These are characters developed for my new webcomic, Nexus Neighborhood. The models were created in Blender 3D with some basic composite nodes. The dark black lines were added later in the GIMP.

I love the idea of drawing freehand. I imagine it is freeing to have an immediate result unfiltered by various computer programs. But instead, I am making a model in 3D and applying a more 2D style in an image editor. I wonder if that is a disadvantage to the expressiveness and overall quality. I have to go through several different programs and techniques, akin to picking up a pencil in a spacesuit.

Whatever the production, I am satisfied with the end result. Now I feel it is more important to get this thing off the ground – the project, technique, and style can change once up in the air.

There might be some value in my Twitter streams (if you’d like to search for it, you can look here and here), but I am beginning to see how important a longer form is for organizing my thoughts and creating original commentary on Blender 3D, animation, and creative production.

So, in an effort to make this blog relevant, I am rebranding and secluding more time to write. There are exciting projects in the works if I can build up enough focus to follow through (like The Blender Show, new films, and a new webcomic), and the number of people who continue to subscribe even when the updates dry up just makes me want to work harder.

So I have taken the liberty of hosting and broadcasting “The Blender Show”. As the first episode mentions, the video podcast is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license and will feature tutorials, screencasts, interviews with Blender artists, interviews with artists outside the Blender community, showcases of works people have created with Blender, and connections with Blender developers.

I fully intend for the Show to be open in the sense that everyone is encouraged to add content. I have no desire to commercialize the podcast or do anything other than administer the content.

The tag-line of the podcast, “A Journal of Open Source Art”, captures the spirit of the project. In the end we are all artists, from the casual Blender user to the developer who writes the code, but we have the unique ability, through technology, to freely share what we have learned and what we create.

The Blender Show can be found here. You may also subscribe to this podcast in iTunes, in Miro, or by basic RSS. You can also access this podcast by Twitter.

The main purpose of the podcast is to educate, entertain, and inspire the Blender community. Any content, content ideas, suggestions, or criticisms are welcome. I hope you enjoy it.

The idea of animating a film against the setting of a subway platform has always appealed to me – the constant exchange of people and rumble of subway cars seam like the perfect place to nurture dynamic characters. The specific story outlining the struggles of creating anything worth something has also floated in my creative conscious for a while with no surprises pertaining to its origins.

From there, I used the motif of juggling (one common in my previous films) as the end result of the creative possess. Madeline, an introvert whose only contact with other humans is through her creations, juggles on the platform to try to support herself. But the common itself is not worth much, and she realizes that more ingenuity is necessary.

I finished a shell version of the film in April but it was plagued by problems, not the least of which was a poor execution of the plot. My failures with that version of that film are discussed in detail in a previous blog post.

Over the next few months, I reanimated every scene to my liking, made the film longer and easier to follow, and made the action less subtle.

I am anxious to hear what you think of the film, how it compares to my others, and any other comments and criticisms.

The plot follows a girl trying to make money in a metro terminal. Madeline tries to street perform by juggling, gets frustrated by the lack of response cash, and retreats to her postmodern dwelling. She tries a different approach: she designs and builds practical machinery and tries to sell it. This fails as well and the discouragement continues until she decides to build a humanoid robot. Here, she is not concerned with making money and the robot serves no practical purpose. Closure is achieved when she realizes that a robot juggling is much more interesting (and profitable) than a human juggling. As I alluded to in my pre-film plot summary, Madeline gives the robot a telling smile just before credits.

A good plot must be straightforward, involve a strong central conflict, and end with a clear resolution. Madeline did none of these very well.

In fact, the best parts of the film where those which have little to do with the plot. One of my favorites is the extended first scene (which is common in my films), which sets the mood, introduces the setting and silhouetted characters, and plays with camera movement. Another is the abstract visualization of the design process, which was not in my original write-up, but felt appropriate to the mood and was largely a result of Blender experimentation.

Most of the short is plagued by seemingly-random images, which make sense to me but not to my audience. I used filler shots, reused scenes, and did not spend enough energy on scenes that mattered – like Madeline’s epiphany about making a humanoid robot just for herself.

My recent films (notably Eros) are good at setting a mood and conveying a basic theme, but telling stories is the the ultimate goal of any filmmaker. Hopefully my future films will watch more like a well-thought out short story than an improve poem at a poetry jam.

The unwelcoming swimming pool shimmered below as he entered the main arena.

——–

From his perch on the second floor, the stranger tracked Ian’s solitary path across the packed showroom floor. He spoke into his radio: “”Subject is where we want him. The market is up.”

“Roger that,” came the crackled reply. “Permission granted to hedge your bets”

——–

Below, Ian surveyed the displays. As he passed the long line outside of Lehman Brothers’ booth, he reflected on the years past. This is like my Middle School Science Fair, he thought. He was right: the booths were more professional-looking and there were many more words like “synergy”, “competitive”, “solutions”, “industry-leading”, and “global corporation”, but the fresh-faced, well-dressed youths standing in front of poster boards bore uncanny similarities to their middle school counterparts.

