Cooking

Ever since I was 14 I had been going to school full time and working part time or visa-verse.  A whole decade!  Now I'm in the working world and it's a lot different than I thought it would be.  I found myself wondering, "Why didn't anybody tell me about this?  Why aren't there more movies focused on this turning point?"  You'd think it would have enough of an impact to inspire someone to want to touch on.  Then I remembered The Graduate (while floating in a pool, all by myself, no less).  Cue Simon and Garfunkel...

I first saw that movie when I was about 20 and I didn't get all the hype.  Years later I was re-living the 1st act (excluding the Mrs. Robinson equivalent).  I'd spent all my time studying and working towards something... then I got there and the world just opened up in all directions.  It's the opposite of a dead end.  Where to next?

After school, so long as you do your job and cover your living expenses, there is nothing else required of you.  It's a scary thought. If I wanted to sit around in my underwear, eat cereal, and watch cartoons all evening when I get home from work, there is absolutely nothing stopping me.

I feel The Graduate captures the dilemma really well.  That's right, the cereal/underwear/cartoon dilemma.  I would argue the graduate's lack of direction being remedied by a love interest is a bit of a cop-out.  "Surely, there's plenty of other thing to life than finding that other person" I told my single self.  You might be asking what this has to do with cooking.  Well, it's one of my alternatives to the love story fix-all solution.

I'm living on a budget and I have a lot of time, so learning to cook seemed like an appropriate choice.  Here's a few things the most recent additions to my food repertoire that turned out well.  That is, they were pleasing to the eye, and my belly.

Pancakes: Surprisingly easy to make from scratch, and inexplicably better tasting than the mixes

Pizza: Very easy to experiment and improvise.  For some reason, simpler to mix than the pancakes.

Also it gives me another thing to put hot sauce and ranch on.

Food photography has been a topic of conversation at work lately.  These photos are far from great food photography, but it is getting me to analyze the image differently and form better habits.

A majority of the other food I make isn't photographed because it still looks like the globs of food Calvin was forced to eat in Calvin and Hobbes.  Hopefully I will have better food, and photography of said food in the months to come.

Avner and Stevie

At Ringling it seems your film becomes your identity.  I imagine it works similarly in other film/animation-based art school programs.  Frequently, when talking about graduates, someone would ask, "Wait, who was that?" and you'd get, "You know, they made [such-n-such] film," and that would suffice.   Now that I'm in the industry people will often tell me about someone they work with and supplement their story with, "You know that short with the [noun] that [verb]s?  That was them!"

We put so much of ourselves into our films.  I wanted to show that by having everyone in my class reenact a fragment of their thesis.  I called it The Visual Credits and we played it at the senior show last year.    If you're friends with me on facebook you can watch the 3 minute clip-show in my videos, but for the sake of my classmates privacy I'm not sharing it here.


What I did want to share is a photo shoot I did with my two friends, Avner and Stevie after filming their segment for The Visual Credits.  I will assume you have given your eyeballs the privilage of seeing their senior thesis, Defective Detective. 

Well, here's the two behind it:

And a little behind-the-scenes Stevie snapped of yours truly.  In case you were wondering where that red light on Avner was coming from, if you look closely behind me...

Of course, what kind of friend would I be if I didn't share this gem of Stevie?  :}

It's hard for me refrain from getting sentimental and sharing more about these two.  They were amongst my closest friends at Ringling.  We were often classmates, and they were constantly setting the bar higher than I'd ever seen it before.  We were first-hand witnesses to each others struggles and triumphs throughout college- both of which were frequent, substantial and numerous.  When you wonder if someone understands you better than you understand yourself, that's when you know you've got a real friend.  It's a rare thing for me, at least, and that's why I feel so privileged to know Avner and Stevie.

Old Photography Assignments

I took a two photography classes while I was at Ringling and I must say they had quite the impact on me. A majority of the lighting knowledge that I use at work I owe to getting away from the computer and going hands on with a camera (and maybe some strobe lights too).

