You are currently browsing tbubb’s articles.
The great Andy Hsu just finished cutting together iNet’s 2011 demo reel!
iNet Showreel 2011 from UMBC commonvision on Vimeo.
I have the most awesome job on campus. Hopefully, I’ll be there again next year as the iNet Grad Assistant. Still no definite word on that…
Only two more days until I move out of Erickson and go back home!
That’s right, no more undergraduate classes for me! Ever! …well, unless I get my Graduate Assistantship at Commonvision, attend the university for the MFA program (which I really, really, really hope works out) and then get to teach a Visual Concepts class. That. would. be. awesome.
Anywho, I finished my Senior Animation, it rendered out just in time for the Senior Exhibition submissions, and I turned in my Dinosaur Box animation with it. In case you didn’t see that from last semester…
So that’s TWO cool animations I’m pretty proud of that are being shown for the Senior Exhibition. Oh yea, I can’t remember if I said this in a post yet or not, but I’m a featured artist on it’s website
. Check it out!
http://www.umbc.edu/cadvc/exhibitions/see/
You’ll see a still from my animation fly by at the top every once in a while. Pretty cool!
Welp, next week I’ll be working at Commonvision a lot, and eagerly awaiting the news of whether or not the second graduate assistant position was created for iNet. The opening for the Senior Exit Exhibition is on Thursday (5pm reception and awards!), and I move out on Friday.
It was an exciting year! A very stressful year. I’m really thankful for both my internship in the IRC and the chance to work with Commonvision as an iNet animator. I made two new animations for National Geographic (which still haven’t aired…) and made a seven-and-a-half-minute short animated film about something I’m very passionate about. It stinks I still can’t post it on here. Just know that I’ve never been so proud of something I’ve made, nor so relieved that something I’ve been working on is finally done–and that people seem genuinely impressed by it. What a swell final two semesters.
Well, not that I actually have free time I’m going to run to the gym! Good luck with finals, everyone!
Today, I finish this animation. Finally. Well, I’d better finish this animation… because it’s due tomorrow, and it’ll take all night to render. Judging by how much work I was able to knock out yesterday and last night (I haven’t slept at all), I think I’ll get it done! Let’s see…. I think I did about a minute and twenty-four seconds of animation. That means, there’s only 31 to go! I can do this! And they can be relatively boring shots, I suppose. It’s the part of the film that is mostly driven by the dialogue and is meant to be accompanied by subtle visuals. Hallelujah!
Yesterday, All Time Low played in the RAC. UMBC really knows what it’s doing in terms of on-campus music. Granted, not that many people are huge Snoop Dogg fans around here, but that didn’t stop everyone from going. I think they sold something like 800 tickets on the first day the tickets went on sale (don’t quote me on that! but if it’s true, isn’t that INSANE?). When I was a freshman, we had Brand New and mewithoutyou play in the RAC, too. I think T-Pain played here before he got big also, I don’t remember. Aside from those big shows, there are tons of little shows at Flat Tuesdays and all over campus, as well as open mic nights. Who could forget my band‘s show during Art Week 2011? Haha. Anyway, yesterday was the first time I saw the campus flooded with 16-year-old scene girls and their parents (usually one set of parents per group of 3 girls, waiting in line for the show or at the Grill in The Commons).
Lookin’ like I’m moving out on the 20th… I’m actually not excited for that. For once. Spring semester usually flies by, but this one REALLY flew by since I spent it all animating all by my lonesome. It kinda stinks. I’ll have to spend these last two weeks hanging out with everyone I possibly can! Aside from work, one last Western Civ quiz and cutting together the IRC Fellows rough cut of our interviews, I don’t have anything else to do. Pretty exciting
Alright, alright, back to my senior project. Unfortunately, once it’s done I can’t post it on here until I find out whether I made it into the Ottawa International Animation Festival. If I do, then I can’t premiere it on the internet until after the festival, which is in late September! Oye. But it looks really good to have a World Premiere at a big animation festival like OIAF. We’ll see what happens. Hope everyone is wrapping up their semesters gracefully, with minimal stress! Adios.
From midnight until 8am, I worked on Scene 2 of my Senior Animation. I only finished 8 seconds. Wow! 8 hours = 8 seconds… that’s not very promising, you know? Hopefully this picks up. I was having some issues with the character’s hair, so hopefully that’s totally resolved and I can cruise through the rest of the project.
Last night, I slept for an hour on the floor of the IRC Fellows classroom while something rendered, before heading down to my third to last Western Civ class. The night before, I think I got 3 hours of sleep. The night before that, I think I pulled an all-nighter, and the night before that was another 3 hours of sleep. This is getting insane!
