Quarter Life Crisis

25 today, though I don't feel it. I think I'll take a day off.

The Ever Ellusive Traditional Animation Desk

I recently went through the process of obtaining and restoring my own animation desk. I'm always busy with school, so this was a welcome breath of fresh air, even though it still concerned animation. I guess I never stop working, whatever.

Anyway, I remember how difficult it was for me to find any kind of resource on the internet on building or even obtaining your own traditional animation desk like this without spending ludicrous amounts of money; Making animation desks a luxury that students can't afford when factoring in the ever increasing tuition fees of a decent education. For example, a desk like the one I have now will run someone at a minimum $300 anywhere you look. While the full size animation desks, complete with drawers, and enough work surface to make any aspiring animator drool can run into the thousands of dollars before you even consider purchasing a decent disc or any paper. So I thought I would document the process I went through as a sort of resource, one of the very few out there, on getting up an running.

First things first, I did not build this desk. I would have if I had to, but fortunately I did not. If you're interested in building your own desk, I'll cover that at the end of this post. Before I resorted to that, I gathered a list of all the animation studios in town that have or were currently producing 2d animation. I figured since traditional animation seemed to be going through a dry spell, perhaps some of these studios wouldn't be needing all of their desks.

Unfortunately, a lot of people had already beaten me to the punch. A lot of the studios said they had already sold all of their traditional animation equipment! But I didn't give up, and eventually I found one last desk available at Bardel Animation Studios in Vancouver. The receptionist said I could have it for a mere $50. Fifty bucks! So I drove downtown and picked it up the next morning. Here it is in the condition it was in when I first got it:

It was covered with all sorts or wear and tear. Signs of the rigorous animation industry I guess. Now some people would be deterred by this, and want something brand new, but I saw passed it. Others might like the worn look, and want a desk with some real animation history behind it. I chose to sand it down, because of some ugly scars, and I wanted to make the desk mine. Take a look at this close up of the desk. It looks like the previous animator had a frustrating time animating his/her scenes, because s/he carved this into the desk! Yikes!

So I was already into my desk for $50. I spent another $8 on some sandpaper and a sander.

Much better! A little elbow grease, and nobody is any the wiser. It's as good as new:


Whoever made this desk, included the option for a light, so I wanted to take advantage of that. I've been told not to rely on the light as flipping and rolling is the best way to become a better animator. But I still wanted the option of having a light. And I didn't just want to put any old light bulb in there. I wanted to light up the disc uniformly. I decided on this light, as it used a circular fluorescent light bulb, called "circuline", which would work perfectly. This ran me $34, a little expensive, but I think it was worth it. Here's some pictures of the light:




As you can see from the picture above, all I needed to attach this bad boy was a couple of screws. The picture below shows the newly sunken screws.


Once I had the light attached firmly, I needed to supply it with some power. For convenience I wanted a switch, so I didn't have to reach down and plug it in every time I needed the light. For these steps I relied of the expertise of my father. I would suggest you consult someone familiar with electrics if you intend on doing the same. Hey were just animators right? Let's not go crazy! I ended up going down to the local hardware store with my dad where we picked out all the parts for under $20. So if you're counting, were up to $112. Here's a couple of pictures from the wiring process:


Whoever built this table, also considered portability. With the addition of the light, it didn't fold up as well as it could before, but hey, that's still pretty compact!


The first electrics trial almost fried the plug! I guess the part I wired was done incorrectly. I tried to help out, and look where it got me. Like I said, I'm only an animator! Anyway, after that it worked fine. Here's a couple pictures of the light in action:



I decided to finish my desk surface. My parents lent me this stuff, which worked out nicely:


Here's the finished desk as it sits in my room. It's so nice to finally have something I can do some pencil tests on this summer. I ordered some animation paper from Lightfoot, and it arrived last week. My main focus this summer will be gesture sketching, but I hope to crank out a few tests on this thing as well. These are the only pictures with the disc, but it was included with the original desk for $50. So all in all, a nicely finished desk, with disc, light,and 500 sheets of animation paper only ran me $129. What a bargain!

Now if you're interested in building your own desk, and like the look of mine, I will be happy to post the dimensions of this desk. When I was considering doing the same, I noticed the lack of this information online, so I will be more than happy to provide it, if you want to build your own based off of mine.

I also cannot forget to mention the one good resource I was able to find on creating an animation desk, Brock Gallagher's blog. I emailed Brock when I first got started on this project, and he was very helpful. I didn't build my desk, but he did, and documented it here.

Anyway, I hope this post helps someone out there. If you have any questions, just post in the comments.

Allow Myself to Introduce...Myself

So here's the much anticipated self-portrait. A much better effort than the previous portraits from this week, and a much more accurate representation of me than I expected to render. This will be the first of many self portraits to come.

It's the classic 3/4 pose and 3 point lighting setup, so I'd like to experiment with different angles and lighting. I also want to loosen up a lot and have a little more fun with the next ones. This one was ridiculously intense, and I am soooo tired now.

This was done live, as in I setup a mirror, which is what the assignment called for. This was probably one of the most daunting aspects of the assignment. It took me a while to get my pencil moving, but once I realized it was just a picture like all the other assignments I was fine. But for anyone that hasn't done a self-portrait before, they are HARD. So I thoroughly recommend giving it a try. I can't wait to do my next one. But for now I need a rest. I did this one over the course of day, but I would guess it took me 3 hours. 18x24, Charcoal.

