Yetis Aplenty(s?)

Coming up with the design for the main character of the Yeti has been
quite the process, but at last Roque and I have settled upon this fellow.
He's doing his best at walking the fine line between bored and
sophisticated.

An hour ago I started storyboarding, and already I have a modest pile of
crumpled up sticky notes to call my own. I have a feeling storyboarding
will be a perpetual struggle to keep my thumbnail Yetis from looking like
Grimace.

I've also been spending a lot of time poring over Nicolas Marlet's work in
the Art of Kung Fu Panda book. Each page affords endless potential for
meditating on one's inadequacies.

It seems borderline reprehensible to post my own work in a blog entry
where his name is also mentioned.




















The baby Yeti is as unrelated to the animation as he is adorable.

Setting Sail on the Internship

Intern project ahoy! I've been hard at work on the concept and character
design for the short animation I'll be creating this summer. Last week
Roque gave me three words (opposite, secret, and balance) with which to
create three different ideas. Working with Kenn Navarro during the
development and pitch process was fantastic. He helped with polishing my
ideas as well as generally demystifying the art of pitching, which was up
until this point, quite shrouded in mystery I assure you.

We chose the story formed from the word secret; a sneak peek into the
everyday life of the middle class working yeti. It is my intent to expose a
softer, more sophisticated side of this tragically misunderstood creature.
The past week has been spent developing the character of the yeti. Roque
has been instrumental in this process; helping to guide my design with
suggestions and examples. There seems to be a veritable cornucopia of
concept art books and insightful handouts accumulating on my desk with
which to draw inspiration and ideas from.

Next week I will begin story-boarding with Alan and working out specific
details with the plot line. More on the intern project soon to follow!

On another exciting note, Ghostbot has invited me to go with them to the
San Diego Comicon. Never did I dream that I would be making a pilgrimage to
this Mecca of nerddom. I've been told to take all my expectations, and
multiply them by 100. One hundred times the level of nerdiness. One
hundred times the amount of undiluted awesome. One hundred times the number of rotund spandex clad Flashes. My thesaurus would explode if it housed an adequate synonym for my level of excitement.

I suppose I should start working on some sort of costume, I would be sorely remiss if I passed up a perfectly good opportunity to wear a cape.

Witty Title...

Five months ago I casually mentioned to my parents that I was applying for
an internship in San Francisco, stressing the fact that it was unlikely to
happen in order to soothe their fears of having to send their child across
the country. Five months later I found myself more than 3,000 miles from
home, and on my way to meet a company I had only ever conversed with via
speakerphone and email.

As any new intern would, I spent the first few hours fretting whether or
not I was scanning files correctly and trying not to breathe too loudly to
keep from disrupting my coworkers. However, the butterflies and irrational
fears didn’t last long as the Ghostbot crew welcomed me with open arms and
introduced me to a new world of design, animation, and destination lunches.

So far I’ve had the pleasure of arguing whether clerics or paladins are more
powerful (clerics for the win), speculating the merits of chocolate chip
bagels and jamming to Stan Bush’s rock ballad The Touch from the 1986
animated Transformers Movie soundtrack (if you haven’t experienced the
glory, I highly recommend). Oh and work. I’ve done some of that too.

My time has been spent helping with a client project currently in the
works, and pitching three ideas for an animated short I’ll be creating this
summer, more details on that soon to follow. Below are some sketches from
both the client project as well as my animation pitches. These are ones
that didn't make the final cut, but we still think they're dandy and
deserve a home somewhere on the internet.

Deploy...INTERNBOT-01!!

It's been six years since we started this company and if we had to boil it all down to one main goal, it would be to clone ourselves. Unfortunately, we're still far from reaching that goal so we thought the next best thing would be to get an intern.

I know the value of internships firsthand and my career benefited greatly from gaining that real world experience at such an early stage. Now being on the other side of the fence, I'm happy to be a part of passing on that baton. We've had many inquiries and applications in the past, but we never felt like it was the right time or the right fit. However, recently the stars aligned and thanks to a glowing recommendation from my good friend and artistic inspiration, Shanth Enjeti, we now have our first intern ever.

Elise Fachon joins us all the way from the east coast where she currently is a Film/Animation/Video student at my old alma mater, RISD (whut whuuut...). Besides sorting all our M&Ms into Pantone groupings, Elise will also become a regular Ghost-blogger during her internship. We thought this would be a great way of invigorating our blog (beyond the oh-so-frequent once-a-year posting) as well as give everyone an insider's perspective on what it's like at our humble studio (she's already got some crazy newfangled ideas she's going to talk about that make me feel old).

Anyway, if her first week is any indication of the rest of the summer, it should be a fun time for all. Stay tuned...

SF Spots

Recently my good friends started their own video content company catered to small businesses called SF Spots.  To demonstrate the quality and affordability of videos they could produce, they asked if they could shoot a spot for me that focused on my recent gallery show.  As much as I hate seeing myself on camera, I think the whole piece turned out amazing.  Check it out and let them know what you think!


63 Bluxome Street - Roque Ballesteros from SF Spots on Vimeo.