the Princess and the Pound

A christmas present for my mom who has been working on some different short stories!

"Cemetery Gates" Miniature

Because I love making trees.

the first task that I've set out on for Michelle's project has been putting together the set for a really really wide shot of Dracula's House. I wrote a bit about it before, but this will consist of 3 panels. The front panel is going to be the most detailed as it takes up most of the screen. 

Michelle had a pretty solid idea of what this shot would be, along with all the props needed. I wanted to have a personal idea the angle and scale of everything, so I tried to draw out a final arrangement for the two focal points (the gate, and the house on the cliff). The initial one I threw together for this was pretty rough, though I wanted to make sure the gateway had a lot of screen presence. The final shot/composite will be framed much better than this portrayal... but this is just one of those things not meant to look particularly pretty to anyone but the person using it as directions.

(Michelle has some much better concept work for it)

Anyways, My first step was making that gateway. It is the first point of interest, and I wanted to have a good idea for the overall scale by making something relative to the characters. The sides are made with carved/painted foam, and rest with a combination of mat-board and wires.

The lantern on top has a wire running down the chain so that it can be animated swinging. The doors are also attached via hinges, and can be opened. 

After the gate was completed, Michelle cut a large wooden board for me to use that would be ample space to make this set. I think the entire thing is around 2 feet wide and a little over 1 foot deep. I worked a bit on making an interesting/slightly inclined terrain out of chicken wire and plaster wrap. I have a photo where you can see the under side of the ground, with all those layers in place. Some painted papier-mâché did well for the dirt ground. There is a better view of that, along with the start of a brick path (again, made with foam) that breaks up as it nears the gate. 

Up next were the trees. These were pretty tough because I wanted them to be really gnarled, thick pieces. To make the roots convincing enough, I decided to collect a bunch of sticks, also used for the branches. I used real bark as well, and to meld everything together I used some plaster-y material. Here's a photo of all of that with the bare plaster:

After that had dried, I painted the plaster parts, and tried to replicate that texture/color pattern. Things here are starting to come together some more. Trees starting to look like trees haha.

The last bit I was able to work on was just putting down some moss to start fleshing out the grass patterns. I also added Michelle's miniature vespa, so you can have an idea how large the character will be in the scope of all this. Keep in mind, the gate is still not attached, just placed in there so you can have an idea.

So this is where the miniature is at right now; this panel is pretty near completion. I still need to work on some wispy foliage for the trees, more blending with the grass/plants, and the fence. The next panel behind this one will be a really wide piece with just open, not-super-detailed hills. The final panel will have the cliff, and a small version of Dracula's house to create a sort of forced perspective.

I'll post some more on this soon! this is really the only animation-related thing I'm working on at the moment, so I'm trying to be pretty gung-ho about it. Again, check out Michelle's side of things along with some awesome interior miniatures here: http://bts-roommatessuck.blogspot.com/

Thanks for reading!

Old Crap

Here is an old album that I put together before I started really paying attention to what I wanted to sound like. I was drawing from a variety of loose influences at the time, most of which being very digital, right-out-of-the-box kinds of sounds, with lots of pretty accessible chord structures (or none at all). I was ecstatic at the time because I was really starting to produce things at a decent rate, some of these being composed within days.

These are by no means bad things, I just started discovering more and more about the process, and seeing some different directions that I wanted to go with music. By the time I was finished with these, I kind of wanted to stuff them away. I found the work I had done to be way too contained to a computer, and they were just overly-digitalized, cold sounds; I stopped enjoying the kind of work I was making. That, and I felt that they weren't very well composed or recorded/edited. I was a complete stranger to even the idea of mastering/mixing.

Anyways, a few years have passed now, and I thought I'd toss together this unfinished album that never really saw the light of day:

Counter Fiction EP (download link)

1. Kindredscape

2. The Childe Thomas

3. Romance of Moths

4. Let's Make Scenery

5. Behind the Blue Wall

6. Sunrise

7. Regressive Property

Thanks for reading/downloading!