But his thoughts quickly turned to the more pressing issue. Can I find synergy in a competitive internship, focusing on solutions for industry-leading global corporations?

——-

He was on the same level as Ian was. He chuckled softly to himself as his long, identifiably foreign fingers toyed with the switch-blade in his pocket. This should be easy.

——

Ian heard the voice calling his name and turned around.

“Hey, how’s it going?”, the caller asked, with the air of a friend.

“Oh, hey!” Ian had absolutely no idea who this was, but was determined not to let it show. This sort of thing had been happening more often since he started college. “Great to see you again!”

“Yeah it is. What have you been up to?”

“Oh, since we last met? Umm, not much. Keeping it real, you might say”, said Ian still straining his mind to make a connection. Perhaps we have class together? Did we meet at preview? “Some showcase, eh? Hey man, I should be going. Send me a Facebook message sometime, okay?” So I can figure out who the hell you are.

Wishing each other the best, they parted, Ian calling back for good measure, “take care” before speed walking into the booth for the Alabama Department of Transportation only to pretend he had done so intentionally.

——

“I’ve failed, master”, he sobbed trough the radio, preparing for self flagellation. “He just played it so cool – as if he always runs into people he does not recognize – and slipped away like a fish.”

But his master wasn’t listening. Earlier, he had just advised another accomplice to postpone a debate. To the stranger, he said: “Good news. I’ve just secured your spot as the villein in the next Dan Brown novel.”

——

Ian had just learned that there were over 11,000 bridges in Alabama’s Highway System, and also learned that he did not want to spend his life taking care of them. Intel was cold and AMD only politely looked over his résumé.

Again, thinking of his mother, he vowed to be persistent.

He finally got to Walt Disney’s Imagineering booth. He told the representative about his experience, his awards, his desire for change, his audacious hope.

“Actually, we’re looking for those interested in corporate management positions”.

Screw this, he thought. I’ll just write novels.

Over the summer, I had planned to update my travels in the form of podcasts and blog entries, but my laptop (which acts as my sole broadcast platform) got stolen in a crowded train station. The trip turned into much more of a vacation without the pressures of creativity. I realized that much of my free time with my laptop was focused on production of some sort, and the theft allowed me to take a break and drink my life slowly and thoroughly.

Since I returned, brimming with new experiences, thoughts, and writings,  I redesigned and rebranded my studio – Orange Marble Studio became Cique Studios. The name change comes with a desire to create a unique identity, something that has not been done before. This idea textually presents itself in the new studio name: Cique (pronounced “seek”) does not mean anything, allowing me to bring my own meaning to the word.

But the idea of bringing a unique meaning must extend beyond the branding. I feel as if a studio (or any organization) functions best by doing something fundamentally different then others.

The problem is Cique Studios does not do anything fundamentally different. In many ways it is unique: it utilizes open source to the fullest, distributes content online for free, and is, so far, simply an extension of one person. None of these factors necessarily lend themselves to better movies.

Better movies is the ultimate goal, and of course there is no systematic way to achieve this. But I hope that the next few years I will discover a unique niche where I can truly bring something new and exciting.

I was asked to design the cover for my highschool’s graduation show last year. Then I stayed iconic to my generation, choosing to edit an image of a 5th generation iPod and putting on the cover. It went over well, but was severely lacking in originality and relevance to the school. This was not art – it was a design, made to look as aesthetically pleasing as possible and not offend anybody.

This year, I was asked to do the same thing. I now felt that mere design was not satisfying enough (the next evolution of the cover would have been an iPhone, which means nothing), so I created this image.

My class is the butterfly, pinned down like butterflies often are in museums and science classrooms around the world. There are several things I wanted to accomplish with this image. I wanted to comment on the Aristotelian focus on classifying everything to better understand the universe. I feel it’s important to make distinctions and categorize for scientific advancement, and nothing could be closer to the heart of my school’s IB program. In addition, I glorified my class by giving it the gift of metamorphosis. The pin, which I figured might arouse some feelings, connects with the past nature of our highschool years, a life which I predict will quickly fade into its own dusty museum piece.

I ran the design past my program coordinator to make sure the image was not offending to the program, and she enthusiastically gave it the green light, saying that the butterfly was beautiful in a much more sophisticated way than she had seen before and that censoring the image would go against her own artistic integrity.

But, when presented to a counsel of parents, the image was caught in a crossfire I had not expected – people were upset about the representation of other classes, the pin reminded them of torture, and the classification was seen as irrelevant. Some of the parents enjoyed the image, though, and so did some of my classmates.

