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After writing a post about Children’s Museum and Mary Blair, it is very strange to post skeletons of Max and I.
It’s for our upcoming film, “something left, something taken” and our characters will turn into skeletons. Very dark sense of humor but we are loving every minute of it!!!

For those who doesn’t remember/ hasn’t seen the characters.

So as you can see, skeletons are made proportionally to the characters.

Here is me working with a tweezer.

With some references of human anatomy pictures.

Who doesn’t know Little Golden Books? -Of course everybody does!
At Children’s Museum of Manhattan in upper west, there is a wonderful exhibition called “Golden Legacy: Original Art from 65 Years of Golden Books” which will end tomorrow!
Hurry everybody! Go! It’s worth your time and money!

Description of the exhibition.
“View 60 masterpieces of original illustration art by legendary artists from American publishing’s best-loved and most consequential picture-book line - Little Golden Books® ! Share happy childhood memories with picture book classics like The Poky Little Puppy, Home for a Bunny and Dr. Dan.”

My favorite artist of all time is, of course Mary Blair. I was extremely captivated by her art at young age- through Tokyo Disneyland’s “It’s a Small World”, and continue to get inspired by her work.

I’ve always loved the story “The Elves and the Shoemaker.” It’s a cute little story of how elves made shoes overnight for the poor shoemaker.
As I was building these shoes for our upcoming film, “Something Left, Something Taken”, I was seriously wishing that elves will finish all these by next morning.
Well, keep wishing. I had to finish them.

I put my shoes (size female 5) to the left so you can compare the size.

Now you can really see the size.

Also, we did another voice over session with Erin and Kyle last weekend.
Still revising here and there with the writing and animatic.
Erin’s been a great all-around sound designer/musician through out! THANKS!

They Might Be Giant’s article was in The New York Times on August 24th.
See the very top left?
That is a still from “Davy Crockett in Outer Space” music video that we made for them!
My hands are in the Times! Hooray!

I’ve been teaching animation classes at Parsons The New School of Design’s Pre-college department.

It’s usually once a week on Saturdays for Fall and Spring semesters but Summer is different!
First, it was “Summer Intensive Studies” for high school Juniors and Seniors from all over the world.
Monday to Friday, 9:00 to 12:00 everyday. Plus editing films and preparing. So It ended up being full time job for 4 weeks. Learned a lot from this experience, and I really enjoyed the intensity of this class. We got to do tons of field trips like watching Wall-E, visiting the Museum of Moving Image, and visiting Nick Jr Studio. Also had 2 wonderful guest speakers, clay-animator Andy Kennedy and theater actor, Tim McDonough.

Here are some students’ final projects.

By Denise Rivas

By Lizzie Marks

By Jasper Johnson and Arvind Menon

By Olivia Pellicer

Then after 1 week of “vacation,” I had to teach Summer Academy for middle school students for 2 weeks. Here are some students final projects.

By Arielle Friedman, Maddie Kasemichael & Ali Soong

By Zac Mau & Will Tavlin

Great job students! Now I have 1.5 months off until the Fall semester to concentrate on my “real job”!!

If you want to check out more animations from the summer course and also from the previous Fall and Spring semester, check out Parsons Animation account on Youtube!

We just finished illustrating/designing a 12 page booklet for Child Abuse Prevention Services.
The audience is 2nd and 3rd graders, so we tried to make the book as fun as possible while still being informative.

Bella the Bunny and Fargo the Fox will teach kids “what is ok” and “what’s not” in their daily lives.
You can check more illustrations here

I got to see my great great great grandpa at the Museum of Natural History.
I think this woolly mammoth is my great great great great great great grandpa.
We found Mocha (cow)’s great great great great great great grandma (buffalo) in the North American section.
And we also found Pinochle (pig)’s great great great great great great grandma (boar) in the South American section.

I found them at a store called “Joyful” in Japan. It’s a huge store that is a mixture of Home Depot, Micheals Arts & Craft, Bed Bath & Beyond. Yes, I know. It’s my type of store.

Slowly but surely we are working on our independent film, “something left, something taken.”
I just made a series of Russian Dolls, I mean cars.
Also known in the animation term, a prop for wide shot, medium shot, close up shot.

Pretty cute, aren’t they?

Making three identical cars required a complex math skill….(!?)

4 cars for some wide shots. Their tires actually roll. I am debating if I need to make more, but I don’t want it to be my next addiction so I decided to move onto other props/background for now.

We just completed a brand new music video for They Might Be Giants and Playhouse Disney.

Making this video was a lot of fun and we got to work with a very talented illustrator, David Cowles.

Here is some production art from the video.

A model sheet for Davy Crockett. I don’t think we ever showed him from behind.

Portion of the storyboards.

This is the final animatic with some rough animation.
You might notice that the beginning is slightly different.

chalkboard/ character animation

Here is the super high-tech super model that we used for video reference.

Yes, I made a paper rocket.

Then we imported and rotoscoped the video footage in flash.

And here comes the most exciting part.

We projected the flash file to the chalkboard and traced it.

It’s actually a lot more difficult than just “tracing” because you have to maneuver your body so that you don’t block the light from the projector.

Then each time we photographed, max covered up the projector with a huge piece of foam board!

puppets

My favorite part was creating the theater ! I felt like I was decorating a pre-k classroom.
Crafted puppets were photographed and composited in After Effects.

collage

For the fight scene, we created the smallest green screen ever.

cleaning up

Our studio was covered with chalk. And we coughed for the next few days.
It took almost full day to clean everything. To be honest, that was actually MY favorite part of the process. (Max didn’t help.)
Enjoy the video!