Jimmy

It’s 2am and sleep is not really in sight. Well, sort of, but iTunes e-mailed me and told me that my pre-order of Green Day’s new album 21st Century Breakdown was available for download and I just started listening to it and damn it’s good and who stops listening to such a good album in the middle? You’ve got to hear it through all at once to fully take it in, and so I’m left with needing to find something to do for the next 1.2 hours. (OK, since doing the math tells me that that takes me ’til 3:30am maybe I will have to cut it short mid-album. But we’ll decide that later.)

Anyway. Final exams are over and I’m pretty sure I failed at least two of them, and quite possibly both the classes that said finals were in. But I don’t really care. I got a much better grade than I was expecting in another class, so that’s awesome.

So I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with my summer. Because sleeping 12 hours well into the afternoon is awesome for only one or two days. So that was today, and now it’s time to move on to bigger and better things (hopefully things that don’t entail sleeping quite so much of the day away). I’ve been feeling for a while that I’d like to focus more on teaching myself more about filmmaking, from actual camera-work and stuff to editing (I loooove editing, but I don’t feel like I know Premiere Pro nearly as well as I could) and post-production stuff (After Effects, anyone?), so that’s something to do with the summer, but then the question becomes what kind of structure to put it in? E.g. what kind of raw video footage do I use for my editing adventures? old family vacation footage, or shoot new footage? If so, what?

Those are the questions.

Enter the awesome web video series that I found yesterday called The Guild created by the awesome Felicia Day (Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog, anyone? She was in that). While watching all 24 6-8 minutes episodes of this little web video that won three awards at the Streamy Awards, I got to thinking: what about spending the summer creating little web video episodes? Obviously this brings up as many (or more) question than it answers, but at least we’re going in the direction of making progress on the question of what the shrack to do this summer. And to help answer some of those questions, we find that not only does Felicia have a blog, she’s currently posting on how to do a web series and make it work. One begins to wonder if this is some sort of sign.

(Click “read more” to read more of my middle-of-the-night rambles.)
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I posted a still image of my almost finished 3D puppet a few weeks ago, but here now is a short animation of the final puppet.

I’ll admit that I can’t take credit for modeling the fire; one of my classmates did that for me.

3D puppet from Jimmy Bouma-Holtrop on Vimeo.

This was my second and final project of this semester in 3D Character Design class. I’ve had a blast in this course this semester, and I hope you’ve enjoyed the few posts I’ve made on it. I’m continuing my 3D modeling/animation coursework in the fall, so look for more posts starting in September.

Meanwhile, as this semester is just about over (last week of classes just ended, now it’s just 4 days of finals next week) I hope to be able to devote a little more time to blogging again and hopefully post more often than once every 1 or 2 weeks. I’m not 100% sure I’ll have more blogging time, but I’m gonna try.

Cheers.

-j

I posted a still image of the model way back in February, but here finally is the actual animation. For some reason the sound didn’t convert, but if you just imagine the sound of a wind-up toy while you’re watching it’ll all be good.

3D Wind-Up Toy Animation from Jimmy Bouma-Holtrop on Vimeo.

Cheers.

-j