Tonight I'm Gonna Party Like It's......

....ten years ago? Oh well....

Happy New Years, Everybody!! ;)

Playing with My New Toy...

So as a belated Christmas gift to myself (and as sort of a reward for surviving a particularly challenging semester/year), I treated myself to a new digital drawing tablet this year!

Is it a Wacom?

No...it is not. However, I love it just the same. ;)

Unless, I would like to put a substancial dent into my "ATL Apartment" money, a Wacom (or at least one of any substantial size) is just not financially in my future at the moment. Seriously, in this recession....is it really in anybody's price range right now?

However, thanks to a little research and a holiday sale that is currently going on at Computer Geeks.com (and you know you want to check that out right over HERE ;) I got an amazingly good deal on a nice starter tablet.

I wound up settling for an 8x6'' Digipro Drawing Tablet, and while it doesn't contain all of the bells and whistles of a Wacom Tablet (or even the insanely soupped up new Apple Tablets that are about to debut in a few weeks), it does it's job.

For the cheap-ish price tag ($44), I have [so far] found the Digipro to be a nice alternative to the Wacom for beginning tablet users (such as myself) and starving artists on a tight budget.

The pad also boasts 512 levels of pen pressure. Even though this pales in comparison to the Wacom Intusos four's 2048 levels of pen pressure, you can still do a lot of cool things with the limited pen pressure. Honestly , if you know how to manuver your advanced brush settings in Photoshop (plus your flow and opacity levels) you can still stretch the Digipro's Pen a bit further than you may think for the price.

Ultimately, what made my descison to go cheaper was size. While I could have gotten a smaller Wacom Intuos (or even a Bamboo model) the only sizes that I could afford were ....well....teeny-tiny.

Since I really more space than a large index card to draw on (and didn't want to pay upwards of $300 for the privelege) I decided to take a gamble on a cheaper (but larger) model.

So far, I'm pretty happy and incredibly excited about my new pad.

It may not be all that fancy (and possibly a tad ghetto) , but it's totally functional and does what I need it to. That's good enough for me at the moment. ;)

Besides, there will always be plenty of time for an upgrade later. For my first tablet, I couldn't be more happy with my purchase. In fact , I'm practically dancing with excitement because the bottom line is that owning a tablet at all is going to open up my digital work so much. This little tablet could just be what the doctor ordered to get me out of this end-of-year creative rut I've started to get into lately.

Speaking of the tablet, the above two images are a couple of 'test sketches' that I did with the Digi pro while test driving it. I must say, it feels really liberating to just.....um....skribble! ;)

Needless to say -- I've been having a lot of fun playing with my new toy *ahem* ;)

Merry Christmas!

From "Out the Other Side" and from the bottom of my heart -- I just wanted to quickly wish everyone a very happy (and safe) Christmas!

I also wanted to thank all of you, the readers of this blog, once again for all of your love and continued support. Since launching this blog in April, I have been very blessed to have many of you leave encouraging comments and share your own amazing work with me. For that, I continue to be inspired and incredibly grateful .

Thank you guys for taking this ride with me. It's honestly the greatest Christmas present that I could ever ask for. I cannot wait to bring a lot more cool things in the new year (not only to this blog but also on the upcomming "Out the Other Side [dot] com" official site ... still in progress ;).

Without further ado -- here are The Waitresses with one my all time favorite Christmas songs, "Christmas Wrapping"! ;)

Original Motion Content : "Buggin'"

The above piece is not only my latest creation but it is also a little exercise in creative restraint (believe it or not).

"Buggin'", while still as wildly experimental and colorful as some of my past pieces, is an exercise in restraint because I am continuing to work hard at containing my motion art to a minute or less.

Picking up the pace has certainly presented itself with it's own set of challenges, but ultimately, I am more satisfied with this end result than I was with "Memories". This should have been a no-brainer to me before, but an average person's attention span is not particuarlly accomodating to long, lingering, dream like motion epics. In an age where commercials and televison are full of quick camera edits and lots of breakneck action, anything much longer than 30 seconds is just going to get boring. Period.

As discussed in the previous post, pacing in motion work is a skill that I need to work on (well....that is if I don't want to unintentionally put my whole audience to sleep. ;)

Now that I've started to become more confortable with cramming more visual information into a smaller time frame, my next big challenge is to tell more of a visual story in a shorter time. While this particular piece is flashy and was a blast to work on, I still think that it's lacking a good bit in the narrative department.

