Hey, It's me again :P. I have another cool video for you guys to look at. It's called Definatley Uncool. It's an anime music video (AMV) to the anime called Hellsing Ultimate with the song Hello/Goodbye by Lupe Fiasco. It's a really cool video and the editing is very pretty :D. The only thing is though that if you're sensitive to blood and gore than I recommend that you don't watch this as it contains doses of both. Anyway, without any further adue, HERE is Definatley Uncool by Youtube user ForYouPeople.

Kill Vader!!!

Hey guys. Do you like Star Wars? How about Kill Bill? If so then I think you'll enjoy a CG combonation of the two called Kill Vader. I liked this video and I think you guys will to. Here is the link to the video.

Daydream

This is just a picture I made

today using GIMP. Enjoy

Yes I'm alive.

I'm back guys. If you're Canadian and reading this than Happy Thanksgiving :). If you're American than well..enjoy school tomorrow >:). Over the summer, I kinda neglected the blog so that's my bad, but I'm just here to share with you guys a quick update on my school year so far. I'm in a Yearbook/Journalism class at school. I know what you're thinking, "Yearbook AND L.O.L...together?" Well yes that is the case. There's alot more of us now and hopefull there's less work on everybody else..maybe. I'm the co-design/layout editor XD. My partner is currently in charge for this until nest semester when her term is done and I'm in charge(though I don't mind taking a back seat to be honest). I have Civics and Careers :/. I don't like careers to be honest. If you're wondering why I'm taking Civics and Careers now, it's not because I failed. To get in CyberARTS last year I had to give up doing the class for that year so I'm doing it now. I have Math. Right now my mark is sitting at a 60 which I don't mind at all, frankly it beats being anywhere lower. And I have video class, in fact today I did a video shoot for a project that myself, Burning Meh and another are in amd well as a few friends of ours. I drew my current display pic and designed a potential cover for this years yearbook and I downloaded GIMP which is like Photoshop but free :).That's about it for my retrospective. See you guys later.

btw. If you're asking when I have CyberARTS, it's next semester :P

Guess what...I lied

Hi guys, It's that time of year...exams. Either we're stressing about out them or we're cursing the day they were ever thought up. The important thing is to study and pay attention in class or if it's a subject you just don't understand, get help from your teacher.

So this is just an update (just as I promised) just to tell you guys what's up with me so far. All this week, I've been studying for the math exam that I had today. I think I did ok..I mean I'm not 100% on whether I aced it or not but It's one of those wait and see kind of things. I finished my painting today. It was a lot of work and I'm kinda glad it's over. Now I can focus on doing the Tech culminating that will take insane amounts of time and effort to finish. On Monday I presented my portfolio presentation to the class. Sadly at this point, the painting was unfinished and I had to present it as a work in progress. The Yearbook maybe on time this year. We'll see, there are no promises. I did a few pages in the book aswell, and just like my other work, it's not a matter of which one is my favourite, because all of my work are like my children, I don't have a favourite child, it's just that there's always one child that I like more than my others(parents don't lie to your kids ;P). Anyway that was more or less a quick update as to what I'm doing right now. Catch you guys later.

Btw. I'm missing out on a few blog entries for school so expect more updates between now and next week. :)

The End.

Hi. So with exams around the corner people are going to be a lot more pre-occupied with work. I myself had three culminating activites, a painting and a t-shirt to finish as well as an exam.So even though I have one exam on Friday, I'm still going to be busy with other stuff earlier on in the week aswell. With school over this also means that i'll be taking a four month interlude from this blog until September(with maybe a few updates now and then :P) So this might very well be my last blog entry for a while so I guess I'll catch you guy up on what's new with me since my last update.

