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Get a Fantastic New Storybook App and The Huntsman Cancer Foundation wins!

As some of you may know I and many others worked a lot of very long hours to produce my award winning animated short, "Flip". Now, I am very proud to share my latest project with you... the "Flip: Interactive Storybook" App. Please help me with the launch of this wonderful children’s Book App and  our charitable partner The Huntsman Cancer Foundation will receive a portion of the proceeds for every app downloaded through this e-Flyer. Made for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch, Flip: Interactive Storybook is a truly beautiful, immersive and magical story filled with moments of hope, love, fear and faith. Join Emma as she goes on an enchanting life journey featuring delightful world-class 3D animation, fully interactive touch screen graphics, originally composed music and captivating narration. Click anywhere on the picture above to purchase this great app from the iTunes store. Remember to click through this e-Flyer link so The Huntsman Cancer Foundation will get credit for the sale. Please also feel free to forward this email to Family and Friends so they too can get this beautiful Book App and support a great cause! Thank you for your generous support and I hope you enjoy... “Flip: Interactive Storybook”

Jill

2012 Copyright Grids Interactive LLC & 2012 Copyright AppFairs.com LLC

Amazing New Flip Digital Storybook App To Debut on iTunes App Store February 16

Amazing New Flip Digital Storybook App To Debut on iTunes App Store February 16

Flip

	Flip ~ Animation (2010) Emma is a little girl who has spent her entire life glued into the same dreary city in a pop-up book. One day she decides to pull herself free from the page! Watch "Flip"

By age, who are your youngest/oldest characters?

Disregarding vampires/immortal characters (of which there are a few.)
My youngest character is probably… Well, I have two eight-year-old characters.

Emma is my character from my senior thesis. She’s an eight-year-old girl who has a lot of big dreams. Her favorite color changes every couple of weeks between pink, green, and light blue. She loves sweets, her favorite animal is a kitten, and she counts her age by months (she’s eight and three months.) Emma wants to be lots of different things when she grows up, which she tends to combine into a string of things, such as- “I want to be a traveling dancer veterinarian nurse horse-riding superhero when I grow up.”

Elspeth is an eight-year-old from a dramatically different story and so has a dramatically different personality. She’s extremely quiet and only talks when she has something important to say. She’s not shy but people sometimes perceive her as such (they can’t imagine why a little girl would be so quiet otherwise.) In truth she just doesn’t have much interest in social interaction. Elspeth is exceptionally good at identifying patterns, so she has a fondness for mathmatics. She gets along better with computers than she does people.

This also makes me think of another character from my first story. His name is Laboosh and he’s nine years old. This story is a scifi that involves different worlds, which is why his name is so odd. Laboosh is a hyperactive little boy, bursting with energy and interest in his world. He lives on the ship with primarily adults, so he’s learned how to keep himself occupied on his own, but since he doesn’t have friends his age he can sometimes be a bit of an attention-hog. As a result, he sometimes gets in trouble just so that people will notice him. He’s a good kid at heart, he’s just misunderstood and lonely.

As for the oldest character I have, that would be Gram from a story called You Too & Stuff. Gram is the main character’s grandmother, and she’s 88 years old. She makes it a point to keep active and sharp. She has a sarcastic sense of humor that can sometimes make her seem cynical but she’s otherwise pretty kind. Gram is a little bit out of touch with the modern generation, which puts her at odds with her grandson, who she’s raising on her own. Sometimes her grandson is a bit tiring or rebellious so she generally lets him do as he pleases and gives him advice when he starts running into trouble.

These characters tend to be the exceptions, however. Most of my characters are currently in their twenties because that’s how old I am. They’re easier to write and more likely to be in the situations that I like to focus on right now.

portfolio

Flip from motiontv on Vimeo.

Emma Turnarounds

I've got some updated turnarounds of my modeled and textured character. Fun stuff!





Note: It seems that youtube put a flicker in my video. Oh well, for the purposes of this blog, it's probably fine.

Flip

Woo! I finished my short film, Flip. Here are some stills!

EMMAAAAAA!

ALKDJFL:ASJF:ALSJ EMMA IS SO CUTE

MAN, I LOVE MY THESIS CHARACTER SO MUCH.

So, here's the render I'll be showing to the faculty for the crit on Friday/Saturday. Hopefully it'll get them as pumped about my project as I am!

Emma Character Update

Here's an update on my thesis work. It's just a screen cap right out of Maya. I've been having a couple render issues that I think I've finally worked out, so I'll post up a turnaround at some point and it'll be cool.

A strange thing happens when converting things from 2D to 3D. Sometimes if something looks good on paper, it might not look good in 3D, so once it's in the computer, you've got to adjust your proportions again to make it feel more natural. Emma's been cutified, in my opinion. I'm satisfied with how she turned out.

In this jpeg, she's hanging out with her many many blendshapes.

Latest Animatic and some

Here's my latest animatic. I've already got notes for improvement, so give this five more minutes and it wont look quite the same. Major difference since the last time you saw it though, eh?

I really need to get the rest of my stuffs updated to the blog. I'll work on that over the next couple of days.

On a different note! I have a job at the school. I'm a render wrangler for IT. Basically, I try to solve rendering problems. Helping out my fellow students, etc. I'm not very good at it so far, but what I am good at is doing research and logically thinking my way through problems, so essentially right now I'm writing tutorials and wiki articles for the school wiki. Putting my strengths to good use informing the masses. Good stuff. I tend to spend the money as fast as I make it though. There's nothing in particular that I want to save up for right now, so I've been expanding my graphic novel collection. Extremely satisfying, mmyup!