However, even if "Buggin'" bears no real story line and is possibly still a hair too long, it think that giving myself time restrictions was ultimately a very positive thing. I certainly intend on further working on pacing and the length of my pieces and I cannot wait to share the results of said experiments soon on "Out the Other Side". ;)

That's about it for now. However, before I wrap this post up, I wanted to share with you guys a little of what inspired the style and color pallet of "Buggin'".

The following music video is entitled "Y a Dez Zazous" . It is by French avant garde legend, Brigitte Fontaine and the very funky multi-instrumentalist, Mathieu Chedid (aka "M").

Chedid has become something of a musical obsession of mine lately (and he will be discussed at length in a later post;)

In any case, as kitchy and strange as this clip is, I found it to be delightfully bright and graphical. I think it was a nice reminder for me of how employing simple, graphical elements into a motion piece in the right ways can lend it's own sense of depth and sophistocation to a piece. Lets check it out, shall we? ;)

Original Motion Content -- "Memories and Hallucinations"

Finals are finally done for the semester and I (due to an unexpected east coast blizzard) am currently snowed in on campus until tomorrow. What a perfect time to take a little nostalgic look back into my artistic past.

Sit down in your coziest chair, grab a warm tasty beverage, and check out the long belated debut of "Memories and Hallucinations":



Regular readers of this blog will most likely notice that I've talked a pretty good game about this one already. As a matter of fact, this piece was the subject of the very first post here on "Out the Other Side" (which you can check out HERE. ;)

"Memories and Hallucinations" (with it's surreal Mark Isham soundtrack) has been regarded as 'epic' by some and 'far too long' by others.

Honestly, I agree with both of these assessments. It's an incredibly long and somewhat surreal display of digital excess. I'm not blind at all to this fact.

It also doesn't exactly host a concrete narrative. In a world were 10 and 30 second commercial clips are the norm, this is just crazily long. It's easy to get lost in in and it's easy to get bored by it, unfortunately.

I believe that since this piece took me so long and was such a labor of love (I even drew and digitally manipulated every stitch of this by hand), that it has taken me a long time to come to grips with the fact that this is simply not as successful as some of my other work. It really is my baby and I suppose that it's hard to admit that your baby totally sucks. ;)

However, one thing that working on this piece has taught me is that just because you labor over something and devote large chunks of time to a piece....that doesn't automaticly equal creative success.

That's kind of a hard pill to swallow, but hindsight is 20/20, I guess. ;)

On the plus side , despite the excessivly long length and quasi-dream like feel, this is still a piece that I can still look back on as a success -- of sorts.

In the end, this was a big technical exercise for me and even if I went overboard with the length and the neverending visuals, I definately learned a lot within the process. Working on this piece (which took nearly 4 months to complete) taught me a lot in terms of the more technical aspects of of creating motion art with After Effects and Illustrator.

I believe very firmly that there is no better way to learn and to grow in your knowlege of Adobe suite programs (or anything, really) than to just imerse yourself and play. Nothing builds your technical ability and know-how faster than just digging into the programs, combining different settings and effects and seeing what you get.

This , of course, is assuming that you have unlimited time to do such a thing. Who the hell has that these days? ;)

Thankfully, the next few weeks will allow me some time finally sit down and just create art without expectations, immediate deadlines, or mandatory critiques. I'm hoping that despite the fact that I will have 'no limits' that I will create work (both motion and illustration) that are punchier and much more accessible but still contain my DNA.

A Christmas without artistic limits? What better present could you ask for? ;)

A Hiatus, the Good News and the Not So Good....

Well , it's officially crunch time folks and it's looking like any new "Out the Other Side" content will have to go on the back burner for a little bit. With final exams coming up for me on Monday, I felt that this would be as good a time as any to take a small hiatus from blogging so I can concentrate on final exam preparation fun-ness. Oh yay! ;)

However, before I close up shop for a little bit, I do have a few huge updates to share with you guys.

This has been a huge week for me and for "Out the Other Side". To say that it's been kind of a surreal whirlwind is a pretty gross understatement. For one thing, I am am still hard at work putting together the epic that is "Out the Other Side {dot} com". It's been an ambitious project and a lot of sweat and hard work have gone into putting it together. However, I'm really proud of the end result so far and cannot wait to go live with the official site sometime soon-ish.

