Rob Edwards....Prince Charming

Yesterday, Syracuse Alum Rob Edwards came to speak to the Intermediate 3D Animation class. He's the screenplay writer for The Princess and the Frog, and has worked on other movies and shows like The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, In Living Color, and Treasure Planet. He had some great stories and his answers to our questions were very useful and relevant to any field, not just writing for animation. It's very evident why this man has been so successful and why he's such a good comedy writer, he's a master communicator! 

As a graduating senior, the story of how he got started was most interesting to me: he said that he got lucky the summer of his sophomore year and got a job as a production assistant on a movie in Los Angeles (he was a film major), then the next summer he got a job as a joke writer. He had written one comedian's act, and everyone loved it so much they all started coming to him for jokes, by the time he returned to SU for his senior year he was a big shot, and he'd already made some good connections in L.A.  He also said that he started pretty early writing various screenplay writers he admired, asking them for advice or if he could contact them when he eventually moved to L.A. and he said quite a few wrote back and told him to keep in touch! It's always amazing what persistence can get you. 

Something I thought was very interesting was his reasoning for working on the new Disney princess movie. When word got out that Disney was making a new princess movie, letters poured in from women arguing that the damsel in distress message should not be told to little girls anymore, that they were single and successful and happy and that they didn't believe the Prince Charming fairy tale was beneficial for girls to hear anymore. Rob said that The Princess and the Frog was made for those women. The princess in this story is just a regular girl, facing all kinds of obstacles and trying to be independent, with a dream of owning her own restaurant. He said she was the girl who was on her way to being that women who was cynical of romance and fairy tale endings. 

What's great was how this story matched his own story of meeting his wife. He didn't tell it in detail, but suffice it to say he kind of "rescued" his wife financially, and he sounded just like a modern-day Prince Charming! So if anyone were to write the modern Disney Princess movie, it would be him, a believer of the classic "magic" that Disney represents. : )

A few more points that were interesting for art students and more:

-When writing for a scene, think about "what action is this action interrupting?" This guy had an astounding sense of what was boring and not boring. I can't say I have that talent myself, but it really was fascinating to listen to someone who does.

-"Tell your audience how to watch your work...maintain your shape," and eventually your audience will catch on and know why certain jokes are funny or why a certain moment is moving. This is really interesting to think about while watching anything. I've had a recent Office binge and so I thought back about how the awkward jokes were hard to get used to at first, and it is kind of a language of pauses and references that you have to learn to understand before you can fully appreciate it.

-When watching a movie, "look at the scenes that move you, and figure out why." He said that if he was writing a scene that needs to push a button in the audience to make them cry or laugh, he watches scenes from his favorite movies and dissects them to figure out how they do it. For The Princess and the Frog, he said he looked at It Happened One Night, and worked on the concept of characters falling in love once they learned to love the things they first hated about one another. 

It's been a crazy week. But hooray for Friday! Have a great weekend yall.

Transmedia Happenings

Hey Everyone,

This morning in class we watched Treasure Planet, in preparation for our guest speaker on Thursday afternoon. Rob Edwards is a screenplay writer, whose most popular movies are Treasure Planet and The Princess and the Frog. He's also written various television episodes, including a few for Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Full House and In Living Color. He's coming to talk to the Computer Art majors about writing and story-telling. It's helpful because the importance of screenplays gets lost in the technical jungle of animation. Students are given full creative control in Computer Art, and oftentimes although the lighting may be inspired, the plot is not. I'll give y'all a recap next week.

For my Transmedia senior project class, (separate from my thesis or from Computer Art senior project), I've been researching public art. I found some really cool artists and here are some links. I think public art gets overlooked as either place-holder sculpture (just there to take up space) or as architecture, and it's interesting to learn about the actual artists behind things that we may see everyday on the way to class/work. My goal as an artist is to get art into the everyday environment, and out of the white-wall gallery. Public art is the most exciting and apparent way to do this.

Leni Schwendinger does really interesting and massive lighting design projects:
http://www.lightprojectsltd.com/projects/art_artworks_lsc.php

Ela Lamblin is an instrument maker - he has a kinetic sculpture in front of the Yesler Community Center in Seattle, but he does these awesome performances with instruments he's invented. This is less computer and more music, but still fascinating!