Brilliant Day Today!!

Many wonderful things are going on. Yesterday I knocked off projects from my list like a hitman. It was awesome. Today I took some time to go to Borders to do a system reset, so now my brain isn't as jumbled and I'm settling down to do a crapload more of work. Things are going very well.

I've been into Fables and Flight. I've got books in the mail coming- I'm so excited.

So, the real point is to give you an update on Emma's Flight! I've just finished rigging/texturing the dragonflies, so I've got some maya screen caps to share with you. Meet Glow, Fly, and Buzz!

Glow

Fly

Buzz

They're Emma's little helpers throughout her story. There aren't any closeups, so they're pretty simple shape/texture/poly. Their primary feature is going to be the dotted line that trails after them, the details of which I still need to work out. But there they are! Super cute.

On a different note, I'm currently taking the Ecology of Water class (require science credit to graduate.) We've got two projects coming up- one is reviewing a movie that has something to do with a water-based event. The other one is a presentation having anything to do with water.

So for my presentation, I'm going to talk about clouds. Because I freakin' love clouds. And for my movie review-

Ponyo anyone?

Haha, I'm excited.

Good News!!!

This isn't an art post, it's an important update! Great news! Emma's Flight passed! Final critique went pretty well. I got a lot of notes for improvement that I tucked away to return to later. I'm so super excited about passing this project, it takes a world of pressure off my shoulders.

Emma's Dragonfly

ZOMG IT'S THE LAST ONE!

Here's Emma's dragonfly in all its glory. Muwahaha, finally! DONE! I think it turned out pretty cool. At any rate, it's done enough for the crit tomorrow. Or today rather. Whatever, you know how us students roll. ~_^



Process:

Emma's Field

Man, I love how easy Blogspot is to use. The little "new post" button is right up at the top, everything is straight forward and clean. This has got to be the best blog site I've ever used. I really don't see too much of a reason to blog anywhere else- though I would admit that having an easy to use friend's page type thing would be nice. But other than that, we're solid.

Anyway, that's beside the point. Here's Emma's field. I don't have pages of process work for this one, mostly because I yoinked all the elements from other parts of the project that I already did.


That's it for the environment designs! (*finally*) Now I've got to finish up my dragonfly turn around, place it all on my flashdrive, and then I'll be able to sleep. O_o It'll be wonderful.

Emma's World

Emma's dream world! Oh, how I wish I could afford a dream world right now. Any dream world, really, as long as it involved sleep, haha. Nah, nah, I'm running on caffeine right now, so it's all good. Anyway, here's Emma's world, influenced by all her favorite elements from the previous worlds. Thankfully, the way this is designed, I don't think I'll have to do any extra modeling- maybe a couple tweaks here and there, but the idea is that I'll be able to conserve time and energy by pulling in the models from the other worlds.

So, without any further ado, here is Emma's world. One more to go.



Okay, I'll admit that the process looks pretty weak. I will also admit that it is 2am right now. However, please take into consideration that most of the design influences were already thought through via the other environments:

Emma Character Design!

Here's Emma's character design! Yaaay! I like to think she's epically adorable. Once again, posted with some process work along with her.

Process:

Emma's Storm

"A great storm was approaching!!!"

This great storm is almost over. Two more environments to go, the field and the final location. What you see here is Emma's storm. Emma forgets to look ahead to where she's going, so she gets swept up in a collection of tornadoes and taken to a place without pop-ups.

You ever listen to Russian music? I know it sounds like a random question, but I've been listening to it for the past couple hours. It's pretty awesome; you should try it out.

Process:

Emma's Forest

*Sings* Another one bites the dust! Another one bites the dust!

Here's Emma's forest, the third location she comes across in her travels. The crazy thing about the forest is that it is kinda two locations in one, since she's moving through it and it transforms around her. Once again, posted with process work because I think that's awesome.

Process:

Emma's Animatic

WHEW. So I finally have a "final" animatic. "Final" in the sense of- I've run out of time and this is the most I could do also taking into consideration that I'm behind in DFA and need to have that done as well.

For those of you who don't know, an 'animatic' is basically the layout for the animation that is to come. Since animation is so work/time/money intensive, the entire film is planned out in a rough hand-drawn version first to see if it works. It's easier and faster to change. So, basically, here's the plan for my thesis:

I appologize if Blogger is being difficult. The video doesn't seem to be playing smoothly. You may view it here as well.

At this point, I need to move on to finishing up DFA and starting the next project. However, I have some really awesome notes from my teachers and peers to improve it even further (this is always the case) and thankfully, if I choose to do "Emma's Flight" for my thesis, I will be granted an extra week at the end of the year to return to it and make it even better.

There is, of course, the summer as well to make changes, but I hear it's never a good idea to depend on your vacation time to improve your work. ~_^

Emma's City

*Crawls across screen panting* Sooo much work needs to be done by Monday. I got super sick and lost a lot of valuable time just a couple days ago. I've got to crank everything out in the next twenty-four hours. Here's Emma's city design, the location she starts out in.

Process:

This was the first draft work for the five locations in Emma's story. Insane, I know. They've changed since, obviously. Buts she starts in the city, goes to the field, then to the forest, gets swept away by a storm, and finally ends up where she wants to be.