Monday, November 30, 2009

It's that time again...

FINAL PROJECTS! And what a very large and terrifying amount of them! Let's see here... What do we have on the menu.

  • Ball and tail animation (it's a ball... with a tail! Bouncing and acting and squashing and stretching and S and C curves oh my.)
  • Artist presentation (from what I gather we pick an artist to profile and give a presentation on them--sounds too simple. I suspect a trick.)
  • Final storyboard project (yet to be assigned, called "Bird in the Hand". Suspecting more tricks.)
  • Repeating panoramic background (with two characters included I believe).
  • Two 9x12 juxtaposition background gouache paintings.
  • Second life drawing portfolio!
  • Bone drawings (9 views of vertebrae, 3 views of scapula, 4 views of pelvis, 4 views of skull, two views of arm and hand, two views of leg and foot--most of these are done already).
  • Leica reel! 20-40 storyboard panels music, sound effects, camera moves, etc.
  • Research paper on animal welfare legislation in Canada.

BRING IT ON!!



I've got my tonals finished for the dual paintings. I decided to go with Safety and Danger. I was going to go with Dead and Alive (zombies) versus Not Dead OR Alive (robots), but I had a dream last night showing these alternate environments and decided they were more interesting. Plus the first idea was kind of a joke. Kind of.

I also finished my expression sheet, which will be handed in tomorrow. Character Design is definitely my favourite class, and this was my favourite project so far. We had to do an animal character, and it had to be a gender I hadn't drawn yet, so it could have been annoying (not a fan of anthro characters, and I always prefer to draw guys), but I made it FUN, by making the most hideous pig lady ever. Well okay, she could easily have been more hideous. She's mildly hideous. Still fun.



And finally, I figured I would post this here, as I had requests for a copy. I wrote this Sheridan Ghost Story for my English presentation with Chelsea on whether or not hauntings were real. Everybody who screamed on cue was hilarious and amazing and made the whole thing go over really well. It was delightful.

A Sheridan Ghost Story
By Sarah Anne Davis

This story was told to us by faculty members who have requested to remain anonymous, for this story is so horrible—so gruesome—that it may in fact scare away any future students wishing to attend this once thought to be happy, peaceful school.

But Sheridan College has a dark past. A bloody past. A dark and bloody past full of darkness. And blood.

It was a long time ago. Too long now for most to recall, except perhaps Mark Thurman. A sweet young girl with massive aspirations wanted only to attend Sheridan College’s world-renowned animation program. Little did she know… her aspirations would end in tears. Bloody… scream-filled tears…

She worked on her portfolio into each and every dark and stormy night. Rotations and storyboards. Expression sheets and layouts. White piles of copy paper ran red with the blood of her endless devotion…

And then, Portfolio Day.

Her rotations wouldn’t rotate! Inconsistent lines and weights!

Her characters were emotionless and dull! Not enough angles!

Her compositions were generic!

Life drawing lifeless!

What happened to the second action pose!? Pose… pose…





Transfer to Art Fundamentals.

(EVERYONE SCREAMS.)

Dreams crushed, the girl went insane. Picking up a deadly camera tripod, a murderous rampage ensued. She destroyed her competition, one by one, until she made it to the top of the waiting list. But it was too late.

In her madness and despair, the girl staggered to the nearest Trafalgar crosswalk and was killed by the unstoppable force of fifty old people in Buicks.

It is said that the girl’s tortured spirit plummeted to the farthest depths of hell, wherein she pleaded with the devil himself to spare her… to send her back to the school she so longed for.

A deal with the devil was made, and in the midst of cackling laughter her spirit was sent back. But her fate was sealed. Her punishment far more gruesome than her crime. Each day, every day, her spirit would cling to the halls… repeating Art Fundamentals for all eternity.

(EVERYBODY SCREAMS.)

To this day she can still be seen drifting through the A wing, withholding vending machine snacks, knocking over stools, and leaving unwanted invitations to pub nights in every locker. If you listen carefully, you can still hear her pencil tearing away at each new sheet of paper, so desperately trying to break free of her cruel purgatory, to one day see the light boxes at the end of the tunnel and pass into the next world…

Friday, November 20, 2009

Those damn, dirty swines.


Well the last few weeks sure have been an exciting ride. Albeit, exciting in the "Dear God help me I'm dying of swine flu" sort of way. First was reading week. Ahh, reading week. A time to relax, a time to head home and see family and ignore whatever homework you're supposed to be doing while you nap on the couch in your PJs, or something like that. Welp, I made the very silly mistake of walking in the freezing rain wearing only a sweater (okay, well, I probably had pants and shoes too) on the Friday my mother came to pick me up. I promptly got sick on the Saturday with a sore throat, which turned into a runny nose, which turned into a cough and runny nose, which turned into a sensation of breathing dust, which turned into a migraine, which turned into puking, which turned into a tiny single-celled organism, which turned into a fish with legs, which turned into a frog on the bump on the branch on the log in the hole in the bottom of the sea--

It wasn't H1N1, just a cold brought about by depraved Canadian weather, and I was feeling slightly better when I came back to school, though I was clearly not better in the not-still-spreading-my-various-bacteriums-around sense, because Annie promptly caught it.

Sooooo another week passes. Annie's had the worst of it and is on the mend when we all go to the Royal Winter Fair to draw animals. It's a fun day, with the exception of the 95,000 children running everywhere, most of whom were screaming and crying and pushing and shoving and coughing and spitting and leaking far worse than most of the livestock. It was inevitable, and delightfully ironic, that one of the little buggers coughed all over me in the "swine area", just a few feet away from a sign about swine flu, in the province of Swine, in the township of Swineshire.

You can see where this is headed.

By the time I got on the train that night, I could feel it. Sore throat was back, as well as the cough. The next day the cough was worse, and I was aching allover, I was hot and cold and tired as hell. Then the stomach issues hit me very hard and very suddenly and the less said about that the better. On Sunday a thermometer was acquired, which showed I had a fever. Congestion followed, ear clogged up and was in serious pain. I had an exam on Tuesday, so I staggered off to school to get that over with. I barely made it through with all of my stupid embarrassing coughing fits, (and I'm pretty sure I wrote a one-page essay about logical fallacies being, er, uh, really false and illogical and full of... fallaciousness) after which I continued my stagger to the clinic.

I was forced to don the MASK OF SHAME, was proclaimed diseased with H1N1 (red stamp on the forehead), and banished from the school. The wide birth everyone accorded me on the way out was both hilarious and mightily humiliating.

So I have been sleeping all week, feeling very restless and wanting to return to school, but for this damn cough that would surely give my secret away.



Feeling slightly better now, though still hacking up sputum every colour of the rainbow (if that rainbow were green, yellow, and brown). I feel desperate to leave the house and get back to work! But I think there is a very important lesson to be learned in all of this...

KEEP YOUR KID AT HOME IF THEY'RE SICK HOLY MOTHER OF CHEESE. Who the crap takes their child out of school for an agricultural fair anyway? $20 admission and they're amused by llama hairdos and pooping sheep for all of half an hour (pooping sheep definitely moreso). Try as you might, your kid is going to realize quickly that this new cow looks exactly like the last cow, which looks suspiciously similar to the last fifty lethargic, motionless cows, and you're the one who's going to have to pry all of that caked-on leftover cow from his little shoe treads at the end of the day.

In short: Royal Winter Fair! Hooray! I had an awesome time and I highly recommend it! 8D

No complaints here.