Callie's Path is Distinctly Her Own

Today is Friday! And tomorrow is Saturday, therefore a day on which I can sleep in! Yay! This whole week I've been working downstairs with Joel on the rough cut of my film. Monday I sat with Sam and Joel and they taught me about the program used for editing, called Final Cut Pro and I was able to pick it up relatively quickly actually. Maybe I'm getting better at computers!? Hahahah. I think it's more that there are only few basic functions of Final Cut Pro that I am using currently. Wednesday I went into the basement again and worked quietly on the edit. It's pretty relaxing because its small room with not a lot of noise. Today, I got to co op late (don't worry I emailed ahead of time asking for permission:) because of a music festival type thing at my school. There were freezies and watermelon and I had to wear so much sunscreen, oh lord. So I came into co op all sunburned (despite the sunscreen) and sweaty and went downstairs again, Joel showed up after a few hours and then I finished adding the audio to my film. I'm not yet sure if I want to manipulate the transitions between shots (like add fancy cross dissolves or whatever) but I'll figure that out later. I rendered out my video and watched it with the audio which was cool. I'm a perfectionist to a fault, so it's hard to look at my film and know that there are many areas I could improve. I mean, I came to Smiley Guy knowing nothing so of course my first animated film is going to be rough around the edges, but I am happy because the firefly sort of makes me laugh and I know that the rough parts show I have improved a lot this year.


So in terms of animating, that is all I did this week, but actually I was finishing up my edit and Joel and I started talking and the industry and careers and also a shared admiration of Malcolm Gladwell. I'm pretty scared to leave co op and know that the next time I will re enter an animation studio might possibly be my first job (also scared about managing finances). We just talked about what to expect from this industry, how it works and also how it's ok to not do something super academic like my parents or sister because my path "is distinctly my own". Joel pointed out that with animation or arts/media careers you see an immediate result from your work in front of your eyes and to people like me and I guess everyone here at Smiley Guy, that's what makes the work meaningful. Anyhoo, that 40 minute conversation along with my invitation to a pizza animatic viewing party was the highlight of my week, so thank you Erin and Joel. Next week's highlight will be actually eating the pizza! Yummmmmmyy. Adios until then!

Callie and Final Cut Pro

Its the end of the week already. Insanity!! Exams are coming up and I'm currently drowning in culminating projects so even though it's the weekend, it is still basically school. Blegh. Someone help. Lots to talk about for this blog post though because I have moved into a new stage. I am reaching the home stretch and the brief romantic tragedy of Sam and Donna will soon be finished. On Tuesday I stared at the computer for hours looking for suitable audio and sound effects for my film. It was very fun at first because the website Erin gave me has a vast stock of sound effects, which are really amusing. Imagine being the person on Audio Blocks belching. After a while I got all cross because you had to properly word what you wanted in the search bar otherwise nothing would come up. However, I am victorious! I, more or less, have all the sounds I need.

Today I was assisted in rendering all my shots and then I ventured into the basement of the studio to have Joel and Sam walk me through literally every step of how to put your shots in to Final Cut Pro (I think that's the name) and a few editing tricks. They are so nice and very patient. I am still quite useless at picking up computer programs quickly. Anyways, they helped me out and I watched all my shots stitched together for the first time. Even though it's a very rough version, it was pretty amazing because all this started as a little pen sketch a BILLION years ago (OK maybe only 7 months) and now it's a mini movie!! Next week I will go back downstairs and just clean it up. Maybe I'll make some dissolve transitions!! And probably learn more on adding audio to animation. Have a good weekend everyone!!!

Inna's Exciting News!

Heyhey everyone, 

I have awesome news! It seems like our Sheridan 3rd year group film “Grounded”was accepted and will be showcased at the Ottawa International Film Festival 2014! Yeey!

https://www.animationfestival.ca/index.php?option=com_oiaf&task=showselections+

"Grounded" https://vimeo.com/95567674

It is an inspiring four minute short about adventures of a bunny and his little brother. The film is hand-drawn in Toon Boom Harmony. It was one awesome experience of the teamwork, dedication and successful short film production. Here’s a vimeo link to our film: https://vimeo.com/95567674 Enjoy!

 

Last few weeks I have been working on several animation shots and learnt more about effects, camera moves and symbol animation in Flash. Alex said it is ok to post the shorts that I worked on and here they are:

Mountains and Sleigh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaJDh8mbv3w

- I designed and flashified Bead Mountains which was the easiest for me except the camera movement. It was my first time dealing with the cinematography in Flash. Rich helped me with a nice smooth truck-in transition using just couple of keys on a comp level and ease-in and ease-out settings.

- Designing and animating stars and sparkles took long to figure out, as I never touched Flash before my internship. Keith helped and explained me a lot and also showed me how to tweak Grandpa and a harness so that they are is in time with the dogs run cycle.

- I enjoyed animating the husky's trot cycle! Last semester in Sheridan I had to animate dog cycle in Maya and it was very interesting to apply same principles in symbol animation.

-Darien and Joel helped me to figure out why the sleigh dogs would start glitching while trucking in, disappearing even when we would export png sequence. As Joel advised I reduced the size of original png images and the problem was yaay fixed. Thank you!

