Hey it's June....say whaaaat?

OH MY LOHD!!


sosososo SOOOOOO much has happened.

…..okay maybe not that much. But YET SO MUCH! First off…I have started working full-time at Augenblick Studios!! :D I am working as a Production Assistant for the last couple weeks and so far has been fun experience! Golan the Insatiable, the show that I interned for at Augenblick back in Oct - February has finally aired on television and I got to experience seeing my name on TV credits for the first time ever! 

The studio had a premiere party and it was amazing to sit and watch how the show came together with the entire team watching. It’s such a fantastic feeling, to have been a part of the show, and I feel extremely blessed to be working full-time with the awesome peeps at Augenblick!

Other than the big news in my career mah-jig, I have also been apartment hunting in NY and soon to be moving into Brooklyn! Plus I have been working with friends on the side on a small project….that I can’t talk about at all! ;D

So between all this excitement I haven’t had a lot of time to work on personal work, which I feel terribly about because it makes me feel so uncreative and extremely tired (my current commute is 4 hours back/forth everyday U__U; ) However, I look at the work I am doing with Augenblick Studios, and the work I am doing with my friends and I feel so thankful... because I think back to my time as a Sophmore at SCAD praying that I’d be working at Augenblick, and wishing to be drawing/ and animating characters for a living. And though I am still really early in my career, I thank God that I have been able to get this far, and allow me to be living my dream! In the beginning it was tough. It still is pretty tough, but I know that it is all worth it!

I don’t know if anyone reads this, but thanks for reading. It’s kind of mushy but it’s really how I feel. Aaaaaand now I lost my train of thought….forgot what I started typing for! XD So I guess I post some stuff I’ve worked on in May! (Oh I just remembered that I graduated from SCAD a year ago last week….it seem so surreal to see the juniors before me now entering the industry! I’m SUPER proud of them!!)

Pudding can't feel the emptiness inside me....

Sorry I haven't updated in a while. Maybe I'll double post this month to make up for not posting April.

Two years ago I designed this character Senor Sarasoza for my Character Animation Course at SCAD.

He was based off of my roommates goofy high school sex-ed teacher and the assignment was to lip-synch a character to a vocal clip. I really liked the character I designed but I ended up animating my character Pyro Pup for the assignment, and never went back to this idea.

But now, two years later, I found the old design and the old sound clip I chose, and decided I'd do a quickie lip-synch:

Work in Progress.

It's finally Spring!!

And it's still freezing here in NYC...

It actually snowed the first day of Spring which made everyone crazy!! Then the next day was 50 degrees of sunshine, melting away all the snow as if it had never happened.


I posted about my internship with Faculty last month, and the work hasn't held back. That is to say this month has been incredibly busy in the studio, specifically the project I'm on. We are supposed to finish by the end of the month so we've been pulling a lot of over-time hours. I even had to go in last Saturday to work! So between that and doing commissioned work I BARELY had time to do art for myself. But work is supposed to settle down pretty soon so I may be able to do more work of When Pigs Fly and other ideas I had rolling in my sketchbook during my commutes...

WELP!

Here are some random doodles I have in my March folder:

less bad doodles to come

I gotta "BRAND" it to yah!

Sorry for the terrible terrible pun.....hopefullly I'll think of another title later  U__U;
So I haven't posted in about a month. I have been meaning to, but I've been really busy at my full-time internship with Faculty NY. They are a small studio in Dumbo, NY and I like working with the people there! The commutes a little long and I don't really have enough time to do anything but work and sleep XD But before I had no time to myself I did manage to re-brand myself & update the look of my promotional material!

Check out my Demo Reel :D

Waymond Singleton Reel Jan 2015 from Way Singleton on Vimeo.

For a few years I have been exploring different designs that I felt represented who I am and the type of art that I like to do. Back in my 2012, before I took any sort of professional development class, I created this mess of a business card:

I loved the idea of having a silhouetted character as a logo, because silhouettes are a HUGE  part of character design and  I wanted to include idea in my branding. However this is before I knew anything about Typography or print design, so it's a very horrible looking mess! But I wanted to go back to this idea of a simple red/black/white design with a silhouette Alligator as my logo, because this was the first iteration of the way I felt about myself as an artist, so it has this raw, unaltered feeling of self for me.

