Inna Is Our Best Researcher EVER!

Oliver Looks Nervous

In the beginning of this week I finished fixing my TFG animation shot. I struggled a bit with Oliver’s arms. I had to make him look worried and make him shrink his shoulders and pull his hands towards his chest and for that Oliver’s back arm needed to go on top of his torso. That was a puzzle for me. In the end I learnt the trick from my awesome mentors and now I know how this problem can be solved.  I need to practice more character animation to polish my new skills. 

 

The big wow of the week was the size of the monitor I got for my working place. I am so get used to my laptop monitor size and already forgot how it feels when you are working on a big screen, especially on design projects.Thank you Julie and everyone!

This week I started working on mandala design for First Hand Climate Change Stories, directed by Alex Hawley and which is currently in development. It’s about how native people of Yukon, in particular Gwich'in Nation or Old Crow people, were affected by the environmental change.

Mandala Feather

 My task is to come up with Caribou Mandala design that will be used in the film at least in three scenes and it should match Alex’s initial Wolf bead artwork. I researched Native American Art, symbols and design patterns, studied Gui’chin bead art and read about their culture and history.

It is an amazing experience for me to have a chance to work on this project because I myself have a profound interest in environmental activism and sustainability. Another coincidence is that I love everything about mandala design and sacred geometry and I actually have been planning to come up with Sun Mandala design for my 4th year film that will be called Dance of Life. And now I have a chance to practice my mandala skills and figure out how to animate the rotation as well. ha what were the chances to work on a Mandala  project during my summer internship:)

 

For those who are wondering what mandala is I found some info about various types of Mandala:

• http://www.whats-your-sign.com/mandala.html 
• About Native American Mandala Art Meanings: http://www.whats-your-sign.com/Native-American-mandala.html#myspot

And here are some great sites that I bumped into while doing my research :

• Awesome Native Canadian & Inuit Graphic Art collection on Pinterest: http://www.pinterest.com/muffy2s/native-canadian-inuit-graphic-art/

On history of Old Crow (Gwich'in Nation):

• http://www.oldcrow.ca/history.htm,
• http://www.yukonmuseums.ca/treasures/olc/02.html, http://arcticcircle.uconn.edu/ANWR/anwrgwichin.html
• http://www.ourworldlanguage.com/p/old-crow-yukon.html 

Carol Learns the Ropes on Flash

Hey guys,

It's been my third week here and everyone got to work on different projects and learned new things. I got to do some layout designs and animation for the "First Hand" project and am proud to say I did the raven animation all by myself. Although there is still many problems overall, it's definitely a big improvement from the first time I touched flash symbol animation.

I wasn't sure how to do cross dissolve or camera move in flash, so I asked for help from people in the studio, and as usual they were eager to help out.

As for now, I am doing coloring for a show called Uberdude. I came across a few problems but they were no biggie. By the end of the day on my first day working on Uberdude, I've gotten a lot faster at coloring and useing only hot keys to navigate around. Makes me feel like a pro lol :P The more I get to work in Flash the faster I will become.


-Carol

All about Anna, Costumes, and Penguins

Hi guys~ Anna here again~
It is officially the end of week two of my internship, and boy has time flown by. I' have been enjoying myself, and can't believe I'm already two weeks into this intern thing.

This week, I started working on Uberdude, which was super cool. I love the art style, and have had the pleasure of colouring all the animations. It seemed like a large task at first, but now that I am actually putting my pen to the tablet and just popping out scene by scene in colour, I find myself enjoying my music and just having fun with these animations.

Other than that... Well, it's soon to be Anime North Time, and my friend has decided to drag me to it, even though I'm busy with life and freelancing and...sighs... I'd like to say i have a cosplay, but I didn't and don't have the time to make it, and when I tried to find material for the jacket that I planned, Fabricland didn't have that many choices... And all of Toronto's fabric stores close at either 6 or 7. By the time I arrive there after work, they would have all closed... I suppose it must be fate.
I have my freelance side job to occupy my dwindlingly little spare time as well. My dad introduced me to a guy named Brandon Feraras, who is working on an ios game about penguins and environmentalism. It's called Pengix, for anyone who wants to check it out. At this moment, the game is all Brandon's - he created the entire thing on his own time, with the graphics being made in Photoshop.

