The Work Thing

Animation

Entry posted by Nathan Strum May 13, 2006

1,059 views

Ahhh... the tsunami of work has finally subsided. Fortunately, I managed to hang onto some debris and survive.

I don't discuss work much in my blog since, well, it's work. I don't really feel the need to discuss work much outside of work. But, I tend to do that anyway, since work pretty-much dominates my life (bad habit to get into - not recommended).

So I work at CalArts as the technician for the Character Animation program. Video production equipment, a couple of Mac labs, file servers, stuff for classrooms; if it's a piece of gear, I probably have something to do with it. Kind of ironic, given that I have no formal technical training whatsoever (but hey - they're Macs). My training is in art, but I have a penchant for using technology for producing art, so I guess that's how I ended up where I am.

Anyway, what's been keeping me buried over the last month is coordinating and assembling the end-of-year shows of the Character Animation students' work. Our "Open Show" features everything the students turn in. This year, we had 152 student films turned in, running over 7 1/2 hours. That's the equivalent of about 5 feature films' worth of material. Our "Producers' Show" (which wrapped on Thursday night) is a selection of about 2 hours' worth of faculty-selected pieces which get shown to the animation industry (as well as friends and family) at a 600+ seat theater in North Hollywood. It's a pretty huge event, and the culmination of a year's worth of work. I got home about 2:30 AM, which as of late, is a couple of hours earlier than usual for me.

It never ceases to amaze me what some of the students come up with. Sure, there's a fair share of stuff I've seen all-too-many times, but there's always something new, and as the production technology improves, and as students become more facile with it, they produce some pretty mind-blowing work. I tend not to always appreciate it as much as others I work with, since I have to watch it more times than they do when putting the shows together, and I'm looking for technical issues, rather than just enjoying the pieces on their creative merits. But once the Producers' Show is running, and I know there aren't any technical glitches affecting it, I can finally sit back, relax, and enjoy the students' work. It can be inspiring. And I've been itching to draw again for weeks. I finally have the time again.

So, back to the "To-do" list...

Colony 7 title screen - Done! I managed to squeeze this in amongst the madness.
Finish the new RPS illustrations - In progress. The pencil sketches are well underway. I actually cheat and use a program called Poser to stage the figures first. The trick is to make the end result not look like you used it. (Hey... I don't happen to have any live models around. Sue me.)
Finish (and animate) the Medieval Mayhem dragon - Check this out - espire8 has contributed some cool dragon designs for this. So now I can use those to do the animation! That saves me a ton of work, and I think his dragon looks much better than what I would have come up with anyway.
Finish the RPS manual - Soon? Work on RPS has reportedly started up again, so I need to get those new illustrations done. I've decided though that they aren't entirely necessary for the manual, but I still want to complete them.
Label contests - One down. I managed to crank out a painting and a few label designs for the Rainbow Invaders contest. I finally finished them up yesterday, after getting some much-needed sleep (it's going to take me about a week to catch-up on sleep entirely).
Juno First title screen
Create an illustration for the AtariAge store
Finish the MGD manual
Revise my 2600 Bosconian mockups, based on Bob's feedback
Start editing "Stella at 20"

And new to the list...

Label and manual for the AtariVox
Label and manual for Conquest of Mars - Done.

I spent last night getting a preliminary rough going for Conquest that looks like it's going to work out. So now I've got to start in on the final illustration, and start figuring out some sort of layout for the manual.

But first things first. And the first thing is... pizza.

You gotta have your priorities.