I am not interested in drawing people apart over symbols – indeed the contrary would be much more satisfying. What I like is the power that my work had to draw such passionate arguments and heated response. People were actually offended by it, which simply illustrates the power of art.

I was able to narrow down all my movies into a single theme: the melding of science and art.

This theme mirrors my own experiences. The entire art world was foreign to me only a short time ago. My parents vigorously encouraged and stimulated me in the sciences, and while I could tell they appreciated art by their collections of music and literature, they felt ill-advised to teach me about actually creating my own art. As a result, I was very much the science and math type, one who would not put any faith in anything, not the least of which emotions, and I even began thinking of science and art as mutually exclusive. It was not until several years ago, when some people convinced me to enter IB Art class based on animation tests that I had a hobby of creating on the computer. In the class, art started to make sense, and I realized that merging of science and art exists at the level of form and content.

As for form, the majority of the creative process is concerned with the science of the software. At its most basic level, it appears mathematical, and my first animations were little more then proofs of concept of technical ability. With each progressive film, however, my films began to include more and more elements of artistic composition and aesthetic concerns. I paid attention to the story, included motifs and symbols, and took care to address the visual quality in each of the thousands of frames in my movies.

The content of my films sits at the crossroads between science and art. My first serious film, The Ancestor’s Tale, was unabashedly about science. it told the story of evolution and history straight from textbooks. Even in Ancestor’s Tale, though, an element of art came though with the relationship of the image with the music, and the scenes of history and evolution which I chose to recreate. As time progressed my animation tests became films rich in imagery, plot and meaning. My later films became ever more focused on the artistic element of the narrative, while still featuring an element of science or technology which I am conformable with. Primitive Welcome, for example, carries the primary theme of the wonder of life. In the film, a robotic alien probe lands on a primitive Earth and explores the landscape with wonder. Soon, its path is blocked by a primate, which, while more natural and alive than the probe, is more reserved and suspicious of new things then the probe is.

Science and art are not mutually exclusive, and each brach has much to the give to the other. The visual element of style must be complemented with technical skills. It is here, at the crossroads, that I delight.

And speaking of delight, Madeline is nearing completion. IB Art is almost over, and after that, my attention can focus on some Eros-level films.

This caught me off-guard. Just like a journalist is different from a writer, an entertainer is different from an artist. My films have been, in my mind, for entertainment. I wanted to make people laugh, to tell a good story.

Then something happened that made art seem a little less cryptic. It starts in the summer of 2005, when I saw someone get raped in Sofia. I was sleeping on a couch with the windows open to a 7 story balcony, I heard unmistakable sounds and saw what was going down on the street below. There were many offenders, and I did not do anything… no calling the law enforcement, no waking anyone else up. I just paced.

So, in my high school Philosophy class a few days ago, I brought it up, leading to fresh thoughts on the matter.

Many people say art comes from such experiences; or indeed, the only way you can create good art is if you have experienced a great amount pain. While most of the time I wave this idea off as silly and insist that most of my “art” (it always sounds so pompous to call yourself an artist, no?) does not come from pain. I realized that much of my memory of that night comes not of the event but the fact I convinced myself to make a film about Sofia, and as the sun rose, made a time-lapse.

That film, the first one I made, was unintentionally born from that experience. But watching it again, my Impressions of Sofia were pretty favorable. Though the will to make a portrait of the city was fueled by what I saw, but the portrait itself is almost optimistic. Check it out; the first scene is from said balcony, on that morning.

I’m amazed that my own art could come from this, without even making the connection. All of a sudden, art makes more sense. What a wonderful feeling.

In Istanbul, the structure of bones (or armatures) in the characters did not use a system called IK kinetics to control the structure of the bones. Instead, each bone was rotated separately and manually like moving a wireframe model. IK kinetics stets up a set of rules for the software that will automatically move the bones near the one moved manually in a realistic (and user defined) manner, making the mesh behave much more like a puppet.

A perfect example of where this is useful is the (almost infamous) scene in Istanbul where a character reaches for an orange. Instead of simply moving the hand and letting the rest of the arm deform itself realistically, I animated it by manually moving each part of the mesh until it looked realistic enough. Of course, it did not look realistic enough.

So, the protagonist in my next movie is fully set up by IK kinetics. Here are some early versions of the character with a disjointed head and stubs for arms, very much borrowing elements from ancient Cycladic statues.

I began by creating the bone structure and modifying it outward into the fingers like so. There are no IK kinetics here.

Once the structure is complete, adding the IK kinetics allows for better control over the mesh, and I maneuvered the statue into a sitting position and moved the hands onto the knees.

And here is a frame from the final render showing the stature complete and expressing loneliness.

Since the style is very similar to that of Cycladic statures and figurines, and since the characters have no facial features other then an elongated nose, all the emotional elements must be communicated by body movements. It is interesting how much faith we put on body language, something that has been lacking in my previous films.