Sand Hound

For my fantasy art class we had to pick 6 characteristics that an animal would have and make up a creature. The characteristics included 1 movement, 2 offensive, and 3 defensive traits. I ended up picking "climbing" for movement, "acid" and "speed" for offense, and "secretion", "camouflage" and "web" as my defense. I sat down and started to think.

It was really hard to get started on this project by any means. It was like all my creativity was drained out of me, I didn't understand. Once I got into this project next thing I knew it was 17 hours later and I have literally created a creature based off those six attributes from scratch. I went into thinking about how it behaves and after looking at different reference of other animals (snakes, big cats, gorillas, bears) different characteristics started to come about. I started molding this creature into real life going as far as differences between opposite sexes, how they are pack hunters and family oriented to how their skeletal system is built and what possible organs they might have as well as informational boxes explaining some of the animal's characteristics.

I present to you a Sand Hound:



Now, the next part of this project is to take your creature and pit it in a fight to the death with another classmates creature of your choosing. This part sounds like a lot of fun! But again, I am having issues starting it. the layout and positioning of the animals is giving me the most trouble. I need a shot that is more dynamic than what I have been drawing so I haven't settled on a composition just yet. Hopefully, like this creature layout, it will all just come to me and I will have a new piece by the end of the week.

The creature I decided to pit my Sand Hound against was my classmates, Anna Zotta, Mountain Creeper. They are similar in size, anatomy and their native terrains can co-exist. Here is what her Mountain Creeper looks like:

*Mountain Creeper(c) is copyrighted by Anna Zotta

Look for the fight to begin soon!

-Ben

Thesis, Thesis, Thesis!

This is the time when it comes down to the final rounds. Thesis is four weeks away and I still have a bit to do but I am in a comfortable spot I think. All these sleepless and late nights I've pulled will all be worth it in the end. I need to also set up character sheets of all my sketches to get ready to present for the show. I plan on getting all these images framed as well.

I am currently creating some show-work to put around my thesis spot in the last two days. It all started with this movie poster:



We had to create a poster for our short, paid for and displayed by the school to raise awareness of each individual TBM project. A background I created before and intended to use for one of my scenes got cut on the fact that it didnt match quite well with my color palette (too green and my short is at night so it needed more of a blueish tone: Original Background Here ). So I decided to actually use it for a promotional photo and added to it. the result was the picture on the Movie Poster. What got me next was I couldn't think of how to title the piece. I knew what it was called but I didn't know what the title would look like. After trying a few varieties for looks I ended up taking a bit of inspiration for other name brands I've seen such as games like Pokemon and Final Fantasy to thinking about what type to hand trace and change up a little bit.

Which lead me to creating this logo for my thesis short:



This is what was given to me as far as a spot goes in the gallery and to tell you the truth I am very happy with it. Three walls, two corners, across from the lovely Dana Joy Jacobsen and the perfect size? Can't complain all. Today I am going to go up and measure everything out so I know how big to print my images off. I also plan on getting my business card and personal logo done today and then it would leave me with wrapping up my animated piece for the rest of the semester until we get permission to start hanging things.

This is what I have to work with:



There will definitely be more things uploaded on here as I begin to wrap everything up and finish things. Look for more soon!

- Ben

Old Flash

Just trying to get some of my older work up on the interwebs...

Enjoy

-Ben

Instagram

Instagram is now available through web browsers. Check out The Moments of My Life:

http://instagram.com/benji_mac/

- Ben

IDAE Ep. 3 Yo!

The Whimsical Wesley makes me laugh so hard. Enjoy a new Episode of I Dream About the Earth and see my wonderful guest star appearance... oh boy.

- Ben

Tyk

I finally got my second main character design done. Took so long because I just couldn't settle on a design that I liked. Finally it is here. Maybe some minor changes and touchups later.

Enjoy!

- Ben

P.S. I'm getting some storyboarding done too. BOOM!

Also, Tyk will be joining my Old Man I designed a few weeks back.

One last thing, my friend Kelly drew her OC along with Tyk. I loved it hahah. Give it a looksy: http://kelleh.com/image/36123267255

The Cosmos

I've always been a fan about astronomy and space and wondering what crazy thing could possibly be out there. So for my post production class we had to do a compositing project and at first I had no clue what I was going to do. People in my class were doing futuristic skylines in After Effects and playing with the green screen or just making some super surreal things. I kept changing my idea and it began to form into its own and becoming something. I chose to make some intersteller scenes all in after effects.

After looking up some tutorials to help me try and get things how I wanted them to look, I finally ended up with this:

Now, for being the very first thing I have ever made in After Effects, I think it is great but it still has a few hiccups here and there and is it just me or does it seem a little blurry on Vimeo? Could just be a resolution problem. For instance, I should've worked completely in a 3D environment. I chose to work in a 2D one and work with the layers and try to manipulate the objects to animate how they should look. Example of this is the moon. Since I worked in a 2D environment I had to have two different layers, one behind the planet and one infront of the planet, and you can see where the two meet during its ark around the planet with a little hiccup. Now, what I should've done was make it a 3D environment and just parent the two objects since I was using spheres anyway. That way the orbit of the moon would be extremely smooth and I could work with camera and light layers as well. That would really spice things up and THAT is what I've learned from this first attempt.

We have to take our ideas for this project and push it forward for our next project. So, I've decided to stay in the cosmos and create my own intersteller scenes. I've been checking out videos and pictures that portray the style that I've been trying to capture. Examples follow:

And that last video got me thinking I wanted to push my idea into a different direction. I wanted to animate a star, all composed in After Effects. The thing I regretted in my video Stellar was how beautiful and time consuming the nebulas were in the background but they didn't move. It was dead space if you will (no pun intended) and that needed to change. I know that nebulas do not move as far away as the planet would be but still the fact that it doesn't move just kills the scene for me. Maybe it is because I stared at it for hours and just grew to disliking it not moving but not quit sure how to get it to move. So, I used similar techniques that I learned from my previous effort and created this test, it is still incomplete, but man, I am on to something here.

Let's see where this goes. It may take a turn to Sci-Fi with spaceships, holograms and what not if I have the time. MAYBE. Time will only tell. Enjoy!

- Ben

**EDIT**-----------------
Here is what I ended up with. Added a few "Solar flare"-like effects and softened the edges and here we are: