Going from thumbnail to finished

I quickly sketched out a few thumbnails for a layout. I was pretty happy with few and I got the go ahead to finish them. I started off with a lot of excitement and enthusiasm. However, a few hours into working in illustrator, I was not feeling the same way about it anymore. I couldn't figure out why and feeling frustrated, I put that on the shelf for a week. I decided I really should be getting back to that so I open up the file today, and like magic, I suddenly saw all the problems.

My thumbnail was highly cropped, and left a lot of details to be filled in by the viewer's brain. (I realize detailing and finessing is one of my weak points, that's why I could never be an illustrator. But I knew I did this one finished background before so I should be able to do this too.) But in illustrator, I was working with an expanded canvas. And that's where I screwed up trying to fill in this extra space in illustrator. Here is a screenshot for you all to see what I'm talking about. The ground plane for instance. And the foreground building on the left. Maybe I will start over. Maybe I needed this kick.

Robot character design for 2D production

Here is a work in progress image of my robot puppet being done in flash. I had intended to animate this guy in Animate Pro. However, looking at the puppet now, I think I might have made a mistake with the character design considering my medium.

Because he is such a boxy character, a lot of perspective comes into play. Shapes will look different when his arms and feet are moving about. Doing a very convincing walk with him could be difficult.

I would appreciate any suggestions or cheats to make this work.

Not for people with upper body strength of a 10 year old girl

Prelude:
I cannot swim, have a fear of deep waters and I decided to sign up for an activity that involves me being alone in a narrow canoe in a river for half a day. Why? Because my best friend Soumitra Goswami convinced me to.
"It is not very deep at all" he said, "You can stand in the water and it only comes up to your waist."
"That doesn't sound too bad."
"Yeah, its fun. I can't swim either."
*blank stare*

So once I was assured that I wouldn't have to do a barrel roll underwater or something crazy like this, I went and put down my $25 bucks for a Friday I would be looking forward to more than any other day! (It was a day after my birthday and I am not a fan of my birthdays)

The build up:
All the prep that was required was to make sure I was dressed for the heat and to get wet. Put on my beach shorts and the new sleeveless t shirt I had just bought. No camera, no cellphone, no ipod no headphones. Just some cash, and the keys to my bike and apartment. I skipped breakfast as I thought I was running late. Big mistake! We were going to have lunch provided by the ISSO but that wasn't going to be until later in the day. Thankfully, Justin in the car had some cherries, strawberries and blackberries. The ride wasn't too long. Soon we were outside the car and stretching while Joshua was getting the kayaks ready.

Between conversations(I am really not much of a talker) with all the new people around me, I took some time off to wander around. Looking out to the calm river that I will be traveling down, all the trees, the critters...(I walked up to the little bridge where I saw a tiny grey/almost white frog sitting extremely still on the post... Gah I wished I had my camera! As you can see, it is hard for me to be away from technology. I moved on, fascinated at having seen what I saw and thinking nobody else will ever be able to experience the moment they way I did.

Boats away:
I wasn't sure if I wanted to be the first one in the water or the last one. I was in some mystery land between excited and apprehensive. After Matthew was in the water, (big guy who used to be a life guard) I figured it was safe to go in. I grabbed a paddle, put on the bright orange life jacket and sat down on the cushion. Joshua pushed me into the water, and with minimal rocking back and forth, I was moving forward gently. Time to put my paddle in the water and practice what we'd been instructed.
"Make sure both your hands are equidistant from the center. Make sure the paddle is not slanted or you're not getting the most out of your stroke. When you want to turn left, put your oar in the left side and paddle backwards. Likewise for the other direction. Quickly paddle backwards to stop."

Once everyone was in the water and the newbies had had enough practice, we decided to head out the first bend. Joshua took the front, Matthew was in the middle. I knew that's where I wanted to be! And Jeff was in the long canoe at the very end. An advantage of being in the middle is people up ahead could warn us of trees or shallow spots coming up. You can learn from their mistakes and be prepared. I got really hot under the life jacket so I decided I wanted to take off my t-shirt. I told Matt I wanted to do this and he guided me to a shallow stop, and stayed close while I very carefully removed my t shirt and put the life jacket back on. However, as people had started paddling faster, I fell behind.Which meant no overexcited people speeding towards me from the behind, and the the sound of collective human blabbering will only be coming from one direction.

