'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!

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- 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