"Those Imaginary Miles": Photos / Fotos

Hi. Here are the pictures I promised:

Hola!  Aquí están las fotos que prometí:

Here you can see my workstation cluttered with papers. The sketches of the ideas I come up with at the bottom, the writing that we're using to make the animation, and my iPod connected to get my music fix while I work. :)

Aquí pueden ver mi área de trabajo cubierta por papeles.  Los dibujos de las ideas que se me han ocurrido están al fondo; arriba, el escrito en el que estamos basando la animación, y a la izquierda, mi iPod conectado para brindarme una dosis de música mientras trabajo. :)

A closer look to one page of my sketches / rough storyboard. Note: the content shown might or might not appear in the final animation, since we're still in pre-production.

Un vistazo más de cerca de una página de mis dibujos / secuencia. Nota: el contenido mostrado puede o no aparecer en la animación final, ya que aún estamos en pre-producción.

Side Project: "Those Imaginary Miles"

Hi again.

I'm currently working in a collaborative project with my friends/classmates Eric Spivey and Navdeep Singh. Our professor Christoph Simon approached us and told us Mr. Harrison Key wanted to have some experimental animation for one of his writings. How experimental is it going to be is still to be decided. The voice recording was handed to us yesterday and we're working into coming up for ideas, and then tomorrow in class we're going to study them, decide what works best where, and link our versions together.

I was going to take a picture of what I'm doing right now so you have an idea of how do I approach animations before animating, but I just remembered a friend of mine has my camera... Oops! Guess I'll just post that later when I get it back.

-----///------

Hola otra vez.

Ahora mismo estoy trabajando en un proyecto en colaboración con mis amigos/compañeros de clase Eric Spivey y Navdeep Singh. Nuestro profesor Christoph Simon nos hizo un acercamiento y nos contó que el Sr. Harrison Key quería hacer un vídeo de uno de sus escritos y acompañarlo con animación experimental. Cuán experimental será, aún está por verse. Recibimos la grabación de voz ayer y estamos trabajando individualmente en trabajar nuestras ideas para mañana en clase estudiarlas en conjunto, decidir qué funciona mejor dónde, y conectar nuestras versiones en una.

Le iba a tomar una foto a lo que estoy haciendo ahora mismo, para que tengas una idea de cómo trabajo antes de las animar, pero me acordé de que le presté mi cámara a un amigo... ¡Ups! Supongo que subiré la foto entonces cuando me devuelva la cámara.

To tell you a little but not all... / Para contarte parte, pero no todo...

Hi! Thanks for visiting my blog!

As for an introduction, I'll give you the past, present and future of the matter:

The Past:

Before locking into one idea for my thesis, I had a few prospective ideas that almost made it: "Screwed", "The Waiting Room" and "Cayendo" (Falling):

-"Screwed" was going to be a musical, but I wasn't completely satisfied with the story. It had a few funny moments, but ended somewhat sad. So then I switched to...

-"The Waiting Room", which I felt at the moment that was going to be it. I had a lot of playing ground with this idea. I started writing the script, and then I got overwhelmed. I had 7 pages of dialogues and I was just introducing characters. So I talked myself out if this idea, thinking: It's a great idea, but to do it the way I would like to do it, I'd probably need to make a feature film or a half-hour animation. So summer showed up, as usual life inspired me to...

-"Cayendo", a song I partially wrote about how I felt by the end of summer. Should I be more specific? Maybe. Well, it was about how I felt after a girl made me feel great and all of a sudden, insecure. She basically disappeared from one day to another, so I didn't know exactly what happened at the time, since she didn't tell me until a week later. Meanwhile I was driving myself crazy, thinking what did I do wrong? Anyway, I started thinking about the previous relationships I've had and what has happened here and there, so I came up with a conclusion...

-"Todas las mujeres están locas" (All The Women Are Crazy). I know, this is debatable, but let's say it's a humorous way of saying women are different from us men. We're just built different, we think different, and it doesn't matter how hard we try, we will never understand each other to a 100% completion. So starting at 12:45am from September 21, 2009, with my guitar on my lap, I wrote/composed this song.

A funny anecdote I have about the topic: The next day, I approached one of my professors (Whose name I'll keep undisclosed) and asked him about this new idea I had. I told him about my concern: that I didn't want to offend anybody, that it was based on my experiences and I just wanted to be comedic about it. In summary, I don't want feminist organizations rioting next to my window, since the purpose was never to offend. My professor liked the idea, and told me to go with it. Not only that, but he told me "It's true, they're all crazy. And you should do this because you'd be speaking for all the rest of us males out there. Of course, you can do something like this, because you're Latin, and Latin people already have some sort of reputation of feeling strong about this."

Just to clear things out: I know that sadly there's still a lot of inequality out there based in gender and what-not. So even though Hispanic people tend to be affiliated with machismo, I am not. I believe both men and women should have the same opportunities. Gender doesn't make anyone better than the other. We're different, but we should be treated equally. Respect! :)

So I locked into "Todas las mujeres están locas". I feel quite happy with this animation in the making, since it combines my three passions: animation, music and humor. I started storyboarding, made a small animatic for the introduction of the story. During December 2009-January 2010, I recorded the song with a little help from my friends (Just to throw a Beatles reference here). It wasn't really a little help. They were very helpful, specially my friend Javi Morales, who put all his recording studio expertise into function and made the song sound like something you could listen in the radio.

In January 1st of 2010, at 9:08pm, "Todas las mujeres están locas", the song, was taken out of the oven.

During the Winter quarter, classes had me so busy, that I couldn't work on my thesis, until now.

The Present:

I'm back and working on my thesis now! I've been selecting the best clips we recorded for the dialogues, and making some dialogues to give a little of ambient to the initial scene. Besides that, I listened to the song a few times and made a lyrics / music breakdown. Now, I'm working on a revamped version of the storyboard, including new ideas, trying different things related to perspective. I'm doing everything in Flash, to create an animatic and get an idea of the timing, see what works and what doesn't, and how everything falls into place.

The Future:

That's what you'll be reading / seeing in the upcoming posts.

Thanks for reading! :)

-Joz