Demo Reel

Ta Dah.

On YouTube.

Will add the Vimeo version later.

By Jove, an update – with lots of pictures

Yes, I managed to write on this thing without months upon months lapsing.

Just to illustrate a contrast between Singapore and my hometown in northern Michigan, some panoramas for you.

The view from my parent’s living room window.

Downtown Main Street in Cadillac, Michigan.

The snow was literally up to my chest (read: 4.5 feet/about 1.3 meters) when I came home to visit for the Christmas season. Can’t say I miss the snow terribly, although there is a majesty to this weather that I miss.

View from the highway.

Winter, particularly in a place far enough from the urban sprawl where there is little to no light pollution at night and the darkness is absolute after nightfall (at 5pM), can make you intensely aware and grateful for color.  Here, in Singapore, the city-tropical environment is so saturated with hues that you hardly take notice of them anymore.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world in Singapore, there’s an awesome nostalgia museum that looks like this.

That teeny museum had a ballin’ back room hang out spot – not for customers of course, but for the employer and his lucky friends.  The museum is located on Bussorah St in Bugis, if you’re in Singapore and you are interested.

Anyway, enough with the photographs.  Prepare for one intense artwork dump.

And yes, I know most of these should be vertical, but I don’t care.  Tilt your damned head.

And here are some pictures from my sketchbook.

This first image are three characters from a dream I had not to long ago – it was in an odd style where they had massive, oval-shaped Tezuka-esque eyes – not exactly my style, but I tried to capture it in the drawing.  I am actually creating a comic about the story of this dream – I am two pages in, and will post the images soon.

Please excuse the bad scans – my sketchbook is big and all of the scanners at my disposal are fit for just A4 paper.

This is some weird, stream of conciousness thing where I just drew characters in the negative space around the big stripey guy.

Now these guys are another story idea that hit me some time ago.  The two fellows on the top are called North (tall guy) and South (short guy) – not their real names, but nicknames they’ve given each other because they cannot remember their names, or in fact anything about their past in the space of time that exists before the actual written story begins.  To ruin it a little bit for you, these guys are actually:

1. Dead.
2. Trapped in Limbo

But they don’t know it yet.  The cops that pulls them over in the beginning of the story knows exactly where he is, and has lost his mind over time.  He thinks North and South could be demons – your nightmares can manifest into physical reality if you let Limbo get to you too much.

When I have a longer, more involved story with lots of dialogue, I thumbnail the comic first, which I have some scans of below.  There are four thumbnailed pages to a page, to make some sense of the mess.  Again, the scanner cut off the sides and I don’t care enough to meticulously put shit together in Photoshop, so you’ll have to settle with reading bits of what you can make out of the dialogue.

So yeah, making some crazy stuff, good times thus far.  I’m going to wrap up this blog post for now because it’s taking forever loading all of these images.

Later skaters.

I Added a Comics Page.

As you can see from the above navigation.  Feel free to look at my terrible excuse for a horror comic.  It might make you laugh – that’s fine.  I think I might try to veer closer to comedy on my next attempt (more updates to come on that).

Not to make this too bland of an udpate, I thought I would link Inkstuds, an (alternative) comics podcast I am quite fond of.  They’ve interviewed nearly (if not) hundreds of guys and gals from within the industry, as well as some smarties and arties.  My favorite interviews as of late are Joe Sacco, Ralph Steadman, Brandon Graham and Scott McCloud.

So Let’s Try This Again – Singapore Update

Scroll down to see my most recent animated videos!

View from double decker SBS bus

I am studying at a 2-year program on Animation and Digital Arts at NYU Tsich Asia in Singapore.  I think that about sums up my life from August 2008 to the present (pre-Christmas December 2008). 

Despite not having…updated this blog for an ENORMOUS amount of time, since Sept. 2007.  What can I say – life eats up your time, although I do find typing out my thoughts and projects on a blog very satisfying.  I’ll continue to make lame attempts at udpates where I can.

Singapore is a beautiful country, a big change from a cooler, seasonal climate to a thickly topical one, with the musk of the sea in the air and the brisk, clean and efficient way of life of modern Asia.

A Singapore Sky

View from my HDB flat.

Bugis Junction shopping center

Below are some pictures of the school itself, or at least where I spend most of my time eating.

The UnCommons kitchen

View from the UnCommons (the cafeteria) at NYU Tisch Asia.

