Holy Flaming @%$#*^!!!! An update!

The incredible Two Star Symphony finally has a full fledged music video for their fantastic arrangements!   Not only did I get to PA on an amazing set with a great group of talented professionals (and a psychotic insomniac donkey), but I got to animate the haunted illustration that appears in The Book In the Library.

As you will see from the whopping 3.5 second run time, all four members of the quartet writhe in flaming agony. Considering they are really cool people, it was a little odd and disconcerting planning and enacting their gruesome pain and suffering. (Well.... except for Jerry, the director. It was kind of disappointing not being able to push his gruesome demise further).

 In addition to animating all four members of the quartet, this was my first attempt at animating fire;  I would have liked to tinker with the flame animation looping a bit more, but deadlines.....

Here is the full 4 frames of animation as I submitted it (I think they had to trim about 12 frames from the beginning).    It needs to be viewed in HD mode, or it looks like fuzzy cubism. The full video for The 9th Level can be found on the Two Star Symphony site - it is gorgeous (I did mention that the entire cast and crew are BAD-ASS, right?)

the 9th Level Animation from Sophia Vassilakidis on Vimeo.

this is going to be bats@!% cool!

Two Star Symphony, Houston's awesome local string quartet extraordinaire, needed a poster for their awesome upcoming live performance at the awesome Discovery Green venue of their awesome original score for the awesome public-domain-footage film "Silent Shadow of the Batman" by awesome writer/director/editor Andre Perkowski.

So, I came up with this poster for them. People seem to think it's cool. If you think the poster is cool, or even if you don't, you should go to the screening. I got off of work just so I could attend (it's going to be bats*&% awesome!)

back from the dead....

not really. yes it has been ages since i have posted. no, i have not been a complete and total slacker in that time period, although the "day job" (which is currently a late shift) is certainly giving me less time to focus on animation.

I did several short scenes for an independent, classically animated short film, none of which I can post for confidentiality reasons. I am attempting to do a full 4 minute short as a music video in conjunction with a local band, although after months of getting nowhere with cobbled together software, camera set-ups, etc, I am going to have to start from almost square one now that I have a way to actually test and export my frames. I can't get any less efficient, anyway.

In the meantime, i checked myself into a couple of classes for busy (or in my case, distracted) adults at the Glassell School, which is affiliated with the Houston Museum of fine Arts. Seth Mittag was instructor for both my Flash and stop motion classes, and deserves props for putting with me and my weird ability to cause computer crashes, system errors, and file corruptions without even touching the computer.

Seth Mittag also deserves props for MAD stop-motion animation, and I encourage anyone in the Houston area to see his current installation/ short-film presentation at the Lawndale Art Center.

I'm not really happy with my output for the Flash class, and I will continue struggling with (mortally combating) the program until i have something that's actually portfolio worthy. On the other hand, stop-motion is a blast, and even though we had only a single 3-hour class period to animate in once the hours of character crafting and rigging were complete, i'm pretty happy with how my first attempt turned out. Nearly 9 seconds of animation after just 2.5 hours or work!!!!!  Eventually, I would like to complete this, when next i get a big enough chunk of time off from the day job.