I've had a pretty long year of CyberARTS...I mean it's the same amount of time as everybody else (save maybe Rali and Tristin Girl) but It's more because I've been doing year1 and year2 back to back. My painting looks better now that I've started on my people. If I can finish it in time for my art portfolio presentaion that will make me very happy. For Tech, I have to make a portfolio website(with CSS but it's passable without it) and I have to print my t-shirt design which gave me techincal difficulties on Friday. On a much less stressful note, the yearbook team(including myself)finished the yearbook. Honestly I've been doing this job for 4 weeks and I can appreciate how hard it is. I can only imagin how hard it's been for the people who've been doing it for more than an a year...(no wonder why some people on last years team didn't want to do it anymore). Other than that, nothing is really new with me. Besides CyberARTS stuff I still have an exam to worry about ;P and maybe later on in the summer go down to Florida and visit my grandparents and kinda piss the days away wathcing satellite tv, hanging outside,and chilling with Nana before going home to piss more of my summer away doing nothing..you know, that sort of thing :). So that has been my last school related update. See you guys in September.

and also btw I want to go see Scott Pilgrim vs The World. Never heard of it or want to see a trailer?Click HERE. :)

Exit Through the Giftshop

On Friday, my class as well as two others went on a feild trip to the ROM. We got to see a few exibits in the ROM such as the Greek Exibit, Canadian History Exibit and the Egyptian Exibit before leaving the muesum.At the exibits, we saw plates,vases,and statues in the Greek section, paintings in the Canadian History section and stone tablets in the Egyptian section. My class was at the ROM as part of our culminating activity. After we had lunch and walked around a little, we all met at the Cumberland Theaters to watch Exit Through the Giftshop. It was a film about a street artist named Mister Brainwash who went from filming anything and everything to filming for a documentary on street art to becoming a street artist himself.

I kinda liked this movie. It was made by Banksy and had interviews from Banksy,Invader and Sheppard Fairey. The funny thing is that after Mister Brainwash tried to make a(bad) documentary on street art he and Banksy kinda switch roles, making MBW the artist and Banksy the film maker. I liked it because no word of a lie, the movie kind of inspired me, by the end of it, even I wanted to go out and do some street art around the neighbourhood. I'm not going to give spoilers but if you have the chance, if you haven't seen it already, go and watch it. It's a great movie.

The Longest Week Ever Retrospect

So as I mentioned in a post I did earlier this week,on Monday to Wednesday myself as well as Nemo, Jade and Ms.Silverman were at a Toronto Star workshop learning about audio and video, writing for web, useing google maps as visual aid for story telling and a bit on photography.

On Day 1, we got there a few minutes late. A table was made for us to use our laptops on(we were the only students at the workshop btw). We had to set up a Blogger account and a Twitter account T.T(I don't really like Twitter :/)and listen to one of our host talking about different sites for social networking(ie Facebook,Myspace,Twitter). Then one of our speakers came up and explained how maps can be an effective visual tool for stroy telling so we had to create our own maps on google to tell a story from our childhood. For another part, Nemo,Jade and myself were very bored by our host. Nemo fell asleep(although it didn't help that she didn't sleep the night before) and Jade and myself had big a conversation on Facebook and a mini one on Twitter. The food there was pretty good though. In the mornings they have sesame seed bread(I didn't have that)and raisin muffins aswell as an assortment of tea and coffee. In the afternoons the had apple pie,cupcakes,and carrot cake.

Day 2 was the best out of the three days beacuse we learned a bit on photography and different cameras and microphones.Our next assignment was that we had to make a video about things to do or see on Queens Quay,Team L.O.L and a jouralist named Allison did a multi-media video on Street Meat. We recorded video, took pictures, conducted interviews and ate lunch. Once that's all done we went back to the Toronto Star building and started to edit the video. The video wow'ed everybody and it didn't help than Nemo's blog was the single best looking blog entered into the blog beauty contest.

Day 3 then went back to being boring, which disapointed me a lot because I had high hopes for day 3 because day 2 was so fun. On day 3 we learned about how to write for the web. A lot of the things he was talking about were the exact same things the Mr.Koczij had talked about regarding web structure. This assignment was to report a fake news story about a Sea Monster in the Eastern Gap useing Vuvox,Twitter or Blogger. Nemo won the blog beauty contest and won us all free Toronto Star jackets.

