A Summer of Wisdom and Wonder

At the end of every summer, our grade school teachers would make us write essays about what we did during our summer vacations. Those were dark and discouraging times in which teachers would gently admonish me for doodling in the margins and encourage me to write something besides “watch cartoons.” Summers later, I find not much has changed… except for the admonishing part.

In addition to doodles and cartoons, this summer was full of action, adventure, and of course, the imparting of knowledge. I did my very best to absorb as much sage wisdom as possible, and learned some valuable life lessons and skills during my summer at Ghostbot:

- Lunch is the most important meal of the day.
- Adding corner shadows makes backgrounds more dynamic.
- Totoro creampuffs, though finicky to make, are well worth the effort.
- Gradients make most things more epic.
- Skywalker Ranch is just as cool as the Wikipedia article says it is.
- The highest destination for tiny post-it notes is storyboarding.
- Animating explosions is infinitely rewarding.
- Nathan Fillion is just as dreamy in person.

Silliness aside though, this truly has been the summer of a lifetime. Coming here was a leap of faith, and the best decision I have ever made. Ghostbot has become my family, and I am so grateful for that. Were this blog an 80’s sitcom, this would be the point at which the studio audience would be cued to “Awww;” and what an appropriately heartfelt awww it would be.

It’s been a pleasure working here, and maintaining the blog. Thank you loyal readers, and with that, I return you to your regularly scheduled Ghostbot bloggers.

Internbot01, signing off.

















Conquering the Meat Mountain





















































Skywalker Ranch
























Final Destination Lunch















Totoro magnet :o)

Yeti. Set. Go.

It’s been awhile since I last updated the blog with regards to my intern animation project. Perhaps it’s simply me being lax, but I’d like to think it’s due to an over abundance of other more exciting things to blog about.

Storyboarding and background designs are complete (thanks to guidance from Alan and Roman, respectively) and the last few weeks have been spent navigating the murky waters of creating assets and animating them.

Learning the Ghostbot animation style has been a fascinating process; a technique at which I have graduated from utterly clueless to a hopeful novice. Each day of animation brings new challenges, and tends to go a little something like this:

Step one: Arrange assets into compositionally pleasing keyframes.
Step two: Get overly excited about the idea of making something move, and forge ahead in-betweening, generally making utter snafus of the original keyframes.
Step three: Wallow in self pity over lack of experience and technique.
Step four: Add unnecessary blinks to make myself feel better.
Step five: This is the point in which Brad swoops in and magicks Flash, imparting animation wisdom and demonstrating how to smooth the aforementioned snafus.
Step six: Feel alternately amazed and inspired, and thank my lucky stars that I decided to major in delayed gratification. I mean. Animation.

Repeat process as necessary until scene is completed and up to Ghostbot snuff.

The scenes I have managed to animate are looking peachy keen, but it’s getting down to the wire, and it appears as though I won’t have time to complete my entire animation while at Ghostbot. I’d like to be an ostrich so I could stick my head in the sand and pretend this isn’t my last week here. But ostriches can’t animate… and aren’t native to San Francisco. So I guess in the long run it’s probably a good thing I’m not an ostrich.

Post Traumatic Comic-Con Disorder

It’s been a week in a half since Ghostbot’s return from the 2010 San Diego comic-con, and after a week and a half I think it’s safe to say that I’ve sufficiently recovered from the shell shock of comic-con to formulate a blog entry.

I was only prepared enough to know I wasn’t prepared. There was a bedazzled storm trooper, a cross dressing Sailor Moon, and I even got to hug Pikachu. Nathan Fillion walked past our booth and I can say with confidence that had I been struck down by a bolt of lightning at that very moment, I would have died fulfilled. We were stoked that our booth was located right next to the cast of “The Guild," including one of my favorites, Felicia Day. If you haven’t seen “Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog” yet, shame. Just… insurmountable shame.

I spent a majority of my time at the Ghostbot booth alternately hyperventilating that I was mere yards from Felicia and helping to sell merchandise. It was really neat to talk to the people who came to the Ghostbot booth. The most frequent thing I heard: “This stuff is awesome!! Are you the artist??” “Nah… I’m, just the intern…” “Oh. *disappointed face*” After which they usually bought some buttons and got a print signed.

Both nights comic-con was followed by Ghostbot outings for dinner, and I realized partway through our boisterous dinner at P.F. Chang's that we were “that” dinner group…

At the very end of comic-con, as we were trundling out the last of the Ghostbot merchandise, opportunity struck and I had the pleasure of getting to meet Felicia Day; truly the cherry on the sundae of glory and wonderment that is comic-con.