justin owens

I’m in the computer lab at school putting the final touches on my wushu animation. I need to work on my timing a bit, touch up some of my key poses and add in the facial expressions. After that I think I’ll be ready to start offsetting my keyframes. I have a bit of a back log of animations (2d and 3d) that I haven’t posted, I’m going to try and get those online in the next few days.

Finally had a day off today, it was wonderful. I spent it relaxing, buying coffee, talking with maiki and going to a wacom workshop at school.

I didn’t get any homework done today, but during the workshop I did start a painting. I’ve been hoping to use the wacom workshop as a chance to do some quick speed paintings, but today was the first time I was able to (previously I had too much homework). I was flipping through one of my art books before the workshop and was digging the forest images.

Here’s what I have after two hours. I have lots of ideas on how I want to proceed with it, but regardless I want to keep it loose. At the moment though, mainly I think because of the linework, I think the house stands out a bit.

Well I’ve been rather lax in making blog posts. I don’t feel that I’ve had any free time between school, homework and work and I typically feel like I need time to feel I can sit down to write.

So the triple-boot didn’t work out. I could get both MacOS and Ubuntu to cooperate, but Windows wouldn’t play with the others. I ended up going with a MacOS and WinXP dual boot, that way I get my productivity and gaming covered. Ubuntu was going to be an experiment in alternate, and interesting, operating systems. Well, another time.

School is going well, I feel like I’m learning lots. I spent six hours working on my 2d animation yesterday (we’re animating the flour sack character jumping off a crate). I’m keeping mine really simple so I don’t get distracted. I got about 80 frames drawn yesterday, I’m going to shoot it tomorrow night and see how it’s looking. There are some sections that really looked promising and others I’m not sure about.

Far Cry 2 comes out tomorrow, I pre-ordered it last week and I’m hoping Kimi can pick it up for me while I’m at school. Or I’ll just get it on Thursday. Now hopefully I’ll actually find some time where I can play it!

Not much else I feel like saying at the moment, just wanted to give my blog some love.

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.