Regaining the magic

I have been having a major creative meltdown and I'm glad to say it's over. I discovered why I was having it. I've spent so much time on my animations thinking to myself what would Pixar or DreamWorks want to see when I apply to get a job with either company. This trapped me in a box because rather doing my own thing I was trying to emulate the work of those companies. I realized I can't do that. I have to make the animations I want to make and how I want to make them and the jobs will come. I can't say this animation has to look like UP or has to look like How to Train Your Dragon. Neither company is going to be impressed by emulating what they have done. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery but in the animation world, it simply means that a potential employer will look at it and say "that's great, but how much of you is put into this animation?" I have been struggling so much with what I will do for my next animation and I woke up in the middle of the night when this idea came from nowhere and hit me. For the first time in a while, my brain started racing with the magic and whimsy of it all. It hit me all at once. My next animation is not going to be for anyone or anything other than what makes me happy, and that alone will bring the success. It will be a laugh, romantic, cute, and sweet. This is the beginning of me carving my niche!!

More Art

Yeah, so I've been in hyper artistic mode lately and I love Beauty and the Beast so I wanted to draw this. Granted the line quality suffers cause I got lazy about sharpening my graphite. lol

Artsy Fartsy

A little drawing I did for class during the fall semester. I'm actually rather proud of it considering I can't draw fine art as the instructor called it worth a damn and it actually turned out okay.

I won a contest!!! Yay!

So there is a website called Indiana Uploaded that is geared towards the CG community in Indiana and they hold contests all the time. One particular contest was a themed contest titled "Dark Side of the Mind" and I decided to do something for this contest and I actually won. I never won anything in my life so I'm pretty happy that I did. It also adds further confirmation that I actually have made the right decision with my career choice.

This is the the work I did for the contest and also a link to the website to show the other contest entree's.http://www.indianauploaded.com/

Projects and what not

So I've been planning and began production on several projects and I"m really undecided as to which one I'll finish first. I had the idea of an alien attacking a secret military installation known simply as "Area 62" but do to limitations of my computer I'm concerned that the rendering due to all the effects necessary for the animation would be extremely long. 

The next one on the list is a mad scientist in his lab trying to bring a freakish creation to life and having it fail miserably. I thought of having the mad scientist be a ring tailed lemur mainly because I want an animal for a character and also because I really want to do something with fur even though this would also drastically increase render times. It also bothers me a bit because it is not really very original.

Thirdly is a story taking place in a morgue although this one is confounding me because I don't really know what kind of a story I could tell in morgue that would be humorous. 

Something else that is on my mind is that I was supposed to be the 3D modeler for a student's thesis and it's been over 4 weeks since his last email and I now think that has turned out to be nothing. I'm a bit disappointed because this could have been a good opportunity to get work seen and also have something great for a demo reel. Mostly I'm disappointed because I've really been wanting to do a collaborative project and still have yet to see that happen.

On another note, I have sort of a love/hate relationship with internet communication. I often find that things like email and instant messengers are completely devoid of any real sort of human connection. Granted cell phones aren't much better but I thought it would be an interesting experiment to just randomly post my cell number on the internet somewhere just to see how many people would actually call or text it. Will I really do it? Probably not. I'm pretty guarded about who I give my number to and the end result probably would not be to my liking. Still though, it would be interesting to do none the less.

And now a little something that always brings a smile to my face...

I can't think of a title

or really a way to start. I guess this past semester at school left me a little bit drained. I did well during the semester... very well in fact. It was just very exhausting and feel like I came up short even though I walked away with A's. I could be being very hard on myself but who knows. A great deal of the disenchantment came from my animation class. Not because I don't love it, but because I felt like my imagination turned off during the class.  It also bothered me because I am a much better modeler than what I did in that class and I felt like sticking to the syllabus was hurting me creatively. Granted, I know there is a reason why the students were being taught to do the modeling the way we were, but my mind kept saying I am beyond what this class is teaching as far as modeling. The animation part of the syllabus I really did need to learn and also the learning to rely more on procedural textures as opposed to painted textures was nice to learn.

Because of this disenchantment, I have decided to start work on my next project that will be a part of the next class about a little alien attacking a fictional "military base" that is meant to be humorous. This raises another concern of mine of whether or not I spend too much time at my computer improving my animation skills that I'm missing the bigger picture. I am constantly in fear that if I spend too much time doing this that I am heading straight for a burnout. I mean really when I'm not at work, I'm at computer. I don't really do much else.

I also have these feelings creeping in that I am going to be 32 this year, am not married, am showing no signs of ever getting married and all that other stuff life brings. I've been engaged before, which obviously and thankfully didn't work out. The most amusing thing about that is why it all came to an end. Not only was the girl not the right one for me, but she kept saying how I had no drive or passion for anything. I kept telling her that I didn't know what it was yet, but was I knew I would be doing it and nothing would get in my way. The real point of is that there were so many times when she and I would sit down and watch animated movies together and the signs of my love for animation were starting to show, and I can't help but wonder sometimes if only she could see me now. Hmmm... I guess I am currently in a bit of a state of reflection at the moment. So yeah...

First blog of the new year. first step... health

So to say I have had my own slew of medical problems would be an understatement. Never in a million years though would I have thought that wisdom teeth could be a severe problem especially after some of my much worse medical issues. After placing an emergency call with my dentist and doing my own research, it now appears that I have an infection resulting from unknown impacted 2nd wisdom tooth erupting into the original wisdom tooth that came in years ago on the bottom left side of my face.

The only course of action now is to have the affected teeth removed which can't be done until the infection has cleared with the help of antibiotics. This is something the dentist wants done soon as the swelling from the infection can cause my airway to close and the infection itself can also get into my blood which like the airway closing can be potentially fatal. The dentist is also concerned about the infection due to my already existing TMJ disorder further complicating matters.

This really sort of puts thing into perspective a bit for me now as I never really viewed wisdom teeth as being something that could cause such an extreme problem. In all honesty it just feels like I have a bearable yet painful case of the flu. This also worries me because I have heard the horror stories about how wisdom teeth should be removed at a younger age because the older a person gets the more lengthy the recovery process takes. One of the things that bothers me the most was my orthodontic surgeons decision to not remove these teeth when the upper wisdom teeth were taken out. It really could have saved me a lot of pain and worry. So here's hoping that I can have this problem resolved without it getting any worse.