Independent Study: A Compilation

I did an independent study this semester with my school's resident experimental animator. I completed three projects, though I consider my stop-motion final my fourth project because I spent sooooo much time on it. I wrote a bit about my process and inspiration on another blog, because my teacher was actually in Belgium for most of the semester, and yes he did read all of these posts, and yes I did do this for credit. I'm embarrassed too. Ok cool anyway here are the following animations I did, in order of creation:


手水 (16mm film) from Marcie LaCerte on Vimeo.


24 Frames On A Windy Bridge from Marcie LaCerte on Vimeo.


The Little Ships from Marcie LaCerte on Vimeo.

Storyboard

I took storyboard this semester, and though I got off to a bad start (in that I didn't turn anything in because I was too lazy), I think I made somewhat of a breakthrough, and the technical aspects I learned have helped me a lot. So, here are my two favorite storyboards. To make it interesting for myself, I made them extremely ridiculous and a bit NSFW. (You have been warned.)

The teens at my internship really love the cereal one. I was insecure about showing it, but the instructor really wanted me to (god bless her), and when I expressed this insecurity to one of the students, she was like, "We are the 'Shrek is love, Shrek is life' generation, and nothing scares us," and I was like, tru.

ANYWAY HERE:

The Tragedy of Heloise and Abelard (in progress animatic) from Marcie LaCerte on Vimeo.

cereal commercial animatic from Marcie LaCerte on Vimeo.

2D and 3D finals

My character animation and 3D animation finals.


Sandwich from Marcie LaCerte on Vimeo.

11 second club thing from Marcie LaCerte on Vimeo.

Learning to Love You More x2

So, in one of my classes, we were tasked to film a 3-minute documentary (without music) that followed one of the prompts on the Learning to Love You More website.

I was struggling to get this completed on time, since I was literally in Colorado over Spring Break, so I decided, at the last minute, to film a sort of experimental documentary based on prompt 43: "MAke an exhibition of the art in your parent's house." The first iteration, set to the tune of "Sometimes You Gotta Make It Alone" by Money Mark, can be found here and not embedded at low res.

Unfortunately, I fucked up. This was only a minute and a half long, and it was set completely to the tune of music. It was essentially a music video. My teacher, kind as she is, allowed me to make another, which I think actually turned out better than the first (even though I tried way less hard on this one than the first one). This was based on prompt 33: Braid someone's hair.


Living Space from Marcie LaCerte on Vimeo.

It was pretty hard to color correct since it was all filmed indoors at night at a high ISO, and everything turned out kind of too pink, but whatever. I almost like how unrealistic and soft and pink it is. I tried somewhat hard with the cinematography, sort of, kind of, though I was told that it looks mostly like a "home video," so I guess I failed in that respect.

I really enjoyed the editing process of trying to create an intimate documentary portrait of someone, and I'm doing something like this for my final project for the class. So stay tuned for THAT, because that's gonna be fun.

CE Figure Drawing Dump

I took a Continuing Education figure drawing class for one credit this semester, and it was really awesome and easy and helped me understand the figure a lot. Some figures are better than others, and I certainly have a long ways to go before I feel entirely confident about figure drawing, but I feel armed and powerful with knowledge that I didn't have prior to this class.

Also, here is a terrible photo of an unfinished painting I did in my drawing class:

I am sorry the frame is wobbly and her face is messed up and her legs look flat. I am sorry. I am sorry.

Animation moodboard and preliminary scraps for "Anxiety Dream"

We're nearing the end of second semester (I can't believe it!), and we've just been assigned our final project in my Intro to Animation class.

Here's the moodboard I put together for it (images were compiled from all over tumblr and cargocollective):

I don't know why the colors appear so much duller when uploaded to this website or even to tumblr. It's a little disappointing.

With regards to my film, which will either be titled Anxiety Dream or Dream Anxiety or Stress Dream or a combination of the three or something entirely unrelated (I haven't yet decided),  I am interested in synesthetically capturing the anxiety and ephemerality and abstraction of anxiety dreams.

I've been having a lot of them this year—actually, I can't remember the last time I had a dream that wasn't dysfunctional.  I wonder why that is; I don't feel like I've been particularly mentally unstable this year. Maybe it's because of my fucked up sleep schedule (i.e. my nocturnal lifestyle).

The first half of the film (about 30 seconds or so) will be her waking up, late to class, and partaking in the daily morning ritual that so many of us rely on to establish a sense of self and maintain sanity. I think it's a known fact of humanity that without routines, our selves and our society would fall into disarray. The beginning half of the film will be done in pretty normal character animation. Halfway through, she'll be running to class and fall into a hole in the ground, and the anxiety dream sequence will begin in her midair descent through this bottomless pit. I'll use, like, markers and crayons and maybe even paint. Who knows?

The character herself looks pretty young and pretty average, and the environment she lives in looks like a normal apartment or dorm. There will be a very strict color palette in the first half—somewhat limited, though vibrant. Biomorphic abstractions will accompany her in the latter half, during the experimental part.

It's all very vague. I showed my animatic to my class on Friday and it was more or less a disaster; nobody could tell what it was about and everyone seemed....doubtful? I don't know how to describe it. It was like when I gave my presentation on Al Jarnow and I was so excited and prepared to talk and then the response was just a letdown. I don't know, man.

Here are some visual scraps/concept art stuff I've made in an attempt to familiarize myself more with the character and her personality/setting:

I've got about 5 more weeks to finish this. I feel a little fucked.

I made my first book!

