#beguiristain

[carolinabeguiristain]

poster for my animated film, Out of Order.  A young woman with vaginismus undergoes physical therapy, but when her pain and fear overtake her, she loses sense of reality and must find the strength to complete her goal.

[carolinabeguiristain]

Unemployed #2

[carolinabeguiristain]

Unemployed #1

[carolinabeguiristain]

this is based on a memory of my friend livia’s! thank you for sharing it with me and letting me make this comic✨ @anyone dm me if you have any weird memories you think would make a good strip.

[carolinabeguiristain]

2hr speed paint Oct. 16 2017

[carolinabeguiristain]

crewing on an animated show!

For the first half this semester here at film school, I am crewing on multiple senior's thesis films. As mostly an animation student, this means that everyday from 9-6 I am at school working. Using a program called Shotgun our directors assign their artists tasks which we then track our progress with. We also use Shotgun to track the time we spend on the shows. Currently I am working on a 2D show that will be hand animated in Photoshop. The director, Stephen Bond, and I are painting backgrounds that he will later comp his animations onto. Working with a director that I don't know on his project has been a first for me. I am used to being intimate with the story and having some sort of bond with my collaborators. At my job at Miami Children's Theater, whenever I had to paint and design backdrops for a show I would listen to the musical's sound track in order to get inspired for my designs. In this case, it was pretty much cold turkey. I got a brief overview of his plans and then he gave me some backgrounds. At first it was difficult to figure out exactly what he wanted me to paint. Since Stephen has a very specific way he's been envisioning his story in his head, I had to match his style. He also created a color script so there was very little guesswork on my part. I would just color pick from his thumbnails and redraw them at 1920x1080.

Another part of the crewing process is Dailies. They are held once a week with our professors to get feedback from them and our colleges on our work so far. Last dailies I learned a lot about common problems with 2D backgrounds. Here are the most important points:

1. Make sure that backgrounds reflect who the characters are.  2. Be clear on the geography of the space. Determine where the light is coming from in each scene. 3. Color consistency across backgrounds is important to keep in check! 4. Always use REFERENCE for perspective. Or anything. Always!! 5. Determine a clear style you will be implementing across the backgrounds. On this show, there was a clear change where the director discovered a new brush so he started to turn his backgrounds from being more gradient&clean to being more painterly. We are currently going back to make them consistent. 6. Push everything- the things you paint should push not only the characters as before mentioned, but also the tone of the piece. Why does the character's bed look the way it does? Who dressed the bed? 7. CONTRAST!!!! I'll make a post explaining an easy way to check your usage of values in Photoshop.

Dailies was a strange experience because I was getting feedback on work I created but felt like I had no control over. It is more important to satisfy your director than meet your idea of what you think is good. In terms of working with the director, I learned that I need to more carefully consider what is being asked of me and critique it. I just need to be more mindful, and then if I have any ideas bring them up if appropriate.

[carolinabeguiristain]

Here is an excerpt from my F2!

[carolinabeguiristain]

Today I love humanity (Week 7)

This blog post is late, but a lot has been going on. Every since we restarted our f2 (for the third time) my group has been working double time to try to not fall far behind in pre-production since we need to start animating next week. We have gone through three drafts of scripts, auditioned about 25 people, and have been developing our visual language for each episode. Additionally, our professor Jason Maurer has been giving us crash-courses in rigging in both Maya and After Effects so when we have to animate, we can make a more informed decision about the right program for us. 

It seems like there isn’t enough time in the world to develop our episodes! I keep telling myself that if I had 2 more weeks… even one extra week, that’s all I need. But it’s too late for that. If anything, I have learned a valuable lesson about commitment. Though I will say that the idea we settled on has been much easier for us to collaborate on due to it’s procedural nature. 

But nope. Actually, today’s blog post isn’t going to continue concentrating on my course work, because something really nice happened today.

One of my classmates, Vishesh, was recently disowned by his parents due to no fault of his own. He was facing the next two months with 4 dollars in his bank account. My group and I decided to set up a GoFundMe to raise some money to help pay his expenses… and in 7 hours, people have donated $1000. In 7 hours!!! 

I couldn’t believe it! We got donations from people in the film school, from parents, from friends of friends, from teachers… in the words of my friend Diana, “I’m so proud to be a person today.” 

And I’ll leave it at that.