All I wanted to hear was the sound of my own breathing, the water from my paddle, the rustling of the trees and the birds that flew about the woods. No cars, no machines, no appliances, no computers, no cellphones or headphones. Just the insects the, the heat...wait, I thought this was supposed to be fun.

Second Leg:
I had already admitted to Jeff that I was tired. That didn't mean I'd given up. However, I was relieved when he said, "we'll have a swim break soon enough." I saw that people had started collecting around a sandbar. I relaxed and got there at my own pace, parked my kayak and reached for another Gatorade. I watched the others get into the water while I stood under a shady tree. Weirdly, I was talking to people about Professor DaCosta's stories from Animation History class. Once people who swam were done cooling off, we took a quick group shot and were on our way again.

This time I decided to start early. Big mistake. As I bumped into one tree, then another. As the river sped up around the corner, I got stuck in a beaver dam. Joshua and Matt both had to come to my rescue. They held the tree branch so I had some room to duck and get out and didn't get scraped. While also pushing me since I couldn't paddle fast enough. I was freed, but Matthew was now stuck. And his kayak flipped in the process of trying to get himself out. Think he lost his t-shirt then.

Well, paddling more carefully and slowly, I kept going till it was time to take the lunch break. We approached a sandy shore and parked our canoos. I couldn't wait to get into the cool water and cool off. I also needed food. There was some delicious cold rice, the recipe for which I'd be getting from Jeff for sure. And some sandwiches and chips. I sat in the shallow water with my plate of food, and a cold bottle of coke. It was amazing.

Last Leg
After we were all stuffed up with food, we began the last and longest and for me the most painful part of the trip. It was like an endurance test. But I think after one point my brain completely shut down the pain. I just knew I was going to feel it tomorrow. I did not let it interfere with my enjoyment of the serene location. I was one of the last couple of people to get to our pick up point. There we emptied the kayaks, helped load those up in the carrier and had some watermelon. Then we were on our way to return to good old Savannah and relax after our amazing day kayaking at the Ogeechee river

The Glitch

Here's a story I wrote for my concept development class. The directive was to explain the death(falling from the sky) of the blackbirds in Arkansas.

In a dark room, Jai is illuminated by multiple computer monitors showing long lines of text. He has his foot up on the table and a keyboard in his lap. He types some stuff then picks up the keyboard and puts it on the desk. Grabs his cup of coffee, takes a sip and goes to put it back down.
Just as he is pulling his hand away from the cup, there is a loud banging on the door and he spills the coffee on the keyboard.

“Jai! We have a situation out here!” a hoarse voice yells. Jai is still trying to save the keyboard, turning it upside down on a towel and patting it. As he is doing this, some code is being typed in on the screen inadvertently. A warning dialog box pops up with OK and Cancel buttons.

Banging on the door again. We see Jai walking over to the door opening it up and walking back to the keyboard with the other guy following behind saying “the temperature program is going haywire…”

“I’ve got problems of my own, Phil” Jai says as Phil is transfixed on the computer monitor to which Jai is not paying any attention.

“What did you do!” says Phil still staring at the monitor as Jai finally looks up…

“Raining birds! How the…” Jai expresses in disbelief and despair.

Phil trying to hide how amused he is by this says “Dude, you are so getting fired for this!”

More 2D animation pencil test

Super excited to be starting this quarter because I am working in 2D animation again. This is the first pencil test of the quarter, Mushu(dragon from Mulan) head turn assignment. This obviously needs some fixes and I will fix it because the assignment isn't due till Wednesday.

Background almost finished

So in my last blog post you guys saw the ultra sketchy photoshop piece which I used as a reference layer in flash to work on this. I have spent a lot of time on tiny little details. I hope the professor likes this.

First week of Summer Quarter

I have wanted to write about a bunch of things over the last couple of days but I have not been very diligent about sparing some time for my blog. But after the last week of classes, I have found myself working on something so exciting that I cannot NOT share this with you.

One of my classes this quarter is Digicel 1 with John Webber. It is an introductory flash animation class. Our first assignment is to design a background. I was really excited to do this background that I imagined would be used in a story I have had in my mind for a really long time now. Won't reveal the plot yet, but it is a bathroom scene. My family would probably find this piece familiar because the inspiration was the bathroom in my house in my hometown, Akola.