But of course I couldn't use this little guy as my logo, as cute as he is, because he was designed out of naivete, so I decided to update him. But before I did any sketching I did a small branding exercise to understand who I am and what type of personality I want to come off with my logo which can be view here: http://bit.ly/1DH81zB

Then after making that list, I started sketch a bunch!:

I absolutely wanted to get a nice curvaceous croc look in the design and wanted to have nive positive and negative space. I remember being really inspired by the Talking Animals Studio logo

....after drawing a bunch of alligators I also considered having a different animal at one point.

A SQUID! I thought of having a squid mianly because I wanted to show dexterity...but I still felt a bond with having an alligator.

On this page I started heading towards the current design (at the bottom) I wanted to incorporate my initials in the logo to make it

Then I sketched it up in flash!

I am really happy with the way it turned out but I have also been slowly making edits to it. Like on the business card version I changed WAS to a font the I have been using on my website

It's been really fun recreating my "brand" and rediscovering what I liked about this logo and design. Now I'm working on making different marketing material that I could present on other sites like my Tumblr and Twitter. And also just in time for SCAD Career Fair 2015 that I am very excited about attending!


Thanks for reading guys!

Way Way Update 2015

I graduated from  college about 7 months ago, and it has been frustrating trying to get my foot in the door in the Animation Industry. Of course I didn't expect it to be an easy task, or that studios and companies would be trying to flag me down when hundreds of other schools have thousands of graduates looking for jobs as well. I've have found that not being able to get any call backs or offers has slowly been effecting me creatively, and caused me to focus too heavily on my job search instead of trying to develop my skills. I have even applied to many positions outside of animation with no avail.  This constant failure has left me feeling depressed about my work and my life as a whole. But I don’t like feeling sorry for myself, and I have decided to take a retrospective look at the accomplishments that I have made in the last 7 months after graduation and record my goals for 2015, as well as long term goals for the next five years.

June 2014 - Aug 2014

• I had not found any opportunities in my field for Summer however I took this time to work on my portfolio, apply for positions, and plan my move to NY in September.

Sept 2014

• Moved to NYC

• Called Studios, Applied to jobs, Applied to agencies

Oct 2014

• Accepted an internship with Augenblick Studios
• Continued to look for freelance opportunities

Nov 2014

• Freelanced with FreshPlanet as a Designer and Animator
• Continued the Augenblick Internship

Dec 2014

• Networked at the Mill met a few other SCAD students and Alumni
• Continued the Augenblick Internship
• Tinkering a lot more with C4D
• Re-branding myself for 2015 and preparing my portfolio for SCAD Career Fair 2015.

Jan 2014

• Freelanced with Freshplanet as an Animator.
• Interviewed for different positions including: Internship with Rauch Bros Studios, Social Media position with Iridium, Internship with Spontaneous, position with King Show Games.
• Continuing to Re-brand and prepare my portfolio.

I thank God for the blessings he has bestowed upon me, and as I look back at the accomplishments that I have made in the last several months, it makes me happy to know that I am experiencing what I am experiencing, and builds my determination to make 2015 the year that my career escalates even further. So with that in mind here are my goals for the upcoming year:

2015 Goals:

• Attend CTNx 2015
• Attend SCAD Career Fair 2015
• Continue creating content to be posted online through social media
• Building a web presence.
• Network with other artists and studios
• Build upon my skillset
• Learn C4D, Zbrush
• Complete the 51 animation exercises list
• Gain more experience in a production/ studio environment
• Continue to enter my student film into festivals
• Update blog regularly

As time moves on I hope to add and complete tasks on the list as necessary, and use these goals to become a better animator and Illustrator.

My long - term goals:

I aspire to be a Character Designer/ Animator/ Illustrator and in five years I hope to be working full-time designing and animating for games, television, and advertising. I hope to continue to use the goals I set for 2015 for upcoming years.

Thank you for reading! I I wish everyone a successful 2015

How to Become a Better Problem Solver

This is something that came across my mind and thought I'd just share on my blog...hope it helps!

 During my senior year in college, as many of my colleagues questioned what the future held for them, I too was perplexed at what successes and mistakes lied ahead of me. It was the final quarter of my senior year when my professor  had given us time during the class to ask anything about the animation industry and the transformation from student to professional. As I had buried myself under countless job applications with some similar requirements, there was one requirement that I for some reason couldn’t wrap my head around. So I stuck my hand up and asked, “How do you become a better ‘problem solver’?”

    I felt the naiveté of the question escalate as I said it and felt a bit embarrassed to ask such a question that seemed to have an obvious answer, but by the look of some of my classmates faces, they too were interested to hear what the answer had to be. At this point, being the final quarter of college, we all had to have experienced “problem solving” in some way, however we weren’t quite sure how to continue getting better at it for the rest of our lives. The answer he gave was informative, but before I give it away I’ll tell you a story that happen to me at an earlier time that could have probably helped me answer the question myself.

