Finally! Finally! Finally!
Please save your date and join us on Sunday night, May 16th.

Exciting news!
We did a book cover for Museyon Guides, “Art + Travel (Europe).”
They just sent us the book and it is amazing. Printed beautifully and so inspiring.
Luckily we are off to Holland in 2 weeks that I will definitely use this guide book to immerse myself with art while I’m there. If you’re planning to travel to Europe, this is a really nice guide book to pick up.
They have other series like “Film + Travel” and “Music + Travel”. These books make you want to travel all the time.

Max and I went to Rhode Island School of Design in early April for a lecture & one-on-one student meetings.
We were blown away by the quality of work. Go RISD Animation students! I can’t wait to see their animations in festivals!
The set up was extremely inviting to experiment with animation. We were so inspired, and all we want to do now is to purchase more equipment and have fun with materials.
Commercial work requires tightness, slickness, and attention to details. So we’ve been working on those elements for the past few years. But in a way, I need more balance in art. Some of the work we saw at RISD reminded me to experiment more, get lose and try new things. Now that we are done with our independent film, I will have more free time to learn new things.
It’ll be a really exciting and fun spring/summer.
I feel like I got massive amount of inspiration and energy from RISD students. Thank you Amy Kravitz who is the head of the department for inviting us. We really enjoyed!

As mentioned in the previous post, our film, “Electric Car” was in NYICFF 2010 in Shorts for Tots category.
My childhood friend, her husband, and her little daughter came to support me.
Thank you for those who came to the festival!
Having tons of little kids (and their parents) as the audience was quite an experience. It’s always nice to get the real reaction to understand what people like, when they laugh, when they scream, etc.

Max and I will be attending New York International Children’s Film Festival on March 13th (saturday).
Our music video Electric Car” is in “shorts for tots”.

Symphony Space
2537 broadway, new york, ny
11:00AM

So excited to be part of the festival. Come join us especially if you are 3-6 years old!
I also got to see “The Secret of the Kells”last week which was unbelievably dark, scary and emotional.
I’ll write more about it in a few days…

Max’s sister gave us tickets to the New York Philharmonic at the Lincoln Center !

Drawing performances is so exciting and it’s a great way to learn different movements. So when I got this awesome news, first thing I did was to stuff my sketchbook into my bag. The conductor’s movements were mesmerizing. One move and the entire atmosphere changes. The unison of the violin bows, the energy that was created by the orchestra, and the total beauty really put me into the drawing zen mode. Before I knew, it was over. I wish it lasted 5 more hours.

What a wonderful treat, thank you Sophie.

Tiny Inventions is presenting at the January meeting for After Effects New York.
We will mainly show “Electric Car” and its making of.
-Actual puppets and sets
-How to put crafted objects in an environment
-How to rig characters using puppet pins

Plus some scenes from our up-coming independent film, “Something Left, Something Taken”.

location: PS 41
116 West 11th street
(BT 6& 7 Av)

time: 6:45pm

See you there!

Will Krause came over again and helped me finalized the set for San Francisco street view.
Originally only 3 houses were constructed over a year ago. At one point, I figured the set will be huge, I put it aside until the last moment.
Now, there are 15 detailed houses and 13 simpler background houses.
The neighborhood grew so much!

Last 5 houses gradually get smaller, forcing perspective.
Something we learned to do since there is a limitation in the studio.

Many people often ask me what I do with the sets and how I store them.
Here is my trick. When I design the sets, I also design how to put them away.
They can be apart easily. For example the airport was constructed in over 7 parts. Some were held with paper clips. (Some fell apart during photographing, of course)

For the SF street view, the stairs in front of the houses made it very difficult to store.
Simpler bg houses are like Russian dolls, everything fit into the biggest house. For the detailed houses, I just pretended to play 3D Tetris and put into boxes.

After lots of work-in-progress posts and anticipation, we are very happy to announce that “Something Left, Something Taken” will be completed by March 1st.
In 2 weeks, we’ll hand the film to our sound designer.
Right now, we’re animating the last scene, editing, fixing up some scenes, rendering TIFF sequences to be composited. Last 3 miles of a long marathon called “making a film”.