So this is the quick photoshop thumbnail/rough sketch with the color scheme(s). I applied some effects to this to convey a sense of heat and disorientation.

In-Class Storyboard Drawings

For his Drawing for Storyboarding class, Prof. Benjamin R Phillips shows us a still from a different movie every class and has us sketch it out in 15 minutes. It involves studying the principles of storyboarding like composition, framing, staging, contrast, etc. Here are two examples from the last two classes.

First is from the movie "The Ghoul" and second(both) from Freaks. Lately we've been dealing with old black and white films that were shot in a different aspect ratio than today's cinema widescreen. So that's what the letterboxing on the right is.

Waking Sleeping Beauty

You know how the internet is… Some trend catches on like wild fire and creates a buzz for a while. Then it dies down and everyone forgets about it. Waking sleeping beauty is a documentary film by Don Hahn that was originally screened back in september 09 at Telluride film festival. It was talked about on all animation and movie review blogs. Eventually, people would stop talking about it.

But I got to watch the movie earlier this quarter at SCAD and had to write a field trip report for Charles DaCosta's class. Here is my paper which I finished last week.


I remember I first heard about Waking Sleeping Beauty on Mark Mayerson’s Blog when it screened at the Toronto international film Festival. It quickly left my mind as I finished my fall quarter finals and went on vacation. Early spring quarter, we got assigned our field trip which was to go watch Waking Sleeping Beauty at the Trustee’s Theater at SCAD. As all the great things I’d read about it on animation blogs started coming back to me, I got very excited that we would get to see this documentary.
I knew I had heard Don Hahn’s name before, and I realized I own the book he compiled from Walt Stanchfield’s lectures on figure drawing. He has also worked at Disney with Professor Troy G. And his page on IMDB page is full of fond names from mine and many of my peers’ childhood. This documentary is his debut as a feature director. Waking Sleeping beauty is a documentary about the revival of animation at Disney from 1980s to 1990s. He would also answer questions after the screening.
The theater was jam packed with students, all animation junkies I presume. This was much bigger turnout than I had expected. I arrived a little late and quietly found myself a seat towards the end of the theater. And I was gripped by the movie from the get go. Being the animation nerd that I am also helped I am sure. The movie only used archived video interviews on screen. Interviews specifically conducted for the film were played as voice overs while funny and captivating imagery was played on screen.
The story started off by talking about the time when Disney was in shambles. None of the movies were the success everyone hoped they’d be. The animators were beginning to lose hope and thought their days at Disney were numbered. Through home video footage we see animators staging a zombie apocalypse enactment in the studio. It was a nightmare scenario for these animators who were ripped apart from their ‘home’ their old studio and put in a new facility, uncertain of their fate.
But the magic was returned through the hands of the talented people like Eisner and katzenberg who were brought in at what was the lowest point of the company’s history. With a slew of successes from The Great Mouse Detective and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the Disney animation era jump started again. Audiences were coming back to the theaters in hordes, the movies were making more and more money and the studio was prospering. However, all was not well.
Animators still had a very stressful life. They worked long hours as Disney resolved to release one new feature length movie each year. They hardly had time to go home. Animators spent days and nights in the studio, never saw their family and kids. This was what everyone had always told me what working in the animation industry is like. The animators made the most of what they had. The studio became their second home, their co-workers became family. They had margarita nights where they let loose.
The focus of the film shifted from the animators to the executives. The politics higher up in the company played an important role in the creative decisions of the studio. However, they did not seem to capture my interest. But it does serve as a lesson that the fate of a company can change drastically in the lack of good leadership. Also that good leaders need to keep their personal differences aside and work towards the greater good.

SCAD president's chat

Today, I believe Savannah College of Art and Design did something that had the potential of being HUGE! They had an open forum for students, faculty and staff to ask questions directly in front(or in the online presense) of President Paula Wallace. I was at work in Montgomery Hall cage and my friend Vijay Prabhakar who works at SCAD in Keys Hall reminded me that this was going on. And I decided to participate. I am copy pasting my question and answers I got.
Yash Gupta: The SCAD site is very information heavy, but still does not provide me with an idea of what other students are creating and doing. I would love for scad to provide a forum/gallery where students can put up their work and interact with peers. I am sure this is something that would also appeal to prospective students. What are your views about such an offering?
Paula Wallace: I am encouraging each chair to present lively, relevant information on each department's Web site.  I believe recent past projects, guest speakers, awards, and facilities should be highlighted. We are very proud of our esteemed faculty, alumni, and students.  I would like to see each department's Web site more effectively communicate its life and essence.

