justin owens

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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I got a new plastic overlay for my graphics tablet, the last one had gotten quite scratched. The tablet is working better, but that unfortunately didn’t entirely fix it. Compared to Kimi’s tablet, it just isn’t as responsive or sensitive. It’s frustrating when it doesn’t work right, but with the new overlay, it’s at least better.

I’ve noticed an improvement in my digital painting recently which has inspired me to finish some older works. I want to finish my three point perspective illustration from last semester. I had been a bit daunted by the image, but I feel prepared to get back into again. I’ll start on that tomorrow after I get some web work done.

The final for my perspective class was to take some written material and turn it into a three to four page comic. I really got overwhelmed with my other finals and didn’t get as much done as I’d have liked, but here are the page roughs.

I based the comic off of a story, Skyships and Tech Chips, by Tim set in the Cloud World universe.

I focused on one small section of the story to make it easier on my self. It was an interesting exercise, taking someones written material and creative ideas and making my own interpretation. I have a lot of other projects I’m working on right now, so for the moment this one is set aside, but I do hope to revisit and finish it.

I’m just about done with finals week, I’m finishing up my perspective piece tonight (a three page comic) and then I’ll be done!

I turned in my animation project on Monday and got some nice feedback. It’s still far from finished, I unfortunately got way distracted by Lord of the Rings Online. I like where it’s going though and I’ll be finishing it up over the next week. In fact I’ll be working to have all the animations I did over this semester polished by June 30th, the deadline to submit demo reels for the Fall ‘08 Pixar Class.

 

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The premise for this animation is a businessman sits down at a park bench to eat his lunch, when he notices a group of pigeons watching him. He gets nervous and transfers to another bench, for a moment feeling safe, until he realizes there are even more birds in that area.

I have the first section blocked out, I need to add in the second bench section and then refine all the keys (as well as adding the pigeons and lunch box).