I took some pictures that I'm pretty happy with as well, however, for whatever reason, they slipped through the cracks of this blog.  So I decided to dig into the archives and share some of my old assignments.

My sophomore year, advertising and still life class:

This was taken in class with the assistance of Athena Torri.

It was a great opportunity to work with such a talented photographer.

For the final I chose to arrange and photograph still lives in the style of renaissance paintings

A few from my location lighting class, my senior year:

   

And lastly a couple of my friend Curtis, for whom a bad photo does not exist:

The class was my first time dabbling in portraiture.  I really enjoy it and I know I have a lot of room to grow.  In the future I hope to find more opportunities to work with very photogenic people.

"origins" Senior Thesis Now Online

origins from Robert Showalter on Vimeo.

Summer 2010

I've been doing a lot of thinking...
...but not a lot of doing.
Sometimes your only option is to sit back and reflect.

I'm interning at Disney this summer. I've learned a lot from being here as well as from the process of getting here. Probably more about myself and life in general than art itself.

Thesis has been on my mind as well,
but it hasn't gotten much further than that.

This guy is more real to me than you could possibly imagine.

Making it through November

[Dec 2011 Edit: Removed Concept III animatics; Added LWF Tutorial; Re-linked Push Pull animation]

Juniors had a pretty rough deadline, our Push Pull animation being due on the same day as our 1 minute animatic and our drama digital painting due a day later. We made it though!

It was really tough, 4 days before Push Pull was due I had just finished wrestling with all my renderman problems and my lighting was still crappy, the animation wasn't in spline yet and I knew I was going to have to invest a lot of time into concept over the weekend (at least 12 work hours). Luckily, things started to make sense when I found I could duplicate the shaders on my referenced objects and reapply them so they were in my lighting file and they wouldn't be overridden by upstream changes on my rig. That way I could bring my lighting and texturing up together without jumping around in files. I also got my feet wet with Nuke, which was the first time I really dug into composting a project. It turned out to really help my workflow- It allowed me to see it as a whole and decide what needed work both in lighting and texturing, but also in regards to animation (something became apparent that just weren't visible in a playblast and other things turn out to be not as big of a deal). Still a few things I'd like to do before adding it to the reel.

I should also mention this is the first time I've rendered Linearly and it really worked the way it should and allowed me to get much further along with my textures and light than I would have otherwise. I'm presently working on a tutorial.

Here's a 15 minute LWF How To for rendering Linearly and outputting to an 8-bit format.

Enough talk, we're going to have to go through all these deadlines one more time before the semester's up.

Push/Pull


Until next month...

September Dump - Click to Play

[Dec 2011 Edit: Removed Concept III work; Re-linked CA Projects]

Silhouette project - Click to Play
My emotions: Cheerful -> Confused -> Gloomy

Waiting with an object - Click to Play


Push Pull Character Design - Click to embiggen


This year's been very fruitful, I feel like I've come a long way and grown a lot. Particularly in concept, while my drawings can still use work and my staging might not always be the best I know there's no way I could have managed to keep up with this last year- A 15 second animatic over the course of a month or so made me really consider if I wanted to be here at Ringling. Now I'm about to finish up a 45 second animatic in 2 weeks and I'm having a long of fun with it. It's very gratifying to put an idea in motion so other people can actually see what you're thinking- it's hard to describe, but it's what brought me to animation.

I am still struggling a lot with Drawing For Animation. It's very difficult for me to invest myself in something that isn't yielding very satisfying results. On the bright side, I think my Push Pull character is the first character I've ever created that I really like. I can't wait to get him in Maya and get some textures on him. So, I can't say I'm at a total loss with DFA. My hope is that I can get to the point that I draw without feeling embarrassed by my drawings. I don't want to be drawing just to get by DFA, concept and prepro, I want to enjoy it like I enjoy animatics and story and just about every aspect of computer animation.