New Jobs, New Songs

I am pleased as punch to announce my retirement from joblessness! In January, I started work at Sony Computer Entertainment, doing facial animation on games for Playstation 3. That's right- a real life, gettin' payed to animate, actual job, job! I realize that the announcement comes a little late, but, you know, I've been busy. Working.

That being said, I actually had some time off a few weeks ago and I had the opportunity to play around with some music that had been floating around in my brain. Every once in a while a melody or a riff will pop into my head and I won't have anything to do with it. Most often I'll sing it into my phone and record a message for myself in hopes that some day I'll have some time to actually get onto my computer and do something more with it. Well, that time came a few weeks ago. I had six songs to do, and my plan was to just get them off of my phone for when it goes to phoney heaven, which will probably be soon. I got through the first five quick enough, but when I got to the last one I got a little carried away and just couldn't stop. And now, as far as I can tell, it's a finished song. So in honor of my new job (and the Spring Break it provided me) I'd like to present to you Phone Song Six.

Phone Song Six by Wheres Boo?

I realized after the song was done that it sounds an awful lot like a song I made a long time ago called Frogs of Industry. So if you want, you can call this one Frogs of Technology. Seems like a logical progression.

Miscelaneousness

Some exciting changes are coming up and I'll be posting the news soon but before I get to that I wanted to put up some recent artwork before it gets lost in the shuffle.

The first is a t-shirt design that I did for my sister when she interned for a non-profit that helps homeless families. Their slogan was "Every family deserves a home."




And this is a design for a tea tin that I made her for Christmas. They're tea birds. Get it?




My other sister wanted a recipe box for Christmas so I designed this one for her. Please excuse the crop marks...



This is the back.



And last but not least, a little bit of Grove. Meet Rocco the possum. This isn't actually a finished picture because I decided that I wasn't quite happy with the character design. However I do like the drawing enough to post it. So just pretend that there's a Grover walking past him, carrying a tall pile of fruits and Rocco is helping himself to one (which isn't really in his personality, adding another reason to not finish the picture.)

The Conscientious Jogger

For the last month or so I've been working on some animation. The Grove has been a fun adveture, but it's such a long-term project and at the state that it's in right now it doesn't do much for my job situation. After many months of rejections and closed doors I realized that it was time to get out of the Grove and update (and hopefully upgrade) my reel to give myself a better chance at actually getting a job. I decided to just scrap my old reel entirely and create a short film that showcased my animation skills, and hopefully told an amuzing, memorable story; something that would say "Hire me." The result is The Conscientious Jogger.

The Conscientious Jogger from Jacob Cementina on Vimeo.

The Window

Yesterday I read a peom that was written by a long time family friend and I was immediately inspired by it visually. Then, for whatever reason, I didn't draw an illustation for it, but instead illustrated it with another poem.
The original poem was written by Tim Blair, and can be found here.


The Window
(For T)

At the country farmhouse of my youth
There was a window nestled in the gable
And to the dusty attic I would climb
To view the tree that grew beside the stable.

The noble oak had always stood for truth;
For when my father’s father bought this land
Its tempered roots had long been steeped in time
And so for age and honor it would stand.

The farm was thus established by the tree,
Foundations laid around the roots and leaves.
The tree would shade the house’s Western face
And greet the window underneath the eaves.

My father’s father often came to see
The view from up among the branch’s reach.
This attic window came to be a place
For him to learn and for the tree to teach.

And as the leaves turned gold, and back to green
Old age and certain wisdom came with time.
And soon he kept a cotton cloth upstairs
to rid his view of country dust and grime.

Throughout the years retreat became routine,
Routine became tradition passed to kin.
The faithful cloth was given to his heir,
Who, soon enough, would pass it down again.

So in this way I learned to love the tree
And grew up gazing through a dingy pane
Because I wiped the window with the cotton
but never questioned why the filth remained.

Then came the day that I began to see
The dirty cloth itself hindered my view.
So with the vision lost but not forgotten
I thanked my father, and his father too
Then slid the window open and crawled through.

From verdant murk emerged a smirking turtle

In the Huntington Library's Chinese Garden there is a giant, green pond. Over the pond is a bridge called The Bridge of the Verdant Mist. And in the pond there is a turtle.

Jenette and I visited the Gardens over the weekend. It was really, really hot. My deoderant melted in my backpack. But that's another story.

Bla bla bla ART!

I felt bad about all the spewing on the last post so here's some more art. A while back I studied some movies to get ideas for the Grover's eyes. These are from Chicken Little and Finding Nemo. They're really just modeling notes for myself and I wasn't planning on posting them but I guess it's all part of the proccess and that's interesting too, right? So here you go.



My main concern was whether or not I could get enough expression out of the characters without giving them eyebrows. None of the fish in Nemo have actual eyebrows and they all have extrememly expressive faces so I think I'll be able to pull it off.

Late Night Epiphany

I think I mentioned earlier that The Grove has gone through some rewrites, but I'm not sure if I mentioned that my biggest concern right now is that the changes I made in order to better explain things actually made the story a more complicated. It kind of sounds like I'm moving backwards, but let me just say that if I can get this stuff to work then the film will be way cooler than it was before.

That being said, I've come to realize that in order for the film to succeed it needs to be really attractive visually. I've noticed that there are films that LOOK really cool and because they're so interesting to look at you watch the whole thing. And then when the film is over you say "Wow. That was really cool. And really pointless." Kind of like living wallpaper, right?

And there are also films that have really great stories and could be really memorable, except that they looked so bad that you couldn't take them seriously and you gave up after the first however many minutes/seconds/whatever. I'm not saying that The Grove is one of those films, but I can say that it has the potential to be if I don't step it up visually. The problem is that the whole first half is extrememly dependant on plants and pay-offs, that is, a whole bunch of seemingly random things happen and you don't learn what they are until later on and then you say "Oh, THAT'S what that was. I get it!" I love when that happens in movies and it makes me really excited that this film has the potential to do that too. But the only way to keep the audience invested with all this random nonsense going on is by making the things that they're watching look REALLY good. I really want people to say "I have no idea what's going on but it doesn't bother me yet." The "yet" is the key because I don't necessarily want to attract an audience that is into watching wallpaper. Maybe I should say that I want people to think "I hope this is going somwhere because I'm enjoying watching it but I don't want to be disappointed by it when it's over."

So, I know what you're saying now. You're saying "But Jacob, a bad story will always be a bad story, no matter how cool it looks, and you can't hide your story flaws behind flashy visuals." I couldn't agree more. BUT you can't deny the power of a hook. After all, "The hooooook brings you baaaaaaaaaaaaack" (Blues Traveler, people. Come on.) And in general the hook should be your story. But since my story is so slow to get going, I need another hook to get people to the story. What do you call those things that attract the fish? The little rubber things that flop around in the water and the fish think it's food and they bite it and get the hook along with it and then get pulled out of the water and get their skin peeled back and their heads chopped off? Tackle? No, a lure? I'm not a fisher, obviously. Anyway, I need that. Really, I feel like I need that in all my art, but that's another seemingly endless rant. SHEESH. Anyway...

All that nonsense is to say that last night as I was falling asleep I had an image flash into my mind of Grovers that looked better than any I had come up with in all my color tests and the thing that was different was that they didn't look like Fruit Loops. They had more of an edge. And I think if I could base the overall palette of The Grove more on these sort of colors it would have more of the appeal that I'm looking for.

Bla bla bla, bla BLA bla bla.


So here it is. The top row is the set that I had decided on before, the middle row is the set from my dream, and the bottom row is that same set but with the contrast narrowed down just a bit to bring them closer together.