Lelavision performing Longwave from ela lamblin on Vimeo.


And lastly if you want to see some of the awesome stuff that Computer Art can crank out, here's our resident code expert and the website for the game he's making for his senior project.
http://craigspaeth.com/mirror/

The Results from Last Semester

Sorry I've been awol this semester, it's been a crazy one, and it's only going to lose more sanity. Here's the video I edited for documentation of Awesome Band, the project I did with Chad last fall. It was a fun show. It was good experience, Chad and I learned that it takes more than one day to set up a project with 4 separate computers running games that have to be synced together over some network but here's the catch in a room with no internet near it. Like I said, crazy.

The link to my portfolio blog with the Awesome Band movie (scroll down some): tracyleedendyportfolio.blogspot.com.
Also for some boring technical complaining and my concept drizzles (not storms) on my thesis: treeartseeyellow.blogspot.com.

Getting Involved

Sometimes school can get tedious. Little things can build up and then suddenly you find yourself a grumpy mess, complaining to anyone who will listen and wishing you had never come here. I think it probably happens to everyone.
It's definitely happened to me! I'm from a warm town in Texas, and coming to college here was a big step that has made it hard to adjust. What I've found though, is when I find someplace to belong, a group or person to depend on me, I enjoy my time here more easily. Being a VPA Ambassador has really helped my bad moods! When you volunteer to tell people why you came here, and tell them over and over again, it definitely helps you remember! Being a senior has been difficult thus far, and although I am ready to graduate, (so ready!) I can still be incredibly thankful for everything I've learned up here. I have accumulated a few groups of people who I also feel a responsibility towards, and that kind of thing forces me to feel like I belong. It's a good lesson I hope to remember from now on: If you don't feel like you belong, make it belong to you! It also kind of goes with the idea of decorating your room. I always set aside a couple days before classes start to make my room look exactly right, because if I don't feel like I own it, or if it seems at all temporary, I won't be able to relax or work there. It gets difficult sometimes, but it is possible to have a home here. And "going home" is exactly what I look forward to everyday!

Back from Neverland

I have been neglecting yall! I apologize.

So! I'm a senior! Woot! Being a senior is very exciting. And stressful. I love it.

Computer Art has TWO NEW faculty members this year, and they're here for good! The first is Annina Ruest - she's awesome. She graduated from MIT and specializes in the field of physical computing (my new love) and she has been a great help to my partner and I for our Fall senior project: *drumroll* Experimental Peripherals for the Music Rhythm Genre! We are making different games that will try to trick the user into playing a music rhythm game, a la Guitar Hero. So far we have a Duck Hunt and Yoshi version, a.k.a. Duck Hunt Hero and Yoshi Hero! Next comes Trombone Hero and Text Hero. Should be awesome.

Transmedia is a-changin'......Our old professors, Sean and Diana, are gone and now we have Andy and Annina. It looks good though, they both are very qualified and have high expectations of us - exactly the way it should be. Andy is more focused on animation and compositing, and next semester he's teaching a class on visual effects! It's teamed up with the film majors and it looks like some fantastic stuff will come out of there. The program is shifting to Maya and RenderMan too! That's good news because Lightwave is not the industry standard and many more studios use Maya. It looks like Computer Art is headed in an exciting direction. More updates soon!

Transmedia Overdrive

Recently the Transmedia juniors threw TROM, the Transmedia Prom. It was the second annual dance and they had it in the lighting studio downstairs in Shaffer. This is the kind of thing I love about Transmedia. Lately most of the computer art majors have been living in the basement, alternating between sleeping on the couches in the classroom and working in the lab. It's a funny thing, but I find myself staying in the lab too late even though I'm not getting any work done. But it isn't really a problem, because I love the people I'm around. We have fun with each other and help each other out with critiques and it's a great atmosphere, all the way until 7 AM. It helps that I live a long way from campus and that it still gets cold at night though. : ) At Trom I was around the rest of the Transmedites and some of them expressed regret at not spending more time in the lab. It's true! In college I've found you can be really great friends with anyone if you spend enough time together. So doing all your work at home is just not as much fun, and it kind of destroys what college is, at least for me. I am still getting a lot of work done, and this is revealing how little of a personal life I might be having, but besides that, the lab is an important feature of computer art, and if you're a computer artist don't neglect it!

