Daily Sketch

Wow! It’s been a long time! Sorry for the two-month delay! Life happens, you know …

Nothing much new has been happening on the animation side of life. Square Peg screened this last weekend as part of the New Orleans Int’l Children’s Film Festival. And I’ve still been doing some freelance work to pay the bills.

As far as personal projects, I’ve been working on a new one with some friends of mine … a show that will showcase local Kansas City Music & Musicians … it’s a bit of process and we’re slowing things down just a bit because one of the core members of our project was recently diagnosed with Inflammatory Breast Cancer … hence the title … I thought that might get your attention.

I didn’t know anything about Inflammatory Breast Cancer … it’s a sneaky S.O.B.! And it often gets misdiagnosed by doctors at first! Please visit my friend Abby’s page about it, where she has a blog about her experiences with kickin’ it’s ass! And there’s a few information sites about the disease. You can visit it here - http://www.thegaslights.com/pages/hope.html

In support of Miss Abby … a bunch of us cut our hair. Here’s a pic of the new do!

Got a little of both in me ...

Don’t we all have a bit of both in us! And here’s all the hair that went to Locks of Love!

Wow! I had a lot of hair!

I recently got the privilege of being asked to do an interview with Toni Pennacchia, the host of Spoiler Alert Radio. Now if you don’t know about Spoiler Alert Radio, it’s a very cool podcast about all things film, locally and globally. She interviews filmmakers and such from around the world about their films, their processes, how they finance their projects, and more: basically, all the stuff you want to know!

Apparently, she had seen my short animation, How To Put a Square Peg Into a Round Hole, on B-Side and e-mailed me about a possible interview and sending my short animation to their film festival The MergingArts Short Short Story Film Festival, which tours the New England area in November 2008. I, of course, said yes to both! Then realized, “OH (Insert Your Own Expletive)! I’ve never done a radio interview before!!” Fortunately, though, I didn’t have too much time to think about it because a couple of days later I was on the phone with Toni doing the interview.

I would love to say I was as cool as a cucumber during the interview, but I was extremely nervous! But Toni does a good job of putting you at ease and I just tried to do my best to give more than the one-word answer … an interviewer’s worse nightmare, I’m sure. We basically talked about my first short animation, How To Put a Square Peg Into a Round Hole, my music videos for The Gaslights, Last Dollar & God, Guns & Glory, my day job career as a Designer/Video Editor/Animator and if I have any upcoming projects. I think I did okay … I definitely learned a lot from it! And if I’m ever privileged enough for another interview I think I’ll be more ready for it … although I’m sure my first thought will still be “OH (Insert Your Own Expletive)!!”

It aired live on Sunday, June 8th from 7-7:30PM EST on 88.1FM, WELH, Providence, RI, streaming at Brown University Student and Community Radio. And you can now listen to the podcast at Spoiler Alert Radio’s website by clicking here.

If you listen to it … well, first off, THANKS! and remember it’s my first interview … so be kind! ;b

Still Animated,
Mary

Hey Y’alll!

For your full resolution TV viewing pleasure you can now download my dvds! Just go to www.maryctaylor.com/shop.html and download one or more today!

Check it out today! And keep animated!

-Mary Mary

A little blurb about God, Guns & Glory on Present Magazine.

http://www.presentmagazine.com/full_content.php?article_id=1178&full=yes&pbr=1

My new music video for the Gaslights song God, Guns & Glory is being featured on Yahoo! Video!

Go to http://video.yahoo.com/

and click on the music button

Yahoo!

-Mary

Read this article on AWN about how you could lose the rights to all of your artwork …

http://mag.awn.com/index.php?ltype=pageone&article_no=3605

Then read this article in response to Mark’s artcicle … http://maradydd.livejournal.com/374886.html

Mark Simon’s Rebuttal - http://mag.awn.com/index.php?ltype=pageone&article_no=3615

Mark Simon’s article - Does Congress Care About Your Creations

From the upcoming God, Guns and Glory animation, “You Have the Power Voice It & Vote” with the American Flag quilt T-Shirts are now available!

Voice It & Vote T-Shirt

Click here to get yours today!

How To Put a Square Peg Into a Round Hole and Last Dollar are now available on DVD at www.maryctaylor.com/shop.html!

How To Put a Square Peg Into a Round Hole is a cute little children’s animation your little ones will love! And with Last Dollar you’ll get your Gaslights fix and remember how much fun they are to see live!

And from How To Put a Square Peg Into a Round Hole get your little one a Gordon T-Shirt or get your own Gordon or Square Peg T-Shirt for yourself! And from the upcoming God Guns and Glory animation, get your “You Have the Power Voice It and Vote” with the American Flag quilt T-Shirt!

