justin owens

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.

Thirty minutes before I’m off for my pastry and break baking shift. I am exhausted. It’s not so bad at all when I’m moving around, but now that I’m just sitting and waiting, the exhaustion has set in. I’ve just about been up for 24 hours, which is rather rare for me, I typically can’t go that long without sleep. I’m confident though that once I’m moving and out in the crisp air, I’ll wake up again.

On top of everything else I feel emotionally drained. It’s been a long day. I look forward to sleep, only five and a half hours to go and I can lay down!

I’m doing decently on the homework front. I finished my figure drawing homework earlier, that felt nice to get out of the way. I’ve a few supplies I need to pick up before class, but I otherwise feel ready. The only homework item left is for my 2d animation class. We’re doing a falling leaf animation this week. I need to finalize my background layer and path of action for the leaf and then onto animating it. After work I’ll sleep, then I’ll head to the animation lab to get that all finished. I hope it won’t take more than a few hours.

Wednesday evening I need to check in with the court house and see if I need to report for jury duty on Thursday. I decided to not try and get out of it this time (I know a few tricks). I feel ready to finally give it a go, but the downside is that my initial report in date is a school day. Because of that, I’m hoping I don’t have to report in, at least on Thursday. I only have each class once a week, so missing a single day cuts out a lot of instruction.

And now fifteen minutes have passed. Time to brush my teeth and put myself together. I feel the pastries calling me!

I’m working the bake shift this evening/morning, Tues from 4am to 8am. It’s going to add up to a long day, but I’m excited to be baking pastries!

I’m working at getting some homework done at the moment. I’ve been pretty busy this weekend and hadn’t really gotten a chance to get much done in that department. On Saturday I helped cater for a wedding, that was a lot of fun, I hope to post about that specifically in the next few days. On Sunday maiki and I took a nice walk around Berkeley, sampling many treats along the way. Much conversation was had.

I had a simple exercise to do for my Advanced Animation 2 class, a basic ball (of the heavy variety) bouncing in place and coming to a stop, using the techniques learned in the last class. I did it pretty much as he wanted, but in the end I opened the graph editor and adjusted the curves so the ball had more apparent weight. Specifically, I broke the tangets of the curves to make the adjustments I wanted, though that wasn’t something he showed us. He had mentioned that technique can lead to problems when scaling an animation, but I didn’t really know of another way to get the same effect, without overloading on keyframes.

 

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