I Moved!

The things in my life are becoming very orange. Just a couple shots of new the workspace, slowly making things more functional and comfortable. One of our friends found a free animation rig that can be fitted onto a work table, so that along with some lights I have yet to invest in will turn this into a pretty efficient little room. We also just got our internet set up today, so that is fantastic.

Still just slowly piecing together music, giving animation a rest until I figure out what to work on next. I've been surrounding myself with these really great, old (tacky) nature paintings. I want to make music that sounds the way these paintings feel. That is the simplest way to put it I suppose.. here's a pretty good example of where things are headed with that: http://perch.bandcamp.com/track/do-as-i-do (sorry for the in-progress design of the site).

Anyways, I don't have much to show other than that. During the move, I was making a bunch of little things because I couldn't stand such a long stretch of time between moving/finding a job where I wasn't being personally productive. Here's one of the little by-products of the last couple of weeks:

Hopefully things will pick up again soon! Enjoy your day! Brush your teeth! Be nice to strangers! Not too nice! Actually be real mean and make this face D:< ! Make cool things! Bye!

Some illustration work

Haven't been keeping up to date on this thing very well... here's some old stuff!

This is a poster I made for a friend's music show,

sort of a weird project, but it was fun to work on. 

Also a couple goofy things I made at the tail end of my time at miad..

And lastly, some concept art I was putting together a few years ago for a short story I was working on

Anyways, just a few things I had done not related to animation.. sort of haha. I haven't been posting very much because between trying to sort out life things and get a job, most of what I have been working on has been my sort of body of music I'm finally putting together after about 3 years of legitimate recording. It's been sort of stressful because I'm really going out on a limb to work on something I don't think will see much light, at least as far as an audience is concerned. Though I feel it's something I need to finish now. Hopefully things will start to look up in the next few weeks.

'13 Reel

Here's the new demo reel containing all my thesis work!


Wesley Cathon '13 Reel from Wesley Cathon on Vimeo.

Putting this together definitely feels like putting a bookend on a part of life/education. Sounds cheesy, but it's true. Continuing education in film and animation is going to have to be as self-driven as it ever was, and I suppose like anyone in this position, the hardest point is going to get people to take the work as seriously as I take it. Time to bunch up my eyebrows and karate-chop some fools.

New Music

I've been working almost day and night on this EP. For anyone who follows this blog exclusively, here's a rough cut of one of the main tracks. I don't want to post the full site anywhere until I finish all 5-6 tracks.

Lost Cells (link)

It's a bit more funky than I'm used to, but it has been a lot of fun to put together. Just a bit about this track: The main chords were recorded from playing an old Funmachine organ (my child) that I still have back in Virginia, and the bass was recorded live as well. This track's beat is pretty straight-forward, without as much experimentation. With most of the other music I'm working on, I've done a lot more with field recordings and found noises for percussion. I still tried to keep a static-y aesthetic overall. Anyways, hope it's something worth listening to, lemme know what you think!

MOMZ BURTHDAI

HAPPY BRIHTDAAY MOMM!

Alive, Staying Busy

I went into stasis for a couple of weeks after all that thesis hubbub. Alas! I'm back, posting things to this site that nobody uses anymore ~

anyways, I haven't put up anything about the comic I've been working on for the last few years or so. Mostly that's because I've wanted to make sure I can tell a good story before I go putting stuff out there.

I just finished a model of one of the main characters:

This wasn't for any real reason other than I had wanted to try this for a while. This also kind of got me excited to start working on the comic again. Basically it's about these 3 really cartoony looking robots and how they deal with some serious themes in this really kind of lush, fantasy setting. There are human characters, and I'm still working out the details of how they are introduced to the story.

