Animation Weekend!

This past weekend was amazing! Animation Mentor held its graduation ceremony so over 100 students flew into town to visit. I spent each day with some great animation friends (and mentors) and overall had an amazing time. Picture to follow at a future date, for now it is time to recuperate!

Demo Up!

My first Demo Reel is now ready! This is the short version (30 sec), I have more shots (and am creating more) for the long version but recruiters like the reels short and sweet:



I'm really excited about this reel! It is my first official reel and signals a beginning, and I can't wait to continue to update it throughout this year. One of my goals is to have a demo reel in 2011 that contains none of the above shots (meaning I have even better work that takes up 30 sec)! Here's to a new beginning! Woohoo!

Avatar

I saw Avatar for a second time last night and am still speechless. I saw it a month ago and afterwords I couldn't describe it. I've never walked out a film with that feeling. The movie was an event. Sure, it may not have the most original story in the world, it is very much like Dances with Wolves and Pocahontas, but the story is good (Dances with Wolves won the Best Picture Academy Award for a reason) and is accented by the visual effects. And yes, the effects accent the story and not the other way around as some have speculated. There have been many movies where the effects are the picture and the story just gets you to the next action shot. And matter how good the effects are you still see them as being an "visual effect shot" (Transformers comes to mind). But in this movie, it is very easy to forget that 95% of what you see is was created by a computer. The real word and CG world blend so seamlessly, and story pulls you in so deep, that you believe Pandora exists.

Then you read all the making-of story by Weta and suddenly you realize how massive this movie was. Remember that single fern in the top right of the screen at 55 minutes into the movie? The one next to the 400 other plants in that scene? Well someone had to create that and animate it. And that set was only used once. The film is 2 hours and 45 minutes and every shot has hundred of plants, rocks, and forest items, not to mention the numerous creatures running around.


Seeing this movie in 3D is an experience. I have no doubt that when 3D TVs are launched at the end of this year (yay?) they will align with the blu-ray release of this movie. This movie will be "The Matrix" of the 3D format (ie the movie you have to own to show off its powers, much like "The Matrix" and DVDs 11 years ago).

More to discuss in the future.

Christmas Photos: pt 2

As happens every Christmas break, I celebrated my birthday a week before Christmas. The kids and I shared an homemade Oreo cake (a staple for my birthday) and later created "Silver Bells' for the tree by covering cups with foil. We had an amazing time, Raeleigh took control of the foil while Mia was on cup duty:

The Holiday Loot

Depending on how you look at it, having a birthday in December is either a blessing or a curse. Either way, at the end of December I have lots of new possessions that should satisfy me (supposedly) until the next December when it happens again. And, depending on the year, by March my most prized gift from December is finished and gathering dust while the unexpected gifts I didn't even include on my initial list are the ones I get the most enjoyment out of.

But this year is different.

This year I changed things up a bit and did not include specific gifts on my list (such as specific games or DVDs); this year I asked for themes which are consistent with this blog. Themes such as "better dress apparel", "bachelor food items", and "art books", etc. And that is what I received! After a few weeks of testing the gifts in real world situations I can safely say that this is probably the most productive gift set ever! And, even more surprising, it is also the first December where I did not receive a single video game since 1989. I'm not saying there is a correlation between those two facts, but it does show a change in my tastes and desires.

So what did I get?

The lion's share of gifts this year involved my looks. In previous years I hated getting new clothes. I liked my old clothes, I didn't need new ones, and I rather play with new entrainment items than care how others saw me. This year, those statements are reversed.

In December, I received 3 pairs of shoes, 3 hats, and a scarf. In one month I received more items in each of those categories than I usually receive in multiple years. more of any one of those items


I love the different options these items allow me. Along with various new shirts/sweaters/pants I pretty much changed my entire wardrobe in one month. Expect a post in the future detailing the different new looks.


Another surprisingly useful item I received was a front pocket wallet.When I first started carrying a wallet at age 14/15 I was but a wee lad. I placed my wallet in my back pocket and the wallet was so big on me that over half the wallet hung out of the pocket. After it fell out of my back pocket for the umpteenth time (basically each time I sat down/stood up) I put it in my front pocket and never looked back. For 14 years I dealt with a giant lump bulging out of the front of my pants leg (yes, the wallet). Now I finally have a wallet designed for the pocket that is relatively hidden when I wear it. Although I was forced to clean out some of the larger items in my first wallet in order to fit only the essential items in this one and I found some very old pictures/cards that dated back to early college. Yikes!