And yeah, the art isn't great - he is obviously not an art person. But the game is quite fun, and only the graphics need improving. And that's where I come in. I'm still working on it, but I have been redesigning the whole look to the game: the sprites, the backgrounds, and possibly adding in animations...

Ohe day, I'll make a game of my own too....
Until next time,
Anna

Lucas Gets Some Competition

Not a ton has happened this week because of Victoria day and a doctor's appointment on wednesday this has been my only day in this week.  So, I want to express my excitement towards another workplace factor:

MORE INTERNS!

My blogs are going to be less lonely on the Intern Blog! I read all of their posts from last week and I have to say that I have some serious competition. They all draw so well! I don't think firework gifs will be enough to win the blog-battles anymore. 

Also, I only have two more weeks here...  Time really flies. On the subject, I'm going to spend the weekend doing work on the game. It's going to be done by next Friday! It's sort of bittersweet. 

On another side note, Mike intercepted me on my way in today and we had a really good chat about literature. Specifically Catcher in the Rye (Holden's such a phoney). I'm building up a summer reading list so he's going to send me some titles that have had an impact on him. I'm looking foreword to it.

Meet Carol Tang, SGS's #1 Fan!

Hi everyone, my name is Carol Tang who was lucky enough to be picked by smiley guys for my internship. I just want to let everyone know how happy and proud I feel to be working for smiley guy.

On my first week here I got to explore different ways to manipulate a puppet in flash thanks to the help of many great people of smiley guy, which led me to finish up two scenes for teleporting fat guy.

After working on teleporting fat guy helped me realize my love for symbol animation and opened up my eyes for the TV industry. Thanks to smiley guy, now I finally know what I enjoy and want to do after I graduate.

This is just an amazing studio with amazing people and I wish smiley guy the best and thank you for this wonderful experience. Hopefully I get to work here after I graduate :)

Welcome to Inna!

My name is Inna Testolini and I am one of three lucky Sheridan interns that joined SmileyGuy Studios for the summer of 2014. I am excited to work and learn from such an awesome studio crew. Everybody is so helpful and friendly here. Despite the fact that they are having interns all year around, they have all patience in the world to answer our newbie questions. Thank you guys so much for taking your time to help us learn and feel at home. 

I haven't had a chance to work in Flash before, we used Toonboom hand drawn animation for our 3rd year group film production. Watching all week tutorials and our awesome mentors' lectures and tips I finally started getting used to the program and I am much more comfortable with all the hot buttons/commands and that Flash "inception" idea of animating symbols within symbols within symbols:) also play once /frame by frame/sync buttons finally make more sense to me. Yeey, I am getting there!

While doing my research I bumped onto a cool Flash extension called Keyframe Caddy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKIhJlWidbM.

I installed it for both of my Flash versions(CS3,CS6) and I am very very happy about it, as it helps me with my lip sync animation a lot.  It's always cool to see the visuals!

In order to see how the main characters move and their expressions, I watched lots of episodes of Teleporting Fat Guy, the first show that we got to animate our first scene. So far my favorite episode is CHINESE MONSTER ATTACKS!(TFG#3) it was so cute:)

That would be it for now! have a great day everyone!

PS Some people were asking about my motherland:) it’s Siberia, the city of Irkutsk that is near Mongolia and famous Baikal lake. Here are some photos of it:

http://iliketowastemytime.com/2012/04/16/breathtaking-photos-of-frozen-lake-baikal-in-siberia-russia-23-pics

http://www.fotopedia.com/wiki/Lake_Baikal#!/items/picasaweb-5521382785969969938

Lake Baikal - the "Pearl of Siberia"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zd4PpVNyfRU

Baikal live ice drumming

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=en0p1Y35p3w

lol it's slightly colder then in Canada but all in all it's same, same bears, mooses and squirrels :))

Welcome to Anna!