The initial idea kind of happened when I was thinking of the word "spare" as both a mechanical term and a compassionate term. I had always loved the artwork of stuff like astroboy, cyborg 009, heck I think even sonic. old sonic.. the really cartoony one. But basically, what I was getting at was the ability to use really simple characters to portray and deal with really serious things like violence/nonviolence, death, weird family dysfunctions, all that stuff. Ah, I forgot about Ralph Bakshi's "Wizards". That was a big one too, albeit it has it's setbacks. Necron 99 will always be my favorite robot design.

Anyways, here was one of the first covers I tried to do for it. This was back when I didn't care about type, and all the robots were pretty much the same design but some using ~spare~ parts. (see what i did....?)

While the robots have changed, that villain is actually one I've used for a long time, part of a completely different story (warning: highschool art.....)

anyways, I don't have much else that's very solid to show. I took some quick pictures of the first real in-progress sequence with the characters I had settled on, though these are kind of bare-bones and I'm back into the writing phase for now. I want this to be gooood!

With a bit more time on my hands right now, I want to really hammer something out. Thanks for reading my crap, more updates soon!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

- QUICK ADDITION: I forgot about this one. I had gone as far as animating a scene I wanted to do really early on. This is when I was using the older characters, but I still like it! Enjoy :3 (hopefully?)

"Spare" Test Animation from Wesley Cathon on Vimeo.

Thesis

Thesis thesisthsisses


IDAE: The Story of Fionn from Wesley Cathon on Vimeo.

Theiss thesis thesssis thesisthesis thesis thessis, thesis ThsSuesissis

yeah! here's the video. I'm still unsure of the final product, but at the same time I recognize that I could pick out dozens of tiny things that annoy me- that I tell other people and they say "huh? what?" So this has been keeping me from outwardly advertising this project. I'm not sure if I want to be known for mixing mediums like this. I feel sort of like isolating the animated segments and just uploading those by themselves, with no narration or video.

Alas! this is the final product, and I'm going to stop talking about it. Here are some stills from the space I was in:

Now I'm gonna go work on other things~~ yeeeeeeeeyyyyyy

Thesis is done

and I'm absolutely sick of it. I'm not even going to think about this project for the next week or so. I'll post up the video after the show- by then I'll probably have a thousand edits in mind that I want to make and will be able to do so before letting the world wide innernets have their way with it. I don't suspect anybody who looks for animation/video work to come perusing through MIAD on friday, so hopefully they won't see/hear a lot of the rushed jobs that will be playing haha.

Anyways, enough loathing. After doing this project, I think I've realized how little confidence I have in my serious work. I stopped working on a lot of things in the wake of thesis, and a lot of times I noticed how genuine I wanted the animated segments of the show to be. I think I'm going to be spending a lot of time on music and comics again, now that this is over. Those are some things I've been holding very closely for fear of them not being good enough.

Blahh I'm so tired.

Almossssst There!

Yesterday, I kind of took the whole day off from school/work to shoot all the rest of the footage I needed for this project. My friend Sam came over and was kind enough to put up with my disjointed thought processes and help work the cameras. I think we only shot for around an hour and a half or so... this was one of the first shoots where I wrote down everything I wanted to get on camera, just because there were a few specific interactions I wanted to have with the story/narration. The more in-depth narration I still have to record, but that won't be hard. That just involves watching the animations and speaking into a recorder about what is happening. 

The exhibition space is nearly done too! I've got a few pictures from over the weekend when I had started setting up

Keep in mind, I have this whole room to myself. Since these pictures were taken, I set up the rest of the miniatures and a few other pictures (and a wonderfully bad looking rug). I have the next few days to edit the entire video togetherrr :U so that's going to pretty much be priority #1. I'm still trying to get a goofy looking chair set up in the space, but we'll see how that goes. Otherwise there are a few other small parts of the set I'll be bringing in soon. YAYAYYAYAYYY it's almost done! I can die in peace soon!

ps. I made this one night a couple of weeks ago because reasons.
http://i.imgur.com/I20i49h.gif

Happy Easter!