Four Sleighs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZu-TF8DxB8

This animation was the easiest as I already had sleigh cycle done. So it was just the timing, tint and alpha channels.

 

Animal Wall:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIa2OkpYIrQ

This shot was mostly about the timing. I also learned how to work with colors and transparency settings in Flash.

 Tundra and objects:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0-VKXkWPNs

This shot taught me about the timing, gravity and again about camera moves. Alex and Keith explained to me that all major camera moves are usually done on a comp level. Keith though showed me some tricks on how to attain 3d effect move by animating objects inside the comp and applying the same ease-in ease-out parameters as the tweens on the main level would have. It has totally boggled my mind but I think I finally got it. like 90%..ok 88%..

  

Animation test for Caribou Mandala:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Zsx2dAHt0g

Working on mandala rotation was fun. I experimented with the timing of all the layers and transparency settings. I think it worked alright in the end. It’s so rewarding to see your own design animated. yay! This mandala exercise and Flash effects techniques I learnt from Alex, Keith and Darien provided me with all the understanding I needed to start working on my 4th year film as I am going to have my Sun Mandala rotated as well.

 Next week I will post my Geese and Caribou Mandala animations. I hope I will be able to finish them before my internship is over which is for one more week. Anna left a week ago and this week is the last week for Carol. No more Carol on the Oakville train and bus. Awe. I will see my girls only in September. It was great to get to know both of them. Smiley Guy made an official goodbye pizza party for us on the roof of the studio. It was very nice! I will miss this roof and all awesome Smileys people with whom we used to have launches together.

Another update of the month is my husband and my wedding anniversary! We had our wedding a year ago in Blue Mountains and it was amazing and beautiful. This summer we decided to celebrate it by going to the Niagara Falls and it was awesome too. We walked a lot, got the sun and the rain, saw the fireworks, got a chance to feed a friendly seagull that would eat only egg and not the bread and who refused to fly away and spent with us the whole hour, cute bird! The Falls were incredibly powerful and mesmerizing. Beautiful place, here:

My husband Chris is a ETM music producer, he got inspired by Alex’s film and came up with the musical piece which if approved by Alex and other producers might be added to the film soundtrack. That’d be awesome!

That’s all for now. Next week there will be my last week and my last post on the Smiley Guy internship portal:)

An Important PSA Video from Lalo

Well, I'm sad to say this but my time here at Smiley Guy Studios is up. When I first started out here, I was just some guy who was going to learn how to do sound design. Then as the weeks went by, I started to learn how to do dialogue editing and recording.

It seems it was just yesterday where on my first day I was being introduced and would do some work on "Teleporting Fat Guy", and then I would do some work on other shows such as "Hair and Mole", "Beethoven's Wig", "Warren" and more. I even got a chance to make some videos of my own.

One of my favourite things I did at work was record guitar parts for "Warren". Now that my time is up, I can say that not only did I learn about Sound-Design editing, I learned how to get along and interact with other people in the studio. And I like to thank everyone for being cool and fun to talk to. I had a great time here and I was happy to be apart of Smiley Guy. I'm hoping to learn more about audio recording in the future.

My final video: here is a PSA I made, Enjoy!

Lalo's Audio Mix Project

All Co-op students at Northern had to do a presentation to explain what we have learned at our placements. I decided to do a clip from The Empire Strikes Back with new sound to show what I've learned working with sound designer, Paul O'Brien. I had fun designing, recording and editing my soundtrack. The best part of the process was experimenting with different sound effects. Thanks to Paul for mentoring me, and to Jeremy Diamond for being Darth Father.

Lalo's Cool Project Tease

For the past two weeks I've been working on a project for school that shows what I do at work.  For my project, I've taken the scene from "The Empire Strikes Back" where Darth Vader tempts Luke to join the dark side after revealing the he is his father.  For this clip, I've changed the dialogue making it seem like it's about a boy reuniting with his father.  This clip has Barry White music which changes the mood of the scene, different sounds and the voices of the characters are different (I voice Luke and Jeremy voices Vader).  Once the video is done, I look forward to posting it.

A Lalo Production - Part 4 of 4

The fourth and final installment of Lalo's Blog video.  *tear!

A Lalo Production - Part 3 of 4

Another highly anticipated installment of Lalo's blog video:

A Lalo Production - Part 2 of 4

Here's the second installment of Lalo's popular video:

A Lalo Production - Part 1 of 4

Here is the first part of an awesome video presentation Lalo made for his school project.  Enjoy!

A Lalo Update!

Since I got back from the winter break, I've been doing some dialogue editing/recording for a couple of episodes of a web-series called "Hair & Mole". One day Paul wasn't here so I did the recording on my own. I also did dialogue editing for Adam's project called "Teacher". If anyone needs voice work, I'm ready to do it!  More recently I've been using a recording device called H4n by the company of ZOOM. I've been using it to record different sound effects in the studio -- door opening and closing, toilet flushing, running water in a sink and other such exciting sounds.

I will be having a Co-op Job Fair presentation at my school soon and I have been taking pictures for my presentation and writing down information about what I do here. Josh also filmed me at work and I'm working on a video which will be part of my presentation. I'll be posting on how the Job Fair goes soon.