Artistic and Professional Goals

I have been thinking a lot lately-- especially since Stephen Silver gave his lecture at LCAD (and since Larissa has been my teacher, but she has worked with Stephen Silver so they basically have said the same things)-- about what I want to do with my life and specific goals I want to set for myself. I'm not super familiar with the entire animation process yet, but I think the way I am swinging is towards story. That's where it's always been for me really. I'm a writer. When I try to see myself in the future, I see myself writing, and that is how it has always been. But also stop motion, because the more I think about it, the more I like it, and the more I want to do it. I dunno if I'll be any good at fabricating puppets, but we'll see. Anyway, I've been thinking more and more how I can follow in the footsteps of professional entertainers and writers I most admire: Tina Fey, Doug Walker, Felicia Day. Even Jenna Marbles has been super inspirational to me these days. Mostly, I want to be in charge of my own future but also part of a production group and the production process. The most obvious thing to me feels like starting my own business or studio...or something. I've had it in the back of my mind for a long time now, but I felt like I should officially put it down on a list finally.
So here is my list of professional and artistic goals. I don't have a specific deadline in mind to achieve most of these things (although some do require me to do while I am in school). You never know, maybe I'll go travel around South America for awhile, or maybe a studio will want to hire me to work after I graduate. I wouldn't turn that down--it'd be a good opportunity to get to know how things are run. I don't mind starting at the bottom. These are just the eventually's I suppose.

-Get a story internship at Pixar (and if it can't be Pixar, then somewhere else.)
-Learn the stop motion trade
-Make a humorous and outrageous stop motion senior film--something that I could never do under another company
-Start an internet media/entertainment/youtube channel/company/studio thing
-Surround myself with competent and talented people
-Give animators the opportunity to develop their own short series
-Give filmmakers the opportunity to develop their own short series
-Develop my own short internet series. 1 animated and 1 live action. Write, produce, and star in both
-Become totally internet famous and inspire and entertain other people
-Optional: Get into the Nickelodeon Writing Fellowship. It's a long shot, but I'm still going to try.


Things to work on the get these places:
-Write often: keep at my blog, and also produce a few spec scripts. Also finish the unicorns novel
-Acting practice: Start an improv club
-Get LCAD to get a stop motion class
-Take a summer business course?
-Learn how to record and edit videos (get a video camera)
-Practice lots and lots of storyboards!! Storyboard sequences from my writings- both my blog (real life experiences) and my fictional stories. Also storyboard live action sequences that I enjoy. Storyboard anything! Just do it-- a lot.

Holy Cheese Balls I am animating

Finally!

Ok, so stuff from the first half of the semester in fundamentals of animation (minus a 5 frame in between test that really isn't worth uploading)

First, some boring but obligatory ball bounces.

And a lion tail

And last but not least the scene I have been working on for the last 3 weeks, the head turn. We were assigned to do a head turn of a classic Disney or Warner Bros character and have them do a take at the end (change of emotion). I chose Goofy because Goofy is a badass. I think the best compliment from my teacher was that this scene captured his character very well. Considering he has animated Goofy professionally, I feel pretty good about that. But oh the drag, how I struggled with the drag.

But it's been fun, overall. It's cool to finally finally finally be animating. FINALLY.

Loooook

at all my hard work!

My midterm for fundamentals of maya. We had to model a 3d character. I chose the cat from Coraline, because Coraline is awesome and I love the style of that film.

I spent so much time on this o.O; ...Like over 30 hours of time. Which is probably more than necessary because I basically only know how to add edge loops and move things around a whole lot.

Please ignore all mistakes!! I AM AWESOME, OK??

Actually I am just really glad this is over and done with and I am not going to touch it anymore because I can't stand it anymore.

Figure Drawings of Late

See?? I promised an update and here one is.

This is all the figure drawing I've done in the first half of my figure drawing for animators 1 class, with Larissa Marantz, who is awesome!

It's nice to actually be taught some new concepts. I can't say that I've produced any beautiful, stunning, portfolio-worthy drawings in the class but I have at least felt like I've made some improvement? Maybe?

The class so far has been following along The Vilppu Drawing Manual and Michael Hampton's Figure Drawing: Design and Invention.

All of these go in order of the class...I don't know how long most of these are...nothing was more than 5 minutes though.

Week 1

Week 2

Week 3

Week 4



Week 5...boxes...ugh I hated boxes.