Hey there! For anyone who didn't catch the video earlier, here's a raw footage montage of the shoot I did this morning with Aaron Jones. I don't think there could be a better person to act this part haha:

So anyways, this will get composited today with the claymation and miniature castle set. A full day of after effects cometh this way. Wish meh luck!

Prog, Dawg!

making some really assuring progress today:

after a trip around to a couple of different thrift stores, I was able to grab all the things I needed for Aaron's costume (for the castle scene)

I look like my back is broken...

also, I finally found a little table to put the globe on, so there's that.

Otherwise, just animating most of the day. I think this will be my last big scene, other than the quick boy-to-adulthood clip I have to make. Sort of like in tarzan, when the elephant throws boy tarzan up into the air, and then he comes back down as a full grown man. Mine won't be quite so extravagant, but you'll get the idea.

Here are a couple of stills from the scene I'm shooting now:

This is one of the only scenes using the actual greenscreen, I'll be keying it out and adding in a bright blue sky, because this whole world of Fionne-whatever is turning out to be pretty dark and sheltered haha. Anyways, now I'm procrastinating, so LaTeR dOoOdZ!

Summers of Sound pt.2

Following the first piece I finished using a lot more analog processing (here) I started the summer with a huge binge of writing and recording and mixing and making a mess of all the noises I could. I'll post up a few that aren't actually online. A lot of them were jumps in different directions that I didn't think were working or were just not quite right in terms of how I wanted to present myself as a musician. They were still getting at a really warm/nonobjective sound though, and were enormously fun to work on.

(Haunted Muth) The first one that I tried to put together was a combination of different things. The first half is the only one part that I still like. At this point I wanted the cumulative project to deal with a lot of narrative. A lot of ideas I came up with had been done before, and so after cutting away more and more I came up with the idea of trying to sound reminiscent of old children's films/animations/stories/etc. This was something I thought was really definitive in sounds that I enjoyed.

These things were rife with static and thin recordings, flutes that sounded like warbling broken frequencies, all that wonderful stuff. This was also something I felt much more oriented towards, being that animation and narrative was what spurred my interest in the first place. Anyways, what I ended with was a step in that direction, but then a step back. At a certain point I believed that I needed a beat to appear with shimmery guitar. After a while, I felt there was nothing original in that, and I also believed that the chord progression was one that had been done over and over again in the past. It was just bringing up thoughts and feelings that I thought didn't belong in the piece. Alas, here it is for anyone who cares to hear.

(Wooden Fifth) After a trip to North Carolina, I found this ancient portable organ that some shop owner sold to me for 5 dollars. That built the main progression of the track, along with a few random flourishes with higher notes. I ran the organ through some effects pedals, and was also playing with a synth that I got to produce a very drifty, fake flute sound that I loved immediately. There are all sorts of other sounds in there, many of the really scratchy distorted voices were actually from friends and I playing with a broken tape recorder. The reason this one got put back under wraps was mostly the percussion. I still didn't like what digital drum sequencing was sounding like, along with not being that great at understanding/producing things rhythmically. Nowadays I have a better handle on it, and a little more openness towards digital beats. This is actually one that I've been reworking when I get the time; I've recently gotten to record with my friend, Michael Marten, on the drum set I've slowly been putting together. That is still being thrown around. Anyways, this one I felt was more a step in the right direction. Every bit was intentional, and not just because I couldn't think of what to do. I think a lot of different writers producers actually feel the same way, that a project that is done all at once and recorded in a long, unstopping process generally stands out so much more to them. Also, giving credit where it's due, this track by Freescha was a huge inspiration while I was making this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8hsXRHe_4o
Though, their method of attack at this kind of composition was much better thought out, and they actually knew how to mix/master.

