Keith's Last Blog

So this is my final blog entry, and what a ride it's been.

I can feel all the experience I've gained here at Smiley Guy, and I'm thankful for the multitude of different assignments I've received. On each assignment I successfully learned something new, and became just a little faster and slightly more efficient.

I was especially fond of the sparky graphics . These assignments although small gave me a great deal of creative freedom, so long as I followed the initial sketch as a guideline. The benefit of them being smaller assignments was the sense of accomplishment I got after finishing so many of them.   it's very akin to the Dopamine hit from leveling up in a video-game haha.

Had a bit of a surprise today when I found out Photoshop up and rebooted itself, taking my file that I had worked on all of yesterday with it; and all my brush presets were gone too (still don't get why that happens).

After a few minutes trying to find another copy of the file, I realized I had to do the entire thing again

After the usual few moments of shock and a involuntary eye twitch or two; I shrugged and realized I could do it again in half the time because I didn't need to spend time figuring it out from scratch; and it's still experience in working faster, so it's all good.

It wasn't as bad as loosing over 10 hours of fairly complex animation because of a corrupted flash file. 

That was unpleasant.

At times like this, I think about the story I'll be telling one day and that makes the entire experience less serious.

The process of painting as much as I have this summer (literally 8 hrs a day) and with a variety of subject matter, has thoroughly improved my understanding of colour and light.

 I'm a hell of a lot faster too.

I leave SGS wiser, and more confident in my abilities, and I thank everyone who helped me evolve, be it directly or otherwise.

Mia Starts on Chirp!

For last week, I worked on pose sheets for Vampire PI.I just created them of two characters from its very cute character design sheets. It takes more time than I expected maybe because I can't work fast with pen tools. Sometimes, I got crooked line instead of nice curved line on my intention.

I got assigned some works to work at home on last week and I borrowed my sister's Mac and this was the first time that I used it because I have been using Windows in my life. And it went over my head! Their mouse scroll direction is opposite of Windows and they have command key which I couldn't figure out its exact functions. That key functioned similarly with control key but mac has control key too and it was confusing which key should I use. Mac was challenge for me and I am afraid to use them again for fear of losing my work by pressing wrong key...

For this week, I am working on a layout for the underwater scene from Chirp! I made a big dumb mistake from the beginning because I worked on very small canvas size. Therefore, I should work all over again.I will never make the same mistake again!

Mia Learns Flash!

It is already fifth week to work from Smiley Guy Studio! This week, I learned a lot about Flash program which I barely knew about before because I usually animated with other programs drawing frame by frame. Building up each part of the character to rig was unfamiliar to me and learning was a big challenge for me. Keyboard shortcuts were different that I used before with other programs and I don't know which tool was where and it was very confusing at first. But, I am really glad to have this opportunity to learn about Flash since most TV animations are made with Flash or Harmony.

I am currently building up a character for other short film from Flash. I think I get better than before for using Flash now. I am looking forward to learn how to animate with Flash later even if it will be another challenge for me.

Mia Makes Friends with the Computer

On the second and third week of work at Smiley Guy Studios, I worked on concept art but did various different things. First thing I started from week 2 was draw a layout of a boy's bedroom. Even though I have a younger brother, there is nothing much in his room and it is not helpful at all for reference, and I did a lot of research for boys' bedroom from Internet. 

The next thing I did was basically draw and paint over Aaron's layout because it was needed as a high- resolution for printing out in a bigger scale. 

And I got back to work on Todd & The Book of Pure Evil. I drew rough rotation sheets for main characters and also drew  hand model sheets for each male and female character. And now I am creating characters from real people who wanted to be in the animation series which is pretty interesting.

I often work traditionally so I did not spend much time on a computer before. Now, I have been using the computer all the time and at first, I looked too close for a long time (just for me more than usual) and it made me sick. It made me dizzy and had sore eyes. But, human beings are infinitely adaptable. I guess I am well adapted to work with computer for a long time now. I feel great!

Smiley Guy For The Win! - Introducing Meghan

I learned more about flash in the last week and a half here at Smiley Guy then I have in the last three years at school. The first few days were a little rough. I was constantly asking my supervisors questions (sometimes the same one more than once), I did the two tests at a snails pace and even managed to lose most of one of the assignments when my flash crashed. I learned a valuable lesson from that however- Constantly save your work.

After a few days of trying to figure flash out, it started to become easier. By Friday, I was working on actual production stuff! I’m currently doing scene set up for an episode of Chirp and resourcing other episodes in-between. With every scene that I finish, I become more and more confident with the program, and less annoying to my supervisors (although they don’t think I’m annoying… or are too nice to admit it haha). I’ve also finally downloaded Skype so the other artists in the studio don’t have to listen to me calling my supervisors over to my workspace every 5 minutes.

The people at the studio are friendly, helpful and very sociable with each other. In my first week we had two organized lunches and a game night. Apparently game nights are a regular weekly thing too!

I’m very happy to be interning here at Smiley Guy and I’m excited to see what the upcoming weeks bring.

Introducing Lucas, Our Newest Highschool Student

Wooh! First blog!

For those of you who are reading this; I am Lucas Tennen the Smiley Guy Studio Co-op student for the year. I enjoy Adele and long walks on the beach. Not really, although I find it's usually a good ice breaker. 

    

So you could sort of say that this was like my first full week at SGS, although it was a bit of a rocky start. Last weekend my computer went through a series of crashes (both physical and software related) which resulted in some programs and files being unable to reach in my computer. One of them was flash. When I tried re-installing I was greeted with the ever so frustrating "Unable to download software." So I did my best to not let my time go to waste by reading about and watching many flash tutorials as I could. Although I haven't actually gotten into the program, I do feel well informed.

On a side note; I got a desk! It may not seem like a big deal, but it's my first so I'm pretty exited. It's relatively plain so I want to bring in a figurine or something somewhat representing of me. Now this next bit may need some explanation: I have a bit of an odd uncle. For my bar-mitzvah he gave me a figure of a dancing Jewish man. I keep it on a shelf near my bed. It seemed harmless at first, but it's starting to freak me out. I swear it's eyes follow me sometimes. So, I figured my desk would be a perfect place for it. It may not be well received, but if one person walks by and gets a kick out of it then it will have served a better purpose then it does in my room. Which pretty much is watching me sleep.

Thanks (sorry about the lack of animation I'm able to upload this week)