This, to me was a very unsatisfying answer. I really suggested something more open. Even if they were to come down to a level where each professor was displaying their students' works on a section of the SCAD website, it would mean more student works get exposure.

Then Jason Parker responded with the following:

Hi Yash, I'm SCAD's social media manager. We have a number of program-specific groups and pages on Facebook where students are encouraged to interact with each other. You can find a comprehensive list on SCAD's Facebook page at http://facebook.com/scad.edu under the ''Connect'' tab.

I feel this doesn't get us anywhere either. There are already better forums like conceptart.org and deviantart and blogger blogs where people can display their work. But the problem is exposure. When put under an umbrella of SCAD, the students are bound to get more focussed traffic and response and appreciation. I have a facebook fan page of my work that only has 17 fans at the moment.

Anyways, the fun didn't stop there. More after the jump break.

More Beanbag Animation

I am very glad I did not post my flag animation here. While going through everyone's flag animation in class and hearing what Troy had to say to most of them about things they needed to fix, I inherently figured out that my animation was a piece of crap and will need to be fixed a LOT if I am to get a decent grade. I guess that's what you get when you finish your work last minute.

So I will be redoing the flag. In the mean time, I wanted to get going on the assignment I enjoy more, the Bean bag. I had shown my angry jab to Aradhana and she said it just seemed like he was poking or touching something. I decided to work some other actions into it. Like he may start off with a heavy exhale like a puff and go at the poor victim. Then he turns around in another grunt when he notices something that shocks him. That's where I am at. I cannot decide on which 'fear' emotion I want to work with. the duck? cower? retreat?

And actually just typing about this, I figured I might need more of a finger wagging than a jabbing action for my bean bag. I don't quite feel up for it tonight. My throat's got me down. So until next time folks!

Bean Bag Animation

Pulled the first honest complete all nighter this quarter. Finished my flag animation, but here's something a little more intertaining (interesting+entertaining- that's my sleep deprived brain for you)

I call this Angry Jab. The first emotion my bean bag is going to act out. The entire animation has to be atleast 4 seconds with 3 distinct emotions. I mapped it out to anger the first second, then transition(shock) and 2nd emotion(fear) for the rest.

Gotta go catch the bus now.

If I had seen this last night, I wouldn't have gone home.

The backstory goes something like this... I came to Montgomery hoping to get some kick-ass (my ass kicking) work done over the course of the night. I animated a few frames of the flag and shot it and it was extremely disappointing. Not just disappointing, it was actually terribly demotivating. I was not enjoying it at all. I knew very little to try to apply to the assignment I was working on. I had been there for only about two and a half hours. So I decided to plough through for a little bit more.

I switched gears and started working on the bean bag animation. I was enjoying this much more. But still the terribly stiff and jumpy flag was poking me in the back of my mind. So rather than dealing with it, I decided to go home. Caught the last Silver B bus back to the terrace and slept it off.

But this morning when I got here, the bad taste of the flag animation was long gone. I captured my keys and looked at my little bean bag guy aggressively jab, jump back and finally get sad. It was such an exciting moment for me that I could not Not share it with you all. And I just wish I didn't have to go to the class now so that I could continue working on this guy.

What I've been working on at this hour...

The entire room is deserted. So very peaceful up in here. Just wish my music was with me. I just finished animating the bouncing ball. All 74 frames of it. or 27 drawings. I had some from my previous session. Doing the rest, along with making some changes to the previous drawings took me about one and a half hour tonight. This time I uploaded the video on youtube and am embedding that here because youtube gives you the option of seeing it bigger.




I removed one frame from before the first hit to make the ball seem like it was coming down faster and not sticking to the ground. I tried applying the same idea to the second bounce, and changed the frames 21(22) and 23(24) to be a little higher. I suppose this drawing will help explain some things.