Having said that, I am not making any promises about the official launch date as of yet. I would ideally like to have the site up and running before the new year. We'll have to see how things look after I get done with finals and assess the amount of work that's still needs to be done. Stay tuned for more on all that later. :)

Meanwhile, this week in particular has brought with it an amazing opportunity, a little bit of unexpected drama (that I'd actually rather not get into here) and possibly some unfortunate news for yours truly.

However -- first the good stuff. As of Monday, I found out that I officially have an interview with Primal Screen in Atlanta Georgia. Primal Screen is a multi-platform design firm that creates animation, dynamic interactive media and motion graphics (among many other amazing things) for the likes of Nickelodeon, PBS Go, Sprout, the Sundance Channel and others.

Oh yeah....this is pretty huge stuff! I cannot tell you how excited I am about landing this opportunity and I look forward to having the guys at Primal Screen look over my stuff and (at the very least) give me some constructive feedback on my current body of work. I can't wait!

Now for the not so fun part. If I am selected for this internship, the only time that they can take me is the summer. The sad bottom line for me is that this will cause me to graduate later than expected and leaves me with 6 months between now and June that I will technically not be doing much of anything with myself due to the fact that I have already satisfied every other requirement for my undergraduate degree program.

Six months of inactivity while waiting on an internship is just not going to be great for my creative juices (or my sanity).

I'm already pretty upset over this sudden change of plans and that I will now have to wait until summer to graduate. I was banking on having my degree by May. I really had my heart set on promptly moving on to a stage in my life that wasn't so directly governed by class schedules and academic advisors. More than that, I'm scrambling to try and figure out what the next 6 months are going to have in store for me. Honestly, I am strongly considering registering for one last semester at my university and just biding my time working my day jobs, saving money, going to class and taking freelance gigs when I can.

At least that way, I won't suddenly find myself being grossly unproductive and unemployed for 6 months. I'm painfully aware that the economy is still pretty lousy right now and frankly, I'm skeptical as to weather I will find even a grunt job within 6 months with no degree.

However, I currently hold down two day jobs at school. In a way, if I'm going to be stuck somewhere....wouldn't it be nice to be "stuck" somewhere were I can still earn some green in the meantime?

As much as I want to try and put a positive spin on the possibly delayed graduation, it's still a little sad for me that sucking it up for one more semester may be the best option both financially and logistically for me at this time.

However, I'm not sure if you guys got the memo, but I'm kind of a workaholic. That may actually be an understatement in my case. ;)

In other words, 6 months with nothing to do would pretty much kill me. I could always try to chance it and try to get something off the ground in my (very small) hometown for those six months. However, the chances of me finding a job are far worst there than if I were to stick close to the university. Then there would be the gross lack of fellow creatives to interact with and creatively stimulating fun to be had. Not fun at all, kids:/

The bottom line is that if staying in school for a little while longer is the only way that I can get to Primal Screen and get a real shot at my dream (without loosing my damn mind in the process), then that's a personal sacrifice that I am willing to make. What's a few more months in school just to keep my sanity intact compared to a chance at a dream job? The choice seems pretty clear cut to me. ;)

Is this situation ideal? It is if it will help me get an opportunity to really reach my full potential and and really make something of myself. I've come too far and have worked too hard already to not move heaven and earth to make this work somehow.

I realize that life is all about sacrifices and trade-offs. Sometimes you have to be uncomfortable for a while to get to those opportunities that will (hopefully) ensure that you will be living much more conformably in the future. The cool thing about sacrifice, though, is that when you finally struggle for so long ....the prize at the end of the rainbow is just that much more sweet. Following your passions, I feel, is well worth any struggle. Isn't that what being a "starving artist" is all about? ;)

A chance to intern/work at Primal Screen is definitely worth any discomfort that I may have to go through in the meantime. It's a dream gig and I'm certainly not too far gone to recognize that those dream gigs are more than worth fighting for. It's not like they come around everyday. :)

In any case, despite my disappointment over suddenly extending my college stay way longer than I originally intended to, I am truly more trilled and grateful about the interview (and possible internship) than disappointed. This is still a huge opportunity and I would be a complete idiot to not jump through whatever hoops I needed to to make sure that I give myself a fair shot at landing an internship with an amazing design company that could really catapult me way past being just another 'starving artist'.

Wish me luck and we shall see in the coming months if this all ultimately pans out in my favor. I sure hope that it does. ;)

Meanwhile, check out Primal Screen's site HERE and get excited. I know that I sure am! :)