Finally, my last gift which has been used on a daily basis is the Rocket Blender. I'm not sure how I lived without this. Basically it is a small blender where the container is just a regular cup in which you attach the blade. It creates single serving blends, you just put the food into your drinking cup, attach the blade, put it in the metal base which automatically starts to blend (no buttons), remove the blade, and drink. It is extremely easy to clean (and this is from a bachelor) since it is nothing more than a plastic cup and a blade attachment. Considering I live 3 blocks from Northern California's largest collection of fresh fruit, this was the perfect addition for my diet. I go to the Berkeley Bowl and pick some random fruit from the thousands to choose from, toss a random variety into the blender (along with some yogurt), and have a new flavor of fruit shake every day.

And that is the essentials of my Holiday Loot. Granted I received more items (dvd, books, pictures, tech gadget) and really enjoy them. But they didn't quite change my daily life like the above items did. And it goes without saying that what I loved most about December was buying the perfect gifts for my loved ones but that will be a post for another day (my kids were the most fun to shop for).

Christmas Photos: pt 1

Not much to say other than trees with lots of lights are very pretty, and fun to play around with using the camera' light settings.

Whistle while you work

My company recently released a "We're Hiring" video full of entertaining footage of all my friends:



To the regular viewer I bet this video looks awesome and nothing seems odd about it (other than the totally fun/craziness we have at work). But when I watch it I cringe at the timeline of the shots they choose: there are shots that happened years apart that flow into each other. Not that it is a bad thing, it just bothers me because I can see the different stages of my physical transformation over the past 4 years happen in a random order. In a few short scenes I go from being a normal weight, to gaining 40 pounds, to skinny in normal fitting clothing, to losing some weight but wearing baggy clothes that don't fit. And my hairstyles... oh man. One of my most prominent shots has me with a mustache which I literally did for 1 day (Halloween, I was a cowboy) but it looks like a normal day in the shot. My hair grew long and unkempt, got short, and then nearly completely shaved; I had a full beard, no beard, goatee; and my sideburns were short, long, and then 70's ultra long (in prep for Mr. Darcy). Make up your mind Jay! What do you want to look like? That being said, I'm not the only one with wildly changing hair over the past 4 years so at least I am in good company. Oh hey, a pun. Awesome.

My kids make brief appearances too! We are the Waldo family at 3:42 and baby Raeleigh is shown with Cowboy Jay at 4:23. Also check out Groovy Sideburns Jay at 2:49, Full-Beard-(nearly)-Shaved-Head Jay at 4:16, baggy-clothes-from-losing-weight Jay at 3:28, and I-just-ran-2-miles-at-the-Marina Jay at 1:16.

Quickie: I love pranks

Too early to disclose the specifics, but 2010 already has its first office prank underway. This one is a multi-day one (if I can make it all month without getting discovered, even better) and the victim is perplexed. Here's a hint: have friends join the prank so when you are the prime suspect suddenly the victim is hit by the friends in a way that makes it impossible for you to have done it (like you are in his presence when it happens). Good times.

(blogging about it may not be the best way to avoid getting caught, but if he is smart enough to search my blog for possible answers he would also be smart enough to check the printer logs to see who keeps printing those random pictures)

Twas quiet in the church...

Consistent readers of the blog may have noticed that the daily posts have recently become less... daily. But fear not, that will change in the near future. As discussed in previous posts on this blog, I set aside a certain amount of time each day to update my blog but recently I have been using that time to upload Christmas photos to my Facebook account (which many of you read already and discovered this site from it). Once that is done those photos will be uploaded here and posts should be more frequent (although not daily, as I am splitting my blogging time between more sources than just this site now).

Oh, and having a baby and spending family time in states abroad also turned out to be time consuming. Who would have thought?

New Year, New Goals

2009 was one hell of a year. It started off interesting, got crazy, and ended in a positive direction I was excited to go. 2010 looks to continue in that direction. As is the popular tradition, I created my own resolutions for this year and will continue to work towards them much in the same fashion as I did the latter half of last year (which birthed this blog). When the sun sets on 2010 this blog will be a delightful documentation of the successes of those resolutions. Here we go!