Cooler Project

Well, it's been months and months and I am officially happy with the end product! I made a cooler for someone of all his favorite sports teams. It's clearly meant for tailgating haha. As for the technique, I had to sand down the entire thing so there was no texture on it, and then paint the thing with a sealent. Then I went on to spend months painting every side. I can't believe how thick the paint became. I'm pretty sure the majority of the time was spent on the Florida seal. After that I had to mod podge all the sides, and then voila! A painted cooler! So let's grab a drink and head out to support one of these Florida teams!

Animation Mentor Class 3

Class 3 is officially done, and man I am pooped. Aside from working 50+ hours on my WWE gig, I had all of these assignments to deal with. I basically spent every Saturday pulling an all nighter just to turn my homework in on Sunday afternoons. I'm not sure if I progressed as much as I had wanted to, but I know I definitely became better at animating! My mentor for this class was Drew Adams. He's an animator at Dreamworks, and you can see the stuff that he worked on here. Drew is pretty much the sweetest mentor that there is, and I have loved every minute of his class. His critiques were always way over the time limit, and I could tell that he genuinely cared for all of his students.

As for the assignments, they wanted us to do 3 shots and stick with a theme. So I chose a pirate theme. I wanted it to take the idea of these three different imps who were all a little goofy and clumsy, were all working on a ship, and it was under attack, and these were each of their own scenarios. I was going for a minion idea, those little guys from Despicable Me. Once I started messing around with the rigs a bit, I realized there was no way I could do one of my shots with that imp because of their arm and leg lengths. So I switched over to the Stewart rig. So I guess the ship is much more eclectic now. I can even make up a backstory for him now that I think about it. Maybe the imps rescued him off of an abandoned island? Anyways, here's my reel!

Animation Mentor Class 2

Class 2 is officially over! My mentor for this class was Joseph Antonuccio. You can see his imdb here. He works at BlueSky, and also attended Animation Mentor. He's been amazing so far, and I can't wait to meet him in the industry one day! 

This class was a little tougher, since I haven't really animated actual people at all. I;ve been used to a flying robot in space where there is no gravity, and everything is slow moving. Hence why it was hard to grasp the concept of weight and texture in my shots. But I pushed through, and this is what I've done! I'm loving my poses though. I actually like all of my poses better than my animations. Go figure.

Palm Oil Action Team

I just recently got an email from someone on Etsy who is a member of the Palm Oil Action Team, asking if I wanted to donate my mini rhino painting. I had no idea of a Palm Oil problem that's been going on. Apparently, people are chopping down the rainforest to plant farms of palm trees. Palm oil is a type of edible vegetable oil that is derived from the palm fruit, grown on the African oil palm tree. According to the World Wildlife Fund, an area the equivalent size of 300 football fields of rainforest is cleared each hour to make way for palm oil production. This large-scale deforestation is pushing many species to extinction, and findings show that if nothing changes, species like the orangutan could become extinct in the wild within the next 5-10 years, Sumatran tigers even less, closer to 3 years. Over 90% of orangutan habitat has been destroyed in the last 20 years, and over 50,000 orangutans have already died as a result of deforestation due to palm oil in the last two decades. 

The woman who wrote me, is the founder of the Boston Branch of the Palm Oil Action Team. They are paired with the Rainforest Action Network, and they are hosting a palm oil awareness day to educate people. It's going to be a big event, and they wanted to work with me to have my Rhino painting as one of the prizes for the wheel of fortune. The Sumatran Rhinos are being driven out to extinction because of this problem.

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It's very eye opening to learn about different problems that are happening in other countries, that most people are completely unaware of.  To learn more about the palm oil problem, you can view their website here-  

http://www.saynotopalmoil.com/Whats_the_issue.php

Animation Mentor Class 1

Class 1 is finished! My mentor was Chad Stewart. He is a Sony animator, and has worked on numerous films, here is his IMBD to check out all that he's done! http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0829256/ He's also worked on a few Disney movies also, so I consider him my Disney teacher too. Class 1 is all about starting back at the beginning and relearning the basics. I really hand a good grasp during this class, and it's amazing to see how the basics should be approached in a different way. But we had to do 6 different assignments and multiple pose studies. The first of them was the bouncing ball. The bouncing ball is the foundation for all animation. Everything always relates back to the bouncing ball. Then we moved on to the pendulum swing, and the assignment after that was a bouncing ball with a tail. Once we finished those, we moved onto walk cycles. I had an amazing time in this class and learned so much. It's amazing how much you think you know, and then once you go back to the basics, you notice everything that you didn't necessarily pay attention to before. But with that note said, here is my class 1 final reel!

Celestial 3D Short Film

We did it! Our short is finally finished! After two whole years of blood, sweat, and tears, we are finally done. For those who don't know, I attended UCF for the Character Animation Program. While there, we spent two years developing a short film called Celestial. We developed it from the original story pitch, script, storyboards, character concepts, environment development, art direction, modeling, rigging, animation, vfx, compositing, all the way up to the final edit. When I say this film is our baby, I mean I would it would end my life if something happened to it before we finished. During the last semester before the final premiere we would completely live in the building. We had pillows, sleeping bags, buckets of food, I think I went at least 3 days once during rendering before I finally went home and showered. We ended up completing our film 20 minutes after the premiere already started. It was probably the most stressful day of my entire life. We had no idea if we were going to get this done or not. Fortunately, there was another team who presented their short first, and they stalled for us by opening up the floor for a q&a. But even though we were 45 minutes late, we still got to see our film on the big screen in front of all of our loved ones!

My job for this film, besides a little bit of everything, was Production Manager, Lead Animator, and Rigger. There were 12 of us on the team, and we each had our own roles for this film. You can read more about about the film over on the Celestial page here.

Once we finished our film and had our premiere, we have been submitting to numerous animation festivals all around the world. Hopefully we will win something, fingers crossed!

And without further ado I present to you......CELESTIAL!!!!!!!

Etsy Shop Up and Running!

I have officially opened up my etsy shop! You can view it here! https://www.etsy.com/shop/LindseyProductions I am selling primarily mini paintings. They will range in all different collections and themes. Starting out with my twitter birds and animals theme. With the twitter bird series, it's a bunch of little blue birds just hanging out. They remind me of the twitter logo- hence the name. For the animals series I was referencing the Weatherly Guide to drawing animals. I love his style and wanted to create some pieces along those lines. So go check it out! All pieces sold with a mini canvas. Here are just a few that you can choose from!

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