The next day I come back to school. I forgot to tell all of my teachers that I would be attending the Toronto Star workshop for 3 days not to mention the 3 days of work to catch up on. I was also supposed to usher for Spring Sensations, a function where the school provides dinner and live music...but I couldn't because I had to work on Yearbook like I've been doing all week..with the exception of one day where by the time I got to the school, the yearbook team went home.So unfortunatly I had to ditch Spring Sensations and I forgot about recording some footage for L.O.L because I've been working on yearbook all night.
I died that same night because as soon as my face hit the pillow, I was out like a light.

Finally, still tired fron Thursday, went to school and wrote 2 test. 1 for Math and the other for Canadian History both of which I think I did pretty good.Sadly enough I still don't know what I'm doing on my web design assignment and I've gotten started of my painting for art. Then surprise, surprise afterschool I went to work on Yearbook until 5:30. Overall it's been a pretty busy week... I'm just glad that it's a long weekend and I don't really have to think about school until Tuesday :)

The Longest week ever!!!!....so far

This week has been a very long week. Since Monday, I've been on a 3 day Toronto Star workshop dealing with Writing for web, Videography(including editing) and we touched a bit on photography. Yesterday we had to do a video about things to do in Queen's Quay. Ms.Silverman, Nemo and Jade and I as well as a journalist named Allison did a video on Street Meat. Honestly the only thing more fun than making the video was making the adults( because we're the only students at the workshop)look very VERY bad. At the end of the week i'll write a big huge retrospect about my week on my blog but for now you can watch the Video called Street Meat that we did yesterday. :)

Website Critique

A good website is a site that follows the 10 Elements and Principals or Web Design. I will focus on 3 of the principals to critique two sites on whether it's a good site or a bad site. In my opinion, Wikipedia is a good site because:

1)It doesn't make the user think. It gives the user instant information by typing what they want to search in the space provided and it gives them the information they're looking for.

2) The site is easily searchable. If you were to type in Pizza Hut and click the "search" button it will give you the search results and give you a choice as to which one do you click,or if you are sure that if you type in Pizza Hut and get the restaurant chain that it will take you right to the page if you click the "go" button.

3) It's also not afraid of the white space. Because it's an encyclopedia site, it specializes in providing information in an organized and efficient manner through it's use of headings,sub-heading, as well as visual imagery.

For theses reasons, I give Wikipedia praise as a well structured site.

Now I site that I have visited a few times in the past is a site called projectfree.tv. Even thought it's not an information site, it is lacking in some of the elements of web design.

1)It doesn't focus the users attention. The attention of the users eyes are drawn everywhere between the bright orange background and the long list of tv shows available to watch in bright blue print. The colours don't contrast each other and they over-use the red arrow icon.

2)Keep it simple. This may or may not be the designers fault but the useless ads on the page make the sight look more busy than it actually is once you scroll down.

3)Don't waist the user patience. A few times I've gone watch a specific episode of a show that I watch only to have to scroll down a big long page just to find it. The user shouldn't have to spend all there time tracking down a specific episode when this task should take 30 seconds to a minute.

Anyway, I digress. For these reasons I praise wikipedia as a good site and say projectfree.tv needs to update their site. K later ;P 

 

The Hand that Walks the Earth Retrospect

So last semester as many of you may or may not already know, I did a clay animated film called "The Hand that Walks the Earth"( as seen above) Part of the goal of this film was for it to show an emotion thought out the film as a theme. I chose a creepy-is theme with some weird and creepy characters.The theme behind the film was a skeletal hand rising from the grave and wandering the the graveyard until it finds a grey-ish blob. The blob then goes on to the hand and it become it's zombie skin(sort of reminicent of the Venom symbiote from Spider-man)