It's called The Complete Encyclopaedia of Humanity and it's very ironic yet serious and modern yet vintage. Here are some photos of it:

This book took me a long time to finish (and I may or may not have turned it in late...) because there was so much writing I had to incorporate. I went through several drafts of writing types before I finally found the one I wanted to do, if only because I was running out of time.

Like I said in an earlier blog post, these photographs are from books I find at thrift stores that I like to hoard for no particular reason. I spend time categorizing these photos into relevant topics and themes, and I keep it all to myself—I haven't shown or shared these photos until now. While looking through my photos, I realized that I was drawn to photographs that specifically featured people; I didn't have a lot of landscapes or flowers or urban environments. I was interested in exploring the personal environment of strangers that I would never meet and never know, and I wanted to push that even further in this book, especially in terms of universally-experienced psychological thoughts and behaviors. So I ended up writing little stories for each photograph, fashioning it like an absurdist encyclopedia. I began the book with an entry on "anxiety," because I wanted an "a" word and because it set the tone for the rest of the book. I also included an entry on "breath," because I love Virginia Woolf and there was a particular sentence in her first chapter in The Waves that I wanted to include, also for setting the mood.

Here's one of my favorite entries:

snow—A morning of mist and an afternoon of snow, alive and breathing in the face of industrialism, and my feet and nose are cold and wet, and I can see the top of my eyelashes turning white while the ground around me turns grey, a pallid grey, and I’m overcome with sensation and beauty and dread and bewonderment, and I am at once trying to walk home while trying stop and admire the flurries, though I know tomorrow will bring news reports of accidents and wintry poverty, yet I don’t care, for it’s not happening to me, and right now I cannot think of anything but how the world is conquering me, how the snow overpowers human construction, how I long to be consumed.

I know "bewonderment" isn't actually a word but I don't care. I ended up writing a lot about humanity and its powerlessness in the face of nature. I think I was influenced by Al Jarnow, who I gave a presentation on just two weeks before I started making this book.

Anyway. This was a fun project. I also made a website for it.

Catalogue – a double layer stop motion

Catalogue, ft. my chubby fist. All sounds were stealthily found in hidden pockets of the Internet. First photo layer taken in the UMN Architecture Library; second photo layer taken in the MCAD Library.

Inanimate life drawing at the MIA

library + light

nice

I made my first walk cycle pencil test! I'll be adding more stuff to it later (like colors and probably a moving background/foreground) but here it is for now. It's dumb.

Hephaestion Preparing for the Games and Prometheus

I drew from the live nude model for the first time last week. I'd never really done figure drawing before, and I've always found drawing bodies difficult (unsurprisingly), especially when drawing from memory. So, naturally, I'm vey happy that my drawing class is heavily emphasizing the body, because I want to be an animator of sorts and will probably have to draw lots of bodies in lots of different positions. (Wink.)

Anyway, my improvement seems, to me at least, quite dramatic, even over the course of just a few hours of drawing. I don't have photos of some of my best figure drawings from the Co-op since I had to turn them in for homework, but rest assured—when I get them back and document them I will certainly upload it all here for all zero of my followers to see!

First week

Our first model was a nice middle-aged lady. She had a nice fluffy belly and inwardly curving back. She was a phenomenal poser—I wish some of my early drawings weren't so awful because they just don't accurately capture how dynamic many of her poses were.

One of the first! I believe these were three minute poses. Looking back I can see how terrible they are, but when I was making them I thought I was the next Michelangelo—an anatomy genius.

I started using the side of my charcoal to get some different textures going on. I also believe these were five minute poses.

My teacher liked this one. I think it looks pretty bad, especially the cloth on the stool. But he was hovering over my shoulder, and authority makes me nervous...

This was the first 10 minute pose. We saw life drawings by Daumier over a short class break, and I think I was trying to emulate his style a little bit. Trying being the key word here.

I wish I had accurately rendered the back leg. It kind of ruins the drawing. It looks like she's standing on one of those rotating lamb legs in Greek meat restaurants, used for gyros. (Oddly specific.)

These multiple pose drawings confuse the hell out of me and look terrible.

Last drawing of the day. Our teacher noted that most of the class was focusing too much on the outline of the form and less on volume, so he had us shade from the outside inwards and try to create a form that way. I think she looks almost holy here, with a dark glowing halo surrounding her calm, contained form.

Second week

Our homework assignment (which I had mentioned above) was to attend the MCAD Drawing Co-op and create 25 figure drawings. I'd never been and was quite nervous about going, but several of my classmates were there, and it was an all-around good time. Our model was literally amazing and had crazy intense muscles and did very active poses. I learned a lot from drawing him for four hours.

I don't have the drawings from his posing, though.

The guy we had in class this week was nice, but kind of funny. He was a bit awkward and did some interesting poses, like making a gun shape with his hand or tilting his wrist to the side, like he was cradling a goblet in his palm. So that was weird. But he was funny and nice. I asked him after class if it was weird seeing so many naked drawings of himself, and he said that he was only upset by how everyone kept unforgivingly drawing his paunch, which was present despite the fact that he exercises. I think he was joking with me. But I also felt it cut deeply for him. 

Three minute poses. This is the gun hand one I was talking about.

This pose was drawn from memory, which was NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE.

The last drawing: an unfinished and pretty terrible planar analysis of the body. Planar analysis is the bane of my existence.

(PS The title of the blog post are titles for the respective models. I was informed that I should name these drawings after Greek figures and characters to add some legitimacy to my otherwise scrappy figure drawings.)