(Romance of Moths) This recording was the next experiment I tried, using a combination of falling water, really delayed synthesizer sounds, and a few different guitar noises. I'll admit though, this one is a version I messed with some more a year afterwards, bringing in some more sounds that were relative to the story of it. The idea behind it was supposed to be an ode to the group of small moths that lived in my room all summer (a lot of people will cringe at that sentence). But I wanted there to be more of a character involved with the piece, so I cut up a handful of samples from a "Wee Sing" children's song tape and sprinkled them in there at random spots. The criticism I had for this one was on the lack of really... anything. There are chord changes, but the synth is so muddy that nobody would really hear them. The guitars don't really sync with anything either. Every track mixed in kind of did its own thing, and I didn't want to be so haphazard with my sounds. This is another one I have stored away in a more recent project where I've actually stripped it down some more, and reversed it on accident to produce a really awesome progression of noises

I worked on a couple of others, but they were pretty mehh. Totally different sounds than I wanted them to be. But yeah! This was a really fun time that I had to completely devote to learning how I wanted to sound with this project. Now I have music projects practically leaking out of my computer, but none of them I have been able to really call finished. I want to be out of school and in a comfortable spot before I start laying these things out and exposing them under a name. Hopefully soon...

Summers of Sound pt.1

Hey guys! I've been really busy trying to finish up thesis, but I thought I'd take a moment to talk about some more musical work I had done.

I really only started messing with music when I needed something to go along with the animations I was working on in high school. They were just really simple piano recordings, but it sparked an interest almost immediately. The first couple of things I tried kind of replicating were really lofty compositions. Stuff like the Tale of Ashitaka from Princess Mononoke, and even working out the Prelude Theme from the final fantasy games. I was pretty certain that it was something that I wanted to build up, even if I only did it for myself and nobody listening. It has still been kept that way, now more so because I don't have as much time as I used to.

So I went on like that, kind of latching onto different sounds and learning why I liked them. A lot of times it turned out to be for the same reasons despite the genre, the textures and the narrative music could build. And that sounds a little cheesy I suppose, but it never left. I didn't know what kind of things I wanted to make, because I didn't know that much about music in general (at least the presentation side of things). Music has so many faces nowadays, so many genres, and even more people who are very judgmental about different genres. It took a long time before I could find something that I believed in enough to work fully on. Albeit, I did have a lot of different projects, many of which I will never show anyone. Lots of different attempts at everything from electronic, acoustic, pop, even funk. I was so excited about music, and it's weird to think about that time because the world of music was so much smaller then. The things I wanted to accomplish were so certain but daunting at the same time. Not in that I didn't think I could finish, but just the thought of having some kind of final product that I could listen to and think, "I made this, this is a world I made for myself" was so huge. And that's not too far off from how I thought about animation, but these projects were actually do-able, and not so convoluted where people could pick out what was wrong with a story, or why things didn't look realistic. Music seemed more like a pure energy that could be justified any way you made it. I mean I know now that isn't fully true, there are plenty of sliding scales of quality, but not at the time.

Anyways, the first semester of collage, I had this video project, but it was totally an excuse to create music. I was using my computer to record at the time, and still had my old keyboard. I went around getting strange recordings of stuff like printers and my roommate's sister talking. Just random stuff. I ended up churning out this:
https://soundcloud.com/wesley-cathon/youre-dreaming-arent-you

After that was a year of just focusing on school. Summer hit, and I had this really wonderful time back home. It is honestly one of the most nostalgic memories I have. I spent the entire time inside getting back into music and finding the world of it had expanded to exciting amounts. I was getting much more into electronic music, and at the same time trying to achieve something reminiscent of 70s psychedelic stuff. It was a weird, weird body of work that came from this time back home. The recordings are stored away in harddrives and computers. One of those things stuck, and it carried over to the next year when we had an apartment. I told myself, "This is getting finished".