HOWEVER, I did turn in my term paper for Western Civ this morning (which was about a student of Giotto di Bondone!), so that’s a huge relief. Now I can return the 10 books or so that still adorn my dorm-room dresser.
What else is new… Oh yeah-I took a break from all the craziness yesterday and got a tattoo with my girlfriend. I’m not sure this is the best place to post pictures, but suffice it to say that it’s awesome. (a 6-winged Byzantine angel on my forearm: ~$400). It’s sort of a graduation present to myself, and probably the last tattoo I’ll ever get. I’m so happy with it! I haven’t really had the chance to let it sink in that there’s this beautiful piece of art on my arm now. Too focused on my animation! Oh well. Everything is going to work out. Sorry I don’t have much to say about events going on around campus–I’ve been a hermit, as of late!
Good luck on your finals and stuff, everyone!
Senior Project is due on Monday at 3pm–I’ve set up camp in the IRC Fellows room in the ITE building. I dragged a big, comfy chair in here from the lobby, brought my coffee maker (along w/ 2 big things of coffee and 2 different creamers!), a pillow, a huge aluminum water bottle and both of my MacBook Pros. With the exception of the IRC Fellows class on Friday, I only have two 2hr-long lectures this week for Western Civ. The rest of the time will be spent living here, animating. Super cool, huh?
Oh, and because I’ve turned into a huge multi-tasker, check this out:
I threw that together while waiting for some test renders for my Senior Project to finish up. I think it looks pretty decent–it’s intended to go up on the iNet displays in the Commons, so I’ll need some feedback from co-workers before it’s “finished.”
Alrighty…gotta get back to work! There are no windows in this room, and it’s totally silent if I’m not playing music. It’s great. Totally isolated from any distractions. I just might get this animation done!
Still working on the 3D campus map while at work–here’s where I’m at now! Idk if I’m going to finish it before the semester is over… we have some pretty complicated buildings on this campus, and I’m taking off next week to (hopefully!) finish my Senior Project.
In other news, the weather was absolutely gorgeous yesterday. So many people were outside reading and playing sports, it was awesome. If only I could create a space to animate somewhere outside… I spent the entire day cooped up in my dorm room working 
. Oh well, 11 more days!
First of all, let me start this post with a few interesting facts:
1) There are approx 324 hours until my Senior Project needs to be turned into the Cage in the Fine Arts building.
2) When I was home this past weekend for Easter, I got a packet in the mail informing me that I was officially accepted into the UMBC Graduate School.
3) That means I’ve gotten into the school and the program, hooray!
4) I still don’t have a definite Graduate Assistantship with Commonvision.
5) There’s no definite funding for one of my professor’s upcoming (and rather ambitious) animation projects–for which he was hoping to employ me as a Research Assistant to help pay for my grad school tuition. So that’s still up in the air.
6) I’m on page 8 of 12 for my Western Civ paper, and it’s going swimmingly. Unfortunately, I’m running out of facts to cram in as footnotes. Looks like I’ll need to go back and read some more before I can move on.
7) Quiz in the morning for Western Civ. It’ll cover the differences between Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox theology. I plan on getting a 7,000% A++++++.
8) The coordinate system in After Effects =/= coordinate system in Cinema 4D… for which I am pulling out my hair. This is why this post was titled “setbacks.” I just spent 3 hours keyframing every single frame in a ~1min, 10 sec clip for the character’s head rotation and position. That’s 70 secs x 30fps = 2,100 frames, x 2 (for position and rotation) = 4,200 keyframes in 3 hours. Not bad! Hope I don’t need to do this for EVERY shot… … … :/
I suppose that’s it. Ha. Sometimes I think in lists, and that translates well to a blog as a short post. If you celebrated Easter, hope it was a good weekend! Christos Anesti! Oh yeah–speaking of that. We had the Epic Easter Extravaganza today in the Harbor Courtyard (WE being UMBC OCF and the Coptic Club). Lots of people came, there was a ton of food–it was great! There were even balloons. Good stuff! Now, I’m pushing to have us visit the Walter’s Art Gallery for the exhibit on Medieval Reliquaries before the semester ends… We’ll see how that goes.
Hey guys! ~five years ago, I saw this awesome musician and activist who called himself Koji perform at my church (which was one of those hipster, small non-denominational congregations where everyone is sipping a coffee and the church is filled with modern art). He was fantastic. I bought his EP at the time and have listened to it every now and again ever since.
After work at Commonvision today, I went up to the Sports Zone to eat dinner with my room mate on a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing and was very surprised to find Koji performing. What a super awesome surprise. He was just as awesome as I remembered, and the last song he played is one I actually knew from 5 years ago. Sweet.
