of some of the Sheridan College student films at the Bloor Cinema in Toronto. About an hour and a half of films from the 3rd and 4rth year of the BAA Animation program, as well as some from the Computer Animation program will be shown. And, Electropolis is among them, along with several other awesome films from our year (including a couple of my personal favorites; Higher Education and Hog Wild).

The screening will be on June 9th at 7:00pm, and again on June 10th at 9:30pm. Admission is $5. So if you're in the Toronto area and have nothing better to do on a tuesday or wednesday night, come check it out.

Assuming it was recieved in time they will be showing an updated version of Electropolis that we've been working on since school ended. This one is a lot tighter with a few scenes redone, some continuity and flow issues fixed, and an overall much more solid feel to the whole thing. So come and see it on the big screen. Until then, see some screenshots on the small screen:

These are some of the scenes that I had a hand in. Some of them just rough animation, some of them all the animation, and only in one scene did I do everything myself. Originally I was supposed to do four scenes but ended up contributing to ten or eleven or so. Them's the breaks. But so did alot of my other group members. It was very collaborative.

Anyway, check out Electropolis at the Bloor Cinema in a couple weeks. For full details check Mark Mayerson's blog here. You might have to scroll down a bit.

Eyes so glad I have them

So, I was walking from work to the train station today and couldn't help but notice along the way that there was this guy welding something to the back of his truck, and he wasn't wearing safety glasses. Now, my father is a carpenter and I've worked in a couple factories, so I know that using a blowtorch without wearing eye protection is stupid. And I assumed that anyone that actually did welding for their job would know that. As I was thinking about how that guy was an idiot, I boarded the train back home and opened a book I haven't touched since last summer. Its this collection of Leonardo DaVinci's notebooks containing his observations on life, nature, art, the universe, pretty much anything, it's pretty neat. Anyway, I opened it up to where I left off some 8 or 9 months ago and by some strange coincidence the page I was on was talking about eyes. Although he goes into detail for several pages about how eyes work, it was more his introduction that, how should I say it... caught my eye?

"The eye which is the window of the soul is the chief organ whereby the understanding can have the most complete and magnificent view of the infinite works of nature.

"Now do you not see that the eye embraces the beauty of the whole world? . . . It counsels and corrects all the arts of mankind . . . it is the prince of mathematics, and the sciences founded on it are absolutely certain. It has measured the distances and sizes of the stars; it has discovered the elements and their location . . . it has given birth to architecture and to perspective and to the divine art of painting.

"O excellent thing, superior to all others created by God! What praises can do justice to your nobility? What peoples, what tongues will fully describe your function? The eye is the window of the human body through which it feels its way and enjoys the beauty of the world. Owing to the eye the soul is content to stay in its bodily prison, for without it such bodily prison is torture.

"O marvellous, O stupendous necessity, thou with supreme reason compellest all effects to be the direct result of their causes; and by a supreme and irrevocable law every natural action obeys thee by the shortest possible process. Who would believe that so small a space could contain the images of all the universe? O mighty process! What talent can avail to penetrate a nature such as these? What tongue will it be that can unfold so great a wonder? Verily none! This it is that guides the human discourse to the considering of divine things. Here the forms, here the colours, here all the images of every part of the universe are contracted to a point. What point is so marvellous? O wonderful, O stupendous necessity - by thy law thou constrainest every effect to be the direct result of its cause by the shortest path. These are miracles . . . forms already lost, mingled together in so small a space it can recreate and recompose by expansion. Describe in thy anatomy what proportion there is between the diameters of all the lenses (spetie) in the eye and the distance from these to the crystalline lens.

"The eye whereby the beauty of the world is reflected is of such excellence that whoso consents to its loss deprives himself of the representation of all the works of nature. The soul is content to stay imprisoned in the human body because thanks to our eyes we can see these things; for through the eyes all the various things of nature are represented to the soul. Whoso loses his eyes leaves his soul in a dark prison without hope of ever again seeing the sun, light of all the world; How many there are to whom the darkness of night is hateful though it is of but short duration; what would they do if such darkness were to be their companion for life?"

