Well, things are still up in the air and all over the place and I can't really wrap my head around it all, but today should still be fun! As soon as works are done I'm heading out to D-Land to stake out a good spot for the World of Color opening show, wooo! Can't get a VIP seat obviously, but I'll find myself a good spot and then just sketch and peoplewatch all day until yamikonumber7 gets there and the show starts. I'm stoked for it! Never been to a first-day opening for a Disneyland show before. 8D

Speaking of Disney, I haaave...mixed thoughts on the Tangled trailer. The production values, as always, look very high. I can only imagine the unspeakable horrors that the rendering department had to go through with that hair, holy crap. The story kind of has me scratching my head, especially since it's way obvious that they're trying REALLY HARD to appeal to their male audience, but that...really shouldn't be necessary. It basically felt like I was watching an advertisement for a Dreamworks movie. And if there's anything I've learned from DW's advertising, it's not to trust it. DW needs to rethink their marketing strategy, because they do not market their films well. (Kung-fu Panda and HTTYD, anyone?) So seeing Disney market Tangled this way is making me react the way I usually do with DW marketing...either the movie will be as...forgettable as it looks, or else it will be a really excellent movie that just suffers from bad marketing. Either way, I'm going to hold off judgment until I actually see it, and I do intend to go see it.

Holy craaaaaap E3 is so close! WE'LL BE GETTING THAT BBS TRAILER SOON. *o* Also, I heard the news about Coded, and it made me go WOOOOO! I totally wasn't expecting us to get Coded, so the fact that it is being ported to North America, and it's for the DS instead of something like the iPhone? Awesomesauce! Can't wait to play that sucker, too!

And as if Square wasn't stealing ALL OF MY MONEY AS IT IS, now they go and reveal THESE SHINIES, which are seriously some of the nicest formation arts I have seen and I want all of those aaaah. I am SO totally doomed come SDCC exhibit hall time. My wallet will not survive the shiny.

Also posted chapter eleven of the DI fic! Big chapter this time! :O


But y u mad?


Drawing: Overload on LG, really need to work on some other stuff now

Writing: More on chapter 12

Days until BBS release: 87

Wednesday I went to a little Disney portfolio drop-off event over in Venice (California, not the real Venice. XD) I totally got lost trying to find the place. While it wasn't much more info that I didn't already know, I did chat with a few people in line and I got to say hi to Alison, so it was nice enough to go. I'm wondering about going to the CTN expo over in Burbank (maybe just for a day or two), 'cause yay animation stuff, but of course it's a time and money issue...

Also, I think I'm gonna try and go to D-Land on Sunday to do me some drawing. :O

Speaking of, I realized last night that holy crap 'Up' is out now! So I rushed over and bought a copy on DVD! No commentary or good extra stuff, which is annoying, but they'll probably release another version later like they always do. And man, watching it again, I still cried. I don't know if there's ever going to be a point where this movie doesn't make me cry.

And then I decided to go on a massive screencapping binge with the movie, and I made a tooooon of 'Up' icons...over 100, actually. 8D; So there's a crapload of icons under the cut! Feel free to nab for whatever reason; credit is nice if you can. (And I can also do icons from Dug's Special Mission and Partly Cloudy if any dudes want them?

( Obviously spoilers in the icons )

Drawing: Commishes and practice stuff.

Writing: Finished a KH fic. :O

Friday was actually a nice day! I got free lunch with a friend from church, and he showed me around his office, which does all the massive 3D displays that you see in movie theaters (among other paper and display projects). It was actually a lot of fun, and the dudes I met were really nice and happy to talk art stuff with me! And I think I have a new appreciation for theater displays. XD

Best of all, since their company does a lot of business with Disney, he offered to take me over to the Disney Internet Group offices across town and have a little tour there! I got to meet even more great people, pass around my portfolio (reaction was pretty positive, yaaay!) and see the stuff they were working on. Mostly a bunch of stuff for Princess and the Frog, Prep and Landing and the Fairies movies. It looks like it'd be a fun place to work, but then again I'm a Disney and toy geek, and the whole place was full of Disney art and toys and geeky stuff. Sooo *crosses fingers* We even talked a bit about Epic Mickey and Princess and the Frog (church friend said he'd gotten to see an advance screening of it, and that he enjoyed it! So AAAAH COME SOONER, DECEMBER!) All in all, it was quite informative and friendly.