Conceptually, I did like my idea. It was different and lots of time was put into it was as a whole, whether it was set design or character creation, lots of time and effort was put into it. There was a few technical difficulties through-out the projest though. A big technical difficulty was that originally, I had wanted to have the film set in the middle of a rain storm, however since trying to use the same rain effect on over 100 pictures, it proved to be too much for the computer. So after switching computers several times trying to use the same effect, eventually I settled for the black fog effect. The creepy mood wasn't conveyed by just by just the characters alone. I think the mood was successfully conveyed well with the help of the effects and the background music backing up the accual animation. Other small difficulties I experienced during the animation was one of my characters( green eye-snake *cough*) was starting to droop. It was constantly falling over. The only reason I knew where to put it back was because I was made of plasticine. Plasticine does contain patrolium oil based products in it leaving the sheet of constuction paper marked with a few oil stains. Anyway, I digress. Enjoy the show. Feel free to comment on it. Also, message me if anyone saw Supernatural last night.

Artistic Inspiration....

I have a few inspirations that spark ideas for artwork or for stories. A few big inspirations of mine are music (or tv, movies, books) people and from my dreams.

It's probably the same with a lot of people but I don't always get good iedas by thinking really hard about it. There have been many instances if I just listen to music, my mind will wander. Sometimes I think of tv shows or movies or something then right out of the blue, I get an idea. It's effective because I'm not stressing myself out trying to come up with an idea..it just happens on it's own.

People can also give me ideas. When I have conversations with my friends sometimes it's something that one of my friends had that would make me think of an idea. The odd thing is, sometimes the idea has nothing to do with the conversation that sparked. I could be something totally random or just unrelated to the topic of the conversation. This method is a little touch and go because this method doesn't always work.

Lastly, my dreams do give me some ideas. If I'm planing to take ideas from my dreams the chances are I'm looking for kind of a weird-ish feel to whatever I'm trying to create. Lots of weird dreams I've had are that time I dreampt that I was mugged by a cow, or the time I took a leap of faith off of a waterfall. Now depending on what you plan to do with your dream and what kind of medium you're using(ie paint, pastel ect) your dream piece may not come out the way you want it to, especially if you're wanting to paint it and you can't paint. That is probably a big draw-back this this method is that if you're choosing a complicated dream sequence, it's just going to make it harder for you to execute your piece of work.

Anyway, these are some of the ways I come up with ideas for my art work. Explaining some of my process may or may not help some of the people who take the time to read my blog entries, if so give it a try..your results may vary..... :)

Sprockets Film Fest

So yesterday, almost all of the CyberARTS students went to the Sprockets Film fest. It's a film festival that featured several short films, some by film school graduates others by film students in their 3rd or 4th year of school as well as a feature length french film called "U"

Now, knowing my bad memory, I had a feeling I would forget some of the films featured at the film festival, however the ones I do remember were the animated films "Animal" and "The Art of Drowning","On the Bus","Forget Myself","The Freshwater Plague" and "Toxic Ingedients". Now some of these films I didn't like such as Toxic Ingerdients. It was essentually a comentary on the toxic ingredients in makeup that could cause many health issues down the line. It's not that I didn't understand it..I just didn't like it much. Two films that I liked for different reasons were The Art of Drowing and Animal amoung others. I liked Animal because even though there is no speech, I liked it because there was a small organism that was eaten at least twice and everytime the preditor dies. At the end of the film, a frog eats the organism but dies almost immediatly after eating it. Soon after, a flower grows out of the frog and re-creates the same organism. This could probably be a represention of the food cycle. With the flower growing out of the frog could mean there is life where there is death. Another film I liked was The Art of Drowning. I liked this film not just because of its depressing nature and overtones(assuming that makes sense) but I did like the idea behind it and the art style. The plot of the film in a nutshell is a man narriating his final thoughts as he is drowning as well as the nature of the whole "life flashing before his eyes" thing that happens just before you die. It was dark but it was a good film.