From: Leonardo DaVinci Notebooks, Oxford University Press. pg 105-106


Quite the introduction. He didn't even get to the scientific part yet. But man, I never realised how great eyes are. It's like, we've always had them so its so easy to take them for granted, but man, eyes are freaking awesome! All the images of every part of the universe contracted to a point. That welder is probably going to be blind soon and he has no idea how big a mistake that would be. It makes me feel sorry for people that are blind, because they are really missing out on what is whithout question the greatest of the five senses. It was a grey, cloudy day in Oakville today, and I was glad to be able to see it.


EDIT: what's with these non-art posts? My blog is tuning into...a blog (shivers)

Third Year Retrospective

Well, 3rd year of BAA Animation here at Sheridan is done, and since I have nothing else to do for the first time in 8 months I guess I'll offer my thoughts about the year to anyone who might be interested.

Overall, man, what a ride. It was probably my favorite year to date, and although the workload was substantially higher than anything I've ever experienced, I still loved it. From the beginning we were really lucky to have a great concept to start from (thanks to Dan), and even more lucky to have a great group that was willing to work their hardest to make it work.

Our class in particular had it kind of weird from the start, because although all the other classes (there are 5 classes per year) stayed the same and had all the same people in it from previous years, people from our class (group E) were mixed around with people from another class (group D). I don't really know why they did that, cause they still had the same number of people in each class. And then after that, some people chose to switch between the classes throughout the first week. In the end, we ended up having more people from group D in our class then from group E. So a lot of us didn't know each other very well, and some of us had never even met. I don't know why all this happened to just our two classes, but I'm glad it did because somehow we ended up with some of the most talented and hardworking people I've ever had the privilege of knowing.

Our group consisted of: Adam Trout, Allison Neil, Amanda Stocker, Dan Seddon, Dawnson Chen, Debbie Yu, Giorgio Mavrigianakis, Jason Walmsley, Kevin McCullough, Ki Eun Suh, Hank Choi, Dimas Mohammad, and myself. Not only did we work really well together, but we genuinely enjoyed eachother's company. We hung out a lot outside of school, and we even had a group spaghetti night. I think it is key that in order for groups to work really well together that they have to enjoy working well together. But at the same time, you can't be afraid to challenge people and tell them your opinions on their work. And they have to be willing to accept all criticism and try to improve it for the good of the film. One of Kevin's shots where there are around seven people dancing on screen and this one character slides in and does the robot, I mean, he redid that like ten times. Because he would do it, it wouldn't be good enough, we would tell him, then he would fix it without complaining. That happenened many many times, and it ended up being one of the best shots in the film. We all have to be willing to accept any criticism and know that it isn't a personal attack, but that it is only to make the film better.

Story wise, we had our work cut out for us. We had an amazing concept (a walking signal from a traffic light wants to be a dancer), and we did everything we could not to screw it up. We explored our story to a redonculous extent. We had one version where there was this city of electronic entities that lived behind the traffic light and he got banished to the 'recycle bin' and he met this handicapped sybol guy and they had to save the world, etc. We had this other version where he had a family that lived with him in the traffic light and he went out into the real world and walked around and his absense caused traffic accidents. We had another version that was extremely dark, where he was a slave along with all the other walking signals and there was this traffic enforcer guy that was basically a traffic light with a cape...anyway, sorry for rambling but my point is, we didn't dwell on anything. We tried so many different options and directions, and each of these verions (as well as several more) were not just ideas, but were brought to full storyboard states, or even leica reels. Hank, our story supervisor would have an idea that the rest of us might be a little unsure about, so he would make an entire leica reel from scratch in one night just to prove a point. We were relentless in our attempts to make sure that the story worked well and did the concept justice.