In related news, I'm considering getting a Blogspot, just to post art stuff, sketches and the like. It seems like that's what all the cool kids do. :Oa

Drawing: LG page and a ton of commissionsssss...

Writing: Here and there...

New Lunargyros page today...getting back to seeing Kylie's parents for the first time in, like, three chapters. o_O

As for the Disney-buying-Marvel deal...I don't really care one way or another, and I'm kind of baffled at how fans are crying OMFG RUINED FOREVER. (Then again, maybe I shouldn't be baffled). It's not like Disney doesn't already have 50-odd subsidaries under their name, most of which people don't even know about. It's not like the other big comics giant, DC, isn't also owned by a media megagiant (Time-Warner). For now I'm just enjoying the lulz that're coming from it.

That aside...today I did some arts:

( Life sketches )

( Ansem model )

Drawing: Slowly getting back into a good groove

Writing: Sporkings!

Nabbed from twilitesea
Dear Disney,

Please to be doing less of that Hannah Montana and Jonas Brothers junk and more of this:



PLEASE AND THANK YOU. Seriously, talk about candy for my eyes.

Speaking of Disney doing epic pretty, what do you flisters think about that new post-apocalyptic steampunk Disney game? :O

( What I worked on today )

I almost feel like making a tutorial for this model...but since it's so complex it probably wouldn't make a very good tutorial subject. :P

Drawing: This and digital painting homeworks, which will come later.

Writing: Notes and tags

I have officially completed my Disney mission, ending it with Home on the Range! I decided not to include Chicken Little and Meet the Robinsons even though I kinda cheated with Tron and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and not to include the Pixar movies for now. Which means the next 2D animated Disney flick I have to look forward to is Princess and the Frog! I so hope it lives up to expectations.

It's definitely been interesting seeing all the movies in order and seeing how they've changed over the years! The company definitely seems to go through high points and low points...high being periods of experimentation in the medium, quality control, and building good story, and low periods being lazy or unexperimental animation and so-so story. It seems like the best points hit at the 30s, the 50s and then again in the 90s, although each of these seems to be for different reasons. Disney seems to have hit another low point pretty much after Fantasia 2000, so I wonder if it'll hit another stride as we start to go into 2010. (Pixar has been kind of filling in the gap instead, but I honestly consider Pixar its own separate entity, even though the two companies are so closely intertwined.) What I REALLY want to know is what's in development for 2D after Princess...there's Rapunzel and King of the Elves, but those are all CG-animated. :O


Otherwise, OH NO GOT CAUGHT IN THE MEME NET AGAIN DUN DUUUUUN

Your result for Roleplayer Test!...

The Biographer

Plotful, Character-Oriented, Platonic

Take Roleplayer Test! at HelloQuizzy

Yesterday was my little brother's birthday party, so he had a bunch of friends over. Also, he had angel food cake and pound cake because he insisted he didn't want any frosting. For some reason I find this very strange.

My Disney mission continues onwards! I'm on to Pete's Dragon now, which seems to be at the tail end of a series of mostly-live-action films peppered with some animation that they did in the 70s. For one thing, it's reminded me that Bedknobs and Broomsticks is a really boring movie.

It seems like Disney hit another good stride in the 50s -with stuff like Cinderella and Peter Pan and Lady and the Tramp, which was all a big jump in quality from the stuff after wartime- and then around Jungle Book and onwards they hit this stretch where Disney ran out of time and money and just started copying over all of their animation. They pretty much reused all of Baloo's animation as Little John in Robin Hood anyway. A bunch of the movies from this time have these...I dunno, parts in them that always frightened or unsettled me when I was a kid.