 Living and studying in a new country, on the cusp of struggle to find my place in the industry or elsewhere is a stressful and frightening trial, but a necessary one.  I’ve met some wonderful people here, but inside and outside of school, but still I spend some of my time tied to a dual-screen computer working out some highly technical kink as I struggle to get my skills up to snuff with what I will need to survive in such a rapidly evolving field.

I did attend Siggraph Asia 2008 in Singpore, which was both daunting and a great experience – and a cold, hard wake up call to my future looming before me.

Speaking of computer and work, let mw share with you some of the fruits of my labor.  PLEASE watch these with YouTube’s new high quality option to get the full experience.  Some of them look like total hell without it.

And some pictures.

I’ve always been a lot better with posted pictures as oppossed to writing lengthy entries.  I’ve already spent far too  much of my life in front of a computer these past few months, and now that I am visiting home at my family’s place back in the icy depths of Michigan, it is time to take a break from the matrix and TV, pour a cup of hot, hot coffee and enjoy reality for a while.

Well, at least until the next Dirty Jobs or Mythbusters is on.  Oh Discovery channel, how I have missed you!

I Am Going To Miss This Weather

So, so very much.

I looked over my summer to do list – I kind of completed things this summer. I don’t know – I think I am feeling bummed about not creating enough work, but at the same time, it was such a lovely summer.

The weather is gorgeous in Ann Arbor right now, but fall is creeping in at the sides. I love the glory of fall too, but not the fucking freezing temperatures that it means. I took some panorama shots the other day while I rode my bicycle to the post office, so I have something to remind me in the depths of winter’s frozen asshole that summer existed, and I was there.

This is the view directly behind the top picture on Catherine St. There used to be this big-ass statue where the orange cones are in the picture – I guess it’s being renovated or something. On the left the shop with the green awning is the People’s Food Co-Op, a semi-socialist grocery store steeped in the bohemian that has, according to the local newspaper, decided to boycott all Israeli goods to protest Israeli treatment of Palestinian refugees. Or something. Regardless, earlier in the day there was one person holding a large, obnoxious sign to protest the boycott of Israeli goods and another person holding another large, obnoxious sign to protest against the protester for support of the boycott of Israeli goods. I think both were expecting reinforcements for their respective protests, but no one showed up save for the two of them, so they were just bitching each other out for a solid hour.

Ah, fucking Ann Arbor, how I love you sometimes.

On a completely different note, we have a FUCKING BLACK KITTEN living in our basement! This is perfect in at least ten-thousand ways for me. Not ONLY do I love black cats, but I was previously mourning introspectively that there would be no feasible way for me to adopt a cat of my own for at least two more years as I would be doing too much moving for a cat to handle – and lo and behold, Dave Who Lives In The Basement is the proud owner of a three month old, frisky female kitten named Bagheera.

So abso-fucking-lutely cute. I want you to be mine. And yes, I flipped my shit so much about this kitten that I came back downstairs and took pictures of it just so I could blog about it later. I have a problem. I know.

On a completely completely different note, my budd-ey Petarr is back from Japan Fantasy Land! Bask in the glory of his awkward pose.

I would like to draw your attention to Petarr’s finger stroking an imaginary air vagina. Oh, it’s there. I know.

I put it there.

Room with a View

A panorama shot of my new room with my friend Joe hanging out on my rug.

I recently moved into a new Co-Op house, and I am in the process of cleaning up the place with the help of the new members. Unfortunately, the guys staying here previously allowed the house to go to shit, so there’s some work to be done. I’ve already cleaned three common spaces – next, up, the kitchen and the backyard. Weeee-hooooo.

Enjoying Kings of Leon lately as I clean – good fresh Southern indie rock. In the meantime, I am preparing for that dreaded event all seniors must face at the School of Art & Design – the Integrative Project (IP). In short, it’s like a year-long thesis project for senior art students – we each get our own studio space and must propose a year-long project to our advisors (we choose out of several pairs of teamed professors). I plan on doing a bimonthy comic series for my project containing a continuous, semi-related creepy storyline (a la Twilight Zone), comic diaries and possible one-shots and sketches. Hopefully my advisors will like my idea and will give me FUNDING to print that damned thing every (other) month.

And, of course, there’s always work do to (and find), friendly drama and future times to fret over, blah blah blah.