    During my sophomore year, I had been in the class Digital Form Space and Lighting, a class that taught students how to think and create using the realm of digital 3D space. Autodesk Maya was the main tool used in the class, and after two weeks my fellow classmates and I were slowly getting used to using the program. It was during this time the Professor decided to give us a challenge.
    “I’m going to give you an hour. And in that hour you have to build something in Maya based on the theme that I give you…THIS WILL BE GRADED and will count for 25% of your final grade” Many of us cringed; we’ve only been using this program for two weeks and many of us not yet comfortable with the maze-like interface it had. We all sat at our computers and waited for him to give us the theme. “Your task...you must create a chair...that portrays ANGER! YOUHAVEONEHOURGO!”

    We all spastically went to work on this “Anger Chair”. Some of us, including myself, started with thumbnails, and others just jumped right into the program and started building the chair on the spot. I remember having trouble creating the chair that I had planned out, but for lack of time, continued to build anyway. A friend of mine who had been a great designer and fast learner had, in thirty minutes, built an extravagant looking death-chair, complete with spikes for the seat and lots of angry looking angles. It was near the thirty minute mark that one of my classmates finished her chair, shut-off her computer screen so no one could see it, and sat at the table in the middle of the room. I was astonished! What could she have done in thirty minutes that could have perfectly represented the theme? What did she do in half the time given that she was willing to bet her FINAL GRADE of the class on?
    I continued to add angry angles to my chair like my friend’s, until time was up and we all came to the middle of the classroom.

    “Alright, let see what you’ve all come up with.” We all got up and circled around the classroom and looked at each others chairs. Few of us, including my friend, had really impressive looking chairs. Most of us, myself included, had not so impressive chairs. But the one chair, that a lot of us were confused about, was the girl who had made her chair in less than thirty minutes.

    On her screen there had only been objects floating about in space. Four cylinders and a couple rectangles just freely floating on the computer screen. As we sat down at our seats the Professor continued to stare at her computer screen.

“This....is FUCKING AMAZING!” We were taken back a little by the Professor’s excitement for the what she’d done, but then the Professor explained: he asked us to build a chair that portrayed Anger and gave us a time limit, and just for additional stress told us that we’d be graded. While all of us chose function over design this student stopped and thought about what she knew about the program, what she could do with the theme, and how much she could do with this tool and theme during the time limit. She thought about Anger conceptually, and what might happen to a chair if someone were angry with it? They might throw and break the chair! And with that thought she quickly made a chair that looked like it was thrown across a room. SHE CREATIVELY SOLVED THE PROBLEM! She didn’t know much about the program so she wasn’t going to try to build something extravagant, and the Professor technically never said it had to be a working chair!
    With that story in mind I’ll tell you what the Professor had told us about how to become a better problem solver. Are you ready because this is going to blow your mind!...

    Practice. Yep, that’s right-- practice! I know it’s crazy, but conditioning your mind to be able to solve problems allows you to be able to become a better problem solver. Giving yourself vague themes/concepts and challenging yourself to create something in a limited amount of time allows you to learn to make decisions under pressure and think outside the box (speed painting). Playing party games such as Charades, Taboo, or Scattergories help to practice thinking unexpectedly to win the game. You can also practice by solving word problems and riddles. A lot of riddles tend to use word play, and requires outside-the-box thinking. Solving math problems can also be a great way to practice problem solving because it conditions your mind to not only think about a problem analytically, but also prepares your mind to think in general; allowing your brain to be strong enough to think in other situations. Ever try to watch a movie or TV show (or any type of story medium) and try to predict what happens next? That’s a good way to practice problem solving (and a little story structure) because you are thinking about the character, the setting, and the millions of ways the characters could possibly interact with each other and how the rest of the story could play out.

Problem-solving is basically the ability to think and rethink to find the solution to a problem set before you, whether technical, or creative. Sometimes not knowing the technical aspects of the problem, like the girl in the Anger Chair story, can allow you to think of more “outside-the-box” solutions to a problem.

The answer was simple and no one in the class jotted his answer down as they did with the other more complex questions. I still felt a little embarrassed to have ask the question at all, but I quickly scribbled “ better problem-solving = Practice” in my sketchbook.

Final Presentation for Concept Illustration

Here is my Final Presentation for my Concecpt Illustration class! There are many assets I still want to work on but I am quite proud of the result I have! :)  Wish you could be here for my pitch!