And also, dorkage is made of COOLNESS AND AWESOME since she traded a bunch of Japan-event-only legendary Pokemon to me, along with some master balls to catch other legendaries in Platinum! :D So now I just need to go capture Palika and Dialga and I'll have all the Platinum legendaries. \o/ But THAAANK YOU dorkage!

It seems like a bunch of the flist is in need of hugs lately. D: So, I drew a kitty and a puppy.



This puppy and kitty is for you, flist!

Drawing: Still bunch more LG pages.

Writing: Taaagz

The past few days I've been on a crazy mission to watch all of the Disney animated movies (main ones, not sequels or stand-alone shorts) in order. It's actually been kind of interesting watching things in chronological order, and seeing how the movies change over the decades...when they were first starting out, it seemed to be much more about experimentation of the medium, what with the big jumps in discoveries from Snow White to Fantasia. I also found it interesting how these movies had some of the saddest moments in Disney films total...Snow White's 'death,' Pinocchio's 'death,' Dumbo missing his mother, and Bambi's mother dying? All of these movies had rather lengthy mourning scenes, and all in succession. They really weren't afraid to depress the audience back then.

And then we hit the war years, where all the animators either got drafted or were working on propaganda, so all of the "movies" released during this time and afterwards were just collections of shorts. (Or else they were movies directed at South and Latin America in a discrete effort to keep the Nazis out.) While some of them have gone on as classic shorts (Peter and the Wolf, Mickey and the Beanstalk), it's amazing how many shorts released during and after the war years followed a very general idea: very happy musical shorts, often high on the romance, and also often big on decrying modernization and the ills of mechanized society. You can tell that these were made as escapism during a really bad time for the country, cut in with the patriotism (and occasional racism and sexism) of the propaganda shorts.

I also finally watched Song of the South, since some brave soul had it up on YouTube and I guess I happened to catch it before Disney removed it. And while I can see why Disney just likes to pretend it doesn't exist, in the grand scheme of things it didn't seem that much worse than Gone With The Wind, which is widely considered a classic. :|a I actually found the animal characters more offensive than the human ones, yet we still keep Splash Mountain running. Although that may be because fans would throw a fit if they ever got rid of Splash Mountain, too.

And now I'm in the 1950s -finished Peter Pan, with Lady and the Tramp and Sleeping Beauty coming up next- and it'll be interesting to see what trends are in those movies in the 50s and 60s. :O (For some reason I never realized that Lady and the Tramp was released in the 50s.)

I've also been spending a lot of time in Pokemon Platinum, and now I'm trying to train a team that I can catch the legendaries with, since they all keep running away from me and I'm missing them. :P Of course, this is ending up to be pretty time-consuming, as I also need to train them to be faster than those legendaries.

Drawing: Whole bunch of compositions, and also LG pages that I still need to get ahead on.

Writing: Things here and there.

I'm really curious to know what people think about the lineup of new Disney and Pixar films through 2012. Man, there's a bunch of them! (A few of these I hadn't even heard of.) And I don't really care about the Tinker Bell direct to DVD stuff; obvious marketing ploy is obvious.
- I'm dying to see "WALL*E." It just looks unique and amazing. The fact that some people are saying that audiences might be turned off by some of the ideas and themes it presents (that in the future, humans have left earth a wasteland and have evolved to become so large that they can't move on their own) just makes me want to see it even more.
- Well, nobody was expecting "Toy Story 2" to be any good, and then it was, so I'll hold out on my opinion for "Toy Story 3." But...why a "Cars" sequel? Aside from the obvious tie-in with the land that's opening in California Adventure, AKA PIXARLAND If a Pixar movie was gonna get a sequel, I would've felt "Monsters Inc." deserved it. :/
- "UP" and "newt" both look ridiculously fun. It'll be interesting to see how they pull off "The Bear and the Bow," since it's the least 'unique' of the Pixar ones. Still, set in Scotland, can't go wrong there.
- What happened to the "John Carter of Mars" series? Is it because that'll likely be live action?
- Why isn't "King of the Elves" going to be in 2D? It looks like "Princess and the Frog" is the only one on that roster that's 2D, even after just visiting the studio and them saying WE'RE DOING MOAR 2D YAY. Maybe they just won't be completed until 2013 and onward? That said, I think I actually saw concept art for "King of the Elves" there a year or two ago...or something like it.

So yeah...what do dudes think? :O

P.S. Is it just me, or has wtf_nature been kind of sucking hardcore lately?

Drawing: Lots more today, too. Digital painting and character design homework, plus that independent storyboard/layout project. ;_;

Writing: Just RPing. Ohgod, I love Wolf.

So, I was gone pretty much all day (starting at Early O'Clock) because I had signed up to go to the Disney Inspire Days at the Disney Animation Studios with a bunch of other dudes from school. I'm glad I got up early for it and went, as it was fun and informative! There was actually a huge group there...I'd say maybe 100-200 people (unless I can't estimate worth crap) from various schools: UCLA, Art Center, Otis, CalArts, etc. We were provided with lots of food and pretty forced into full-contact mingling. XD; Got some emails and names exchanged and met a few neat people during said mingling!

Most of the day was spent listening in on presentations and talks given by various people working at Disney, such as Dan Cooper, the art director for Rapunzel. :O We actually got to see a bunch of in-progress stuff for Bolt, Princess and the Frog, and Rapunzel, including some Rapunzel stuff they had to give disclaimers for because it was all unfinished test models. XD (FYI, Rapunzel is being directed by Glen Keane, but it'll be CG animation.) Since the theme was a lot on inspiration, they were also showing a bunch of concept art and inspirational art both for themselves in general and for their particular movies. (You should enjoy this, Shi: a lot of Rapunzel's look is inspired by Rembrandt. XD) Also, apparently I'm supposed to be stalking Craig Mullins. After we got split up into 2D and 3D groups, we also saw some talks on the animation of Bolt, procedural texturing for Meet the Robinsons, and then the modeler speaking showed us a video on him playing in a bad monster movie and it was a laugh riot. XD

What was perhaps most encouraging was them talking about 2D animation. The statement was basically, "Since we've gotten new leadership, we'll be doing a bunch more 2D, and NOT just Princess and the Frog." How the company's desiring to push ahead in innovation while still recognizing the value and tradition inherent in 2D, and making the two work together. That was just a very exciting thing to hear...it got cheers from everyone! And whether or not it produces some good work is yet to be seen, but if nothing else it's very good that they at least acknowledge that an audience for 2D exists and is worth pursuing. Even if it's not necessarily in all the usual ways (apparently, the Goofy short "How to Set Up Your Home Theater" was the first ever paperless 2D animation), it still gives me hope that we'll see some great things rendered beautifully in 2D. :D

After that madness, there was a brief public portfolio review of a few of the students. I brought my stuff, but I didn't realize it had to be submitted for a public viewing...kinda glad, as I probably would've had a nervous breakdown like I did that one time in middle school for some poetry award thing. >_> They were about as brutal as you'd expect for portfolios, but maybe that's just because they were speaking to someone other than me. Regardless, it actually gave me a bit of hope that I can produce some stuff by the end of October (I want to apply for the associate program) that actually might be passable! There's no telling since I'm sure competition is cutthroat, but it's nice to try. ;_;

Aaaand we ended things off with a quick tour of the studio...actually not as extensive as when I met Sonserae there a few years ago, since she actually took me under the Hat and into the animation offices itself, but this one was fun since our guide was a funny guy and pointed out a few things I hadn't seen before, such as Pluto's Corner. We also got to delve a teeny bit into the tunnels running underneath the entire studio.

So...YES. Very fun but busy day! o_o And then after that, had to scramble back to school for Dynamics class. We made little moving galaxies out of particles, ooooh. Although I can tell that particles and dynamics in general is the kind of thing for me that would be fun to play around in, but a huge pain in the ass to actually make work. D: Since essentially the whole point of dynamics is "punch in some numbers and hope the computer does what you want it to."


I hope everyone in LJ land is doing well today~

Drawing: LG, painting homework, another project I really need to work more on.

Writing: Very little.