Tak and Jeannie's cake topper

Newest cake topper for my friends Takeshi and Jeannie. ^_^

Sketch:

Sculpt:

Painted and sealed:

Nintendo Charity Gallery Submission - HarmoKnight: Tappy

"Tappy"
Edric Yamamoto, 2014
Magicsculp, acrylic paint

This year I was lucky enough to get selected to submit a piece for the SHM Charity committee's Nintendo gallery.  Proceeds from the gallery auction will go to the Morgan Autism Center, an organization devoted to helping autistic individuals. You can find more information about Morgan Autism Center here: http://www.morgancenter.org/

Each artist was assigned either a character from a game or a game where we were free to choose any character from.  I was given the latter, in the form of a rhythm game called HarmoKnight from the makers of Pokemon.

Having never heard of the game, I did a fair bit of research and the main protagonist of the story just seemed a little vanilla.  However, the bunny sidekick was ridiculously cute and the villain was pretty badassedly cute as well.  And sidekicks never get the glory, so I decided to focus my efforts there.

I started off with some sketches....

and with some help from my good friend Samia, found an idea/pose that I liked.  

I normally don't build a fully fleshed out armature in my previous sculpts, opting to add wire for support here and there but this time around I wanted to try working with a more organized structure.  

Aluminum foil was a nice way of adding body w/o using the much heavier and expensive clay.  I threw a quick clay covering to get everything solid and allowed that to cure fully before moving on.

Various stages of sculpt.

After the sculpt was done, I sanded out the imperfections, primed with a flat white spray primer and started adding my base coats.

He ended up being a little top heavy with the bulk of his mass being in the head/helmet area so I didn't trust just epoxy to hold it to the base.  I drilled a hole and attached a wooden peg to add strength and epoxied the whole thing together.

Sealed with 3 coats of a semi-gloss polyurethane spray sealer and... whalah. Glory shots. =)

All told... about 2 weeks to finish.  

Fall 2013... Epic!

In a nutshell, this was my Fall 2013 semester.

-Lead animator for the Dave Yee directed short film "Jimmy Loves Juice" which premieres this Wed, Dec 18 at University Theater, SJSU at 10am.

Jimmy Loves Juice Trailer:
https://vimeo.com/81298031

-Attended my first CTN expo and was amazed by the awesome talent that is out there.  Went to informative lectures and demos and finally met one of my favorite inspirations in person, Ryan Woodward.  He gave a great talk about how to stay motivated in this profession and the importance of personal work to one's creative potential.  I also had a chance to show my reel to various studios who were so tremendously kind in taking the time to not only take the time to go through my entire reel, but pick each shot apart and give me constructive feedback on them all.  Big thanks to the guys at Reel FX and Sony Animation especially!

My 2013 Demo Reel:

-In Raquel's advanced 3d animation class, we had the opportunity to do not one but TWO collaborative projects which I enjoyed immensely.  Dave Yee brought up the old adage and I echo his sentiment completely in that "the whole is almost always greater than the sum of its parts."  We had a group of three for our first collaboration and then a group of six for the final.

"Cheese, Please"
Animators: Michael Claus, Julio Diaz, Edric Yamamoto

"Jeffrey"
Narrator: Ryan Eways
Animators: Michael Claus, Melissa Palacios, Jessica Reilly, Daniel Sambrano, Casey Straka, Edric Yamamoto

-All in all, this would've been an epic semester all on its own.  But on the last day of class I received a call from Dreamworks Animation letting me know that my application had been selected to come in for an interview for an internship.  Today I got the call back from DW offering me the position for the upcoming spring semester!  Surfing on cloud 9 and so excited for the new year.  Gotta represent the Shrunkenheadman Club and do them proud!  Fire it up!

- And last but not least, I started up my speed animations again =)  Hoping to keep it up over the winter break.

Ball Bounce, Stewart - 3 hours (2 nights)

Speed Animation #3 - 51 Great Animation Exercises to Master

Winter break is here!! Semester was freakin' epic but I'll write a longer post this week regarding all that.

It's time to get back on the horse in terms of personal work.  Among the many things I want to accomplish are starting up the speed animations that I barely got into before the end of semester crunch got underway.  My friend Samia forwarded me this link about 51 great animation tests that one should try and master to really work the fundamentals, so together this break, we're going to see how many we can get through.

http://www.animatorisland.com/51-great-animation-exercises-to-master/

Our plan is to do a two night pass on the first couple.  First night is getting as far as we can get through it but minimally, have a nice blocking set up. Second night is polish.

The first one, a ball bounce, seemed rather simple so we decided to spice it up a bit.  I wanted to try out Animation Mentor's free rig, Stewart, as well so this was as good as time as any.

First pass is here. Took about and hour and a half to set up, mess with the controls and get some blocking in.  After looking at it, I really need to push the squash and stretch far more.  Tomorrow!

Speed animation 2 - Slapshot

About 45 minutes, 10 of it was spent watching reference on YouTube. :-)
Definitely could push the timing on the windup I think to add a bit of antic and also push the final pose to really feel the tension.

Speed animation 1 - ninja hop

Inspired by the infamous Jason Wong, I've decided to start doing speed animations as well! Today was familiarizing myself with the app "animation desk" and playing with the tools. Spent about an hour messing around and made a little ninja man hop in and roll. Being able to draw and animate straight into the iPad is kinds crazy cool. :-)

Also updating this with the blogger app I just downloaded. ^_^

2013 Fall Semester *GIANT SIZED* Update

Been a long while since the last update!  In fact, seems like the last time I updated was before the end of last semester before summer.... woops!

So the artistic highlight of the summer was spending 2 weeks at CSU Summer Arts taking the Dreamworks Animation course under the tutelage of PDI Dreamworks's animating director, Rex Grignon, and SJSU's irrepressible David Chai.  It was incredibly intense, with the 20 of us working 15 hour days for our entire 14 day stay.  Our goal was to come out with a 6-8 second professional level shot that we can use in our demo reel.  We learned acting tips from professional actor, Todd Warring who spent the first two days with us, helping iron out our story and then it was game on.  We also played a lot of frisbee and frisbee golf.

And here's the shot that I came out with titled, " I Need a Bigger Drink."

The other art piece I worked on during the summer was a cake topper for my good friend Jei and his beautiful bride Yen.  I love magicsculpt!  =)

The rest of the summer was filled with lots of family time and rest.  It was a pretty epic 3 months. =)

Now onto school!
It's been a really busy semester so far, filled with lots of animating!  I'm taking advanced 3d animation, a physics of animation class and a short film course.

These are the two shots I've done in 3d animation thus far. =)

What I've been most excited about is the short film that we've been working on called "Jimmy Loves Juice" which was conceptualized and being directed by Dave Yee.  I landed lead animator for this film so I help oversee the other animators' shots and give advice and tips on how to get everyone's animations to feel like one cohesive project.  All in all, our team is kicking much ass and I'm so excited to see this film done!  Currently all our pencil animation is done and we are now in the cleanup stage.

Some of my pencil animations for JLJ:

And just for fun:

And last but not least! =)  Grey loves Jimmy Loves Juice too!