A Different Kind of Dreaming

I took a break from animation to check out the Vancouver International Auto Show this weekend. If this animation thing ever works out for me in a big way, I'll probably look like this without the show room background:

My dream car: Jaguar XKR

Switching servers...

Need to renew hosting right as school starts, may take some time. Sorry if you have trouble accessing some of my server specific content. I'll be back up as soon as possible.

Luongo

My local team just aquired arguably one of the top three goalies in the world.

I am so pyched! I can't wait for the new season, I've been waiting for a good goalie since the days of Kirk Mclean. No offense to Mclean, but Vancouver has never seen a goalie this good before. Too bad we had to give up Auldie in the process, but I see a brighter future. The Northwest is ours again. :)

The Outside World

It's hard being a student of animation. Any member of the club will tell you. Spending all your time hunched over a sketchpad, desk, or in front of a computer. Endlessly trying to understand the same basic principles. Always coming back to them and re-learning them. How long does it take for something so seemingly simple to sink in? (Say that ten times fast!)

I whole-heartedly agree with Glen Keane when he said that animation is the most difficult art to learn and master (or something like that).

So with animation occupying 99% of the brain these days, I found it a delightful surprise to accidentally open the wrong directory on my desktop and get a small glimpse of the past. Not too long ago, in the middle of my search for the right animation school, (which unfortunately turned out to be the wrong one, more on that later...) I got into photography. These pictures, into which I was immediately transported, are from a trip to Spain a few years back. Back came all the great feelings of being there. The heat, the beaches, the laid back lifestyle. A culture that knows how to live life.

I realized how busy my life is right now and how much a break like this would benefit me right now. Oh well, at least looking at them gave me something else to think about for five minutes, along with a nice nostalgic high completely unrelated to animation. I had to sell my camera to pay for tuition, but I'll pick one up again someday.

Russian Connection

I just realized that I'm going through a sort of Russian phase. I've been reading Anne Applebaum's Politzer Prize winning "Gulag". It's quite haunting, and I'm only half way through it. Anyway, if you're a history buff like me, go get it! It's amazing that events so horrific could remain out of most of world's public conciousness...

At the same time I've been frequenting a couple of sites for that much needed morsil of traditional eye candy I love to keep in my favorites. They just happen to be Russian too! Check them out:

Russian Insider - Official blog for Prince Vladimir feature film
A. Riabovitchev - One of the artists working on the above mentioned film

Of course I can't go without mentioning Peter Starostin's latest work. Looks like Animation Mentor is really helping his game. Congrats Peter, lovely work you're pumping out!

Updates

Overhauled the old resume, it was way too cluttered. Updated the animation page, no new animation yet. I'll upload another piece and update the run cycle within the week. I also added links to some of my classmated, check them out in the friends section below.

Cripes!!!

Holy three weeks left till graduation Batman. Time is getting tigher...by the...second...heh.

Gotta shift into 10th gear now, gotta get me a jay oh bee.

RSI Haunting Me Again

Ughh...

If it isn't enough to try and finish all this stuff on time (which I never seem to able to do), I now have RSI creeping back into my life. For those that aren't familiar it stands for Repetitive Stress Injury. In lamens terms, my wrist feels like it has a red hot knife wedged inside it! Good thing I have experience with this. When I was working at FoED I came across the same thing and invested in a book on the subject. I blew off the dust from my old RSI manual and skimmed through it once again to relearn all those nifty hand stretches I'll have to do from now on...

Can't stop won't stop!

Production Bliss

I'm so exhausted.

To the point where I think I can actually use the word "fatigued" to describe my constant disposition.

But I'm also so happy.

I wake up at around 7:30 every morning and before I know it, the clock says 2am. I get so caught up in animating all day and (even though it takes forever and it's so frustrating sometimes) I can't get enough of it. I remember when I started here at VFS having so much respect for all the new traditional knowlegde I was gettting. But at the same time I was going nuts waiting for my chance to enter the production phase. Well here it is!

I don't know if I'll end up with a job in 3 months time but I know I'll still be animating all day and night regardless. I guess the ultimate job for me would be getting paid to make my demo reel. Sound retarded? Brian Taylor certainly doesn't think so...

Copyright Schmopyright...

I've got a nice soundtrack picked out for my demo reel, and an even better dialogie clip I'm planning to use for my final exercise. You would think I could just go ahead and use them, like every other demo-reel-making student on the planet does, because who cares right? Nobody's really gonna know right? Atleast noone that would get upset....

Unfortunately the sound geeks at my school want copyright permission in writing for everything I use that isn't mine. I've spoken to a lot of students at a lot of different schools (even Academy of Art), and this is unheard of. Those students just do what they like, and I think we should be able to as well.

Can you imagine how long it's gonna take for these big production companies to get back to me? I guess it's a good thing I started sending out the requests now...

Evening rant concluded...

Stress

Working hard on the demo reel has it price it seems. I finally burned out. I didn't think I could, or would. Heck I've been pulling all nighters on the computer everyday since I was 15! I have a theory as to why I finally fell victim to the burnout though. I have a deadline! That adds a level of stress that's unheard of even to my nocturnal self. On top of that, I'm trying to impress everyone, or atleast everyone that matters. It's a new form of all night from here on out.