The Renae Update

Hi All,
So this last week I went on a class field trip to a professional motion capture studio called "The House of Moves". Its a really huge motion capture facility that does some amazing work with all the big hollywood directors on the major films, video games, and more! Anyway, they asked for volunteers to get into the mo-cap suits so they could do a real-time demonstration, using our marked up bodies to drive 3D models projected in their software. The setup was a wrestling ring that day so I got to drive one of the wrestlers and my friend Sepher was the other wrestler. Anyway, thought I would share a quick picture of me all markered up in the mo-cap suit, hehe....enjoy!

O and I should also note that the picture was taken with the camera on a friends phone (so its a little low res), you can see the wrestling ring in the back, and all the red lights in the background are the big infrared cameras that capture all the movement.

Hi all,
I found out today that DUCK studios named me "Cool Animator of the Week" on their blog! How cool!! Check out the studios blog post here:
http://www.duckstudios.com/blog/2008/10/cool-animator-of-the-week-renae-radford/

Thanks so much DUCK :)

Hi all,
So you probably have noticed the new look. I felt like it was time for a change. I'm going to start updating things throughout my portfolio site now as its getting closer to the start of my next semester. I'll be adding a few things here and there once I get the movies compressed and pages ready to go. Enjoy the new look!

A recent email update that I sent out - thought I would share with the rest of you:

Hello Everyone!
Its been a long time since I sent out an update and I've had a lot of requests from people lately, so I thought I'd send a little something out to let you all know what I've been up to.

I guess I'll begin from this last semester. This last semester I finished my second year of grad school and I am now moving on to my third and final year of school. During my second year I had the opportunity to create even more great work to add to my portfolio and was even involved in producing my own animation installation in the Zemeckis Media Labs multiple projector lab space. All of my projects and shows went well during the year and now I have the task of updating my portfolio with them, which I'm trying to get to. During my upcoming final year I will be working on producing and finishing my final thesis film and this film has to be finished by May of next year. As of now I have a general idea of what I'm going to be doing for my film, which is mainly in the form of the visual structure, however I'm working out the story structure right now and trying to get a jump on the style frames for the overall look of the film. As of right now I'd like it to consist mainly of 2.5 D elements composited with some 3D elements and will be in the form of a more motion graphics film rather then a 3D narrative. We only have the year to complete it and if after that it isn't finished we will be done and will not be allowed to continue work on it (many of our previous classmates were allotted more time to finish, but they have stopped that starting with our class) so I have to work really hard to get it finished by the end of the year. Wish me luck!

As far as big events happening lately my most recent happening was my vacation to Hawaii! This was my first real vacation ever! Hawaii was AmAzInG and I absolutely want to go back again. I ended up going on a group trip with a few friends and we all rented a condo together and stayed on the big island of Hawaii. While there I got to go to the beaches, snorkel, hike, swim with sea turtles, see the volcano and much, much more. While there I also got to visit some of my family who live on the island and who I haven't seen in many years so that was a great experience as well. My friends and I all had a great time and I hope to make it out again soon, hopefully next time to a different island.

For the rest of my summer I've basically been busy working up at Dreamworks Animation again full time as their digital training intern. My position is much the same as last summer when I was there, but this time I've got a lot more responsibility and our department has grown quite a bit. We now have 3 major films in production with the 4th ramping up. Our Kung Fu Panda film did quite well in the box office when it was released at the beginning of June and I recommend it to all to see! I'll be working at Dreamworks until the end of August and then I hope to apply for a full time position when I graduate and see if I can get hired on in one of their artistic positions. I'm working on getting my portfolio together and prepped and I'll have to include my thesis too as I get more work done on it, so I still have a long road ahead.

Other then work this summer I've been busy going to the beach on the weekends with friends and visiting my parents. For those of you who are interested in an update on my parents, they are both retired now and traveling the country in a BIG RV. They sold our old farm in Orion about a year or so ago and have been traveling around from place to place, mostly in the southwest and western sections of the US. They ended up getting a RV hosting job at the end of May up at the Malibu RV park, which is unbelieveable and amazing, so now they work during the day or night helping set up appointments and run the RV park during the week and on the weekends they usually have a little time off so I've been able to go up and visit mom and dad almost every weekend, which has been great. They will be stationed there til at least october, and if they want they can renew their contract and stay there for longer, which they may or may not do. If they do they might be around then until I graduate which would be great, but they may have the itch to get back out on the road again, so we'll see in time what they decide to do.

