Galleries on Mourou Itself!
I took advantage of gallery implementation and really made this blog feel more like my own website! Take a minute to look around at the new features. I have switched the pages at the top of the site (near the header) and have included separate galleries for my storyboard work, illustration, and figure studies. Check it out!! On top of that, I fixed some things on my demo reel. I updated the previous post with it and I also have it posted on the “animations” main page.
As for this weekend, I saw Insidious last night. Fantastic stuff. I love the classic feel to this horror movie. Similar titles and sound effects as old classics like the Shining and Psycho. Good film! The second half was kind of subpar, but the first half’s complete perfection was spot-on. You need to see this film!
Sucker Punch
So, I finally got to see the movie I had been waiting so long for! It was highly entertaining. I will, however, not get into whether or not it was good or worth your money. I am not going to be a critic. I was entertained. It was fun. I mainly want to comment on this character design of Sweet Pea. This was probably the one thing out of the film I loved the most. She has this pseudo-monk hoodie/cloak thing going on, and on top of it she has medieval armor on her left shoulder. She then has all this modern-day clothing and weaponry coupled with a Scottish sword. I thought it was just awesome. My mind was blown. You might see something like this in a video game, but never on the big screen. While I can’t say much on the actress (I haven’t seen any of the other movies she’s been in), the design was pretty awesome. Babydoll and Rocket were cool characters as well. However, their design did not resonate with me quite as much. Fun stuff! I might do a fanart sometime soon.
Fox
Here, have a fox this morning. May he bring you joy. This was a quick sketch I did on Saturday morning this past weekend. Trying my hand at animals for once. I did it with a 0.5mm fineliner and used a photo reference. I think he turned out pretty well! This was after I spent the morning watching the 3D animated film “Igor”. It was a great movie! I really, really liked it. The thing that bugged me was that a lot of the film was blatantly exploited. I see Megamind and Despicable Me stealing directly from it and it makes me a little irked that it’s so obvious. John Cusack was amazing, as always. It’s really too bad that a great film like this was so unpopular. I never heard anything about other than like one newspaper article a few years ago. Oh well. However, the movie obviously inspired me and I had to draw something while I watched it. So I drew this slightly cartoony angler fish with the same fineliner:
I kind of miss just drawing on an open canvas and just seeing where it goes. This is an example of doing just that. It was a fun little doodle, I guess. The even cooler part about it was that this drawing was featured on Shadowness’s Daily Inspiration for Sunday! It’s always exciting to get featured on an art site. This weekend was a weekend of drawing. All of Sunday was spent in my sketchbook. I don’t know when I’ll get around to uploading them, but I’ll do my best to get them sooner rather than later.
Back to animating.
Getting Under Your Skin
So, today was a good day. Very productive. Worked on my Senior Project until about 6:30am this morning, finally put a segment of it in for a test render and it worked out beautifully. I’ve gotten just about 1 minute of it compiled together and fully produced. It feels good. I still have some more scenes to animate but it shouldn’t be too bad. This is going well! I love my workstation, it’s so much more effective than going to the Mac lab. PC for the win!
While I was working on my project, I had the company of my good friend Keff. He showed me this amazing animated trailer for an upcoming game. It really gets under your skin and tugs on your heartstrings. Just wow. Don’t watch it if you don’t like zombies, graphic violence, or the idea of things happening to your kids. You will be scarred. If you do watch it, make sure to turn the sound up, wear headphones, whichever. Enjoy!
Solanin
In the midst of my sickness, I finally got around to finishing the epic manga I purchased over the winter break called “solanin”. This is a rather touching story about a college grad who doesn’t know what to do with her life and how to find happiness. It’s rather depressing, sad, and total bleak. It doesn’t even answer a lot of the questions it brings up, which rather upsets me. It’s things like these that make me feel like I’m never going to find happiness and no matter how good I have it, how easy, simple, whichever – I’m never going to be happy. I don’t really know what to think of it, but alas, I am posting about it. I’d love it if someone else were to read it and tell me what they think about it.
The art is truly awesome in this. It boggles my mind that someone can single-handedly create a 400-500 page illustrated work at this quality in just a year or so. It baffles me. Inio Asano has become a new favorite of mine. I also researched this and found out that they made this book into a live-action film just this past year. I’ll have to check it out. If anyone wants to borrow it and give it a read, I encourage it. Maybe afterwards we could check out the film!
Not Simple
Okay, so today I finished reading “not simple” by Natsume Ono. This is a wonderful little graphic novel and a great find! I originally got this book solely because of its peculiar art style. Though it was clearly Japanese, the art was extremely sketchy and reminded me more of Scott Pilgrim than anything.
However, upon opening it and reading the book, I can say that this was a fantastic story. Very sad, emo, whatever you want to call it. But – it was done very artistically, and fast. I’ve never really read anything that is so fast and at the same time so sad. The art style moves you from page to page rather than keeping you fixated on the image for long periods of time. I like this, as it lends itself to animation, allows the artist to crank out pages faster, and still keep the story intriguing. It goes to show that a simple, almost child-like, presentation cannot entirely override story – just as a horrible story cannot override an amazing presentation with jaw-dropping visuals. All-in-all, I recommend this to my American friends and colleagues. It’s a cheap buy to add to a growing collection, and the title definitely trumps the art style when it labels itself “not simple”.
