Friday, September 27, 2013

Introducing Lucas, Our Newest Highschool Student

Wooh! First blog!
For those of you who are reading this; I am Lucas Tennen the Smiley Guy Studio Co-op student for the year. I enjoy Adele and long walks on the beach. Not really, although I find it's usually a good ice breaker. 
    
So you could sort of say that this was like my first full week at SGS, although it was a bit of a rocky start. Last weekend my computer went through a series of crashes (both physical and software related) which resulted in some programs and files being unable to reach in my computer. One of them was flash. When I tried re-installing I was greeted with the ever so frustrating "Unable to download software." So I did my best to not let my time go to waste by reading about and watching many flash tutorials as I could. Although I haven't actually gotten into the program, I do feel well informed.

On a side note; I got a desk! It may not seem like a big deal, but it's my first so I'm pretty exited. It's relatively plain so I want to bring in a figurine or something somewhat representing of me. Now this next bit may need some explanation: I have a bit of an odd uncle. For my bar-mitzvah he gave me a figure of a dancing Jewish man. I keep it on a shelf near my bed. It seemed harmless at first, but it's starting to freak me out. I swear it's eyes follow me sometimes. So, I figured my desk would be a perfect place for it. It may not be well received, but if one person walks by and gets a kick out of it then it will have served a better purpose then it does in my room. Which pretty much is watching me sleep.

Thanks (sorry about the lack of animation I'm able to upload this week)

Friday, September 20, 2013

Welcome Humphrey! Our First International Intern!

Alright, here's my blog entry:
Humphrey Erm here, I'm a Swedish animation student from The Animation Workshop in Denmark.  From what I have understood I am the first international intern that Smiley Guy Studios has ever had, so I have by nature of my geographic location made history here.
I've been here a workweek now and am so far simply impressed and pleased with my internship.  The studio itself is nice and large, capable of housing quite a few professionals.  There's a comfortable meeting room and even a rec room with a ping pong table and table football which I'm looking forward to trying out.  I even get my own desk and computer to do all my work at which is much appreciated.
The people here are also really cool.  Everyone is working hard on separate tasks but they have all had time to give me some pointers or simply showing me what they're up to.  They have done a good job making me feel welcome in this studio and I for one appreciate that.
The work so far has been manageable, starting off with a tutorial on how to create a Flash puppet.  Working through that I got many great tips from Joe Lague regarding how to better organize the symbols as well as subtle changes to the design that makes the character look more dimensional and volumetric without sacrificing the ease of use for animation.  I'm now placed on Flashifying (taking a bitmap picture and translating it into Flash vectors and symbols) character concepts for the online show Teleporting Fat Guy.  It's working out really well so far thanks to the amazing feedback I've gotten previously, though there are still improvements here and there that I can do.
That's it for now I think, I'm looking forward to 12 more weeks of this in the beautiful city of Toronto!  Have a good one everyone!
~Humphrey Erm