New Class

Hello everyone. It has been another while since I have posted. Yep, it's been another hit of a large amount of work.
If unaware I have been currently working on several projects.

• Mind Katalyst
• The Taffetas
• & my Portfolio 101 class

They have all been wonderful, but each is so time consuming.

For the Taffetas, if unaware I have been entered into the Animation World Magazine's (AWM) pitch party contest 2011. For the contest we have been in the works of creating a (really tiny) magazine ad to place on their magazine. The cost of entry was $375 but SCAD was nice enough to pay our way in. This was our entry:
Tracy and I worked very hard to produce the ad. All of it was done in a weeks time because to the time we received word of the contest. Despite the hardship and the sleepless nights it took to manage our finals as well as create this ad the finial result was something wonderful. We have yet to recieve word of the contest results, but we wanted to thank everyone for supporting the project!!

For Mind Katalyst, we have requited the wonderful and very talented Nana Boachie for an animated short the company is working on. We are also currently looking for other talented interns as well, but until then this short proves to be something very promising.

And for my own portfolio, I have been in the works of editing and fixing up a few of my old projects. In the meantime I had to come up with my goals and mission statement. Half to say it was actually nice to have it all on paper. Feel more focused and all that jazz XD

Either way I thought I might share them.


These are pretty obtainable right!? ;-)

new facebook XD

http://www.facebook.com/taffetas

Hey! Long time since I last Posted,
but I'm excited toshow off the newly redesigned facebook group. I have never done facebook pages like this before, but after hitting the books and figuring things out I was able to make a nice welcome tab from a static fbml app. It rather took me a bit to figure things out though it was worth it. It's now a more professional, easier to understand, mini-site.

If you haven't liked us yet on Facebook, do it!
You will receive updates from the blog on your wall, a mere visit to the page will directly take you to our main page, if you already like us you will have to click "The Taffetas" link on our side links, or just click here!

What's exciting, too, is this is also a bit of a sneak peek at our upcoming website specifically for interested sponsors, distributors and supporters to plainly state who we are, what we're doing, and what our show is all about!

So stay tuned, everyone. Big things are in store!




Just for kicks I wanted to show the other design choice I was thinking prior to the completed thing. Below is the screen shot of it. Not too different admittedly, but I fixed some things up. Other choices I had made before was a lime green/grey color scheme, a dark red/gold one and an all white set-up. For obvious reasons I did not go with those.


Anyhow, you should check out the facebook group. I'm rather proud of it.

Vector Sketches

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This image is for the business cards for the Taffetas project.










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And if this one looked familiar its an old sketch up i did for Tracy when she was feeling under the weather. I just edited it a bit since there were parts I didn't like.

Something Beautiful

Here it is completed :D

Taffetas Poster

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This is a poster I created for the pitch The Taffetas, an online drama series. It is to be featured in today's Senior Soiree at the Savannah College of Art and Design campus. If the pose looks familiar, its because it is referencing Botticelli's, The Birth of Venus. Hopefully people find them as humorous as last quarter and we get a nice turn out.



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The image above does not do it justice. The original printed poster will be done in a 3 layer cut out format where Gemini pops out from the poster just ever so slightly, and Veil is jumping in from the left, blushing (though his blush doesn't show in this one), and trying to cover up his wife.



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The characters themselves were sketched out by Tracy MacLauchlan and then vectored by myself.

Test Fight Poster Spring 2011

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This is the newest poster I've done for Tracy's wonderful animated short : Test Flight, due to be completed Fall 2011.

The wife of an eccentric inventor deals with her feelings of neglect during the
test flight of her husband’s most beloved invention : a flying Ford Model-T car.

Needless to say the contraption crashes, and I tried to convey it rather subtly by basing the poster off a cover of another rather interesting story : The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

Just Working On Some of That Mind Katalyst

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As I have mentioned before in earlier post, I have been working under Mind Catalyst LLC (Now Mind Katalyst LLC) a learning company focused on compter programing and science education for children K-12. It has been a long ride but a wonderful one. This is the final logo in a mutitude of many roughs. (Below are just a few)

(You'll notice the amount of revision before reaching the final piece. Some are better than others, and the company went through a lot of restructuring as far as what kind of business it wanted to be as well as a name change after coming up with concepts and mock-ups)

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Business cards were relatively the same process. The final piece is above while mock-ups and early versions are below.

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In the end, we went with a very illustrative style that's simple and straight forward. Here are shots of the tabs I created for Mind Katalyst's Twitter site as well as the facebook fan page. Check it out, and like them.

Opening Credits

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My first mock up of the beginning credits for my friend Tracy's film Test Flight. Please check it out, its amazing. [LINK]

What is Test Flight?

Test Flight is a 2011 student animated short at the Savannah College of Art and Design. It will be completed using Adobe Flash with a mix of puppets and frame-by-frame and composited After Effects. It runs about 2 minutes.

What is Test Flight about?

This film is about the wife of an eccentric inventor who deals with her feelings of neglect during the test flight of her husband’s beloved invention, a flying Ford Model-T.

Gemini Puppet Finially Done

While this puppet took a very long time to complete (2 whole days non-stop ;3;) I am very happy to say the results are fantastic. My good friend, and co-creator for our animated web drama, Tracy MacLauchlan will be test animating it very soon.This was definitely the most complex puppet I've ever made for sure, but my favorite. She came out so cuuute. I really want to thank Tracy for the wonderful turnaround she had done. I could not have done this work without her.

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The Taffetas animation will be a Flash-based puppet
animation with special effects and compositing done
in After Effects. This is so that we can work in-house
as well as distribute our media more on the internet.

Puppet, or cut-out animation, relies on a marionette-
like base for the characters made up of various shapes
that create the whole (for instance, Gemini's arms are
made up of two cylinder shapes that are connected at
the elbow like a puppet). In Flash, Toonboom or any
other animation program that like it,an animator can
then move and manipulate these shapes to animate.



For Taffetas, puppet animation makes sense not only
for production and resource reasons, but also for our
fashion and marketability plan. Take note of the var-
ious outfits we can put Gemini in, ready to go for ani-
mation for whatever episode we are now working on!

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New website

Finially finished my new website! I think it looks pretty nice! the link is here : www.ygrafix.com
but here are some screen shots too