I took away the guitar parts, because I realized that I didn't have the technology to make that sound good. I still wanted the strange ambient bits, but I wanted the whole thing to be based more electronically, because that was what I knew I could finish. This was what I finished after a long time of figuring out how to compose everything, because it was kind of my baby at the time:
https://soundcloud.com/wesley-cathon/the-childe-thomas

I was on a total high, and wanted nothing but time to work on music. I finished this a few days after the last:
https://soundcloud.com/wesley-cathon/kindredscape

There were many others, but again, those are stored away. I only really show that goofy stuff to people I know really well. Anyways, after a while, my roommate at the time, Luis Perez, sort of out of nowhere introduced me to the world of IDM, and it changed everything. Well not everything, but I found the sound I was looking for. I didn't like anything I had recorded at this point, and realized that I couldn't work on something that was completely limited to a computer.

I researched much more about analog recording, I wanted the work to be as genuinely close to the warm aesthetic as possible. Although I didn't have an analog synthesizer, I managed to get ahold of a four track tape recorder. That was my holy grail of the summer following all of this. As the school year ended, I went back to those 70s roots, but in a different way. I was listening to very orchestral things, and strange pioneering into the beginning of electronic music. Stuff like Tangerine Dream:

and more things from the 90s, like a lot of Boards of Canada and Aphex Twin:

I was seriously in heaven. These textures and nostalgic feelings were overwhelming. I started trying to think of how I could work with these ideas, but not rip them off. I began experimenting almost every day with different things I could do with old tapes and obscuring the sounds of different instruments. It's still a struggle I'm taking on now, but I'll get to that later.

My first real break with this sound came with a recording I put together that used a digital organ synthesizer (bashed to hell through the tape recording/re-recording process) and different sounds from around my room. I also tuned down the guitar I had to the lowest note I could play that still had some sort of recognizable tone. As I transfered everything back over to a digital format, This is how it turned out:
https://soundcloud.com/wesley-cathon/the-voice-in-the-hands

It was just an experiment, and was painfully slow moving, but I still think fondly of it as the first time I generated a sound that I was happy with. It was actually supposed to be sort of a sound scape for a story I was illustrating:

So yeah! I'll stop there for now because I realized how long this post turned out to be. If you read this far into it, it actually really means a lot that you took the time to do so haha. This is a practice I hold onto almost sacredly nowadays, and will never give up recording. I'll be continuing with where the work has gone nowadays sometime soon. Thanks!

-Wes

Owl Scene

Shooting a new scene today with the little owl figure that I had posted a while ago. I also have a few new additions to the sets I'm using. One is a castle that I'm using to juxtapose over a character that will be shot outside in a scene where Fionn tries to enter under the service of a king.

And here is the open field where some of the interaction between Fionn and Finnegas (the owl-y figure) occurs:

There will actually be a black curtain over the green-screen, and the field will be lit sort of as if there was a bonfire near it. Hopefully that works... otherwise I'll have to get creative with positioning the field in front of the already made set. Which would work, I just like the idea of an open field, it adds to the kind of enigmatic feel of Finnegas.

I'm mostly posting this because I need something to do while my camera battery charges. I'm working with my own t4i today, but I only have one battery so I have to charge it after every take.

For the bonfire scene so far, I've been able to get an interesting flicker with the small, orange LED light being cast over the set. There's a knob on the side that I've been adjusting for every frame. It's been a really big hassle to pay attention to that along with the animation, but so far it has really paid off. I've been waiting to do this scene for a while, but for some reason never realized how much work it would be. Lucky me, I want to do this for the entire scene. Maybe they'll write a song about this valiant effort in lighting after I die in a few hours.

Anyways, I also finished the sound for the fighting scene, and it turned out fantastically. Again freesound.org came through. I did have a strange cache of noises from one trip out to the woods that ended up working really nicely with the stick hitting/breaking noises. so yay!

Anyways, battery's done. Gonna try and jump on as much as I can get done today, because this set up takes a while to prep/take down. YUSSSS