Drawing but different

I've been doing a lot of drawing. I'm trying to get a character designed for a game for Mory. It requires a female main characte

Character design is always difficult, and drawing faces is difficult and a giant hurdle that I don't felt I have ever really gotten over is drawing female faces and really understand what makes them female.

So this is just a big pile of female face and face drawing research that I have been doing.

Now there is something special about these drawings. They look like pencil but the aren't.

I just graduated from school and received as a graduation gift an Asus Ep121 tablet computer. It has a wacom pen built into the screen so that I can draw directly on it with pressure sensitivity and very precise line work.

I am really loving it. I don't feel at all hindred by the tablet anymore. I'm still working on getting some really good animation software for it, but I have use a trial of TVpaint and it is going to be great to create 2d animation on.

Kyler

Illusion

I am very enamoured by illusions.

Whenever I find a new one, I am intensely interested in it.

My most recent find was mime.  This video is quite incredible.

Tug of War from Karen Montanaro on Vimeo.

I ended up buying the dvd set because everything he is talking about is utterly related to animation.  It arrived today and I already learned a lot from the first hour.

But back to illusions.  I've been interested in animation, the illusion of movement, optical illusions, magic eye 3d illusions, magic tricks, card tricks, video games, computer graphics, binaural sound recording, motion tracking, stop motion, photosynths, high realism drawing and painting, virtual reality,  and probably a number of other things.

I'm pretty sure that I don't just like fake things, it's that I like knowing how to directly communicate to our perceptual systems.  This fantastic mime has stripped away everything but the bare essentials parts of what he is trying to communicate, which is a tug of war.

Every illusion is actually the result of a deep understanding.

Kyler

Inside Job

I just watched the Inside Job, a film that explains the root causes of the financial meltdown in the last few years.

Out of that comes a discussion of money and wealth.  There are all sorts of people getting millions dollar bonus, moving billions of dollars around.  And a lot of the time, it feels like people are saying that if a banker got 150 million dollar bonus that money should be going directly to some average working class people.  It should just be divided up and given around.  In the film, a number like 150 million dollars was compared to 18 000 dollars that elderly were being paid from a pension fund.

And this type of math makes everything feel insane.

But I think there is something weird going on.  I don't really think that one banker having 150 million dollars is the same thing as 150 people having a million dollars each, or 1500 people having 100 000 dollars.

The question I am asking is where did the bankers 150 million dollars come from?  Did it actually come from hard working people, or was it simply withdrawn from other mysterious investments inside the bank?  And what did the banker do with 150 million dollars.  I have a feeling it went right back into some sort of investment.

And the thing with investments is that you can't really take all of you money out of them.  Suppose all of the bankers with 150 million dollars suddenly wanted to spend all of that money.  They would need to sell all of there investments, the market would be flooded and the end value of what they actually had would be dramatically reduced.

So in fact while all sorts of bank statements and computers might say that there are millions and billions of dollars moving around in the bank accounts of a minor top percentage of the world,  I have a feeling that that money is tied up, and simply could not be let forth into the world.  And money that can't be used doesn't really have much value.

The bankers did do something wrong with how they were practicing economics, but I don't believe that the numbers that they are telling us have anything to do with the actual amount of value which they stole from the world, though they did a really good job of mucking up how everything and everyone else in the world thinks about value.

I guess value is the real mystery.  I will have to think more about what is money and what is value and what they mean.

Lies

I don't like going to stores very much anymore.

I don't like looking at many commercial things anymore.

Every sign, picture, word, message, jingle, phrase, logo, tag-line and catch phrase is lying to me.

You said your food was fresh.
You said your restaurant was world famous.
You said this was a triple A grade egg.
You said I was saving money.
You said this was a great deal.
You said this was a guarantee.
You said I was helping the environment.
You said I wasn't cutting down trees.

But it's all lies, all the time.

Just tell the truth and I will buy your products.  But don't try to tell me your telling the truth, because that would probably be a lie.

Good luck economy

Black Swan

Always remember that film isn't the real world.

It feels real. It has consequences. Continuity must be... except of course it doesn't have to be.

This film isn't reality. It is a type of fantasy. It is part science fiction. It is the filmic representation of a platonic form. It demonstrates with powerful film language what it takes to create the perfect performance. It doesn't surrender in an attempt to be real.

Don't try to understand what actually happened in a film, because it didn't happen.

Understand what the film meant.

Building a mountain

I guess I haven't written much about the project I am working on for school.

My film is about a mountain and two mountaineers.

The past few weeks I have been building this mountain. I had a rough outline of what the mountain needed to be from my storyboards. What should be roughly where. I had enormous books, with gigantic pictures of Mount Everest and Mount Blanc borrowed out of the library for weeks. I had thought a lot about this mountain.

I sculpted a tiny version of the mountain and adjacent mountains in plasticine. I painted watercolours of the mountain.

And the last week I have been finally creating the mountain in 3d. For along time it felt really small in the computer, just like the model that I had sitting on my desk. But today, I started in on the details. I started adding parts where the characters would actually be up close and personal.

Finally I added little stand-ins for the characters, just to get the idea of the scale of things.

I put my virtual camera right next to these tiny little figures, and suddenly the massive scale of the thing I had created took shape.

It's a primal feeling that I get when I work in 3d, where I am no longer looking at a virtual set, but I feel like I am there.

I put myself at the top of the mountain, and I felt unease, vertigo, high above the glacier I had just created.

Right there, that feeling, is why I like 3d, why I like computers, why I use his medium and not any others.


Kyler

End of Fall Life Drawing

And that is all the life drawing for this semester.