Well thats about it for me. I just wanted to send out a little update on how things are going and I hope you enjoyed it. I hope that all is well with you and as always, I love to hear updates from all of you whenever you get a chance to send one out. Have a great summer and keep in touch,
~Renae

:: 1/8/08 ::

Hi All,
I'm on winter break and I've finally found a little time to update the blog! I know there has been an out cry from many people who want to see my new work, and I'd love to post up my finished short films, but unfortunately all I can post at the moment are snapshots from my shorts and I'm currently out of town on break and unable to post to my portfolio. In time I'll get the short films up, but for now I thought I would share some screen shots, so you can at least get an idea of what I've been working on this past semester.

This past semester was a great one as I was able to produce a great deal of new work for my portfolio and it has been a really exciting process. In my masters film class I was able to create a number of short works, a couple of which I have some snapshots to share with you. The first one shown below is called "Tango" and is a short motion graphics/text/symbol piece that was a lot of fun to create. This piece as well as all the others I'll be posting about will be up on my portfolio so you can see the full projects in due time!




For my final project in my masters class I decided to create another motion graphics piece that went along with a poem. I chose the poem "Brown Penny" by William Butler Yates. Using the words from the poem I was able to loosely base some of my visual design inspiration to create a colorful, whimsical piece.
Below are a few screen shots from the short film.





Another class that was really great this semester was my contemporary animation course. I got an overwhelming amount of inspiration from other artists work that we viewed throughout the semester in the class and was able to bring together some of my inspirations to create some cool work of my own. The first project I worked on is a short film focusing on creating my own stylistic look and feel and integrating subtle animation of motion. The short film is called "Smooensual" and below are a few screen shots from the film.





As the final project for contemporary I created another short film, this one with a little character animation and some fun tech styling. The idea of the short is that a robot (which is the cameras viewpoint) is inspecting the small blue character and evaluating him for the next stage of the short. If I was to extend the project I would continue with the my original idea of having the robot continue with several passes over the character and with each pass the characters exterior skin is changed to give it a different look and feel. For now I have the beginning short sequence finished and here are a few snap shots from the piece.





And moving on to my VFX course I was lucky enough to work again with Eric Hanson, an amazing VFX supervisor for several big hit films out there today. With his help and the help of some of my classmates I was able to create a cool VFX sequence using panorama photography, which we shot out in the mountains north of LA in Red Rock Canyon, and integrate the photography with my CG work in Maya. For my CG world I flooded the basin to create a CG ocean in the panorama photo, used the HDRI photos we took to recreate the environmental lighting, altered the day photos for night, and created metallic sea serpents which in the sequence emerge from the ocean to try and capture an unsuspecting bird (the camera is from the birds viewpoint) that is flying too low near the oceans surface. The sequence turned out pretty good considering I was the only one working on it with help here and there from the professor and friends with issues I had along the way. I'd love to revisit it sometime to fix the things bugging me in the current sequence and create a couple more short, slower sequences but for now thats on hold as thesis and other courses will soon be demanding my time. Below are some screen shots from the sequence.






Well thats about it for an update on my work. Of course I will in time be putting up small video files of the short films or sequences that I've shown you here, but with the new semester starting up in less then a week and the demands of my new spring courses I can't pinpoint when I'll be able to get to it. I hope that you have enjoyed the snap shots that I've shared and as always if you have any updates of your own or just wish to get back in touch feel free to drop me an email (r.radford@yahoo.com) anytime! Take care :)

Hi all,
Just a note on the blog. I've had to disable comments now becaue for some reason this blog software can't tell when someone is spamming my blog with comments, so I'm just disabling them from here on out. Sorry, just send me an email if you want to get a hold of me or comment on something! :) If the developers ever fix it maybe I'll add it back on, but for now its staying shut off.