Meeting with Carrie Brooks

Yesterday I met with Carrie Brooks to discuss my resume and my future plans. We started off talking about my resume. She was very impressed with it and didn't see any problems with it. She was hoping that I would be willing to teach the other students how to make a resume as solid as mine. I was pretty proud of the fact that she felt my resume was good. After that I asked her about the internship and externship opportunities. I described to her that I was a Junior and going to work and school part time. There were two companies she recommended me to look up and get in contact with based on my busy schedule. One was Paramount Arts which is located here in Memphis, so it will be a good opportunity for me. Carrie will help me this following summer to get started and strongly recommended me to do an externship as well. I had a great talk with her and learned some interesting things and look forward to getting more into my field. I have scheduled another meeting with her when classes start for the spring time.

Self Critique

Sorry I'm Late

Major student suggestions were to work on the craft of my characters. Some suggested that my scenes were too short and needed to be a little longer. Most of them suggested there needs to be more work on the cinematography.

I agree with the students on all the feed back and have no disagreements about it.

After studying the critiques, I learned that I need connect the characters better, make my scene longer to clarify the situation more, and to work on my craft of the characters more and will make the following revisions: Character design, scene length, camera actions and more established shots between the two characters.

Character updates

Had to redesign the body builder zombie and the lady zombie.

A couple of  Jay turnarounds.

Rick redesign

Walk Cycle Test

TestWalk from Justin Taylor on Vimeo.

This is one of Jay's main walk cycles. I placed him in a stationary black background with some ground. I wanted to use this to test how I would make his walk more of a walk that would fit his personality. I also made a separate layer for his toes so that his walk would be more realistic and the effect came out pretty well.

Walk cycle in Enviroment from Justin Taylor on Vimeo.

This is the test walk cycle I made and just placed him in the first scene I started to create in the airport. The scene isn't fully done yet but this is the basic idea and look that I am going for. I also wanted to put the character in the scene to test scale and placement. The background was made using SketchUp and Photoshop.

Sketches

 

Jay's back and side profiles. Side profile is made functional and i will be utilizing the replacement animation technique for most of the character turnarounds.

This is just the redesign of Rick with sandals instead of the shoes he had before.

This is a sketch of the background of the first scene set in the airport at the Burger Munchers restaurant.

Meet the Zombies

These are the zombies i came up with for my scenes I will be working on. From left to right I have Becky the zombie, the old person zombie and the body builder zombie. This is the style of zombies I want to work with in my piece.

Visiting Artist: Suzanne Ramljak

           This artist lecture was slightly different. She wasn't the artist of most of the works that were shown. The pieces that she was showing were pretty interesting to me as I was working on my metals work right before i came to the lecture. The main focus of the lecture was centered around protective ornaments. There were interesting things about what was thought of the old stone bead necklaces and bracelets worn around the necks, arms and legs for protection from animals. I learned that Amulets are known for protection and status, Talismans are for specific purposes and charms are for good luck. These things were used for conjuring up good or bad spirits to help, it was used for channeling beliefs through organic objects or animal parts. One of the artist I really loved made these beast helmets. This was an interesting lecture and did last a bit long, but all in all was very intriguing.