There was also a french movie call "U". It was about a unicorn named U that appears to a rabbit princess named Mona(I could be wrong about her name) when she was young. Years later Mona falls in love with a guitar-playing cat from the traveling family, the Yeah Yeahs(I forget his name :P) while U falls in love with Lizare who is in the same family as the cat. By the end of the film, The Cat and Mona plan to get married while U and Lizare tell eachother that they love each other. Now I'll admit that I'm bias toward this film because it's in french and that is something I can't overlook, however, the film did have exellent character development and the film did have more than one character focal point as it turned it's attention to other characters besides Mona. Now, watching this film, there are differences between North American style cartoons and Cartoons from other countries like U. In France, it is very likely that there standerds for what appropriate for young children are different than North America. Even though it is definately out of the norm compared to other childrens shows in North America, I can't imagin a network like Treehouse or YTV editing or censoring it because of a descriptive kiss compared anime that shows lots of blood.

The Western Wall (also known as the Wailing Wall) is an important Jewish religious site located in the old city of Jerusalem. It is important because It's purpose is to mourn the destruction of the old temple; it is the last remnant. The total height of the wall is 32 meters and is 1600 feet wide. It was build among the temple mount in the 10th century and destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE.

Many people of the Jewish faith make pilgrimages to the temple as it is essally excess able and is a very holy spot. The people of Jewish faith wrote their prayers on a slip of paper and placed them in the cracks of the Western Wall. Many people think that those of Jewish faith can not set a foot upon the Temple Mount because it is considered a sin. The Jewish people believe that the temple was created by King David and was one of the first .

When the Roman Emperor Vespasian was in the midst of his take over. He left the temple standing as a reminder of what he conquered. In 1967, the Western Wall was under the control of Israel. During events like Bar Mitzvahs or Jerusalem Day people gather around to pray.

Other cultures besides besides the Jewish faith find meaning in the Western Wall. In the Islamic faith, it is believed that the Prophet Muhammad left his winged steed, Buraq by the Western Wall(they call it Al-Buraq Wall) A few cultures have their own opinions about the Western Wall. Palestienian have their own opinions as does the Jewish, Israeli, and the Egyptians. They have their own opinions about the Western Wall and it's origins.

IT'S A ZOMBIE GORILLA APOCOLYPSE!!!

So there is this group called the Gorillaz. They're an ok group. My favorite song by them is Clint Eastwood. The video is all about them hanging out at a cemetery until zombie gorillas rise from the grave to attack them. However why I like this video specifically is the fact that it's all animated. All of their videos are animated cartoon characters. The animation is different in different videos but it's still cool. I hear that even at their concerts they have the videos of their songs playing and a silloette in the background. Here is a link or one of their songs.

Goodbye March Break :(

Well, March Break is done. Back to reality for everybody. Althought I'm not too crazy that it's over(since it was too much fun) I accually am looking forward to April because Kick-ass is coming out in April was well as Nighmare in Elm Street. So even though I'm sad to see March Break go, at least I have something to look forward to right?

Technical and Artistic Reflection.

Hi readers. So finally I finished my typography assignment. Which also means the Typography unit is finishing. So in a previous blog entry, I think I touched on what I did fro my typography, well now I'm going more in depth about it...almost reflecting on it..O.O...

Anyway, my Kinetic Typography assignment was called Jack's Persuation.Looking back I probably could've chosen a better name but it is what it is. The medium I got the audio from was Pirates of the Caribbean Deadman's Chest. It was the part where Jack does what Jack does best, he smooth talks his way out of his problems.He manages to persuade Former Commodore Norringtion into ditching the key to Davy Jones' heart to fight Will Turner. To make my Typography I use Flash MX.

I used several layers during this assignment(Eight to be exact).I also switched to different fonts through out the assignment as well as different backgrounds. Even though it took very long, feel that the time that I put in was worth it in the end. As a class I think we learned a few cool thing to pull off some of the complicated technical stuff that we did.I am happy with my work.

