Hansel and Gretel Animatic (by headexplodie)

Hooray! I’ve finished with all my classes this semester and it’s time for a little bit of a break. I’ve been totally brain-drained this week and am looking forward to a little less stress. Just a little.

Anyway, I took my first storyboarding class this semester and learned a ton about trying to tell a story through film. I’m definitely looking forward to watching more movies during the break with an eye for staging, composition, camera angles, etc.

Here is my final project, a scene from the story of Hansel and Gretel. Of course, final projects are never THAT final, and I hope to work on it more over the summer. Got lots of ideas during the last crit. My teacher Robert strongly suggested the bird should poop chocolate. Hehe, not sure if I will make that happen, but just goes to show, there are many ways to tell a story.

So close to the end of the semester. So busy! Not a lot to post, but I did make this little ditty about a week ago just for funsies. I wish it were Summer already XD

Made this goofy little animation with family during the holiday break using Flipnote on the DS. Thanks, Vivian and Michael for drawing with me :D

Sweet little animation to look at this morning. Yes, 12:27pm is my morning today :P

The Hand (part 1) by Jiri Trnka. Lewis Mahlmann invited us to watch Jiri Trnka films yesterdayand this one just blew my mind with its beauty and powerful images. 

The Hand is Trnka’s most blatant critique of politics’ command over art…So what allowed Trnka the absolute and unimaginable freedom to create his films without fear of government intervention? According to author Antonin Liehm, simply this:

Artistic animated films, and above all artistic animated puppet film, is probably the least lucrative aspect of film work. Its very existence depends on public subsidies – or at least it did in the forties and fifties – especially in a small country before the boom of television… But while [the Stalinist patronage] demanded bland works of propaganda when it came to ordinary feature films, it put far less pressure to bear on animated films, in part because the very nature of animated and, particularly, puppet films is so much a matter of extreme stylization and poetization that they were difficult to harness to the heavy wagon of Stalinist political propaganda.

Read more from Adam Balz’s article on Jiri Trnka…

Stop Motion Ice Cream Dinner:

After an exhausting trip to the dentist, we treated ourselves to some tasty cheese sticks, a burger, and of course, ICE CREAM!

Watch me paint!

I’ve had these little 3”x3” canvases for a while now and it’s taken me forever to hunker down for a painting session with them. The nice thing about the size is you can finish a painting in one day and it makes you feel really accomplished, hehe. So here is hopefully the first in a series of tiny paintings done just for fun.

Also, because I am in love with stop-motion animation, I decided to make a time-lapse movie. Paintings take so long to do but when they’re done I almost have no memory of having painted it because I’m just so excited to have finished. At some point I nudged the camera and it lost focus, but it was an interesting experiment anyway. The next one will be better, for sure.

My first stop motion animation experiment!!! “Flamepig” is me and “Michael Bulldog” is my boyfriend and creative partner, Michael. We like to make cartoons of the two of them loving and living together, much like their counter parts, but more fat and animal-like.

The song is “Crazy Rhythm” from Nellie McKay’s wonderful album of Doris Day music.