Week 6

We started doing "sketches" in preparation for our 6 hour sketch crawl for our midterm. I did terrible drawing this day, but it was kind of fun because the model was given instructions to act like superman and and prince at a ball, and we had to imagine the costumes ourselves.

Then we focused on drapery and that was a drag :/

Maybe in the second half of the semester I will have more pretty drawings! I hope!

Bu-bu-bum-bum!!

My depiction of Fraser playing Rhythm Heaven on Video Games Awesome, an internet show about people sitting on their couch playing video games (ok, so it's more of a live stream thing)

Yes, this is what I do with my time. Watch other people playing video games and then draw them fan art. It's the best.

I promise one day I'll post real work (I have been doing stuff, I swear!) I've got some pretty animashuns to post, some hardcore maya modeling I've had to do, and uh, some boxes I drew in one point perspective. Yea, my classes are kind of unbalanced with their difficulty right now. I probably have a lot of figure drawings too. I'm finally in a figure drawing class for animation and it is THE BOMB. Someone is teaaachiiing meeee!!

IN THE MEANTIME,

I have been writing a new blog about my awesome life and doing a few quick drawings for it just as quick little doodle illustrations. It's nice to draw things without any pressure to make them amazing.

Click here to have your mind blown

Projects/things I want to do:

-Calvin and Hobbes fan comic

-Organic design/illustrations hearkening back to things I drew in high school. I realized how much I hate to design when I am worried about functionality all the time so it might be nice to loosen up and just have fun. I want to take my doodles--which are probably the most creative things I do right now--and make them real artworks.

-Hark a Vagrant style comics about Ancient Greece for my Western Civ class (this is the one most likely to happen since it is an actual project I will be graded on)

-Environment studies. I like drawing environments. Why don't I do it more often?

Someone asked me what my favorite thing was to draw the other day and I couldn't think of an answer....I don't know man. Does that make me a bad artist? (by bad I mean not dedicated enough)

In other news: This blog gets most of it's hits from people googling "rejected sheridan portfolio" Ha, that is kind of depressing.

To all those kiddos out there applying and getting rejected: it's not the end of the world. I promise. There are wonderful things waiting out there for you in the world. You just have to keep looking.

Comp and Color Digital Notebook

So for my final project in Comp and Color class we had to put together a digital notebook of all the work we did from the semester. Since it was the most challenging and most fun class I had, I thought I would post it for all the world to see.

We had to do a crash course in basic page design for this, and since I'm no designer, I went with something pretty simple.

Also, this isn't all the work. A lot of these we had to create many, many images. I included my favorites. Also also, some of these were in class exercises, which is why they are kind of crappy.

I would like to say thank god I had a digital comp and color class. I saw the traditional ones and they got to reproduce painting after painting after painting. It was much easier to learn the principles on a program like illustrator, rather than trying to mess with painting techniques and so on.

(In class exercise)

(In class exercise)

There were 12 of these we had to do...and answer all 6 questions for. It took foreveeeer.

(In class exercise)

(In class exercise...I've been meaning to redo this project because I had some cool ideas but was too limited by the time to pull them off the way I wanted. Also my tablet stopped working in this class.)

Dumpy dump dump dump

Oh yea! This blog. Forgot about this.

Well I didn't take any pictures of my longer pose figure drawings or of my three week still lives. But it's ok, you are really not missing out on anything spectacular.

Here is stuff I did last semester that I do have pictures of.

Here is an illustration based on one of my unfinished nanowrimo novels from last november that I never finished and probably never will.

Sculpture! 5 weeks. Ultimately earned me a B overall in the class when I had an A :( Had some trouble with the thicknesses and such.

Figure drawing final. Was supposed to take a photo of someone I knew and reproduce it in charcoal on 22x30 paper. 12 hours. Pretty pleased, for the most part.

Fanart I drew for skyward sword over break because I wanted Link and Zelda to kiss because they never do! D:

Fanart/illustration for The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness of the Chaos Walking series. Interesting books. I won't be able to finish the last one until I get my kindle replaced :(

Parody of a Calvin and Hobbes cover I started during finals week because I wanted to pretend my life was like Calvin and Hobbes instead of the miserable anti-social mess that it is.

"digital painting" of the open space by my house in Boulder for photoshop class.

The only picture I took of anything I did in my fundamentals of drawing class this semester. It was just a master copy for homework but I put in the 4 hours and I think it shows. This was about where I started to "get" charcoal. Finally.

Yep! Tune in next time for my entire notebook of work for comp and color class!