The Invisible Children group had him come perform while he’s touring to raise awareness of child soldiers. There was also a speaker, and a 4 minute video about all the craziness going on, and it was moving enough for me to add my name to a petition asking Congress not to cut the budget for a previously approved plan to help stop the violence and rescue these brainwashed kids. It was an awesome afternoon.
However, getting pleasantly surprised led to me losing ~2 hours of would-be-animating time. So I decided I’d stay up late tonight. The problem is, I stayed up late last night too. In fact, I only got 3 hours of sleep last night. Two nights before that, I only got one hour of sleep. Rough, huh? Well, at least I’m making progress. The past 2.5 hours were spent lip syncing my main character’s final monologue (~42 seconds) and I’m VERY pleased with how it’s looking. I used a combination of FK, masking and puppet tooling to achieve a simple, but effective look for the mouth movements. Can’t wait to render it out tonight. Check out how many keyframes I had to meticulously set:
Anywho… it’s time for sleep. Tomorrow is Good Friday, so I won’t be going to the IRC Fellows class. Tomorrow is a day for church, and I’m looking forward to it.
Hey guys! This week has been pretty sweet so far. First of all, I pulled an all-nighter on Monday to work on my Senior Project. Unfortunately, the upload to vimeo of my latest animatic didn’t properly transfer to their servers, so I can’t post it here yet. Suffice it to say that it’s coming along very well and I’m uber happy about it. As always, there’s still a ton of work to do. I believe we have 18 more days until the deadline for the Senior Exhibition, and that’s all I’m worried about.
At 2am on Monday night, I remembered that I was supposed to be a guest speaker/lecturer(?) for a Special Effects and Motion Design class in the AM–at 9am, to be precise. Good thing I remembered. So I had to skip Western Civ to grab some iNet project files and show them to the class. It went pretty well–I talked about what iNet is, what we do and specifically what my job is. I also encouraged everyone into looking into getting a job with us once positions open up, because it’s arguably the coolest job on campus. Definitely #1 if you’re an animator. I also started to dissect a few compositions to show some cool tricks I use in my animations, but ran out of time. My coworker, Max Hathaway, then came in and ran everyone through a sweet hands-on After Effects tutorial for the remainder of the class.
After that, I got back to the iNet studio to upload the AD for OCF’s Epic Easter Extravaganza. Check it:
So that’s going to be a lot of fun. I’m also pretty proud of myself for getting that iNet together so quickly–I think I did the whole thing in like 3 hours.
Hmmmm, what else? There’s a Western Civ quiz on Thursday (tomorrow) for which I am ill prepared… I think that’s it for school. Aside from my Senior Project stress, this has also been a particularly tough chunk of the semester because it’s Great Lent. Well, technically Great Lent is now over since we’re in Holy Week (the week between Good Friday and Easter). Orthodox Christians do as the early Christians, and fast from meat, fish, dairy, wine and olive oil for the entirety of the Fast. We actually stop eating meat a week before Great Lent as a way to prepare ourselves for the Fast. Pretty crazy, huh? So basically, I can’t wait for this Sunday! I can get back to my usual diet of Chic Fil A and Starbucks.
Alrighty, back to work!
Soooo I decided not to use my previously (mostly) completed title sequence for my Senior Project–it’s not a massive enough project to warrant a ~minute long, dramatic build-up-style title sequence. Instead, the title flashes by at the end of the first scene. It’s classy!
However, I did cut about half of the title sequence together with a stronger vignette and some “swing-tilt” fake depth of field to be used as a credit sequence. Check out this still:
Cool, huh? Still TONS of work to do. Also, check this out! I set up a website that functions as a countdown to the day our Senior Projects are due for the Senior Exhibition, haha. Hopefully, it helps someone out. I foresee my self waiting for a render and tearfully watching the clock tick away…
Yes, I did actually pay for that domain name. Haha.
What else is new…? Quadmania just happened this past weekend! Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to check it out for that long (since I had to animate!). I did watch Where the Fear Has Gone’s set, which was the best I’ve ever seen them perform. And not just because I got to do guest vocals for the last song again, haha. Lots of kids were really getting into them, which is always great to see.
I also got a free shirt from SEB, watched some guys run through an inflatable bootcamp obstacle course (yes, this was set up in the Commons!), and won a pin for correctly translating a number of German words into English. Fun stuff!
Well, according to my nifty count down website, I now have 21 days and 33 minutes to complete this animation. Better get back to it!
Josh from UMBC
Kaitlyn {lovesintheeyre}
umbcjen
meronumbc
modestmind
dmason1
monicab
Kelsey K from UMBC
Asif from UMBC
Carmen from UMBC
Lionel from UMBC