Technically speaking, our film is certainly not the most cohesive or consistent. There are significant differences from shot to shot in the way the characters look, the way the backgrounds were painted, and the animation style. We noticed the 3rd year films last year often had problems like that and we tried so hard to not let that happen, but man, it was tough. We had over 15 characters so mastering them all in such a short time was next to impossible, and because crowd shots and dancing animation were a lot harder than we anticipated, we had to struggle just to get it all done, let alone done well.

But in the end, we're pretty pleased with how it turned out. We think. We're not really sure how good it is because we've been working on it for so long, but it recieved some good reviews at the screenings and it won an award for what the judges thought was the best 3rd year film of the year (although since B1's 'The Auction" was shut out of the top three, it leads me to question the value of the judges opinions). Now we're just going to touch it up a bit over the next couple of weeks to prepare it for festivals and stuff (and for that reason the film will not be put on the internet for a while because that would disqualify it).





So, uh, yeah, sorry to bore you with words (although technically this is what blogging is supposed to be), and I guess I'll just leave any 1st or 2nd years (or anyone interested in getting into animation at Sheridan) some pre 3rd year advice:

-Make sure when you pick your story at the beginning of the year, to pick something interesting. Something unique and different. Something that no one has ever seen before, though something with enough familliarity that people will be able to relate to it. If you are lucky enough to have something like that to choose from.

-Make sure that your group enjoys hanging out with eachother. If there are problem members that insist on fighting with eachother, find some way to make it work. It will hurt your experience if you don't get along with your group.

-Show your progress, especially story progress, to a lot of people. Always show new versions to fresh eyes. Anyone that knows about your story ahead of time will not be able to give a genuine opinion.

-Be prepared to redo everything. Story, character designs, paintings, animations, everything. Nothing will ever be right on the first try. If you are not willing to accept criticism and redo your work, then you will not make it in this business (or any business for that matter).

-Prepare to finish early. Because everything, and I mean EVERYTHING takes longer than you think it will. If you schedule rough animation to be done by week 10, it will not be done until week 11. I gaurantee it. No matter what it is, no matter how much time you give yourselves it will always take longer. Someone (if not everyone) WILL always be late. That, I promise you. So plan to get everything done at least a week or two earlier than it has to be, that way it might get done on time.

-Be organised. We weren't. In fact we were probably the least organized group in our year. And as a result I was finding out the week before the film was due that some scenes had barely been started. I think there were 3 scenes that were done from scratch the day before the film was due because I didn't know until then that they hadn't been started. If we payed closer attention unwanted surprises like that would not have happened. And unwanted surprises are not fun (especcially the day before the film is due).

-Use all your time you have to your advantage. I think were were the only group that spent the majority of our Christmas vacation working on the film. Most people just chilled or worked on their internship portfolios, we worked on the film. As a result we had an extra month of story work that the other groups didn't take advantage of. The film would not be what it was if it weren't for that.

-Avoid crowdshots and dancing animation. Man those are difficult. And an audience isn't going to care how hard it is to do crowd shots cause they see crowd shots everyday in real life. I mean, if you have to do them then you don't have much of a choice, but be prepared to work your butts off.

-Have fun with it. It's just a cartoon.



Thanks to everyone that helped make the film happen, thanks to Alexis Marsh for composing the music from scratch in the last two weeks and for being awesome about taking criticism, and thanks to all the other groups in our year who I think raised the bar for 3rd years to come and for being a constant inspiration to us all.

The Princess and the Frog

Okay, blogger is being stupid today, and is not letting me upload images, so I'll put up something else that recently came to my attention. There is finally a trailer for "The Princess and the Frog" on Disney's website! I don't normally use exclamation points, which means I'm pretty excited about this. I grew up on the 2D Disney musicals of the 90's (The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, Alladin, etc), so this is a pretty big deal for me. It doesn't come out for over a year, but I'm pretty stoked. This one film is going to have a huge effect on whether or not 2D will ever make a comeback, so here's hoping it will be awesome. The link is here