 All critiques welcome.

Bohemian Bullshit

"You gotta learn to bullshit; Talk like a bohemian." he said.

The more I read, the more I am convinced I have no talent whatsoever with words, sentences and narratives. So I cannot, try as I might, make this any more interesting as it already is. Let me just give you some background.

The 'wise guy' who proclaimed the above is in my Survey of western art 2 class. We finally got our grades today. I always just thought to myself in that class, "I don't see it", "I don't get it" or sometimes even I don't agree. I constantly tried to analyze everything we read, watched and heard. Which would lead to me being overwhelmed by just how complex it all is. So much more involved than just memorizing dates and names like we did in survey 1. Thus, my final grade came as a complete surprise to me.

Walking out of the classroom, I casually asked him how he did in the class, and then remarked with a "good job!" when he started:

"Well, I was getting a C in this class, and I was scared I might go down to a D."
"oh..."
"But you know, you just gotta know how to bullshit. Learn to talk like a bohemian." he said while making grand gesture with his arm...
"uh... sure..."
I had, at that point, stopped paying attention.

Ever since 10th grade board exams, we have been told stuff like "Just make it look like you wrote a lot, nobody reads those essays anyways." or "Just throw big words in there". There were also tales of those who wrote plots of movies in their math papers and still passed. (I personally cannot verify that last one was true.) However, I considered that very unfair and never ever attempted such a thing. That is why finding a place where teachers actually take the time to read and remark on your college level papers with all their incoherence and grammatical errors was a reason for much joy.

I don't think I would have scored 100% on this class by bullshitting on the papers. I think it was my critical thinking and judging and analyzing that got me this mark. I am extremely happy about this.

I wish I could have been a little bit of a jerk that one time and told it to him to his face. Oh well, that's what I get for being a nice guy.

I Have Never Gotten a Scholarship in my life

Before now, that is. I was so happy to get an email from Julie, the International Admissions Counselor at SCAD. She is a very nice lady, and one of the reasons to go there, would be to meet her in person and thank her for helping me out with the admission process. I still remember when I sent her an email I was supposed to send to a classmate here, and I accidentally typed the wrong email address and pressed send. Realized what mistake I had made at 2:30 am in the night and immediately sent her an email apologizing for the mixup. And she was really nice about it. I was so relieved.

So, When I first read the email from her, I called up Arpan, then Sachin. I was so excited, I wanted to talk to everybody! I called up Natansh and doni, but didn't get to talk to them. I also tried anju mausi... I missed her birthday 4 days ago on 27th march.. (happy bilated birthday mausi) but there was some problem again. I didn't bother to go and paint as I just felt like celebrating! I met Franziska in the learning commons and we decided to go eat something in the cafeteria. It was a nice sunny day.

After that, as I was heading home, I met Sachin, talked to him in person about the scholarship and the rest of the admission process. He asks, "तू खुश है ना?" I just smiled and said, "बहुत.." That is, until I ended up talking to Sujata. I don't say it's her fault. But as she scratched the surface, asking me all these questions, it dawned on me that it's only 11 % of the fees of 2009-2010 Parents would still be paying $24k in tuition. Well, atleast for those one and a half hours, I was truly happy. Even though my parents aren't saying anything about it, (I told dad to tell mom, but she didn't find out until the next morning, at which point, I wasn't available to talk to her on skype.. so I talked to her the day after that.) I emailed SCAD back and asked if there were other opportunities for financial help. And Julie let me know that there was another scholarship I could apply for. I am going to get on it asap.

Today I got the letter from SCAD in mail. I was running late for college so I put it in my bag as I left. After the printmaking class, I went to the learning commons, and met Sachin. Asked him to open it up and read. Their letter head is really sweet. SCAD  written on the top in silver ink. I read that they will get back to me about my artistic honors scholarship in two weeks, and that I was awarded Academic Honors Scholarship for a gpa of above 3.0 I have only ever gotten a D in History of western Art, in fall 2007, which brought my GPA for the term down to 2.85

Another 'fine print' was that I would only get 70% of the scholarship if I was not living on campus housing. I don't know how I feel about that. But I am still happy that I have a shot at artistic honors scholarship also. All my friends are really excited about the news, and we are looking for an opportunity to party. As soon as we are not as busy anymore.