I don't think there is a specific part of the assignment that I didn't like. I think I put a good amount of time into and I think it shows. Our teacher did show me a few things like how to adjust the alpha of an image. Personally, I don't think mine is as good as some of my classmates or the others that you might see. Although this is a very time consuming process I think that it shows that I put the time and effort in by the quality of my work. Sadly my only regret is that I don't feel like I spent my time as effectively as I could've.

As for my design choices, the backgrounds for my stage change three times during the animation. In the beginning of the presentation Norington is speaking to Will saying "do excuse me while I kill the man who ruined my life" the background was purple but had a pattern kinda blended into the purple. Purple was a very regal colour in England. Iwas was also coupled with a fancy font with a pinkish read colour. Because Norington was a very important man, choosing a regal colour seem like a good idea. Choosing a dingy colour would've worked as well since he is now disgraced.For Will, because he was a blacksmith I had a stoney background coupled with a kind of stoney font. For Jack Sparrow, I gave his background a ripped, tattered, parchment look with a bit of blood spalatter on the top for effect. It was also coupled with a kind of scratchy hand written font.

What I found difficult was the course of the animation it's self. One I got the hang of it, the animation wasn't that difficult. The next problem I experienced was chosing the backgrounds. Solid colours where too plain to do the job right so I then had to think even deeper. With the deeper thought process and advice from our teacher, I did end up using patterns in addition to using solid colours to make the background more interesting.

That's it for my reflection.Thanks for reading. :)

Nightmare on Elm Street remake

Most people may or may not be in favor of the new Nightmare on Elm Street remake coming out in April, however I for one am looking forward to it. Now there are visible difference between The Elm Street of 1984 and the up and coming 2010 remake besides the obvious casting differences. Because of the new special effects we use in movies now, they should be able to pull of a lot of complex dream sequences. They have also changed the look of the glove as well as the overall attitude of Freddy Krueger. Also, Robert Englund is not returning for the role of Freddy Krueger which would be sad if not for the fact that Fred Krueger will be played by Jackie Earle Haley who played Rorschach in Watchman. Now I'm not complaining about these changes, I'm in favor of them, (most of them) however hopefully this movie won't disappoint me because the effect look fantastic. This link is the link to the trailer.

Space Bounty hunters

Most of my drawing are spontaneous. I hardly ever plan out my drawings. No exception to this is a picture of Boba Fett from Star Wars.I did said picture completely out of boredom and I will say it came good for my first one. I don't have a copy of the picture on the computer but I'll upload it on a later date. For those who have never heard of Boba Fett except from Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, This is a picture of him when he's all grown up.

Kinetic Typography

So this past week, my class and I have been working on Kinetic Typography assignments. For those who don't know, Kinetic Typography is basically moving words. What you do is you take source material like a song or and audio clip of a movie and animate the words to the source material.It does take a lot of time and patience depending on the length of your animation but the finished product will be worth it. The program we're using is flash however there might be other programs you can do Kinetic Typography with. The links below will show you examples of Kinetic Typography. One does contain strong language.

El Anatsui is an African artist who uses found objects like bottles, bottle caps can and other found objects to create works of art. He is the one of worlds most celebrated sculptors of our time and has made instillations in places like Toronto, New York and other galleries and museums around the world

His art word is created from found objects like glass bottles, bottle caps, cans and sews them together with copper wire. He gets some of his supplies from distilleries that just throws them away and turns them into something useful. His art work includes walls and quilts made out of found objects.

He tackles social injustices or unbalances through his art work in both current events and historical events like European Settlers looking to acquire slaves and ivory in West Africa.

Although I will not be joining some of my classmates in collaborating with El Anatsui at the ROM, I can appreciate his work because he can take something as mundane as a bottle cap and turn it into art. Not to mention the bright vibrant colours and the arrangement of them. Thanks for taking the time to read my first blog post on my new blog.

New blog :)