http://ciquestudios.com/blog A Log of Creative Digital Production Sun, 21 Jun 2009 17:11:18 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en These are characters developed for my new webcomic, Nexus Neighborhood. The models were created in Blender 3D with some basic composite nodes. The dark black lines were added later in the GIMP. I love the idea of drawing freehand. I imagine it is freeing to have an immediate result ... http://ciquestudios.com/blog/2009/06/21/amiel_leo/ I love the feeling of having blogged. I like the act of writing as much as the next person, but sometime in the last six months, I began to substitute my blog posts with Twitter updates, for the simple (but unsatisfying) reason that twittering offers much quicker gratification for less ... http://ciquestudios.com/blog/2009/06/18/rebranding/ Many people have discussed the promise of creating a Blender-centric podcast. So I have taken the liberty of hosting and broadcasting "The Blender Show". As the first episode mentions, the video podcast is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license and will feature tutorials, screencasts, interviews with Blender artists, ... http://ciquestudios.com/blog/2009/02/07/the-blender-show-a-journal-of-open-source-art/ Madeline is now available for online viewing. The Blender-animated short film is the result of almost a year of production on home computers and is my first with a female human character. The idea of animating a film against the setting of a subway platform has always appealed to me - ... http://ciquestudios.com/blog/2008/12/30/online-premiere-madeline/ Madeline's failures were twofold: the idea behind the plot was weak, and that plot was poorly executed. The plot follows a girl trying to make money in a metro terminal. Madeline tries to street perform by juggling, gets frustrated by the lack of response cash, and retreats to her postmodern dwelling. ... http://ciquestudios.com/blog/2008/11/15/mad-about-madeline/ The other day I submitted The Ancestor's Tale to the Digg-like voting site, Reddit. The comments are worth taking a look at. http://ciquestudios.com/blog/2008/11/11/digging-and-burying-the-ancestors-tale/ Damn this building for being so hard to find, thought well-dressed university student Ian Elsner as he slid gracefully off the bus and strode purposely into the O'Connell Center. No wonder I don't swim here. He bypassed the line and went directly for the complementary trinkets and corporate-logo-festooned pens at ... http://ciquestudios.com/blog/2008/09/24/the-oconnell-code-a-short-story/ I am returning from a partly self-imposed, partly circumstantial hiatus. In this time, I toured the masterpieces of Paris and Rome, I reviled in the stillness of rural Eastern Europe, and I started my first semester of college. Over the summer, I had planned to update my travels in the form ... http://ciquestudios.com/blog/2008/09/22/cique-something-new/ I find a perverse pleasure with the fact that my own work demonstrates controversy. Controversy is the point at which the illustrator becomes the artist - instead of taking work at face value, it is analyzed. I was asked to design the cover for my highschool’s graduation show last year. Then ... http://ciquestudios.com/blog/2008/04/20/controversy-pleasing-the-public-and-art/ I am almost finished with my work for the HL Exam, which has forced me to become more self-reflexive then I usually am about my work. I was able to narrow down all my movies into a single theme: the melding of science and art. This theme mirrors my own experiences. The ... http://ciquestudios.com/blog/2008/04/10/the-melding-of-science-and-art/ I spent last night in the Atlanta Airport because of flight problems. With coffee and computer in hand, with the air of one who briefly smiles and nods at anyone who happens to pass, I wandered around the massive, dark airport, podcasting on the moving sidewalks and plotting my next ... http://ciquestudios.com/blog/2008/01/19/en-route-to-sundance/ The missing piece of my movies is the soundtrack. I make everything except the music, even going so far as not beginning a project until I find the right music. Indeed, Eros was first imagined on an airplane some years ago after simply listing to the music for the first ... http://ciquestudios.com/blog/2008/01/14/music-madeline/ Early in 2007, I began sculpting a realistic human face. The result can be seen in the two protagonists of “Istanbul”: obviously human but creepy in a less obvious way. The hard-to-identify creepiness came from the concept of the uncanny valley, which states that the more realistic a creation becomes ... http://ciquestudios.com/blog/2008/01/03/facing-%e2%80%9cistanbul%e2%80%9d/ My next film project roots it’s inspiration where Eros left off. As satisfied as I was with the picture, I originally intended it to end with a huge orgy of juggling - many statues participating in the exchange of the red balls. While the main an working theme of the ... http://ciquestudios.com/blog/2007/12/22/metro-robots/ With Eros complete, I have spent a lot of time wondering about art. Eros truly felt like an art piece to me, different from the other films I created, which feel like pure entertainment. This caught me off-guard. Just like a journalist is different from a writer, an entertainer is different ... http://ciquestudios.com/blog/2007/12/11/discourses-on-art/ It’s been a long time coming, but now I can happily announce my latest film, Istanbul! Istanbul is my first attempt to model the human form, and also is more plot based then my previous films (seems plot plays more of an element in each successive film, doesn’t it?). The story ... http://ciquestudios.com/blog/2007/11/23/web-premere-of-istanbul/ On Tuesday of last week, after I arrived home from school, I casually glanced at my webstats to find thousands of hits from BlenderNation. Excitedly, I checked my favorite Blender site to find my podcasted self staring back at me in a featured article. This was the first time I was ... http://ciquestudios.com/blog/2007/09/23/limelight/ Modeling humans is something that I’ve done before (see Istanbul). But a model by itself does not contain any information about how the mesh will react when animated. Each movement has a corresponding counter action (ie, a model’s center of gravity must change when picking up a heavy object) and ... http://ciquestudios.com/blog/2007/08/03/marionette/