I’ve begun a Book of Shadows and I am using it to document my dreams in comic form – I’ve almost finished the first entry, and will post it when finished! And, by Book of Shadows, I mean an old sketchbook I’ve collaged the crap out of that I’ve filled with recipes, herbal remedies, diary entries, weird info, etc. – in a sort of pseudo-witchy way. I don’t actually believe in magic, and I couldn’t really call myself Wiccan or anything but I definitely have a perverse interest in the occult and I integrate it in humorous little ways into my life.

I guess I get it from my Dad.

Trapped in a Cave

Not really, but it feels close.

I am capturing video at the Duderstadt Center on what was a gorgeous day, sitting in a small, sound-proof room in front of two large monitors – basically just waiting as I capture something like 12 hours of video. Capturing video requires that it all be done in ‘real time’ – meaning the computer translates it into code as the video plays. So, if your movie is an hour long, you will have to play it completely through to capture it all. Fortunately, this is for work and I am being paid for my time.

Unfortunately, the Duderstadt Center is practically empty on a Sunday in summer, and no stores are open – meaning there is no place to buy food within a five mile radius. Short of the vending machines, I am fasting for the entire twelve hours while I just wait for it all to complete. I really hate this, but such is work.

In the meantime – yes, I know. I have not written in a great while. I’ve been busy-busy, more or less, getting my own projects done and working for others.

Here is a montage of drawings I’ve made recently….

I’m also beta-comicing (read: storyboarding for a long comic) for a short novella. The tentative working title is ‘Caleb Knows‘, although I may choose something with a stronger biblical reference. Our protagonist, who remains unnamed throughout the story, is a prodigy of sorts who, at the age of fifteen, will soon graduate high school. Disillusioned and paranoid, the protagonist begins to see apparitions of his dead older brother, Caleb, a wayward youth who made our protagonist and his family’s life hell up until he and his 1978 Mercury Grand Marquis was found at the bottom of a river five years ago. The story insinuates that Caleb was dealing drugs and upset the wrong people – this leading to his questionable demise. The apparition Caleb gives our protagonist advice on how to ’stand up for himself’ and eggs him on to seek out revenge on their stepfather, John, for Caleb’s death. Our protagonist soon finds his life and his sanity spiraling out of control.

Detail from Page 2.

Detail from Page 5.

More on this story as it develops.

What else – preparing to shoot a short film with Ronen Goldstein as my DP. I am excited for it – it’s a feasible short story by one of my favorite authors, Jonathan Lethem. The major complication is that it will require some special effect, so Ronen and I will be doing some tests to figure out what the hell we can do to create semi-transparent salmon-colored glowing objects. Yes, really.

What else – I recently chopped off the dreadlocks of a friend of mine. He had, valiantly, attempted to do the white boy dread thing, with … some success, but he’s lookin’ all classy now with his buzzed head. God, I am hungry. I want to leave this damned room.

You know what I want? I want one of THESE.

Not Beef flavor though. I like Chicken flavor. I don’t even know if any real chicken is involved in the process of making these things, but I do not care. I just want some ramen. That’s not too much to ask, right? God. I need to eat something.

So I am thinking I will wrap up this post so I can take that damned bus down to Central to get something to eat.

Colleen out.

Leeloo

THE FIFTH ELEMENT (PART ONE) (PART TWO) (PART THREE)

Movies and LOTS OF SKETCHES:

Hey Baby, Wake Up From Your Asleep.

I’m not responsible for Zlad! at the top. God, I wish I was though.
Planning homebrew-ery with Adam Konner. Loveliness.

The movie is a promo for Play Gallery.org.

The comic is fine, from a dark fairy tale. Trying to get the actual copy back from Phoebe. A valiant effort.

Indian Food & Beer

INDIAN FOOD
My recent hobby is to attempt to master the fine art of Indian cookery. God, the food is so good. I have perfected the craft of making paneer/panir (indian cheese) and am now working on cracking the code behind Madras Masala’s amazing Panner Tikki Masala dish. If you are in Ann Arbor and looking for a great place to eat Indian, Madras is affordabler and DELICIOUS. That freaking sauce WILL be mine to make…someday. I slowly work towards dechipering its magical ingredients.

HOMEBREWING
Bought Charlie Papazian’s Joy of Homebrewing, 3rd Edition with $15 I found lying on the street (lucky!). Now I must gathering homebrewing supplies. A guy who lives next door mentioned having a whole kit that he got for this birthday – perhaps he will lend it to me…

In other news, plugging away at LIMBO and revising it as I beta-comic. Will post pictures of beta comic pages as plan progresses.

Also looking into the Fulbright and other opportunities for next year – never too early to start getting ready!