Visit www.maryctaylor.com/shop.html Today!

How To Put a Square Peg Into a Round Hole will be screening on Oscar Day Sunday the 24th - 12:45pm-1:15pm at the San Francisco Int’l Children’s Film Festival as a part of WonderCon 2008. So if you or any of your friends and family will be in the area, check it out!

Well folks, I’m yet another casualty of the dreaded downsizing! So if you know of any video editing or animation freelance and/or full-time gigs out there … let a girl know.

You can direct people to my portfolio site at www.maryctaylor.com to view my demo reel, download a pdf of my resume, and find my contact info.

Thanks Everybody!

-Mary

Hey All!

I’d thought I’d update ya a bit on the work I have in progress and I think Super Tuesday is a fine day to do it. Don’t forget to get out there and voice your opinion and vote!

A rough animation I’m working on for The Gaslights song God, Guns and Glory is done. I’ve completed the initial artwork and worked on the camera moves … but still have to clean up the artwork and do the animation. I hope to have it all done by some time in late February or March.

Wow! It’s been quite a while since I’ve blogged here so I thought I’d better do a little update on my goings on … I’ve been workin’ hard on my new animation to The Gaslights song God, Guns and Glory. It’ll be a little retrospective on the Bush Administration’s terms in office. Below is a sample of some of the initial artwork. Barring lots of freelance work, I’m still looking to get it done by some time in February … fingers crossed! Wish me luck!

2000 Debate - The Beginning Of It All

So them rich old white men can dream up wars for the young poor kids to die

Holy COW!!!! I don’t know what I did to get on the front page of Yahoo!
but Woohoo!!! Yahoo!!! My friend Bryan took this screen capture of it …
check it out!!!

Yahoo Front Page

-Mary

Well Alright! The Gaslights music video for their song Last Dollar which I just finished up is now online for y’all to see! Please check it out and feel free to rate it and/or leave comments, we’d love to hear how y’all like it.

And if you’re diggin’ the video well enough that you just feel the need to forward it on to friends and family, please go right ahead and do so. Here’s the url: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRdD5p_luFs

But, don’t stop just at the video … come on out to The Gaslights CD Release Party at Davey’s Uptown in KCMO on Friday, November 30th.

L.A. Screening Sat. Oct. 6

If you happen to be in the L.A. area this Saturday, Oct. 6th and are looking for something to do … my short animation, How To Put a Square Peg Into a Round Hole, will be screening at 1p.m. at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as part of the Los Angeles Int’l Children’s Film Festival.

I finally got around to creating a rough storyboard for the God Guns and Glory music video that my fellow motion graphics artist, Cody Donelson, and I hammered out rough ideas for a couple of fridays ago. That night was also his first time Cody saw

Now that we’ve done some research on style & imagery and done the rough storyboard … next up is finalizing a cohesive style and shooting the video of the band we need. Since I’m also cutting together another video for The Gaslights we’re just going to shoot two birds with one stone and get all done in one day. Wish us luck!

I finally got around to hammering out an initial rough storyboard for my new animation, The Letter.

As I said in a previous post, the idea for the beginning and ending came to me immediately … although I have tweaked it a bit in the past few weeks that its been mulling around in my head. The middle part has definitely been the toughest part for me to figure out. It really just came down to finally putting pen to paper and hammering it out.

The basic set-up is this … it’s about a guy, we’ll call him Nick, who is a big fan of the local weather gal, Wendy Weatherby. Nick is just finishing writing Ms. Weatherby a fan letter while watching her latest weathercast. She says “It’s a beautiful day! So get out there and enjoy the weather!” Nick smiles, licks the envelope and heads out the door. It’s a beautiful day, the sun is shining, the birds are singing … you see the mailbox in the distance down the road. Nick sets off to mail his fan letter. And that’s when the fun begins …

Click on the picture below to see the first page of the storyboard … just stick-figure drawings, but it helps me to quickly figure out the story and what kind of shots I might use (i.e. close-ups, medium-shots, wide-shots) …

The Letter - Page 01 Initial Storyboard

Of course, this is the initial rough storyboard so I’m sure there will be changes as I move along. The next step will be figuring out what the style of the animation will be and character design.

I’m sorry it’s been so long to post this, but I was awaiting client approval before I put it live. Below is the final version of the Dine and Dash comic-book style commercial.

Click here to watch the Dine & Dash Commercial

A lot of times at my day job I will be brought in on a project that was started a long time ago but for one reason or another was never completed. It will then be placed in my bin to get done. Dash and Dine is one of those projects.