Hi~ This is Anna, one of the interns from Sheridan.

This is my first week here at Smiley Guy.
I haven't been in a lot of internships, but honestly speaking, Smiley Guy has been the most fun and the most educational.

On my first day, I was nervous, excited and in all ways a noob to the industry. I can't say that I have the hang of it now, but I sort of have the hang of it now. You should have seen my Monday animation compared to my Friday animation. Just a week and it improved by so much!

Everyone here is really nice and they teach us patiently even when we're interrupting their work - which is all the time xD

Right now, we are animating scenes from the Smosh series, Teleporting Fat Guy. I can't wait to see my name in the credits xD

It's been a great week and I'm hoping to learn more.

But for now, I shall leave you with this picture~
Over and out~
Anna

Sheridan Interns 2014

Lucas Gives a Speech

So, this wednesday was the Northern Co-op breakfast. It was pretty cool to see what everyone had been doing for the last year. Mr Rowell had asked me to do a speech which was pretty cool. There were seven other people doing little speeches and we each got up and spoke for about a minute. I was asked to talk about how as opposed to waiting for the teachers to set up interviews last year, I went out and did the job search on my own. I think it went really well. I also got a certificate for speaking! It's fairly fancy. Julie got one as well for putting up with me the entire year. 

Otherwise, the week has been fairly uneventful. Work with the game is on track. I finished another book. I'm probably going to see Godzilla today. I'm looking foreword to that.

Lucas is Wrapping it Up

Hello people of the world! This week has been on the less-eventful side but nonetheless, everything is still in motion!

The game is almost done, just minor changes are being made now and I'm prepping for the final version! It's really cool to see all the work finally come together. I'm looking foreword to it.

Unfortunately, the short film that I was talking about last week will have to be postponed. My film-making friend and two of the actors are unable to put in the time due to exams so we'll be doing it during the summer. I am slightly disappointed because I'm a teenager and I crave immediate gratification but it's probably for the best. We'll end up not having to be so rushed and not confined to a small amount of time.

On a side note, I read "Of Mice and Men" and "the Catcher in the Rye" this week.

Still sleep deprived.

Lucas Continues to Shame Us All With His Energy

Ok, this week has been a busy one! I'm just going to go through the list of things that have been pulled together over the course of this week. Seems like the best way to do this.

1. Co-op: So, the write-ups for our final culminating projects were due this Wednesday. I'm pretty happy with mine. I of course, made a game. I borrowed a huge amount of the code from the work that I have done here at SGS so that cut down the time that I had to spend on it my a monumental amount. Despite that, it looks and plays completely different. I also had to do a powerpoint presentation to the class. I think that went really well too.

2. Writing: Last week when I finished my pilot episode, Julie sent me a link to withoutabox.com. It's basically a hub for film festivals. I was looking through the site to find a script-only festival but I was having difficulty finding one that had parameters that fit my pilot. However, I did find a bunch of student short film festivals. I figured... why not just write one of these? So I did. I have a good friend who is in the film program at Earl Haig (It's an arts school). He's going to help me shoot it. I am going to direct. And I'm also doing the casting this week (There are enough drama-geeks at my school would be up for it). We're going to film next weekend. It's only going to be about 5-7 minutes so the filming shouldn't be too laborious. I have however, started making a call sheet for the times that all the actors need to be there. Just so that we can manage the time well.

3. Reading: I know this is a bit off topic, but from tuesday till now, I have read two novels. I felt like mentioning it just because it's been quite intensive. My sister gave me "A Fault In Our Stars" by John Green. It was really good. I went out and got "Looking For Alaska" which is also by him on wednesday. That was really good as well. I need more sleep.