Clothed Figure Studio continues...

Mr Man Gets Away

This was an assignment from my storyboard class this semester: Mr Man (whose character design was predetermined) has to wake up, go to one other room in the house, then leave the house - make up the story.

PSI

I'm not a car person. I still drive the first car I've ever bought and owned, a 1997 Honda Civic EX. Yes, it's black. Yes, I'm asian.

But I do get a little obsessive when it comes to car maintenance and the latest zit on my mind was tire pressure.

My wife's Subaru Outback LL Bean edition has a leaky tire that I refill with air every once in a while but never checked the psi before. When I brought it in for a checkup at the dealer I asked them to be sure to check the pressure in the tires. They assured that they had when all was said and done. Shortly after I noticed that the leaky tire was low again, so I read up on the manual on what the correct psi is for front and back tires (30 psi front, 29 psi back) and got out my trusty tire pressure gauge (pictured above) and checked the pressure on ALL the tires.
Front driver side: 20 psi
Front passenger side (leaky): 10 psi
back driver side: 35 psi
back passenger side: 37 psi

Needless to say I corrected the tire pressure for all four wheels and keep an eye on the leaky one. My wife said she immediately noticed a difference in the way the car handled.

Then I checked MY car's tire pressure...
Front driver side: 20 psi
Front passenger side (leaky): 10 psi
back driver side: 20 psi
back passenger side: 15 psi

I corrected these as well and I did notice a difference in handling although it could be my imagination.

Moral of the story. Go get yourself a tire gauge. Check your tires when they're cold - as in not driven for at least 2 hrs. Add or release air as necessary.

From your friendly car maintenance man,
Fred.

in studio work...

More Sketches

Sketchbook

I have been drawing quite a bit lately but just haven't been posting the work. Here are some sketches from my sketchbook. You're going to see a lot of people's backs because people get a little antsy when they think they're being watched. Which they are.

This American Life

"This American Life" is a radio show that I've rediscovered in podcast format. It's a 50 minute broadcast of a particular theme delivered through three 'chapters' or individual stories. Once you subscribe to the podcast you get the currently released podcast for free but the archived episodes are sold separately via Audible.com.

It is an outstanding piece of storytelling week after week. At worst it's reliably entertaining, at its best it is moving, heart-wrenching, marvelous and hilarious. And now they're producing a brand new television show debuting on Showtime on March 22nd. Should be interesting, will DVR that baby.

One of my favorite pieces is the one titled/themed "Babysitting". Does anybody have an episode they would like to recommend? I wouldn't mind buying them off of Audible but would rather not pick blindly.

Impro

Last semester I took my very first acting class, "Acting for Animators". Why is an acting class in the curriculum of an animation program? In an animated feature film, there are voice actors such as Mike Myers providing the voice for Shrek or Tom Hanks providing the voice for Woody. But they only provide half the performance. The physical performance, what you actually see on the screen, is not the work of the Hanks or Myers but of the animator. Therefore in production, the animator is considered the actor and often times will study acting to reference physicalities they can incorporate into the animation.

I really enjoyed the class. It really pushed us to act physically: touch, push, pull, punch, shove, grab. Reactions then come more naturally and spontaneously. One handout reading assignment was a chapter from a book called "Impro - Improvisation and the Theatre" by Keith Johnstone. The book was mainly about improvisation acting but had a lot to say about storytelling and learning. The handout was the chapter on Status and it was fascinating. Many comedy routines that improv actors can utilitize are about shifts in high and low status between the characters. I liked reading this chapter so much I checked the book out of the school library. It's an excellent read. If you're an actor, it's a must read, but it's also essential for storytellers.

duke

I forkin hate Duke. And I really hate Duke basketball. Why? Maybe it was the Kentucky/Duke championship game where Christian Laettner (grade A asshole) stepped on the Kentucky player and went on the hit the game winning shot. I hate Christian Laettner. Maybe it's that Duke's rep is that of a homogeneous, white, privileged, stuck-up, entitled, white, cocky school (reminiscent of my high school. I hated high school.) Maybe it's the Duke fans. Yeah, it's the fans.

I actually like the coach, Mike Krzyzewski. I respect what he does and how he does it. But I find the Duke fan just completely obnoxious and undeserving. Feel the hate. Feel it.

Why mention it? Well, you see, my wife went to Duke. And she has a lot of friends here in the Bay Area who were her classmates. And now they're my friends. And get this, they're all really great people. Well, most of them anyway. But they do shatter my image of Duke. But does it quell my hatred of their basketball team?

No.

So when people find out how much I hate Duke and that my wife went to Duke they ask is that a problem in our relationship. I reply, "Only in March."

It's March.

Home Alone

The wife took a business trip to Baltimore from Saturday to Tuesday and I was home alone with the two boys. While I have been a pretty involved dad and being the primary parent on duty (PPOD) was nothing new, this was a fairly long stretch for me. The big difference boiled down to one thing: there is no backup.

When there is a diaper changing emergency you can't call on your significant other for a little help. When one both boys are having mini-emergencies you have to choose to deal with one at a time. In the middle of the night wake-ups, there's no taking turns to deal, it's just you.

Milo, the older one, really missed his mommy but overall he did ok. Ben, the younger, didn't seem to mind at all, out of sight out of mind. I did well and am pretty proud of maintaining some sense of normalcy in the household. Nobody got hurt and everybody was fed. But, I am really frickin tired.

Y! Sports Redesign - It's the Internet, Stupid

I wanted to sit on my review of the new Yahoo! Sports redesign for a week or two so I could digest what I liked and didn't like and not just react to the change.

In brief, I like the new visual design, but I don't think there's huge improvement in the utility of the site and my big rant is that big images are overrated (read below).

Small tidbit to begin, I miss the nav bar that disappears when you dig down to a main sports level - I always browsed "across" all the major sports pages to get an overview of everything. But I'm probably in the minority and it's not that big of a deal.

Here's where I get pissy: images are overrated, information and functionality is King. The new design seems to be driven by the massive image size of the photo. In magazines and brochures images matter a great deal. But the internet is about performance, efficiency and practicality over glamour and gloss in every instance except for brochure sites where how you appear affects your brand. But on the internet it's how it well does it function - do you get what you want quickly, consistently... and then, easily.

One could argue that a sports media site is like a magazine and therefore the gloss and glamour of a big photo applies. They're wrong. One might say that the users wanted the big photos - well, the useres are wrong too. This is a case of not giving the users what they think they want. The reason they like the internet is not because it's just like a big magazine. It's because the internet is basically a gigantic database laid out before them. It's a database. Information. Very dry, very boring, all statistics and feeds. And that is the beauty of it. Images only tell so much. What's more informative to the sports fan: the scores of all the NCAA basketball games or the acne on Mark MacGuire's face?

The most obvious evidence of this truth is the history Yahoo! Sports itself. Before its first redesign it was a very successful site. After it's first redesign (1998) it was still a very successful site - all the while ESPN and Sports Illustrated had big honkin images on their frontpages, and Yahoo! did not. But the scoreboard was in plain site. The information displayed quickly and reliably. If splashy, glamourous and glossy equals success, then why was Y! Sports (all business, dry as a bone) among the top 3 of its category year after year? I'm not saying good looks don't matter but just that huge images are vastly overrated for an INTERNET product.

I'm glad the scoreboard is still on the frontpage(s). But it's a pity it got pushed down.

At worst, Y! Sporst looks like an ESPN wannabe by copying the high contrast black background theme. That's probably unwarranted, but I'll stick it in there anyway.

Kudos to the Sports team, I know that a redesign is an odyssey of pain and pain and more pain. And I know that the design process is full of compromises, where the designer is hearing it from all sides. I still think Yahoo! Sports is the best sports site on the web hands down.

Silhouette

In Storyboarding and Animation, they talk about silhouette value. If you block your character completely in black, how does it read? Can you tell who it is and what they are doing... feeling? It requires the artist to think about positive and negative space wrapping around their character. Characters that have good silhouette read better on the screen. Ten times better. See my revision of Raul above.

Sick

I have had a low-level cold for several weeks, which then mushroomed into a bad cold with flu-like symptoms, which now has finally subsided but not completely gone away. Breathing through your nose is a privilege. Hacking up green goo was getting tiresome. Children are a germ farm especially when they start school.

Harry the Hairdresser

nuff said

Raul the Butcher

Betty

In my Storyboard class this semester, one assignment was to do a single drawing of one of these characters:

Betty the Beauty Queen
Raul the Butcher
Harry the Hairdresser

Above is Betty.

Pics from my backyard

Dusk a few days ago.

SteamBot

My oldest son, Milo, LOVES trains every since he was a year and a half. I got into trains because he was into trains. The above is a sketch of SteamBot, a robot that 's modelled after a steam train.

My New Obsession...

When I discover something I like, I really dive into it completely. I immediately rented all of "Deadwood" Season 1. I binged on "Battlestar Galactica" Miniseries, Season 1 and half of Season 2 from iTunes. Well, move over Battlestar, you've jumped the shark - and hello to my new obsession...

"Avatar: the Last Airbender"

Yes the title is pretty forking lame. And the characters at first glance make it look like it's "just for kids". But this show is seriously good.

First, the animation is GOOD. Usually you don't find good animation in television cartoons because there isn't enough of a budget and time to make it good. That started to change when Bruce Timm developed Batman the Animated Series in the late 90's - he gave a sense of style and grace to the movement and character design as well as great storylines, in a medium that was still cheap. A lot of Japanese anime shows are more like animatics, where it's just a still frame with camera pans - very cheap and uninspiring. But the animation in Avatar is smooth, graceful, intricate even.

Second, the story is GREAT. It is character driven. It is well researched. It is well designed. Again, I'm talking about Story. Plot points come full circle. Episodes link with one another in an epic sweep. It is well executed.

Third, it is pumping on all cylinders. The voice actors are good to great. The character designs are brilliant, the layouts are gorgeous and they didn't skimp on any production detail. Wiki this thing and watch it!

Blink - written by Sideshow Bob

I just finished reading "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking" by Malcolm Gladwell. He also wrote "The Tipping Point" which was, like, a must-read for any silicon valley resident/employee (like, oh-my-gawd, like).

Anyhoo, Blink is also a very interesting, compelling read. I drew many parallels to my experience as a UI Designer at high tech companies in the valley. But that's not very interesting. What is interesting is that the author, Malcolm Gladwell, looks exactly like Sideshow Bob (see pic above.)

I didn't doctor the pic in photoshop. He intentionally grew his hair out as a sort of social experiment (as explained in the Afterword of Blink) with interesting results. He did not mention however, that he now looks like the Kelsey Grammar-voiced Simpsons character. ("The Bart The") You have to believe somebody told him thought. Hafta.