So this is my last blog entry for awhile. My plans for the summer are still up in the air, but my plan all year has been to spend the summer in Austin, TX. I have been applying to internships sporadically and only through craigslist, which is a mistake but I'm falling behind anyway. That's a bad attitude, sorry. I've lost count of the places I've applied to, and only heard back from a few. Also, the friend from home who was planning on living with me decided she couldn't afford it and had been offered another job, so now I'm on my own. Imagining living on my own in a bigger city than I'm used to and without a car or a guaranteed plan is getting intimidating, but I still really want to do it. It's like a push to grow up which I feel I'm in need of. My parents are still going to be paying for a lot of my plans, and god bless them they refuse to influence my decision based on that. I've always taken my time at everything, not really last minute but always slowly, like getting my driver's license at 17 and applying for colleges in January and getting my first job at 20. I'm in no hurry to have responsibility, but now I realize that experience is a significant thing that one needs before they graduate college. I don't know what I'm expecting, but I do know I'm ready for some more responsibility/independence. Finding a paid internship to even apply to is proving very difficult and job hunting is the worst kind of fun there is, so it will be hard not to get discouraged through this "quest." I won't give up though. I've been telling people all year my lofty plans for the summer and I know I'll feel like I've gone back on my word even though no one's judging me because of it. I've given up on feeling regret, and so opportunities lost are not going to be my problem.

I just attended a couple Capstone presentations, because I'm in the honors program and will have to do mine next year. One of my old friends (from freshman year) is graduating early and I got to see her presentation. Capstone Projects are a requirement for all honors students, and they have from their sophomore year to start working on them. We can ask for funding, and some people use it to go abroad or get equipment for research or anything they can think of. It's an awesome opportunity and some people come up with fantastic ideas. My friend is a photographer and she sent disposable cameras to kids all over the world, and made a website cataloguing all of them. She's still working on it but the presentation was awesome. She's one of those people that has huge ambitions and has been able to really make thigns happen for herself. In the summer of freshman year she got an internship in London! She's almost intimidating but she really will have an impressive life, and it's cool to have ever known her. Here is the website: http://thecameraproject.com/ you should check it out! You can search for photos with tags - a good one is "oops."

Sorry this last post was so random, and I want to keep this up later on, but I had a lot to say and they were all kind of related to future ambitions, friends, and how I spend my time here, so I hope again that this was interesting!

Happy Summer and Good Luck

Crazy Times

It's the end of April! That means too many shows to count let alone attend! Tomorrow night is the opening of the Responsive Environments show, for which my group has been cleaning and assembling all morning and will be far into the night. Syracuse has their "Third Thursdays" which is a big sweep of art openings and Connective Corridor events on the third Thursday of every month. What's unfortunate is that during my class's show, my professors have their own show, the grad students have their MFA show opening, and all the galleries have cool openings. And since I'm never downtown (car-less) it will be hard to not go to these while I am downtown for our show. All of us have plans to sneak out though. : )

I would say the best thing I've learned from being a junior and going to shows with faculty and grads is that I'm not as young and inexperienced as I've always assumed. I have important things to add to the conversation, dad gummit! (Dad Gummit is something my mom says all the time. I don't know how to spell it but rest assured it's only Texas slang for dang it.) Anyway, feeling equal has proven much more useful than feeling inferior. I know a lot of people don't ever have this issue, but for a shy and quiet girl, being brave enough to overcome an inferiority complex is kind of a big deal. But believe me, if you're shy, there's no reason to be! Just walk up and talk to them. For me, I deal with artists, and it's been a revelation to me that these guys are in the same boat I am, just a little further down the river. They still struggle with concepts and connections and getting technical things down. I'm about to be a senior, then a grad student myself maybe, and even though a lot can happen in two years, it's not that long of a time. Especially when you consider the grad students you're talking to yourself. Now I am not advocating disrespectfulness, which I think is a thin line people cross often when joking around or arguing a point. But then everyone deserves respect!

Yall please excuse my didacticism. I know I sound a little preachy sometimes. ; )