justin owens

A quick post before bed, it’s been a long day. I setup my imac with a triple boot system today. I’m running osx, winxp and ubuntu. I’m excited. I’ve much customizing and adding of drivers to do (no wireless in ubuntu yet), but at least everything is installed and ready for me to play with.

This weekend has been the first in some time where I’ve had two days off in a row, I feel like I’ve finally had some time to rest. During the week I always have two days off from work, but then of course I’m at school those days.

It’s tough, I really wish I wasn’t working at all so I could put all my energy into school, but I’m enjoying work so much, I’m getting to do lots of things I’m really interested in (baking, food prep and soon I’ll be getting training on the line). Bill keeps joking that Kimi and I will probably take over the Bread Workshop, that really caught me off guard. I’ve always had a dream of having a bakery/cafe/small restaurant. I’ve no idea what the future holds for me, and there’s no way I want to stop pursuing animation and art in general, but all of a sudden it seems like that dream has much more of a chance than I’d have thought. Interesting.

I have a lot of homework to get done today. YCON starts this weekend and lots of friends will be visiting. I’m starting with my 3d animation homework as I find it a lot easier to focus and get started on computer work.

I just ordered a new 24″ iMac, I’m looking forward to getting that setup. I had thought of getting a new tower instead, but the iMac includes a gorgeous monitor and has such a small footprint (I should be able to get rid of both my g5 tower and pc box), that I couldn’t resist. My work area at home isn’t ideal at the moment, I have the aforementioned two towers next to my desk, two keyboards and mice on my desk and it’s just too much. I can’t wait til it’s simplified, I think it’ll work much better for me.

I’ll still be using two monitors, so I won’t lose that functionality. I forgot to order the mini dvi to dvi adapter though, so I’ll drop by the apple store before school sometime this week.

Last week when on break in my intermediate figure drawing class, I had a chance to speak with my teacher Keith. He attended the Art Center College of Design, an amazing school that many artists I admire have come out of.

I mentioned such to him and his reaction was interesting. He told me how competitive the school is, where it has you submit a portfolio for review to try and get in. He said that meant all the students around you already knew how to draw and were incredibly talented. He worked extremely hard to keep up, and so the environment really pushed him to learn. He said a lot of students couldn’t take the stress and would drop out.

I’ve heard so many amazing things about the school and as I mentioned above, the artists that I’ve seen who’ve graduated are just so talented. He really gave me a different take on it though. Money aside (it’s at least twice as expensive as theAcademy of Art), I don’t think I would have been able to get in. It’s an interesting system. It picks out individuals who already have great skills and then refines their craft to a great degree. I don’t like that it leaves others behind, regardless of whether or not I think I’d be one of the people left behind.

Now I don’t know what they look for in the submitted portfolios, but the impression I was left with was that you had to be pretty good to get in. The academy accepts everyone, so long as they can pay (a serious issue unto itself), but at least people aren’t turned away for not having the skillset they’re coming to school to learn.

Hmm, I had a lot to blog about … yesterday, but now it all seems so in the past. And forgotten. Mostly forgotten.

Between work and school, and the rare attempt to sleep inbetween, I’ve been keeping quite busy. I’m so incredibly excited by my classes this semester and feel that I’ll be leveling up by the end of the year.

In my advanced animation class we’re starting out with a martial arts routine. Last night we went over how to do the first pass blocking, I was surprised by how simple it ends up being. I feel like any complicated character animation is doable at this point, I just have to break it down into the most basic poses.

I turned in the falling leaf project in my intro to 2d animation class yesterday. I felt it ran a bit fast, but my teacher really liked it. The main focus of the animation was ease-in and ease-out, having the keyframes get closer and closer as the leaf comes into a curve and then the opposite as it leaves the curve. I had such a hard time finishing the animation. I kept wanting to wrap it up, but I’d have the leaf moving too fast and so I’d have to add another curve to try and slow it down.

 

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The bake shift was fun, I only destroyed a few breads. I’m going to keep things short for the moment, I’d love to get into the details of what I did, but I’ve had very little sleep these last few days. We can safely say, pastries, I has them.

After a bit of a nap I met up with Kimi in San Francisco. We shared some pasta at Bristol Farms and then ate creampuffs at Beard Papas. After that I went to the animation lab and animated my two dimensional butt off. I was able to get around 75% of the project finished, I’ll need to go in tomorrow morning to finish things off. I’d do it Thursday before class, but I might be reporting for Jury Duty.

On the BART ride home I struck up a conversation with a woman named Karen, who was born blind. We discussed accessibility and how the blind audience isn’t a concern when it comes to visual medias, including movies. It’s very interesting to me, as I deal so much with visual works, be it drawing or animation. I feel motivated to try and include the awareness of the way others experience media into my work.

I was thinking about that and was trying to come up with specific examples for myself in how I could make my work more accessible. Based on my conversation with Karen, the first thing that comes to mind is story. She goes to the movies and was telling me that she doesn’t need to see to be able to enjoy a good story.