It’s a cool concept … comic book style commercial. And one of our guys in the print department, Bryan Long, did an excellent job with the illustrations.

The Characters

The Diner

For the last few days I’ve been working on prepping the artwork for the commercial. Creating the layout of the comic book and the individual frames and jazzing up the illustrations a bit with some dodging and burning in Photoshop.

Comic Book Cover

Comic Book Inside Layout

Unfortunately, while the illustrations are great they are not ideal for animation purposes and there just isn’t time to have him re-tool his illustrations. So for the animation part of this commercial, I think about the only thing I can really do is some camera moves in After Effects with the illustrations in each frame separated into different planes to give it some depth and some simple animation where I can.

So … I’m off to animate! More next time … same blog space … later blog time!

Inspiration struck this week and now I’ve got a couple of new projects I’ll be working on in my spare time.

One is an idea I had for an animation for a song called God Guns and Glory by a local Kansas City band, The Gaslights. For this animation, I recruited a couple of other local motion artists, Cody Donelson and Kyle Hamrick. Since this is just for fun and something to work on to further our skills and we each also have our own pet projects and day jobs too, it might take awhile but I’ll be sure to keep ya up to date on our progress. This weekend I will be doing some research on the kind of style we will be aiming for on this piece.

The other idea will be my second animation … the first being How To Put a Square Peg Into a Round Hole. I am tentatively calling it The Letter. It started out being about Missouri and the old Missouri saying “If you don’t like the weather, just wait … it’ll change.” But has since changed to become a cute little story that is more about global warming. I have a solid beginning and ending but still need to flesh out the middle. When I come up with the first initial storyboard I’ll be sure to post it.

So it looks like I will be a busy busy girl for a while! ;b

In December of 2006 I finished my first animation for which I wrote, animated, and directed … How To Put a Square Peg Into a Round Hole. It took me a couple of months in my spare time to complete. It probably would have taken me a couple of weeks if I had had the opportunity to work full-time on it.

I hadn’t made an animation of my own in years, since college, and those were very amateur … so I finally decided last year that I was going to make time to create one and have it done by the December 10th deadline for the KC Jubilee Film Festival. I had no idea what the story was going to be so I started brainstorming a bit and the old adage “square peg into a round hole” popped into my head. So I mulled it over some and then boom it entered into the foreground of my brain and I sketched the initial character and storyboard out on paper in about half an hour. Click on the thumbnail below to view the intial storyboard.

First Sketch & Storyboard for How To Put a Square Peg Into a Round Hole

Now I had something to work with! The next step was to create the character sheets. I created one for the main character, who I named Gordon, and one for the Square Peg. I drew them up in Illustrator because one, I planned on animating in After Effects, and two, I like the brush styles you can get using Illustrator. Click on the thumbnails below to view the character sheets.

Gordon Character Sheet

Square Peg Character Sheet

Next, was to create a more polished storyboard. Once I went back and looked at the original sketched storyboard I decided to make a few changes and added in some voice-over. Click below to view the final storyboard.

Storyboard for How To Put a Square Peg Into a Round Hole

Then I finally got to animating … where things got refined just a little bit more. Once I had it pretty close to finished I needed to find someone to either create the music or find some canned music. Luckily I was able to find someone to create the music, Randy Skach of Western Automatic Music. I told him I wanted some silent film type music and he came through with flying colors. So the only obstacle I had left was the voice over. I called a guy in to do the voice over but once I edited it in I decided it was much better without … especially since I was using silent film type music. So I just re-edited a bit by adding in title cards like in the old silent films, got a co-worker to add in some sound effects and voila … done just in time to meet the KC Jubilee Film Festival deadline.

Unfortunately it didn’t make it in to the KC Jubilee Film Festival. But it got my butt in gear and now I’ve definitely got the itch to do another one. I’m also entering it into other film festivals … so I will keep ya posted. You can view the trailer below.

Click here to view the short film.

This is my new demo reel with a new open and close to better match my website and other materials.

Well, it took me a couple of months, but I finally finished my new portfolio site!

Home Page

For this new site I wanted to create more of a concept site. So, my home page is the outside of a building. The side menu represents the supporting pillar of the building and the name/tag design above are the roof of the building. A lady leans out of her window to view the movie projected onto the building as the newsboy below is directing your attention to the news of the day. For the sub-pages I wanted it to feel like you were looking into one of the windows of the building.

Contact Page

Software page

Portfolio Page

If you’d like to see the site in action, please click here to take a look. Next up … is to refine my demo reel with some of my latest work and create a new open and close to better reflect the website.