James Gurney

On Friday, James Gurney, author and illustrator of Dinotopia and now Imaginative Realism, visited Calarts to speak to us about creating what doesn't exist. He spoke about the processes he used to illustrate the world of the dinosaur utopia Dinotopia, and many other worlds that he brought from the imagination to paper. The talk was essentially his book "Imaginative Realism" in lecture form. If you haven't picked up a copy i would highly recommend it. He and his wife were selling copies of the book after the lecture. I picked one up and had him sign it. He drew an awesome T-Rex in 30 secs. Then he whipped out two more drawings of dinosaurs for the two Dinotopia books i have at home.

He had his sketch books in the back of the room and they were amazing. I got to show him my maquette that I've been working on. He seemed to like it and had some good tips for completing it, including some places to get good tips on painting it. Over all the talk was very inspiring. But the most inspiring thing was finding out he didn't start painting until he was 20. It's always good to hear that there is hope in the art world for late comers like me.

I can't believe i forgot to talk about Mandrews!

Last week (err...2 weeks?) Mark andrews came and did a guest lecture at calarts again. Though this was not your typical Mark Andrews lecture. Instead of getting up and talking about concepts of story telling or triangles, he got up and he boarded right in front of us for 3 hours! Now this may sound boring but he held my attention the whole time and i never fell asleep. We were free to ask questions as he boarded, and he would talk us through what he was thinking about for the scene as he put it down on paper. The lecture was really great and it was reasuring to see Mark was drawing just as rough as i was. Go Story!!

Gotta do an update

So i'm not being as good as I was last year with the updating the blog! but don't worry as the year goes on i'm sure i'll get back in the groove.
So first things first. Eliza Frye's show was awesome.

The event was held at the Sirens Salon which i didn't realise till i got there that it was actually a hair salon .

They had drinks in the shampoo sinks!

They had artwork hanging on mirrors and between stations

They had prints for sale! I bought one for $15

I really want Eliza to make this into a print.
We had our first guest lecture of the year on Friday! The head of the Creative Talent Network and the animator of the magic carpet in Aladdin!

She talked a lot about the Creative Talent Network and the up coming CTN Expo.

Finally My birthday was on Friday!!


This card was done for me by Cory from Experimental animation. I think he should have just done the designs for my film instead of me.
For my birthday I presented Almost Famous in the palace! It was great we had a pretty good turnout; about 15 or so stayed through the whole movie. Overall a great birthday! thanks guys!

Agent says you don't need an Agent

we had an agent come in and deliver a talk about how to get jobs in the industry. The two best pieces of advice he had to offer was to learn a second language, and that you don't need an agent. He also gave some good advice about were to go around the world for jobs right now and how to make yourself more marketable to studios. He brought up the idea to get some live action experience as all of the animation studios are owned by live action studios and those are the studios selecting the directors and filmmakers to work on the animations.

OIiver Designs

So I did these designs for the Oliver Design assignment and I underlined the ones they really liked.

and here was my portfolio from my first year.

One big update

So this post will have a lot in it...hopefully it will be interesting.

Someone once told me that the photographers of National Geographic are the ones who write the articles... and that is why the National Geographic has great photos but sucky articles. I think my blog suffers from a similar fate. See I can post all of these photos and art work to let you know about my experiences at CalArts, but the minute I try and explain anything it just turns into to me pointing out stuff in the photos. Today I just realised I have 12 people following this blog some of whom are people I don't know. I'm not really a reporter of events here, so why do people I don't know look at this blog? That is not a rhetorical question. I would really like to know. LEAVE ME A COMMENT.

Anyway so here are a bunch of my life drawings. I haven't updated these in a while so there are some from last week and the week before that here as well.







We are in the middle of a two-part character design lecture by character designers Shane Prigmore and Shannon Tindle (don't ask me which one is which). They just finished working on Coraline. The first lecture was great and they gave a lot of good advice on character design and just design in general. Like they gave us an example of were someone actually designed characters for the different instruments in this song:



It was really cool and they gave us an assignment to do. Design Oliver, Fagin, and Dodger based off the descriptions in the book Oliver Twist. I already did my designs and I'll be sure to post them after part two of the lecture.

On another note Dead Man's Bones was here looking for people to collaborate on a music video. Dead Man's Bones is a new band but you may recognize their front man from the Notebook. That's right. That is Ryan Gosling. I gave them my info and told them I would love to work on a team project. Here is one of their songs.


Oh yeah and I know I didn't talk much about turning in portfolios but I turned mine in on Monday and already Dan Hanson, Corney Cole, and Jon Gomez have all said they really liked it.

Rhino Team (well not really)

So on Friday we were supposed to have a visit from members of the animation team for Rhino from the new Disney movie Bolt. Unfortunately two of them canceled so we got the one and only Clay Kaytis, who worked as the animation supervisor. I can't believe I did not make the connection but this is the same Clay that makes the animation podcast! Essentially he is the reason that I know that Calarts exists, so thank you Clay for that. Clay's talk was very technical but it offered a great deal of insight into the way animation is being done at Disney right now. I did notice that he used a lot of the same slides Don Hahn used. Anyway overall great talk and great free pizza so who am I to complain.

His website is here if you want to see it or listen to his podcast:

Animation Podcast

I am working on animation right now and it is fortunately the last thing I need to do (other than a writing arts essay). I'm already done with everything else and it's good because I am seriously drained creatively. I really need this break. I can't wait to go home and see all my family and friends.

I'm pitching my boards for my final film tomorrow, so wish me luck on those.

Here are three songs for the week!

The first one is just an awesome song and awesome video that i discovered back in september but kept on forgetting to post on here.

The second one is a great going home song by Rogue Wave called eyes

Oh yeah and before I started listening to pandora I never really got into Bob Dylan but I think that's because I just never heard the right song. So here is just one of the many songs of Dylan's that I really like now:

The Friday night Lectures are on Fire

California is on fire! Again... You can see the smoke from my cube! just a quick note: doesn't that photo at first glance make it look like calarts itself is on fire. The only effect it has had on calarts so far is the I-5 has been closed.

So we have had two friday night lectures in the past two weeks. The first one was done by Don Hahn, a producer at Disney. It was really cool and informational. He talked a lot about what makes good animation and gave a lot of insite as to what a producer does and what they look for when taking on projects. He also showed us the Disney short Lorenzo, which was good and apparently is a rare thing to see as it is not published anywhere.

Yesterdays lecture was Leo Sanchez. He had a lot of insight to what it was like to be a modeler and he talked a lot about the changes going on in the disney pipeline. I don't think i can get into specifics but it seemed that the way they went about working on 3d productions felt a lot like how people work on traditional projects. He also showed us Glago's Guest. Glago's Guest is the Disney short that is going to be shown before Bolt. Tonight I'm going to go to a preview showing of bolt with some friends from Calarts.

This song is pretty cool

I Felt Your Shape-The Microphones