New York

Hey everyone,



SO!  Slight change of plans from last post.  I'm actually not going to be able to work on any personal projects for some time.  I recently got offered an internship out in New York.  Sorry I didn't post anything about it but I just got the offer last week and now I'm already here, so I had alot of free lance work to finish up before I could come out here. 

But yes, I am here now doing an internship for IP Demons, and plan on being busy busy busy!  So I will have to put a hold on those projects I had in mind, but hey, the whole reason for those were to stay fresh while looking for work.  Now I have IP Demons to do work for, at the moment temporarily but who knows in the future, so I won't need those personal projects.

Thats all for now, I'll try to keep you guys posted.


Jacob Funk ~ The PreAnimator

"Pre-Animator"

Posting once again,

I decided against using the face I previously had for my "Stop Staring" face.  Instead, I want to include more character than that face allowed since it was meant to be generic.  So I'm going to be creating the "Pre-Animator".  He isn't any kind of zombie, but he is a mad scientist, the maddest to be exact.  For now he is just going to be a floating head, once I learn some new techniques I may do a body, but not quite yet.  I'm going to focus on making as robust of a face as I can with as many features and personality as I can fit in it.

I'm hoping that once I finish this head I will be able to do some animation exercises with it so it can be used to animation practice as well as rigging practice.

It will go down in a few phases:
Phase One = Concept/Visual Development
Phase Two = Modeling Character and Blendshapes
Phase Three = Setting up Doo-Dads, Joints, and Blendshapes
Phase Four = Interfacing
Phase Five = Animating and Stuff!!!


Here's the beginning of the first phase!

Phase One:  Rough Concept


Leave some feedback here on this blog to help me make this guy awesome n' stuff.  I'll be sure to post whenever I make progress on this, which I "hope" will be fairly often.

~ Jacob Funk, The PreAnimator

An update.

Hey everyone,

Haven't been posting here, because sadly I haven't been doing any personal projects as of late.  Yet I have several I want to start, and I'm getting into the mood of actually doing something productive while looking for work.

 I know I want to start doing 11-Second club entries again, and plan to start back up next month.

 I also want to make some headway on "Home is Where the Haunt Is".  Been in talks with someone for storyboarding but I may have to do some of that myself if it makes things go faster.

I'm also going to start modeling/rigging/animating a head the "Stop Staring" way.  I already have the head built, I just need to check and make sure I can use it since I originally made it for a different gig.

Since theres nothing really to show from any of these at the moment, I'm going to show you all my rigging reel I recently put together!



Be posting more soon,
Bye,

Problems be fixed.

Hey all,

So finally after figuring out a way to get internet on my PC I can finally post again.

A week or so ago my good friend Ashley and I worked over ideas from my logo concepts, and she was able to help me get simple enough yet still having enough meaning behind the image.  Let me know what you guys think!

Hopefully soon this will make itself more prevalent to my imagery, as well as a new aesthetic for my design.


Also while I was away for the web I finished up my first freelance work on "Detective Ralph Raccoon"! Its a collaborative project with Whitney Fox (The Creator), Tom Bruno (Modeling and Animation), Dave Bruno (Design and Story Boarding), Jenni Brody (Environments and Rendering), and myself (Character TD and possibly animation).  Here are the set-ups I created for the two main characters Detective Ralph, and his accomplice Mr. Squawb!

On a personal note, I have started to read the book Stop Staring and have found it hard to put down so far.  Don't know why I haven't read it sooner, I already learned a boat-load.  Hopefully as I get farther in it I will have some examples of how I am following along with it.

Expect more from me a bit quicker than it took to get this one out!

~ Jacob Funk, The PreAnimator

Working demo reel and logo/mascot concepts.

Hey all,

So my old reel wasn't working on vimeo.  I think it had something to do with the compression, since when I uploaded the full rez version it worked fine.  Here's the WORKING reel.



Also, here are a couple of concept pieces for my logo/mascot of The PreAnimator.  The final one will be much simpler but I just wanted to the idea down a couple times.  I want to incorporate both CG iconic imagery with a zombie face.  Combining the idea of "The Reanimator" with Pre-Animation set-up.  Let me know what you think overall and any ideas to simplify, since I will be working on these in the next couple days!

~ Jacob Funk, The PreAnimator

Beginnings Pt. II

Hello all!

Welcome to my new and "improved" art blog!  By new and improved I mean consolidated form my old blog to fit my new identity.  This will be a place for me to grow, and show everyone what I am working on.  Things you can expect are REGULAR UPDATES with both traditional art, such as digital paintings and sculptures, as well as my works of animation and rigging.  I hope that this will be a place for growth not only for myself, but for anyone watching as well!

To start off here is my current demo reel showing off all that I have learned at Columbia College Chicago while I was a student there, as well as a few of my own undertakings.



Next post will be early next week with some progress on logo ideas!


~ The PreAnimator
          (Jacob Funk)